John K. Davis is professor of philosophy at Cal State Fullerton, and the author of New Methuselahs: The Ethics of Life Extension.
God appears. You ask whether there will be an afterlife. He answers:
That’s up to you. I’ve found that some people worry that the afterlife will be interminably boring, or lack the finitude and challenges that make us appreciate life, so I give people a choice at the moment of death. Moreover, just to reduce anxiety about what it will be like, I’ve made the afterlife resemble this life, with all its hazards and challenges, except for one thing — you will stop aging in your twenties.
You ask if this would be permanent. He answers:
That too is up to you. You can end your afterlife by dying (again) any time you like, but once you do, that’s it. Annihilation is forever.
People may someday face a choice something like this, for the afterlife described above is very similar to what life extension may provide a few decades from now.
Life extension is not end-of-life care as we know it, with elderly patients on feeding tubes in hospital beds until they die. Life extension consists of slowing or halting the biological processes of aging so that you either age more slowly (or not at all), and live far longer than humans do now — perhaps decades or centuries longer.
Researchers have already extended life in mice, yeast, fish, worms, and other species. One mouse lived for 1819 days (the equivalent of a human living to 180). Big money has noticed; Google’s Calico (“California Life Company”) and pharmaceutical giant AbbVie have a 2.5 billion dollar partnership to develop drugs and other therapies to slow human aging and extend life.
So would you take that offer from God (or Google)? According to critics of life extension, you should not. According to them, a healthy, youthful extended life is a life worse than death.
Worse than death? Surely extended life is good for the reasons that normal life is good. We want to enjoy life and pursue various goals that take time. Extended life might even bring greater wisdom, for wisdom comes with age. A human race that ages more slowly may finally grow up, learn to care more about future generations, be more averse to war, and otherwise make wiser choices.
And yet, surveys by the Pew Center and various universities have shown that a slight majority of people believe they would not choose extended life if it were available. In a Pew Center survey, 56% of American adults would not want extended life, and in a survey by two universities in Australia, only 35.4% would want it, and 38.9% thought it would do them more harm than good.
They are not alone. Many ethicists (most notably Leon Kass, as well as Allison Arieff in this column) argue that extended life is bad for you. They argue that living under the death sentence of a normal life expectancy teaches us to value our time and appreciate the precious gift of life, and drives us to accomplish something instead of frittering our lives away. Facing death teaches us to accept mortality, as well as acquire courage and other virtues that come from facing danger. Accepting our mortality forces us to invest our hopes in the next generation, thereby learning selflessness, rather than obsessing narcissistically on personal survival. Endless life, they say, would be endlessly boring.
There are, of course, other reasons to worry about life extension. Extending our lifespan may cause overpopulation, and we might develop a caste society where the rich live for centuries and everyone else lives a normal lifespan. These are serious concerns, but let’s focus on the more personal question: Is extended life a good life for you to live?
The critics are right; facing death has a silver lining. However, extended life isn’t immortality. It’s life with slower aging, or perhaps no aging. You’ll still face death. The young can die in an auto accident or from disease, and so can those who live extended lives. You’d still have to accept your mortality and deal with the fact that your time is finite. You’d still have motivation to use your time well and acquire whatever virtues facing death helps us develop. You’d just have a lot more time to do these things.
And, if you grow bored with extended life, your decision would be reversible. You can always cease taking the drugs or stem cell treatments, and resume aging.
Now flip the arguments around. If death teaches us to appreciate life, life must be precious; why, then, should we turn down more of it? If we want to avoid wasting time, then turning down extra years of life is a waste of that time. Accepting death may be easier, not harder, when you’ve lived long enough to accomplish what you wanted to. Turning down life extension in order to learn to accept death amounts to dying early in order to learn to accept dying…early.
So — is extended life worse than death? Someday you may have to answer that question for yourself.
Of course, you may believe that choosing death is not choosing annihilation; it’s merely choosing whatever afterlife God has arranged for you. My take on that is that if there’s an afterlife, there’s no need to rush into it, and if there isn’t, there’s no need to rush forward. But that’s between you and God.
