Truly Human Enhancement: A Philosophical Defense of Limits

6. The Moral Case against Radical Life Extension

6 The Moral Case against Radical Life Extension The longest verified human life span is that of the smoking, drinking Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who lived for 122 years and 164 days. Calment died in 1997. She had vivid memories of meeting Vincent Van Gogh—“a dirty, badly dressed, disagreeable” man. Calment put her extreme longevity down to a diet rich in olive oil, port wine, and chocolates.1 Radical life extension would give its recipients life spans that far exceed that of Madame Calment. Aspiring radical life extenders want to live for thousands of years. There’s a difference between the topic of this chapter, radical life extension and the topics of the previous three chapters, the radical enhancement of our physical and intellectual powers. The explicit purpose of the latter is to change us in quite significant ways. Physically enhanced runners will record marathon times out of the reach of unenhanced human athletes. Radically cognitively enhanced scientists will formulate theories far beyond the intellects of unenhanced human scientists. Radical life extension seems to have the reverse goal. It promises to protect us from change—specifically from age-related change. If all goes according to life extenders’ plans, you in a thousand years’ time may differ little from you now. We might therefore expect few of the barriers of imaginative identification that thwart our engagement with radically cognitively or physically enhanced beings. It is possible to object to the prudential rationality of radical life extension . In my earlier book, Humanity’s End, I mounted such an objection.2 Enthusiasts present multiplying a conventional human life span by ten as multiplying by ten all of the good experiences in a conventional human life. I argued that this is unlikely to be so. The activities that seem to us to be rewarding and pleasurable—travel to exotic locations, driving sports cars, viewing the Niagara Falls from close up, and so on—are likely to seem 114 Chapter 6 too dangerous to our especially long-lived future selves. We should view radical life extension as a transformative change that purges our lives of our familiar pleasures. This chapter offers a different kind of response to life extension. I argue that translating the theoretical possibility of radical life extension into a therapeutic reality is likely to require immoral acts. This charge of immorality does not attach directly to the act of extending one’s life. For the purposes of this chapter’s argument, we can allow that the act of acquiring a millennial life expectancy is, in itself, morally permissible. But the experiments necessary to make life extension a therapeutic reality will impose significant unjustified and undeserved burdens on others. I derive this conclusion from two different claims. The first claim concerns the science of radical life extension—it addresses the experiments necessary to establish that a proposed therapy safely halts or reverses aging. The second kind of claim concerns the motivations of those who desire radical life extension. I argue that very few individuals who seek radical life extension will freely offer themselves as participants in clinical trials for anti-aging therapies. Since they are unlikely to volunteer in the numbers required, the search will be on for others to serve as anti-aging guinea pigs. I present the enterprise of radically extending human life spans as requiring an immoral transfer. The central characters in vampire stories achieve radically extended existences by draining the blood of victims. In this act, “life force,” or something similar, is transferred from the human victim to the vampire. The concept of life force has no place in modern biology, and this means that radical human life extenders simply could not arrange its transfer from disempowered donors to empowered recipients. The empowered do nevertheless acquire something from the disempowered that has consequences similar to supping on their blood—this is their participation in dangerous clinical trials. The empowered will achieve their extended life spans by effectively taking years from others. The mechanism by which these years are transferred differs from that in vampire stories, but its consequences are the same. Two Kinds of Anti-Aging Research There are two kinds of anti-aging research. The traditional approach focuses on diseases of aging. In this chapter, I shall understand diseases of aging as comprising the diseases acknowledged in conventional medical practice as The Moral Case against Radical Life Extension 115 both becoming more prevalent as humans age...