The Ethics of EmortalismNames are important, because they become the symbols around which we organize our thoughts, like impurities in liquids around which crystals grow. When Dr. Alvin Silverstein introduced the word ‘emortal’ in his 1979 book The Conquest of Death, he had probably hoped that the term—which describes a ‘life without the need to die’, rather than ‘life without death’—would replace ‘immortal’ in the minds of those interested in the significant extension of the human life span. Alas, this was not to be, and ‘immortal’ rules supreme in the conceptual worlds of, and the endless and sometimes bitter arguments between, the proponents and opponents of human life extension.
However, in this essay I will speak about ‘emortality’ and confine my comments to the prospect that, given current bio-medical and other scientific progress, it is highly likely that within the measurably-near future techniques are developed which allow ‘incremental’ life extension—meaning serving to extend life for, say 10-20 years beyond the current maximum limit—and that this in turn will even allow many people in their 50s to live for long enough to benefit from more extensive life extension technology; all of which means that they are in effect, already potentially emortal.
To re-state this clearly and making it personal: If you are 50 years old—give or take a few—in good health, and unafflicted by any genetic time-bombs that might finish you off before your average three-score-and-ten years, your chances of living to see the 30th century are extremely good—if you so desire.
The premises of this assertion are subject to dispute, but let us assume—purely for argument’s sake, if argue you must—that my proposition represents a ‘highly-probable’ outcome of current scientific and technological developments.
There are people very much in favor of such developments. There are others equally as, or maybe even more fervently, opposed. There are many more who don’t know what to think, and are torn between their instinctive desire to have themselves and their loved ones survive, and the apparent conflicts between this desire and certain ethical precepts they may have been brought up with, or problems they can see with the implementations of such technology for human societies and the species as a whole. The debate between the pro and con camps seems to leave little room for understanding or compromise. It’s emotionally charged, touches very raw nerves, and follows the usual pattern of arguments between polarized positions, and has the potential to create a climate not unlike that engendered by the abortion debate.
I am unequivocally on the emortalist side of the argument, but I also see those on my side ignoring some very troubling issues raised by the ‘others’. Most of these issues qualify as ‘ethical’, and those I wish to talk about. Emortalists tend to avoid them in favor of wooly-brained futurology and/or techno-babble, or else respond to them with some vague, and usually silly, hand-waving dismissives. They shouldn’t. They can’t afford to—if only because they are emortalists; but also because by dealing with them they would actually be doing themselves a great favor, for they might learn something that will help them and the world to deal with the most fundamental change that has ever come upon it.
Here are a two often-raised ethical and philosophical issues:
1) Isn’t emortalism just a form of extreme narcissism and selfishness that we have no right to pursue because of its potentially disastrous consequences for the world?
2) Won’t becoming emortal dehumanize us—and if it does, is that not a reason not to pursue it?
The first point is apparently an issue of having a right to do something; never minding whether we can.
The second is more about, ‘well, even if we have the right, should we?’ It encompasses everything that can be related to what we think of as ‘human nature’, like our view ourselves as entities in an endless cycle of ‘generations’ and the ‘life meaning’ we extract from this; our relationship with our children; our relationship with our other fellow humans; and, for the religiously disposed, our relationship with our chosen deity.
Emortalists will usually reply to (1) with something like: “Selfish? Maybe. But I want it, and actually we all want it, and it’s actually our right to do it, and it’s going to be great for everybody.”
As for (2), the generalized response is akin to: “Human nature is what we make it; and there is no God, so we’re on our own—and so let’s make ourselves better, and we should start with not being forced to die when we don’t want to.”
These and similar answers are facile, and sometimes plain silly. Often, and this is especially so with people who are new to emortalist ideas they are propounded with religious fervor. I remember it well. I, too, was there once, some thirty years ago.
But these answers are not wrong either. They just need to be injected with some more cogency.
