Having spent a number of years now paying close attention to articles and other media on the subject of longevity, it seems quite clear to me that most people see no problem with improving healthcare quality and distribution across the board (even as they may differ in their ideas of how this might be accomplished). That is, I don't see any vast conspiracy to "celebrate suffering and death" for people of any age -- quite the contrary, in fact. What I see instead (for the most part) is a world full of vulnerable beings trying to come to terms with that vulnerability.
But -- at the same time, I see some attitudes that genuinely do concern and confound me. For example, some people still respond with expressed worries about economic strife and overpopulation upon hearing that lifespans (at least in some countries) may be increasing, or that some progress is being made in hacking the mechanisms behind the nastier health problems common in old age.
There are so many layers to this stuff I scarcely know where to begin to address it. But I'll make an attempt.
Personally, I like to take an open-ended perspective when speculating about the future. I don't see existing social, economic, and political structures (anywhere in the world) as being "sacred" or intractable to positive change -- change occurs largely as a function of what people decide they value most. So when I see people arguing that much longer lives would be a bad thing because it would stretch existing retirement systems and other benefits (presumably "forcing" the young into longer, harder work days), it seems to me that they're starting at the wrong end of the value equation entirely.
The lack of realism in this projected scenario notwithstanding, why is it that whenever a group characterized at least in some part by its members' vulnerability stands to benefit from some emerging development, it is assumed that the impetus falls on the vulnerable group to "prove" its worth?
More to the point, why is it not assumed instead that individual lives are of primary value, and that the socioeconomic complications which may arise from saving more lives are just things we're going to have to suck up and deal with?
I obviously can't speak for anyone else, but there has never been a question in my mind that when you have a chance to save a life (or several), you take it. You don't (unless your name happens to be Ebenezer Scrooge) sit there playing numbers games, trying to determine whether saving this old person will mean that maybe 10 younger people don't get a big tax break that year, or whether a healthier elderly population might "hurt the job market" for young people.
That said, there are a number of arguments and essays out there by people trying to make a case for why overpopulation and resources won't actually be issues in a future of widespread effective longevity medicine. But my take on the matter is that they shouldn't really be necessary in the first place -- at least not as far as "justifying" healthcare improvements goes from an ethical standpoint.
On the resource/labor market issue: the Longevity Dividend is a pretty darn groundbreaking acknowledgement on the part of Persons of Authority regarding the benefits of better elder health. I have some serious philosophical and ethical problems with describing any population as a "burden", and there are parts of the Longevity Dividend's rhetoric that irk me (hypersensitive as I may be to that sort of thing) for that reason. But as far as the actual arguments go, they make an excellent case for effective longevity medicine being an economic boon as opposed to a crisis.
In other words, I don't think the number-crunching types have anything to worry about.
And on the overpopulation issue: yes, overpopulation can lead to environmental depletion and the kinds of problems that tend to come along with crowding, but there's no reason to assume that improved elder healthcare is incompatible with addressing population and resource problems. If one starts, as I do, from a mindset in which all people are intrinsically valuable and well worth saving on that basis alone, then one has a "given" or constant to work with that must be accounted for in any large-scale project attempted.
Put another way, the acknowledgment of the goodness of saving lives when possible should be non-negotiable. In this framework, no project claiming the goal of "improving" conditions in the world can hinge upon the necessity of people dying by a particular age.
There is absolutely nothing anyone could say to convince me that we ought to "hold off" on developing or distributing better healthcare on population-control grounds -- if you want to make an observation about the problems of overpopulation, fine, but please don't make your population-management strategy contingent upon denying healthcare to certain demographics. All too often I've seen population-management being raised up in the form of apologism for racism, classism, disablism, etc., and ageism is no more acceptable than any of these as a rationale.
Yes, we humans have a hard road ahead of us as far as fixing our environmental problems, economic woes, healthcare messes, persistent social inequality, and other pervasive issues goes, but we must come to terms with the fact that these fixes all need to happen. The fact that it is impossible to do this "perfectly" or immediately is no reason not to try our best in whatever area we've chosen to focus on, and as far as improving healthcare goes, I would say that "trying our best" in this project must entail an acknowledgment that people are valuable and worth saving no matter what their age, background, income level, etc. happens to be.
