Whenever I am told by ethicists that enabling people to live longer is a threat to society, a complex development that must be held back and studied so as to understand how best to allow it to progress, if at all, I have the feeling that I'm being held up for money. Ethics is, I feel, someone undermined in this day and age by the incentives that operate on the ethicist as a professional, with an office and a titled position in one or another institution. If he or she fails to find thorny problems that will require years of careful study, then he or she is out of a job. As a consequence I think a sizable proportion of the more modern incarnation of the field is essentially nonsense.

Acting to reduce the suffering and death of aging, by far the greatest cause of human pain and loss, isn't ethically complicated at all. It is the simplest thing in the world. Are we for or against suffering and death? Against? Good. Then we should bring an end to aging. That really is all there is to it, and all that has to be said on the matter. Medical science is close enough to the goal of rejuvenation therapies that no amount of effort deployed to other means of reducing suffering and death can be anywhere near as efficient a use of resources. Yet, strangely, those other approaches still receive far more attention. So we advocate for an adjustment of priorities: less war, less waste, more life science.

The author of New Methuselahs is one of those folk cheerfully carving out a portion of their living by making the ethics of rejuvenation appear much more complex than is actually the case. There is no problem that could possibly arise from ending aging that would be worse than what presently occurs as a result of aging; the hundred thousand lives lost daily, the hundreds of millions suffering pain, loss of capacity, loss of dignity as their bodies and minds corrode. The threat of overpopulation that is constantly brought up is a Malthusian dream, not a reality. Frequently predicted overpopulation and resource exhaustion has never come to pass, current trends head in the opposite direction, and the demographic models show that ending aging doesn't result in rapid population growth. If anything it is a madness of our era that we collectively have the capacity to do something about the death and suffering of aging, but would rather talk than act.

New Methuselahs: the Ethics of Life Extension

Life extension - slowing or halting human aging - is now being taken seriously by many scientists. Although no techniques to slow human aging yet exist, researchers have successfully slowed aging in yeast, mice, and fruit flies, and have determined that humans share aging-related genes with these species. In New Methuselahs, John Davis offers a philosophical discussion of the ethical issues raised by the possibility of human life extension. Why consider these issues now, before human life extension is a reality? Davis points out that, even today, we are making policy and funding decisions about human life extension research that have ethical implications. With New Methuselahs, he provides a comprehensive guide to these issues, offering policy recommendations and a qualified defense of life extension. After an overview of the ethics and science of life extension, Davis considers such issues as the desirability of extended life; whether refusing extended life is a form of suicide; the Malthusian threat of overpopulation; equal access to life extension; and life extension and the right against harm. In the end, Davis sides neither with those who argue that there are no moral objections to life enhancement nor with those who argue that the moral objections are so strong that we should never develop it. Davis argues that life extension is, on balance, a good thing and that we should fund life extension research aggressively, and he proposes a feasible and just policy for preventing an overpopulation crisis.

Want to live longer? Consider the ethics