Indeed, the desire not to die is selfish. But it is also built into our being, and without it we would not be what we are: ‘human’. Life is the prerequisite for all experience. I’d go so far as to say that life is all experience, and that the other ‘important’ things people usually talk about—like ‘love’, to mention the one that immediately comes to my mind—is just an aspect of life, albeit a most important one.
The termination of life therefore, at least to the vast majority of us, is an undesirable event. This is true even for those who believe in an ‘afterlife’. Even the devout mourn their loved ones. So, yes, the desire to live is selfish, but not just in relation to ourselves. The desire to survive is projected on those around us in direct proportion to how much we care for them.
These are facts. To call the will-to-live ‘selfish’ in order to demean it or make it into something of lesser ‘spiritual’ value, is demagoguery. It is the way it is, and that’s that. It is a quintessential aspect of ‘human nature’. All of science is motivated by, and much of it is focused on achieving, that desire. Most philosophy, and definitely all metaphysics, has its roots in the need to deal with our mortality.
We are reaching a stage in history where the scientific project is coming to fruition. It’s just a question of time: one decade or five? Those who would like to block it have already failed. These also are facts.
The above constitutes my reply to the two issues raised earlier. Note that I have skirted the ethical questions; mainly because they are already moot. It doesn’t matter if this is good or bad anymore. It is happening. Live with it. Move beyond it. Adapt. This is the key to helping humanity get the most benefit out of what is coming.
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My avoidance of ethical comments—in an essay about ethics—was deliberate and intended to make a point, which is this: the ethical issues we have to confront have to be oriented toward the future, not the past. ‘Old’ or ‘classic’ ethical questions are already moot, as are the cogitations of just about every philosopher that’s ever lived. ‘Should we do this?’ must be replaced by ‘What should we do, now that things are as they are and will be as they will be?’
The problem is that there are no guidelines for an ethics of emortality. Nobody’s ever been emortal—at least not as far as I know, though I could be mistaken. Certainly no significant numbers of people have lived to three-hundred years or more, and so there’s never been a need for guidelines on how to live under such conditions, and ethical systems emerge when they are required through whatever social contingency. I am going to tread on some new ground here, because even those who have written about emortalist—or immortalist—subjects always dealt with this issue in a generalized arm-waving fashion, which only gave their opponents new hooks for their vitriol.
First and foremost of all we have dispose of the word ‘immortal’ and everything connected from it. It is obsolete: a term inherited from an irrelevant philosophical tradition, which grew out of an ignorance about the human body, that which we call ‘mind’ and the relationship between them. For those interested I recommend George Lakoff’s Philosophy in the Flesh as an introduction to just how out-of-date the established philosophies of the world really are. Forget what you think you ‘know’ about body and mind. It isn’t so. Philosophy in the Flesh is hands-down the most significant non-fiction book published in recent times. It’s one of those extremely rare works that indeed brings it all together. Above all, and here’s the relevance to the current subject, it makes an absurdity of the immortalism grounded in the notion of ‘mind-transfer’ into machines, and by implication, in ‘transhumanist’ concepts grounded in such ideas. At the same time it also provides the most significant justification of the emortalist project—without ever saying so, because that’s not what the book is all about..
To ground ethical systems—that is, prescriptions on how to live lives using such concepts as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘good’ and ‘evil, and so on—in the notion that one wants to be immortal is, to my mind at least, silly and irresponsible. It’s silly, because it means basing them on the old religious nonsense, reincarnated in scientific verbiage, and thus attracting the attention of the post-modernist intellectualigensia, who like to think of themselves as Atheists, with a capital ‘A’, but who secretly wallow in the same philosophical swamps as those whose traditions they claim to reject. It’s irresponsible because, since it’s nonsense, to invest energy in it is to waste time and resources—scientific, technological, social, philosophical—on…well, nonsense. And we may not be able to afford that. Let me state that more forcefully: we can’t afford this nonsense; not now—especially not now!