10 comments:
I wouldn't always take an option to save a life, in all situations. What is wrong with death is being forced to do it when you don't want to. If somebody was pleading for me to kill them (maybe they are in excruciating pain or something), then I'd actually feel bad about 'saving' that person's life.
But aside from that minor nitpick, I agree with you. Few would advocate returning to the lower life expectancy and lower population of the past, yet many don't want to go to the greater life expectancy and greater population of the future. Do these people really think that the present is the best possible situation imaginable?
Joshua:
Regarding the "excruciating pain" thing: if I came upon someone in excruciating pain begging to be killed I would first try to see if I could do something to help alleviate their pain -- I've heard that women in labor sometimes beg to be killed because of the pain, but it's more an expression of "HOLY CRAP THIS HURTS!" than an actual wish for death.
(Actually, those stories are one of the many reasons I've decided not to spawn myself, but anyway.)
Autonomy and self-determination are primary principles for me, most definitely. But death is just about the most permanent thing that can happen to a person, and consent issues are notoriously tricky in that department.
I don't claim to have it all figured out by any means, but I guess my opinion on this stuff is very similar to the one expressed by (sadly, recently deceased) disability rights lawyer Harriet McBryde Johnson:
"We shouldn't offer assistance with suicide until we all have the assistance we need to get out of bed in the morning and live a good life."
IMO, it's very important to make sure a person isn't asking for death because they feel like a "burden" to the world, or because they've simply not been able to secure adequate pain management. But that's getting way off the original point of my post, and I most certainly don't want to incite a big assisted-suicide debate in the comments here.
Back to the population issue, you said: Few would advocate returning to the lower life expectancy and lower population of the past, yet many don't want to go to the greater life expectancy and greater population of the future. Do these people really think that the present is the best possible situation imaginable?
Funny you should mention the thing about people possibly thinking that the present is the "best possible situation imaginable" -- I was actually having a conversation with Matt (my SO) the other day about how weird it is that some people are so obsessed with the idea of "traditional marriage" that isn't actually "traditional" by any means. As a friend put it recently: "I'm always entertained by the term "traditional marriage". Would that be the tradition where my father decides who I marry based on political and financial advantage for the family, or the tradition where if I marry someone of another race we could both go to jail?"
Basically, I think some people have a very short-term view of the past, to the point where it's difficult for them to speculate about the future without being scared. That is, people who are fairly comfortable with the way things are "now" seem biased toward arguing that things are the way they are "now" for good, solid reasons, and therefore, destabilizing the status quo would be a bad thing.
Mind you, I do think that when it comes to the specific issue of population, humans do need to look for ways to minimize the destructive impact of our presence. But IMO, the best way to do that is to provide and educate more people about contraception while simultaneously seeking ways to operate our industries and utilize resources more sustainably. I'd wager that a lot of what many people see as population-related problems are actually resource-use and distribution problems, which are totally curable given a bit of effort and creativity.
And, of course, in the distant future, I've always liked (perhaps a bit romantically) the idea of humans heading out into the stars to explore and find new lands to settle. My guess is that if we do things right here on Earth, there will be plenty of time to deal with any population-borne issues prior to them actually posing any kind of real threat.
Anne, I have read many, many posts on the subject of overpopulation and yours is one of the best. No one is more concerned about the subject of overpopulation than I, and I agree with your post 100%. Increases in life expectancy should be celebrated and we should never stop trying to extend life and improve the quality of life.
But overpopulation is still a problem and it simply means that we have to work harder on the birth rate side of the equation (and, at a national level, we also need to consider the role of immigration). All too often, those of us concerned with overpopulation are portrayed as "merchants of death" promoting a "culture of death." Nothing could be further from the truth. It is actually those who are opposed to reducing the birth rate who are promoting a high death rate, since these are the only two factors involved in determining our population, a population which must stabilize at some point, one way or another. Those opposed to stabilizing it at a lower level through a reduced birth rate are, by default, choosing to stabilize it at a higher level through a high death rate.
Most people are concerned about overpopulation from the perspective of resource shortages and environmental degradation. But there is another factor to consider. At this point I should introduce myself. I am the author of "Five Short Blasts: A New Economic Theory Exposes The Fatal Flaw in Globalization and Its Consequences for America." This book explains how the consequences of overpopulation - high unemployment and poverty - are actually imported when we trade freely with overpopulated nations.
