Methusela Morality

At Reason’s Hit & Run, Ronald Bailey praises the latest prophet of beating this thing called death:

What is particularly interesting is that many of those raising the question of the ethics of immortality do so with an answer already in mind — “No, it’s not right!” Both conservative and liberal writers alike are expressing a lot of moral angst in recent books, articles and opinion pieces about the prospect of people hanging around long, long after the last broadcast of “The Price Is Right” has aired, which could be an eternity.

Caplan ably shoots down the usual suite of anti-longevity arguments: (1) more decrepitude, (2) against God and/or nature, and (3) what about the kids? The point of (1) is not to be older longer, but to be younger longer; (2) in the Bible lots of people lived centuries and Mother Nature could care less one way or the other how long you live; and (3) we can take care of the kids.

He correctly concludes:

Despite a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing, it is not obvious that wanting to live a lot longer is evil or immoral. The case against trying is not convincing.

I’ve written on this topic before, but I want to take a different approach here. We all recognize (or we all should recognize) that there are a lot of bad things that could happen if radical life extension (RLE) became a reality. And we all (or we all should) recognize that there are a lot of bad things that could happen if it never became a reality. So the important thing here, especially for an opponent of immorality like myself, is to carefully not condemn problems that could be correlated with RLE but not caused by it.

After due consideration, then, there’s a huge difference — a huge moral difference — between seeking significant life extension — say, to the Methuselan point of 400 or so years — and seeking immortality. Thus there’s a moral problem with obscuring the difference, as Caplan appears to do by concluding that wanting to live ‘a lot longer’ is not immoral in an article that purports to argue why seeking immortality is not immoral. Trying to master and abolish death is the relevant moral issue here, not trying to stretch out life or youth (which has its own set of problems that we already know well). Neither nature nor God has ordained that we die at 120 years of age. The much stronger argument is that both nature and God have ordained that we die — some day, some way — and that we want to be mortal. It’s possible to conceive of a ‘morality for immortals’, but it’s no human morality. When we say ‘immoral’, we mean ‘immoral according to human morality’.

Those are the terms on which this conversation has no choice but to proceed. And on those terms, the argument for immortality is always immoral.