But the folks in the immortalist community continue to do go on as if the only issues of importance were basically scientific/technical. I am certain that in this collection of essays you find a nifty hotchpotch of everything ranging from musings on transhumanist futures, to the propoundings of ‘singularity’ philosophers, technical treatises on how to do everything from living forever in, suitable modified, human bodies and/or machines, and predictions of how it’s all going to pan out—plus a lot of usual justifications of why the, usually immortalist, project is a good and proper thing and why its opponents are either misguided/stupid/ignorant/myopic or just plain evil.
This is just about par for the course, and it continues to be a source of grave concern for me. Why is it that the only serious contemplation of the ethics of the emortalist project or the potential consequences for the ethical underpinnings of future human society comes from the project’s opponents? (And writers of fiction of course, but that’s another subject.)
It could be because the vast majority of folks hasn’t been in the emortalist game for long enough to get a sense of perspective; and even those who manage to lift themselves above the level of boys playing with nifty new toys—be it gadgets or ideas—obviously haven’t gotten to the point yet where they can think of anything but what to do so they don’t die. Some of them sound, not to put too fine a point on it, like whining losers, while others give the impression of being seriously socially and otherwise dysfunctional. All of them however share an acknowledged aversion to dying, which is what distinguishes them from the rest of humanity, because there one finds that the fear of death lurks unacknowledged and hides under a cover of religious and philosophical nonsense.
I know what its like to suddenly confront openly, and without any of the protection afforded by the pretense that it isn’t so, the abject fear of one’s personal extinction. I first faced it when I was a child and was therefore pretty much unable to deal with it, though the ever-present lingering awareness influenced everything I did. I faced it again openly as an adult, and I know a difficult place to be; though nowadays it is nowhere as difficult as it was thirty years ago when Alan Harrington penned The Immortalist, which was the book that shook me to the core—and the world was never the same again after that. In the early 1970s, the notion that one might like to live—if not forever, but for a damn long time, like centuries, or maybe, like Heinlein’s character, Lazarus Long, millennia—was considered heretical, outlandish, stupid; certainly if one took it seriously. This is not so anymore, as attested to by the existence of an extensive and growing opposition to the emortalist project. That opposition will fail, of course, and spectacularly so—which is why they, too, should be spending more time trying to figure out how to deal with the coming world, rather than trying to stop it from becoming.
Unfortunately, the existence of this opposition, and especially its more cogent and intelligent elements—like many of the members of President Bush’s Bioethics Council—still occasions a predictable counter-reaction in the immortalist movement, most of whose members are comparatively new to emortalism’s very scary, though exhilarating, concepts, and therefore basically insecure and defensive against anybody who appears to be ‘against’ them. This insecurity is covered up with a lot of fervor, ill thought-out conceptualizing and a faith that many a religious fundamentalist would envy. This means that, instead of admitting that some members of the opposition raise very cogent and valid points, immortalists respond with facile dismissals or other demagoguery, combining this with refuge into huddles of think-alike groups whose musings make sense only to the initiated members and believers. Above all, they behave as if there were no ethical issues to attend to; as if ethics was something peripheral to the project, insignificant compared to the technical issues involved.
Well, it isn’t. And the project will have unnecessarily unpleasant consequences because those aware that something of unprecedented significance is about to happen in human history are either against it—or, if they are for it, they too wrapped up in their own importance, real or imagined, and their little projects and sometimes ludicrous schemes and games, to see the bigger picture.
Reality check here, folks! Some of you are important—and I am speaking of the technical aspects of the enterprise. People like Aubrey de Grey or Michael Fossel, to name but two, stand out because they have the scientific/technical training, and the personal motivation and the all-important publicity-clout, to drive the enterprise forward. But, let’s face it, as far as science/technology are concerned, at the time of writing such individuals are few and far between; though a lot like to think they’re important, but aren’t. The immortalist movement is riddles with people of overinflated self-importance.