I think you'd find the theory and solutions proposed in my book very enlightening. I invite you to visist my web site at OpenWindowPublishingCo.com where you can read the preface, join in the blog discussion and, of course, purchase the book if you like.
Pete Murphy
Author, Five Short Blasts
Hi Pete, thanks for commenting. I'm definitely an advocate of reducing the birth rate, though of course not through coercive or discriminatory means -- IMO, birth control is a wonderful tool that all women (and men, though it's more of an issue for women, seeing as we've got the wombs and all) should have free/cheap and easy access to.
I looked up some information on your book and the arguments it makes, and while I'm sure a lot of it would frankly go over my head given my lack of background in the areas you're writing about, I find myself very suspicious of your apparent assertion that it's essential for people to keep buying and storing things, and that population growth is bad in part because it encourages people to conserve rather than being good little consumer drones. As a chronic do-it-yourselfer and fan of flea markets and yard sales, I value my freedom to independently problem-solve and acquire things in this way, and resent pressures to throw things away constantly so I can buy new ones, effectively subsidizing huge corporations.
That, and I totally disagree that "immigration" is a problem -- I have trouble understanding national dividing lines to begin with, as they seem ridiculously arbitrary, and I cannot for the life of me understand the sentiment some people have (not necessarily you) that immigration ought to be dealt with violently. "Securing the border" has always sounded to me like a creepy euphemism for "shooting brown people", and that makes me tremendously leery of those who make a lot of noise about it.
Back to population, though: as a species I think we're still adjusting to the very idea of being able to control our reproduction, and as with any similarly powerful technology, care must be taken to avoid having it used in racist/classist ways by people who want to impose their "gated-community" visions on a reality populated by a diverse group of stakeholders.
The scenario in which people of all income levels and nationalities are able to access birth control freely is a wonderful ideal, but I still occasionally come across people today arguing (in classic eugenic fashion) that we need to decrease the birth rate primarily in peoples who happen to be poor and brown-skinned whilst raising the birth rate amongst the powerful, affluent white population. And to me that's an incredibly wrongheaded position to take, as it is not only objectively racist, but demeaning to women as it seeks to frankly "use" some of us as baby-factories.
Again, I'm sort of going off the main point of my original post, but I figured this was as good a time as any to bring up these points in particular, as there have been occasions wherein I've been quoted favorably by people whose ideologies I wouldn't want to touch with a 100-foot pole.
The Longevity Dividend article makes a good point about the wealth accumulated and invested by people who stay healthy and work longer. Delaying aging by seven years wouldn't be the amazing futuristic accomplishment they seem to be claiming, though. Healthy life already has been extended considerably more than that in the modern era, and I expect those gradual improvements would continue even without a major life extension breakthrough.
I think you're right that many people are afraid of changing the status quo because they have such a short-term view that they can't see historical trends in context. On the population issue, Earth now has many mega-cities that would have been thought impossibly large a hundred years ago. and we will no doubt learn how to live much more efficiently.
Curious - what is your opinion of the so-called Repugnant Conclusion, for that's what your reasoning seems to lead to? (Not that I'm saying this is necessarily a bad thing - some moral philosophers have no problem with the RC, as noted in the article - but I'm just wondering what your opinion of it was.)
I previously supported life extension primarily on the "it saves lives" grounds, as you seem to do, but eventually found it far less problematic to just argue in favor of life extension because it seems likely to raise the average quality of life, ignoring the "saving lives" argument entirely.
xuenay: Huh? I don't think my line of reasoning leads to the "repugnant conclusion" at all -- the idea of creating more people in the service of some abstract "happiness maximization" ideal strikes me as incredibly bizarre.
I have never liked philosophical frameworks which attempt to divorce principle from the individual lives affected by it (or that seem like they're doing something like that to me; it could be that I'm misunderstanding the language, but still.)
Back to the "repugnant conclusion", though: I guess I just don't see how a motivation toward saving the wanted lives of existing people can be conflated with some kind of weird obligation to create as many people as possible. People exist right now. People who are alive (so long as they aren't suicidally depressed) generally want to stay that way. Helping them do so (via food, housing, medical care, etc.) is therefore a good thing, and has nothing whatsoever to do with how many babies people "should" have (or not have).
