Hi,
Attached is a very first draft of my contribution to this volume, entitled "Immortality: A Philosophical Dialogue". As I make clear at the end of the piece, numerous stylistic and some substantive alterations are needed. The dialogue also lacks an ending, and in fact may be slightly expanded if desired. My original intention was to submit a definitive version, but the deadline caught me by surprise. If you grant me some additional days, I would be happy to introduce the necessary changes.
Regards,
Pablo
--
Dear Pablo,
Wonderful!
The ultimate cutoff for submissions to the first book is Feb 15. In the mean time, I've forwarded this first submission from you to the editing team... I'll let them know of your desired additions.
Bruce
Immortality: A Philosophical DialoguePABLO STAFFORINI
Beta: A few days ago, a friend of mine was invited to submit a paper for a forthcoming book. He was very worried, since he intended to give the article an unusual format, and didn’t know whether it would be accepted by the editorial team.
Gamma: What format was that?
Beta: I couldn’t tell. But now that I think about it, what actually troubled him was the fact that it was going to be a dialogue. A dialogue on immortality.
Gamma: Immortality? Are you kidding?
Beta: No. Listen, this is serious stuff. It’s sponsored by the Immortality Institute, and the list of collaborators includes such people as Ray Kurzweil, Marvin Minsky and Nick Bostrom.
Gamma: Bostrom… oh, yeah, the Simulation Argument guy. That really got me thinking. But –seriously—does he really believe it is possible that his life is just a simulation? Could someone actually think that we are all, in a way, just characters in a fictitious story? For my part, I know that I exist.
Beta: So do I. But would you like me to comment on what he planned to write on the topic?
Gamma: Sure.
Beta: Well, one of his ideas… but wait! There he comes. Alpha, I was talking to Gamma about your planned paper on immortality. Could you explain your views on the subject to us?
Alpha: Oh, that bloody piece! It tortures me day and night. It’s just a few days to the deadline and I have barely written a page. I have tried to clarify my ideas, sometimes using fictional characters, with poor success. Fortunately you are here with me, and you are going to help me. So, my views were triggered by thinking about overpopulation. As you know, population growth is a function of birth and death rates. If immortality becomes possible and people start living, as the Immortality Institute promotes, “infinite lifespans” without a correlative decrease in birth rates, the world would become increasingly more populated.
Gamma: That could be catastrophic.
Alpha: Perhaps, but let me finish. I’m not interested in that problem, important as it may be. What actually caught my attention was another one which, to me at least, is much more fascinating. Suppose (as few people do) that a correlative decrease in birth rates could be achieved. The effects of immortality would then be neutralized –or would they?
Gamma: Of course – as long as the decrease in death rates due to the introduction of immortal people co-varies with an equivalent decrease in birth rates.
Alpha: No doubt about it. But the question is whether other relevant questions would subsist after the elimination of that one. Given two equally populated scenarios with the same expected population growth rates, does the fact that one (and only one) is composed of immortal people make a difference at all?
Gamma: Don’t know… does it?
Alpha: It does. Take what I call intergenerational morality. Do you grant that there’s a prima facie case against harming people?
Gamma: I do.
Alpha: And do you also grant that it is possible to harm future people?
Gamma: That’s more complicated. In the present, the future person has only a potential existence. And it is not clear that a potential person belongs to the class of entities that can actually be harmed.
Alpha: Fair enough, but my question was more straightforward. I was not asking whether the future person could, in the present, be harmed; I’m rather asking whether my present acts could harm, in the future, a person that would exist back then. Suppose you plant a bomb that would explode in a couple hundred years. Although it is not clear whether your act was wrong in the moment you performed it or when a previously inexistent person dies because of it, it is clear that, if someone will be harmed, the harm would be done by you.
Gamma: I agree.
Alpha: Well, giving these two assumptions, I believe that a scenario of immortals would have, over one of successive mortal persons, an extremely important difference. In the latter, to harm a future person would be, for the present one, immoral. But in the former, where the present and future mortals are replaced by a single immortal person, the problem ceases to be moral and becomes a rational one. For what’s now involved is the harm done, not to another fellow (future) subject, but to the later self of the very same person performing the act. If I’m immortal and favor an irresponsible environmental policy that causes great harm to beings living 500 years ahead, my choice does not involve a moral issue, but a rational one. Simply put, I won’t harm others, but myself.
Gamma: Wait a minute! From the fact that in the immortalist scenario some future people are in fact future selves of your present immortal person it does not follow that all future people are. This is elementary logic. Some future people would be the future selves of other present immortal persons. In this case, the choice involved would be moral, not rational.
