“Who wants ... to live ... forever…?” or so Freddie Mercury crooned in the 1986 power ballad. Having grown up with Queen’s A Kind of Magic album playing constantly in my mother’s car, it was with great surprise I learned years later that that majestic piece of songwriting was not – as I had believed – an anguished meditation on mortality in light of Mercury’s failing health, but rather a piece of incidental music written to describe the temporal-romantic challenges faced by the protagonist of the action-adventure film Highlander.
Beyond the Highlander’s fictional struggles lies a real trend for behaviours aimed at drastically extending lifetimes. Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson receives transfusions of his son’s blood, meanwhile Vladimir Putin and co allegedly bathe in the antler-blood of Siberian deer. It’s easy to scoff at this latest manifestation of self-obsession among certain Silicon Valley and autocrat types as another symptom of having too many resources and too few good ideas about how to disperse them.
But are radical life extension efforts always misguided? Lecturer in political philosophy at the University of Sheffield and expert on life extension Ben Davies thinks not. He distinguishes two strands of motivation for wanting to radically extend our lives. “First, people might have a positive motivation: they enjoy life and want more. That’s been the main focus of philosophical work: would we really continue to enjoy life forever (though, even if what these people are doing works exactly as planned, they won’t live forever).”
“The second, negative reason is perhaps more interesting, and probably more common, which is simply that people don’t want to die. That seems consistent with thinking that living forever might not be great. As another great singer, rather later than Freddie, put it, ‘I don’t wanna die, but I ain’t keen on living either’. Love of life and fear of death don’t necessarily come as a pair.”
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So, what do philosophers mean by “death” in this context? Davies distinguishes three possibilities. “There’s the process of dying: everyone agrees that can be bad. Then there’s actually being dead – that’s been a major focus for philosophers. Finally, I think we should also consider the moment of death, namely as a moment of loss.”
Not all philosophers think being dead is a bad business. Epicurus, for example, suspected it was incoherent to be worried about death, since it’s a state we probably never actually experience. As he put it: “Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”
Davies disagrees. “We do tend to think that things can harm us even when we’re not aware of them. If we focus on the moment of death, as I suggested before, we can look at a point when death affects us while we still exist. Basically, there’s a sense (admittedly a self-centred one) in which our death is the end of the world for us. From a subjective perspective, everything is destroyed.”
It might be my current phase of exhausted motherhood, but for now, at least, it can seem irrational to worry much about something literally everyone goes through. Davies finds death worries to be more well-founded.
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“Should we allow a fear of death to take over our lives? Of course not. But I do think it’s rational to have negative feelings about our deaths. And it’s not clear to me why the fact that it happens to everyone makes it less regrettable! I think if we look at what people like Johnson are actually aiming for, the more realistic goal is some kind of effect on ageing: slowing it, or undoing its effects. The fact that we all age doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to undo some of its harms, any more than if an entire population suffers from some disease means we shouldn’t try to cure it.”
Of course success in the field of life-extension might bring new problems, like that there is subtle value in the arc of ageing as it currently happens. Ageing allows for a natural winding down, forcing us to slow up a bit and perhaps prepare for death. A scenario in which more people went from perfect youthful health into sudden death doesn’t seem obviously better even if it reduces the discomfort and unpleasantness involved in much ageing.
Others worry about overpopulation. Davies says: “If people live longer, particularly with healthier bodies, they might have more kids, and there won’t be as many people dying. But, it’s worth noting that some models don’t lead to overpopulation in this dramatic sense: for instance, people might have the same number of children but over a longer period.
“Again, I’d say once we focus on ageing rather than immortality, we should see that people will die, even if much later. Putin and Johnson mightn’t want to accept that, but it’s a statistical certainty.”
Perhaps a major issue with the life-extension project is a PR one. There is obviously a rich continuum between the more radical antics of Johnson and the normal business of public health and keeping people well. Davies agrees: “Ending ageing isn’t our greatest priority. But nor is space travel or the creation of art or many things we spend time and money on.
“I think ending ageing is a worthwhile project, given a bad name by its associates.”
Dr Clare Moriarty is a Research Ireland Enterprise Fellow, working at University College Dublin and the National Library of Ireland