In other words, desiring to save the wanted lives of people who *already exist* in no way obligates anyone to have a certain number of kids. People will likely keep choosing to have (or not have) babies for a variety of very personal reasons which only they can truly answer for themselves, and I think that's the way it should be.
Mind you, I am definitely all for the proliferation of cheap/free and readily-accessible contraception, and I do think a massive population spike would probably lead to some serious crowding issues -- but I believe quite strongly that, given the choice, most people would not choose to have a zillion kids running around. Birth control is pretty popular and widely used where it's actually available, after all.
Also, in case this wasn't clear from my prior comment, I don't tend to think in terms of "abstract aggregates" when forming my philosophical positions.
Hence, the "repugnant conclusion" seems like a non-sequitor to me.
I don't see happiness as something that can be looked at outside the context of individual lives, which is exactly what the "repugnant conclusion" does when it posits an aggregate of happiness consisting of the sum of many (presumably tiny) "happiness elements". It seems that in that scenario, no-one gets to experience that Big Happy in the first place, making it moot as far as individual lives go.
Ah, I realize I was a bit unclear. I didn't mean that your reasoning would literally lead to the RC as stated - however, it did seem to lead to an equivalent result. At least the way I read your post, you were saying that saving lives takes priority over concerns of their later quality of life, up to the point that it doesn't matter even if life extension causes severe overpopulation. This principle, if adhered to, could eventually lead to the "scenario Z" in the RC.
(As for whether it will - I'm not sure. I'd certainly hope not, and think it's worth the try, since the quality of life for the elderly can be terrible once your body really starts to fail. On the other hand, I did some calculations based on current mortality figures about a month ago. I came to the conclusion that in order for the population to stay stable, the birthrate would need to fall to one fiftieth of what it is now. That's something on the order of 0.04 children per woman, which seems quite challenging, to say the least. On the other hand, most Western countries are in a population decline right now, so we'd have time to adjust, with life extension first reversing the decline and then gradually increasing the growth rate over several years. I need to find somebody who actually works with population growth statistics, or otherwise figure out how to model this - I'm not sure if I've committed any methodological errors in my calculations.)
Also, I personally think that the "same person" at any two different points of time isn't really the same person at all, but two different people whose shared memories make them imagine themselves as one. I have no expectation that the "me" who is now typing these words would still be alive tomorrow, even if this body picked up zero physical damage. This makes the distinction between saving and creating lives feel a bit artificial to me. It's one of the main reasons I've abandoned "saving lives" as an argument for life extension, and also explains why I feel that you saying "lives should always be saved" is rather similar to the "lives should always be created" in the repugnant conclusion's original reasoning.
xuenay:
Also, I personally think that the "same person" at any two different points of time isn't really the same person at all, but two different people whose shared memories make them imagine themselves as one.
I've heard (and considered) that reasoning before, but at this point I've pretty much rejected it on the grounds that it seems to be a philosophical "trick". Yes, it's a valid way of linguistically framing the fact of existence over time, but it doesn't really reflect the way life is actually experienced by individuals. In other words, it strikes me as being more wordplay than actual explanation. No offense to you, of course, or anyone else who holds that view -- I just disagree with it.
I think that the entities we call "persons" are dynamic processes, and that the subjective sense of having a set of memories over time from a particular perspective is extremely important. I don't think it's bad to create more people (to a point; I don't advocate people breeding like rabbits just for the heck of it!), but I think it's a lot worse to kill or neglect existing people than it is to fail to create a certain number of new people. People who don't yet exist don't have perspectives at all, and to me that's a very important distinction.
Furthermore, I don't see my position here (in which "existing persons" are prioritized, in some respects, over "potential persons") as contradicting the idea that it is good to plan for the future and live sustainably. Sustainable living is a good thing no matter whether you're talking about existing persons who have the potential to live a very long time OR about potential future persons.
At least in my opinion.
(Just figured I'd bring that up, as sometimes people tend to take the "prioritization of existing persons" as some kind of bizarre argument in favor of killing baby seals and strip-mining the rainforests and whatnot, and that's not at all what I'm saying here.)
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