Alpha: My dear Gamma, in a scenario where all present people are immortals and where —like I’m assuming— there are no new persons created, harm done to future people could be accounted in terms of harm done to present people. For the future person harmed is, ex hypothesi, the future self of a present person; and being necessarily caused either by the person herself or by a different contemporary of her, the harmful act can only belong to the sphere of rationality or to that of conventional morality. There is no place for problems of intergenerational morality. This is because in certain types of scenarios involving immortal persons (like the one I described) the step from intertemporal to intergenerational, normally taken from granted, becomes invalid.
Gamma: I see. But then again, your conclusion holds only if, like you say, an assumption is made regarding the creation of new personal lives. But surely that’s a wholly implausible assumption. There is always the possibility that some immortals will eventually decide to terminate their lives, and that would involve the creation of new personal lives to replace them. This, of course, means the re-emergence of potential problems of intergenerational morality.
Alpha: I agree. Nevertheless, what I said serves to show what a move in that direction would involve: namely, a reduction in the number of intergenerational moral problems and a correlative increase in the number of conventional problems of rationality or morality. Though maybe never to be realized, this scenario would allow for an assessment of real –and not merely ideal- social phenomena: the greater the proportion of immortal over mortal persons and the smaller the amount of newly created persons, the lesser the number of moral problems involving temporally separated generations.
Gamma: Right. But, to be honest, I don’t see how this constitutes an “extremely important difference” –as you put it - to our current situation.
Alpha: Here is why. Generally, what is bad for others is more difficult to avoid than what is bad for us. Given the chance to impose a higher burden upon others rather than a lower burden upon themselves, many people would choose the first alternative -- if they can get away with it, at least. In this sense, immortality could have the unexpected but most welcome effect of “internalizing” people’s “externalities”. In a world of immortals, making future people pay for our own improper behavior is simply not an option; and that, presumably, could prevent many wrong acts to be performed.
Gamma: Interesting. But, again, this can be challenged. Whereas it is true that, generally speaking, people choose rather to be immoral than to be irrational, in this particular type of situation, which involves long-term decisions, the generalization just doesn’t hold. We are all biased towards the present, giving more weight to the near future than to the one that’s further away. Given the possibility of getting something that’s valuable to us, we choose the act that would secure it in the short term, even if we could have chosen a different act that would have provided us, in the further future, with a greater quantity of the same good.
Alpha: Yes, but sometimes these decisions can be accounted for in terms of the lower probability that something may actually happen in the long term. In these cases, although the consequences of our chosen act have a lower utility, they nevertheless have a higher expected utility: when considering the value of something multiplied by the probability that the act will cause it, we choose that which results in the highest number.
Gamma: Sometimes – but not always. Clearly, there are situations in which this does not occur. As Hume noticed, given the chance of choosing between a good now and another one with a greater expected utility that’s quite removed in time, “tho’ we may be fully convinc’d, that the latter excels the former, we are not able to regulate our actions by this judgment; but yield to the solicitations of our passions, which always plead in favour of whatever is near and contiguous.” (Book III, Part ii, section vii [535]). It would be foolish to say that smokers or reckless car drivers somehow calculate the possible long-term effects of their actions and proceed to perform them once the have become convinced of their overall greater expected utility; on the contrary, it is more reasonable to assume that, if troubled to assess their probable future risks at all, they have concluded that they shouldn’t do what they are doing, but keep doing it for other irrational motives.
Alpha: Let me see whether I get your point straight. You agree with me that in general it is harder to be moral than to be rational –-it is more difficult to do what’s best for others than what’s best for oneself—; but you disagree on the possibility of including the case we are discussing in this generalization: according to you, the temporal separateness of goods sometimes causes us to act irrationally. Is this so?
Gamma: Precisely.
Alpha: Well, I grant this proposition; but I deny the validity of your argument. Time surely makes us act irrationally; but it also makes us act immorally. Assuming its distortional effects are equivalent in both cases, it follows that it would still be more difficult to act morally in this particular case. Therefore, if immortality, as I argue, will transform some of our intertemporal moral decisions into rational ones, a scenario of immortals should, other things equal (including population growth rates), be preferred to a scenario of mortals.
Gamma: Perhaps. But you are omitting an important factor. Whereas we are usually free to do what’s rational, we are often compelled to do what’s moral. That’s what liberal legislation is all about –in theory if not in practice.
Alpha: So?
Gamma: So, even granting that people may behave both irrationally and immorally when the object of their act is in the future, a present sanction that punishes omitting the morally required act will avoid our difficulty. If people are unable to take intertemporal morality seriously, liberal legislators could force them to do what’s right by appealing to their present self-interest.