The main momentum of the emortalist enterprise (note I said ‘emortalist’, because the ‘immortalist’ one has gone nowhere and likely never will) has been generated not so much by any organizations promoting prolongevist ideas and/or research, but by a very fortuitous set of contingencies, mostly technological and having to do with current scientific fashion and where-the-research-funds-are. I dare say that we all ultimately owe the current progress to the discovery—or is it ‘invention’? I never know what to call it!—of the transistor, and the ultimately-resulting ‘computer revolution’; which, apart from having some seriously unpleasant social side-effects, also has pushed scientific research-power to new extremes by allowing the construction of instrumentation that twenty years ago not even the most technologically-minded and visionary science fiction writer would have considered. That, and the social mechanics of academic and private-enterprise scientific and technological R&D are what drives the current emortalist project to its fulfillment, almost as a spin-off. The main task of people like de Grey and Fossel is to help sift through the results and come up with those aspects of the inexorably advancing scientific juggernaut that are useful to us.
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Have I lost sight of ‘ethics’? By no means. I just needed to put some things into perspective, before coming to the real difficult issues. Because, if we assume, even if it’s only for the sake of the argument, that there is something inevitable about the coming of prolongevity; if we accept that in due course—anything from ten to fifty years: take your pick—people will be able to live for hundreds and maybe thousands of years; then we must surely understand that, for those of us not involved in the technicalities of the emortalist project, some really big issues loom, and that to confront these issues requires not expertise in some scientific discipline, but something much more basic: namely an understanding or appreciation of what we consider our ‘humanity’, and what makes us what and who we are and what will make us what we are going to be, given the altered circumstances. And when I say ‘we’, I’m referring to us as individuals as well as members of the human species and, ultimately, life on planet Earth.
Ethics is not something on which there is anybody who could be termed an ‘authority’. Nobody knows better than anybody else what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Anybody who says they do, to paraphrase Lazarus Long, is either a fool or trying to sell you something, or both. In fact, I would argue that there is no such thing as ‘Good’ or ‘Evil’, but only behavior which gets labeled in that way. Such labels, post-modernists would have us believe, are functions of historical and/or social context—or possibly even just individual judgment issues, as there are patently individuals who have these values either inverted, or for whom they just don’t exist. We call such folks ‘deviants’ or ‘psychopaths’ or give them other suitable appellations, but it all boils down to the same notion, namely that ethics should be considered relative. Against that stand those who maintain that it is absolute, usually provided by some supernatural authority, and transmitted by suitably initiated non-supernatural members of the species.
The correct way of looking at it may be that neither is entirely true, but that ethics and morality are simply by-products of our biological and social structures. George Lakoff essentially takes that position. Considering the evidence, I’m inclined to concur with him. Ethics ultimately is explainable with reference to our nature as social, biological creatures. We are ‘ethical’ because we need rules to live by: individual and social guidelines. We need these guidelines so that our social systems allow our species to survive. Or, to put it the other way around, and looking at it from an evolutionary point of view: the social systems and what we call ‘ethics’ exist as they are because they are the ones that survived, in the sense that its members reproduced more successfully than those who did not have such regulatory systems.
Ethics can be relative and absolute at the same time; it depends on the point of view. It is relative in the sense that for every one it is referenced to a different context, the psychological equivalent to what physicists would call a ‘frame of reference’. It is absolute in the sense that—ignoring the ‘aberrant’ members of the species—its fundamentals are always the same: that which promotes the welfare of those in our graded ‘circle of care’ is ‘good’, and that which attempts to destroy it is ‘bad’. The ‘circle of care’ is a prioritized ranking system which we use, usually unconsciously, to position every member of the species relative to every other. Highest rank those closest to us: typically the members of our immediate families.
The ranking usually descends through our range of relations, friends, acquaintances, other group affiliations (clubs etc), nation, cultural grouping, and so on. Consider this like a geometrical arrangement where the distance of someone from you is an indicator, not always linear, of their priority and weight in your circle of care. The positions are inherently dynamic and change constantly as circumstances contrive. Some circles of care are strangely convoluted and untypically arranged: for example, some apparently consider the members of distant nations as more important than their own, and sometimes closer than their own kin. Still, there is a saying: ‘Charity begins at home’. This probably reflects the usual arrangements in one’s circle of care. And we will tend to arrange our ethics in such a way that what is ‘good’ ends up being that which somehow maximizes the total benefit to the welfare of those arranged in this complicated, often conflict-generating, scheme.
