Question The issue of immortality is a tricky one, ethically speaking, since death has a stabilizing effect on our population and for everyone to be immortal would result in overcrowding and shortages far faster than would happen otherwise. However, if one were to look past the simple economics of immortality (say immortality is only possible for those who have no children, and that it implies permanent sterility), are there any other ethical problems related to it? What other ethical issues would crop up if we were to gain the ability to halt the aging process?

Accepted:
October 28, 2010

Comments

It's a lovely question. Let me start by recommending a couple of things to read. One is Bernard Williams' classic paper "The Makropoulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality" (in his book Moral Luck.) Another is Larry Temkin's paper "Is Living Longer Living Better?" (in Journal of Applied Philosophy, 2008.) One of the interesting things about Temkin's paper is that he believes the question isn't merely idle. He believes there is at least a serious chance that we might learn to halt the aging process.

Be that as it may, let me raise one issue among the various possible ones.

It may seem that living forever would be an unmitigated good. But Williams argues forcefully that this isn't so. His argument has two parts, but I want to note just one of them: if we lived more or less as we find ourselves now, then eventually life would become unutterably boring. The title of his essay is taken from a play in which a woman (Elena Makropoulos) has been given a potion that lets her live indefinitely. Life eventually becomes so tedious that suicide is her only escape.

Is Williams right? Would unending life be insufferable? I don't know. Not everyone finds Williams's case convincing. Temkin, among others, offers some reservations, but Temkin concedes that there may be much more to what Williams has to say than might seem to be so at first.

This suggests that simply granting everyone unending life might be granting them something that they would come to hate. If so, then waving the magic wand, so to speak, might be doing great harm.

Of course what I just said seems premised on giving immortality to people whether they ask for it or not. We could mitigate the problem at least somewhat by imaging that only those who consent get the "gift." That helps, but it leaves a residual issue: since we have so little idea what would really be entailed by living indefinitely long, is there any hope that anyone could make an informed decision? And if not, would it be right to make the offer? There's a good chance that many people would find it too superficially attractive to resist. But if Williams is right, they would have been better off resisting. Is the moral risk too great here? I, for one, don't feel that I have a good answer.

There's far more that could be said here than these few comments cover. But it's a really interesting question; what I've tried to suggest is that the answer isn't as obvious as many people might think.