Alpha: But what sort of legislation would that be?
Gamma: You are already acquainted with it. There are environmental laws that take into account, at least partially, the interests of future people.
Alpha: But our current legislation is extremely lenient. It’s based, if anything, on current economic orthodoxy. See, welfare economists believe in what they call a social discount rate. According to this view, when assessing the future consequences of social policies we should discount their more remote effects by some fixed yearly amount. Say we adopt a discount rate of five percent, as is usual for economists to do. If we discount the future accordingly, we should conclude that the death of a person now counts for more than a billion deaths in 500. As Derek Parfit points out, “catastrophes in the further future can now be regarded as morally trivial.” From an ethical point of view, this is simply nonsense. As long as legislation continues to be based in this type of moral calculus, the interests of future beings will never be adequately protected.
Gamma: But then we should strive to convince economists to abandon their mistaken views, and legislators to adopt more reasonable ones.
Alpha: If you want my opinion, that will never happen. Bentham, in all its bluntness, was essentially on the right track when he advised his readers to
[d]ream not that men will move their little finger to serve you, unless their advantage in so doing be obvious to them. Men never did so, and never will, while human nature is made of its present materials.
Helping others may indeed be advantageous: reciprocity usually pays off. But future persons will never reciprocate. The last statement expresses a physical impossibility. So there is no way legislators could ever be motivated to pass laws that seriously restrict our use of resources –as they would need to do if they were to take future people seriously. On the other hand, immortality, if technically possible, will be adopted on purely self-interested motives. Few, if any, will choose to become immortal, or have immortal children, because that will help future people: that will just be a concomitant result of a wholly rational choice.
Gamma: Yes, you are right. But going back to Bentham’s remark, why did he qualify his assertion with the “while human nature is made of its present materials” condition?
Alpha: Your question leads me to another extremely important (as well as interesting) issue. For in fact it is, or will soon be, actually possible to change the “materials” by which human nature is composed. See, many immortalists are also transhumanists.
Gamma: Transhumanists?
Alpha: Right. We are a group of people that seek to transcend human physical, cognitive, emotional and perhaps even moral limitations by the use of applied science. In my view, one of the most promising technologies available today is genetic screening, which combined with in vitro fertilization allows for selective implantation of embryos. Couples now have the option of having several ova fertilized and implanting the egg that shows to be genetically preferable. This technique, however, is somewhat limited: not only is it traumatic to the female partner, but the “menu” of designer babies is limited by the genetic constitution of its parents. Their child will simply never be able to have, say, a specific eye color if both mom and dad lack alleles that code for it. But in the future that will become possible via genetic engineering: instead of negatively discarding all but the most desirable embryo, parents will positively choose the baby they most want to have.
Gamma: But what does this has to do with immortality?
Alpha: Be patient. Like every living organism, we are the product of natural selection. Unfortunately, Nature has chosen genes as its fundamental replicating structure, and biological fitness as its one and only maximandum. We are what is better for our selfish genes to be. Hopefully that’s about to change. Soon parents will replace nature, children will replace genes, and happiness will replace fitness: for human evolution will become conscious. Now, we were talking about the pervasive bias towards the present. Has it ever occurred to you that this bias is also the result of natural selection?
Gamma: What do you mean?
Alpha: Simply this: that those members of our species (or any other animal species, for that matter) that had genes that coded for a certain degree of bias towards the present would have had a fitness advantage over those that gave the same weight to all their future moments. This is so both because our nearest decisions tend also to be our most urgent, and because our probability of being alive in a certain future moment diminishes as the moment gets further away into the future. What’s more, these selective forces operated mostly when we had a much lower life expectancy, and so we should expect a greater bias than the one that would actually be optimum for us, even in evolutionary terms.
Gamma: That’s interesting.
Alpha: Yes, but it gets better if you couple this with what I said earlier: as our life spans increase, it would be more sensible for parents to favor alleles, or constellations of alleles, that code for a lesser bias towards the future. A child capable of, as it were, “looking at the bigger picture” will have a better chance of “success” –of doing what her parents expect (and hence want) her to do— than her less lucky, and improvident, ones. This factor increases in proportion with length of expected lifespan. True, this trait may prove to be multifactorial and thus incapable of being the object of a reproductive decision. But I would say that even in this rather pessimistic scenario the bias towards the future will tend to become more attenuated, since more general decisions choosing for more “rational” kids will have it as a probable byproduct.
Gamma: So immortals would not only live more, but would also tend to value their life more equitably?
Alpha: Exactly. In fact, you said it better than me: they would value their life, not just their future life, equitably.