In the center of the circle of course are we: the closest person to ourselves in every aspect imaginable, and therefore also the one with whose welfare we are most concerned. Still, our own importance need not be all-overruling. All in all it’s a matter of some unconscious, highly emotional and probably not-open-to-inspection, mental weighing process that ultimately leads us to make decisions which can be said to be based on ‘ethics’.
‘Welfare’ usually means ‘survival’, but, next to that, can also refer to other important indicators, such as ‘conducive to reproduction’, ‘state of health’, ‘state of physical well-being’, and so on. ‘Care’ is a measure of our emotional engagement in the maintenance of such states for those we focus our attention on.
This is an as unemotional-as-possible description of the fundamentals of ethical behavior. For us, as human beings, the whole thing is, of course, charged with emotional content. Certainly, if one of my children were in peril and threatened by someone, I would not think of it in terms of weighing the importance of their welfare to me. I would kill whoever tries to harm them without a second thought or much ‘weighing up’ of any damn thing. I would use more cogency when considering, for example, the pros and cons of a nation that I happen to be a member of going to war against another—or even, as is currently pertinent, of the same issue facing the whole of what I consider my ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’. Still, ultimately it still comes down to the welfare of those closest to me. Do I consider them threatened? If so, then I would unhesitatingly do whatever I consider necessary and appropriate to protect them. I might even assign so much ‘weight’ to their welfare that I would, if this proved necessary, perform an action that would terminate my own, highly valuable, existence.
Ethics up to now was always predicated on one very important premise: that, no matter what we do, ultimately the most highly ranked thing in our lives would come to an end. Over what happens after that we have no control whatsoever, because we have ceased to be active, that is influential, participants. Whatever happens in the world after we die, it’s out of our hands, and ultimately we are not responsible for it. We are responsible in a way, in the sense that what we do now may influence what will be after we become inactive, but the emotional impact or import of that notion is comparatively impotent. Indeed, we have constructed our religions—that is, our fantasies about what we are after we cease to exist—in such a way as to demean the importance of the physical world and the embodied creatures than were us. In our post-life fantasies we ultimately become beings untouched by mortality and the trivial pursuits of life, and not only unable, but also disinterested in influencing what goes on the unimportant physical realm. All of this reflects a denial of the notion that we do have a responsibility for what happens after our deaths, and that being dead then does not absolve us from our responsibility now, no matter how much we like to talk ourselves into believing it.
An emortalist future cannot sustain this delusion, if for no other reason but that we will be around to suffer or benefit from the consequences of actions. We can’t just send our children off into a future that they have to deal with on their own. Therefore, any decisions we make now and which potentially extend beyond what would usually be our time of final demise have to be completely re-evaluated and reconsidered. We cannot withdraw from the game. We will reap as we sow; not just our descendants. And everywhere in this world there will be others in a similar position, and they’re not going to die either. We’ll have to live with them, and what we’ve done to them—and they with what they’ve done to us.
The basis for the coming ethics then, as is surely clear by now, must be an all-pervading sense of personal responsibility: for our actions and their consequences—and, more importantly, for the people around us. Not a sense of obligation or duty to some non-existent deity, who commands us to behave such and thus, in order that our ‘souls’ might be saved from oblivion or damnation, but an understanding of the sheer necessity of acting responsibly, for, if nothing else, our own sake.
This isn’t a novel idea, of course: the notion that ethical behavior is ultimately utilitarian. Indeed, the religious or idealistically inclined may well object to such a notion, claiming that it is demeaning of the notion of ‘good’ to make it into something done for the sake of its ultimate benefits. Whatever happened, they ask, to, say, ‘Good for its own sake’?
