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The human condition ends in death, but is there anything to do besides simply accepting it?

We are mortal. We are all going to die. What is one to do about it? Nothing, according to the dominant position: One must accept the human lot, and if possible, accept it with equanimity.��

Premature death is viewed as a tragedy, of course, and we sympathize with fear of the inevitable even on behalf of centenarians, yet attempts to extend human life significantly are viewed with suspicion. What kind of person, the thought appears to be, would attempt to overcome biological limitations on lifespan? Someone exceedingly greedy, surely. Or worse, someone forgetting himself, like the character Braddock from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “A Diamond as Big as Ritz,” who tries to bribe the Almighty with a very large diamond. Ultra-wealthy anti-aging champions such as Bryan Johnson seem to fit this schema and may provide support for it in the popular imagination, if unwittingly.��

Iskra Fileva is a CU �鶹ӰԺ associate professor of philosophy who specializes in moral psychology and issues at the intersection of philosophy, psychology and psychiatry.

Virtuous people, we think, may hope for immortality through their deeds or yearn for eternal bliss as an immaterial soul in heaven, but a desire for a much longer life in the literal sense is deemed unseemly. Research on life extension has, for many, the flavor of a Faustian bargain: We suspect that only those without scruples would try to cheat their way out of the human condition andavoid death.��

On the other hand, we don’t want anyone to get too cozy with death either. While we may, if grudgingly, accept behaviors that increase the risk of death—think car racing or climbing the Himalayas—we don’t think it quite proper to assume control over the end of our lives, especially when that end isn’t otherwise imminent. I suspect, in fact, that widespread qualms about physician-assisted suicide have less to do with alleged worries about murderous doctors or relatives and more with the background assumption that death must come for us when it will and not when we choose.����

To be sure, support for the two directives is not univocal—both life-extension research and the “right to die” movement have advocates—but it is very widespread. We thus seem to embrace two injunctions that pull in opposite directions: “Accept mortality” and “Don’t choose death.” Should we or shouldn’t we want to die?����

Natural human lifespan

Perhaps the two directives can be reconciled by appealing to the idea of a natural human lifespan. We can say that a mature and virtuous person aims to live out roughly the span characteristic of our species and then die a natural death. On this view, one should accept temporal finitude without actively seeking to bring death about, open the door when the Grim Reaper comes knocking without trying to lure him in, face the inevitable without claiming authority over the schedule.

A crude version of this position can be easily shown implausible:��After all, medicine can seem, in some ways, unnatural.But the proponent of the natural-lifespan view need not bite this particular bullet—she can argue, instead, that the proper role of medicine is restorative, not transformative. Medicine ought to ensure we get the number of years we are “owed” by correcting genetic errors or counteracting the effects of harmful environments without feeding fantasies of living for thousands of years.

But just what is so good, never mind normatively choice-worthy, about a natural lifespan and a natural death? I will take the first question first.��

It has been suggested that a much longer life would get tedious or meaningless or both. Philosopher Bernard Williams, in “The Makropulos Case,” adduces considerations to that effect. The title of Williams’s essay is a reference to Elina Makropulos, a fictional character courtesy of writer Karel Čapek. Čapek’s Makropulos acquires the gift of life extension and initially takes advantage of it, but after living for several centuries, becomes apathetic, as if frozen in boredom. She continues to fear death, but at 300 plus, she is so jaded that she laughs when another character burns the document containing the secret of life extension.��

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Virtuous people, we think, may hope for immortality through their deeds or yearn for eternal bliss as an immaterial soul in heaven, but a desire for a much longer life in the literal sense is deemed unseemly.

Williams’ argument appeals to self-interest, not virtue, so even if it succeeded, it would not show anything untoward or Faustian about the desire for radical life extension, but let’s set this point aside.�� I suspect that Williams’ view, and Čapek’s, likely expresses what is sometimes called “an adaptive preference”: that is, a tendency to see the attainable as better than the unattainable, whatever the alternatives’ underlying characteristics. We don’t have life-extension methods, so we might as well tell ourselves that human lifespan is best as is. Moreover, barring the possibility of a dystopia in which anti-aging treatments are obligatory, no one in a world with life-extension techniques would be forced to live longer than they wished, so there is no need whatsoever to browbeat each other into adopting a preference for current lifespans.

The price of a longer life?