Gamma: What?
Alpha: Besides being biased towards the present, we are biased towards the future: a second, and fundamentally different, type of bias. If we can discount moments in the further future is because we care about it in the first place. Instead, for us the past just does not matter. We regret to be told that we will endure a great deal of suffering in the future. We may regret it less if the event is farther away. But we don’t regret it at all if the event is in the past. This is so obvious that we don’t even stop to think about it. Yet, it is an asymmetry which is also the result of natural selection. At least at the macrophysical level, backwards causation does not hold. We therefore don’t care about the past because we can’t do anything about it; and, a fortiori, we can’t do anything that increases our evolutionary fitness.
Gamma: Yeah… but I don’t see how the fact that, for certain humans at least, blind natural selection will be replaced by conscious human selection makes any difference to this kind of bias. Who wants to care about her past?
Alpha: Immortals! And all of us, too. Imagine, as Parfit does, a person called Timeless. Here’s a brief description of her. (As a side note, the “blank mental node” I have manufactured to represent this unknown individual is deliberatively of the female sex. Parfit, however, presumably writing with an exclusive interest in the time bias of his characters, has unconsciously allowed the still predominant sex bias to creep in.)
When such a person is reminded that he once had a month of agony, he is as much distressed as when he learns that he will later have such a month. He is similarly neutral with respect to enjoyable events. When he is told that he will later have some period of great enjoyment, he is pleased to learn this. He greatly looks forward to this period. When he is reminded that he once had just such a period, he is equally pleased.
Timeless, then, would lack this bias towards the future we all have. Would this be better for her, or would it be worse? Like Parfit, I think it would be better. With the past, we can be selective; with the future we simply can’t. Thus, the remembered moments of our past life would be more valuable than the anticipated ones of out future existence. If so, someone who cared about her past would have a better life than someone who only cared about her future. But as we have seen, this bias is also an evolutionary relic. Thus, prospective parents, if fully informed and properly motivated, would not only choose genes that code for “provident” children, but also for “retrovident” ones.
Gamma: Stop! This is the second time you jump from the assertion that something is good for a certain individual to the conclusion that it would also be good, and hence chosen, by her parents.
Alpha: This jump is justified. Because of fitness-enhancing kin sympathy, parents tend to identify their interests with those of their prospective children. Generally speaking, what would be best for the child is also what’s best for her parents; consequently, we should expect this valuation to be reflected in their reproductive decisions. Interestingly, one could ask whether kin sympathy itself wouldn’t also tend to disappear. This is a fascinating question, but one to which there is no clear answer. And lacking, for the time being, an answer, we can temporarily ignore it. So let’s go back to our discussion and bring back immortality. Clearly, if what I said makes sense, an increase in lifespan length would make the bias towards the future even less desirable.
Gamma: But that’s only trivially true. If someone was not biased towards the future but remained biased towards the present, she would not only discount her further future, but, presumably, her further past as well. Thus, although it would be true that a longer life would mean a greater number of accumulated valuable experiences for one to care about, most of those experiences would be so removed in time that their contribution to the quality of life would be marginal. In other words, I may have lived an extraordinarily long life, but as I’m biased towards the present, I only give significant weight to my recent experiences. Being long-lived is, in practice, irrelevant.
Alpha: Your argument would be sound if the proposition that we will still be biased towards the present were true. But why would it? As we’ve seen, prospective parents would have a strong reason to choose for genes that code for provident children: the longer our life expectancy, the less sensible it becomes to care for the small portion of our life that’s closer to the present. So, parents will select against both biases simultaneously. Granting that, immortality enters the scene once more. For immortal persons would be the ones with the longest potential past, and, accordingly, those for whom caring about it would bring the greatest reward.
[May be continued. Numerous stylistic and some substantive alterations needed. Some additional references should also be added. Needs ending.]
* * *
About the author
Pablo Stafforini was born in 1978, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He has studied philosophy at that city’s university. He is currently working as a volunteer for Amnesty International (Argentina), as well as being assistant editor of Perspectivas bioéticas, a bioethics scholarly journal. He has translated and edited an academic edition of John Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government for a volume that will be published in early 2004, celebrating the 300th anniversary of Locke’s death. He is also editing a volume of essays on applied ethics, tentatively called Ensayos de ética aplicada, and has written articles on ethics, political philosophy, and ancient philosophy. More recently, he co-founded the Argentine chapter of the World Transhumanist Association, and writes frequently on the collaborative Cyborg Democracy blog. Pablo can be contacted at pablo@stafforini.com. His website can be found at www.stafforini.com.