My reply to that would be that, if we dig deeply enough into our motivational structures—and if we exempt the inevitable, usually pathological, exceptions—we will realize that nothing has, is, or will ever be done ‘for its own sake’; but because it is associated with the pursuit of desirable goals at completely different levels, and that ultimately such goals are ‘humanistic’, in the sense that they involve our relationships to other people at all scales, from the one-on-one to that with our whole species. This in turn is so because of our essential nature, which is that of a social creature.
We always come back to this, and emortals will do so even more, because in the end there will be nothing else for them to provide meaning. The pursuit of the vast and inexhaustible range of activities and ‘games’ that utopian immortalists envisage for their ‘infinite’ lives has strict limits. It may work for some: those who are predisposed toward social isolation. But I’d like to submit that those who do so by choice, predisposition or psychopathology, rather than being maneuvered into it by contingency, represent a minority. I’ve also noticed that this minority invariably consider themselves, whether they openly admit it or not, elites of sorts. In the immortalist context this elitism appears in many guises, most of which have trendy futuristic labels under which the faithful gather, thus attesting to the ever-present need of humans to congregate and form social structures. There really isn’t any fundamental difference between them and your average religious community.
The emortalist future—if we manage to bring it about, and if we do it in such a way that it will not destroy us—will ultimately provide us with daily proof that nature is beautiful in its consistency, and that we need nothing outside it to give ‘meaning’ to our existence. For it will be shown again and again that that which is ‘good’ is that which preserves, and that which is ‘bad’ is that which destroys. We will have to learn to understand the importance of our ‘circle of care’ and realize that, in order for there to be a future, this circle will have to be expanded far wider than it ever was possible in the current finite human life-time. This is going to be very difficult indeed, and it will mirror, on a vast geographical and temporal scale, the vicissitudes currently (end of 2003) facing the U.S. in rebuilding Iraq. That’s because it is an enterprise undertaken by flawed human beings, and all such enterprise will inevitably involve struggle, toil, violence, and above all, the making of many, many mistakes.
So be it.
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I’d like to close with a few words addressed to those reading this article. I don’t know who you are or where you come from, or why you’re reading this at all; but I can see you divided into roughly three groups:
1) The ones implacably opposed to the emortalist/immortalist project.
2) The ones who are trying to figure out what to think about this.
3) The already-converted.
To the members of group (1) I’d like to say this:
It’s going to happen. There is nothing you can do about it. Quite probably it will happen within your life-time. Live with it. If you have any sense of social responsibility at all, if you can for just a moment let go of your gods, consider the possibility that the world might just become a better place to be. A very new and scary place, but if we hang in there, also better—for all. Don’t you think that’s a more productive ‘faith’ to follow than those the decrepit religions of the world provide?
To those who ‘just don’t know’:
Try emortalism. Don’t be discouraged by the panoply of ranting elitists extant here. You’ll find them no matter where you look for anything, and they are just the ones who shout the loudest and have the strongest opinions—which is no indicator of their truth. It seems that people need to have outrageous ideas, but there’s no need to take them too seriously. Everybody needs a hobby-horse. Hopefully these guys will grow up.
Emortalism is on the horizon. It brings perils, about that there can be no doubt. But it also brings an incredible promise. This is the way things always are: the bigger the boon, the greater the danger.
Start thinking about these things. And maybe you’ll end up in group (3)…
…to whom I wish to say this:
You could be in the vanguard of leading mankind into that scary and exhilarating future I mentioned just now. Don’t screw it up! Don’t get so wrapped up in your own self-importance and, occasionally truly silly, schemes and ideas that you forget about those who matter most: the ones next to you. For without them your bright future will be a nightmarish quagmire of boring, self-involved, anti-social dysfunctionals; magnified versions of those that make the world into such an occasionally horrible place even now. And if you’re not careful you might just wake up one day, in a hundred years or more and find that you’re one of them. And you might just find out that you’re unable to live with that. And you might just end up killing yourself. Which would be very stupid indeed.
You think you’re working on a big, important thing here, and so you are. But if you are doing this for yourselves, you’re doing it for the wrong person. Only by doing it for others are you actually doing it for yourself. This is the fundamental paradox of the ethics that emortals will have to learn to live by.