I must note here that I don’t know how many believe the prudential argument anyhow. For it is also sometimes suggested that were anti-aging treatments to become available, their price would be prohibitive for most people. Yet, if a significantly longer life was not an attractive prospect, the potentially high price tag of life extension treatment would bother no one. As for the price argument considered independently, the obvious response is that we should work to make the treatments affordable rather than try to persuade ourselves that we’d have no use for them anyway.��

Another argument put forward has to do with morality rather than with self-interest: What about the unborn? When do they get to live? If we slow down aging by a lot, we’d need to drastically reduce the number of births as well.��

This argument is well intentioned, but I don’t think it is good enough. No merely possible person is owed a chance to be born. A merely possible person is not a person at all, so there isn’t anyone that such a chance may be owed to. (Think of all your merely possible siblings or children. Who are they? How many of them are there?) The people who die every day due to old age, by contrast, are quite real.��

But the more important point I wish to make in response to the “what about the unborn?” line is this: Our intuitions of what lifespans are “fair” for us to expect are anchored in current lifespans, which are an accident. We could have evolved to live for thousands of years, like bristlecone pine trees, in which case we’d think it perfectly fine and not greedy at all to live that long. Or we could have evolved to live for several months, like many mice, and then wishing to live for 80 years may have seemed to us terribly selfish, nay Faustian.����

That may be, my opponent may say, but we �󲹱����’t evolved that way. Granted, our intuitions are thoroughly shaped by the contingencies of our evolutionary history. Still, we mustn’t discard them for all that: We mustn’t because we don’t know what life would be like if we did live much longer. Forget fairness to the unborn and consider self-interest again. Had we evolved to live for many more years, one might say, we’d probably have psychological features that allow for good longer lives, but we �󲹱����’t. Given that, extending life is a risky business, a leap into the unknown. What if anti-aging techniques turn out to be a Pandora’s box, and we end up saddling ourselves with greatly extended but very miserable lives?��

Gauging what is good for us

A cynic may quip that it’s not as though we are all currently thriving, but let’s bracket that retort. ��The argument from deeply ingrained features of human psychology should not be dismissed lightly. There is a certain wisdom in taking naturalness as a heuristic that helps us gauge what is good for us.����

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While there is no normative reason to prefer natural human lifespans, virtue does require that we desire mortality.��

I'm not arguing against proceeding at all; I'm arguing for proceeding with caution.

To be clear, I do not intend to propose a different optimal lifespan. It may well be that even were we to live for thousands of years, many would desire more. (This is the main theme in what may be the first sci-fi novel, Voltaire’s Micromegas.��, I call this the blessing and curse of imagination.) My ��point here is simply that having a choice to live longer is better than not having that choice.��

I conclude from here that while there is no normative reason to prefer natural human lifespans, virtue does require that we desire mortality.��

But does it prohibit desiring death on a given day?��

It is difficult to see why. Note that a heroic self-sacrifice is seen as not only compatible with but also exemplifying virtue, so the question would have to be whether one may choose death for self-interested reasons.��

The idea tends to make us squeamish. Since death is irreversible, the squeamishness is all well and good, but ought we moralize it?

No one argues that a virtuous person cannot prefer mortality in general, and some, as we saw, claim that she must prefer it. So why can’t one choose death on a particular day? What is so virtuous about dying only when you don’t want to?��

There is a much longer discussion to be had about this than I can offer in this essay, but for present purposes, I wish to say the following: In choosing to die, a person may hurt loved ones. This is not a trivial matter, but how much weight those considerations have would depend on one’s particular circumstances. Particular circumstances cannot private an adequate ground for a general principle.��

Or is the thought that it would be somehow terrible for society as a whole if someone were to choose death for private reasons?��

A character named “Mr. Tredegar” in Edith Wharton’s novel The Fruit of the Tree adopts some such view in the course of an argument with a nurse named Justine Brent. Wharton writes:

“Human life is sacred,” he said sententiously.

“Ah, that must have been decreed by someone who had never suffered!” Justine exclaimed.

Mr. Tredegar smiled compassionately: he evidently knew how to make allowances for the fact that she was overwrought by the sight of her friend's suffering: "Society decreed it—not one person," he corrected.

“Society—science—religion!” she murmured, as if to herself.

“Precisely. It’s the universal consensus—the result of the world’s accumulated experience. Cruel in individual instances—necessary for the general welfare.”

Yet the appeal to general welfare is unpersuasive. We cannot impose on each other a day full of experiences that the recipient does not wish to have. The prolongation of life of a person unwilling to live is but many such days.��

What, then, explains the Tredegars of the world?��

My strong suspicion is that the answer, once again, lies in the naturalness heuristic. It seems to us against nature’s injunctions for a person to end her life. But an otherwise healthy and helpful heuristic, when too rigidly held, may become a superstition. I suspect, in fact, that it is precisely an awareness that we are in the grips of something like that superstition which partly explains why we tend to oppose life-extension: We fear the motivational grip of “naturalness” intuitions and worry that in a world with life extension, we might end up accidentally saddling ourselves with very long undesirable lives that we would not be able to end.��

It is quite possible that if radical life extension became possible, there would be some who don’t wish to live any longer but who, having opted for another several hundred years, would be unable to end it all, a bit like a person unable to walk away from a cult or a very bad job. The problem may be exacerbated by the fact that in the alternative world, people in this position may appear and biologically be thirty-five even if they have already lived for three and a half centuries.��

Still, we successfully combat instincts (including the survival instinct, if doing so could help save a loved one’s life) and rethink heuristics. At any rate, the question is whether this is what we should try to do or whether, instead, we must continue to maintain that a mature and virtuous person would always choose mortality but somehow never, on any given day, choose death.��

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