A paper published in Bioethics makes a startling case for people to die at 100 years old rather than live as long as they might choose.
Deathism is relatively rare
People who wholeheartedly believe that human lifespans should be restricted to a pre-defined span are not common. Most popular concerns around life extension involve its feasibility and cost along with the perception that a handful of gerontocrats will use it to maintain power even while chronologically younger people die of age-related diseases. This frequently dovetails with very real concerns about the cost and accessibility of medical care in general. What therapies are developed, how they can be put into clinical practice, and who ultimately pays for them are the topics of greatest concern; very few people argue against the idea that people should have accessible therapies.
Survey results tell us less about people’s true desires than their actions; in the economics world, this is known as ‘revealed preferences’. For example, if someone states the desire to eat healthy food, but spends hundreds of dollars a month on unhealthy food, we know that person’s true, revealed preference. Similarly, if someone states the desire to die before getting old, but then voluntarily opts for intensive treatment while gradually succumbing to currently incurable age-related diseases, we can surmise that this person did not actually want to die after all; given the notoriously and consistently high cost of end-of-life care [1], it is clear that this is the most common option.
People who do choose to die at advanced ages are not making the choice between healthy life and death; they are choosing to die immediately rather than suffer increasingly painful and debilitating medical conditions before dying later. If such people were instead offered a comprehensive suite of rejuvenation technologies capable of restoring their youthful health, it is a very safe bet that the overwhelming majority of them would gladly take it. Bringing such technologies into fruition is the business of the Lifespan Research Institute and the life extension field as a whole.
Under normal circumstances, human beings would, given the choice, rather not die; this is heavily backed up by everyday experience and medical expenditure data. Even people who engage in dangerous or self-destructive actions are known to be chasing short-term pleasure over long-term survival. Most people who ‘live fast, die young’ do not actually want to die young; they’re simply more interested in living fast. Of the people who soberly claim to want to die young, it is usually more accurate to say that they want to avoid the problems involved with being old.
With this background of human experience in mind, it is rare to see a published paper arguing for finite lifespans, but this is what was authored by a team led by the Project Director of Biotechnology and the Humanities at the University of Oxford.
A case for death?
This paper was written as a rebuttal to Ingemar Patrick Linden’s The Case Against Death, a well-known book that is commonly found on the shelves of life extensionists everywhere (including in China, where the translation was published by Immortal Dragons). Importantly, neither Linden’s book nor this rebuttal discusses the mechanics of how indefinite lifespans might be achieved; instead, for the sake of argument, it is assumed that everything involved in aging has been effectively cured. In such a world, the authors of this paper imply, it would be better for people to simply die at age 100 rather than continue to exist past that.
The bulk of this paper is focused on a concept of ‘self-giving love’ that ties into aging and death. Specifically, the authors consistently refer to people as “embodied beings” that have a shared web of relationships, and they refer to meaningful life itself as being spent fulfilling the needs of other people. This theme of gradual self-sacrifice is found throughout the paper, such as “a 100-year time span could provide an important reference for the amount of anticipated work remaining in relation to spending one’s life in service to others.” and “it would be disorienting and disheartening to run a race with no obvious end.”
Death, in this view, is a reprieve from a life of constant toil, making it questionable what ‘love’ actually means in this context. Obviously, the authors do not want to continue these relationships forever; rather, such human interactions are portrayed as an obligation, a duty, rather than something they want to keep doing. Despite the authors’ claims of meaning and purpose, the subtext remains that such a life is a long, tedious chore that will be mercifully, fortunately ended by death; simply giving up or setting aside such relationships is not seriously considered as an option.
They mention that some people may choose to die and leave others behind, leaving scars on the survivors: “Would it not correspondingly become difficult to love, and so open your heart to another, after watching so many people die?” Of course, such traumatic events very often happen due to age-related diseases right now.
There is also a Malthusian element: “We will only say that one might reasonably conclude it is an act of necessary love to forgo the inhibition of aging so as to not risk the imposition of birth restrictions, or else transform society in other radical ways—especially without the full consent of any particular populace.” The consent of the people being told that they have an obligation to die is not mentioned.
The dystopian elephant in the room
Like most works on ethics, this paper concerns itself with what people should do and does not concern itself with how such a world would be achieved. For the indefinite-lifespans world, it’s easy to envision; people go to the doctor to have their aging treated. For a world in which people have access to indefinite-lifespan technologies but are instead consigned to die at age 100, there must be some sort of enforcement mechanism; the mechanics of how this might work are left as an exercise for the reader.
Given that such a future dystopia is highly unlikely to actually occur, and extraordinarily few people choose to suddenly die while experiencing healthy lifespan, regular readers might wonder why we’re choosing to take this seriously instead of summarizing a scientific advancement. The problem, as always, is one of resource allocation; this was published in a journal with the backing of a major university, meaning that it might reach the eyes of decision makers. If such people are swayed by arguments against longer lives, then vital projects might not get funded, critical breakthroughs might occur much later than they otherwise could have, and a great number of human beings might suffer and die.
This also underscores why pro-longevity activism is surprisingly important. People want to live, but they might not know that the processes of aging are targetable, understandable, and potentially treatable. Getting this information out, and making sure that productive work is being done to fight against these harmful processes, is necessary for us to be able to choose life over death.
Literature
[1] Hoover, D. R., Crystal, S., Kumar, R., Sambamoorthi, U., & Cantor, J. C. (2002). Medical expenditures during the last year of life: findings from the 1992–1996 Medicare current beneficiary survey. Health services research, 37(6), 1625-1642.
View the article at lifespan.io
