You and I are gonna live forever

It’s a general rule that any webzine/online debate forum (Cato Unbound) edited by my two favorite libertarians, Brink Lindsay and Will Wilkinson, should always be read, and this month’s issue on radical life extension is no exception. Aubrey de Gray and Ronald Bailey defend that medical science should try to expand life expectancy and forgo aging as much as possible while Diana Schaub and Daniel Callahan think that there would be profound negative moral, psychological and societal consequences of radically prolonging death. You can read the four articles if you want a more in depth summary, but this argument Callahan makes is typical of his side of the debate:

There are a few premises of de Grey’s convictions that need to be examined. One of them — and I say this at age 77 — is that getting old is “tragic and potentially preventable by medical intervention.” Maybe age is “potentially preventable”; it is a mistake in science to say that something could never happen. But the word “tragedy” sounds like the voice of youth to me. Most of us who are getting old, or are already there, have many complaints about it, physical as well as mental; it isn’t the best stage of life (but then adolescence wasn’t great either).

I had a child who died a few months after birth, and I considered that tragic as did everyone else, but when my mother died at 86 of cancer, no one considered it a tragedy or even a great evil. Those who knew her said at her funeral that “we loved your mother and will miss her, but she had a good and full life.” I have never heard anyone say it is a tragedy that Socrates, Shakespeare, George Washington, and Albert Einstein died and are no longer with us. And while I hope in my more self-regarding moments that my friends and families will wail and gnash their teeth at my funeral, I doubt at my age they will do so; and I can, so to speak, live with that. I will get old and will die, an ancient story, but not a tragic one.

It is certainly true that with today’s technology, medicine and life expectancies, gracefully dying at 88 isn’t really a tragedy. The thing is, and Callahan even hints at this, is that in the 13th century, one could say that dying at the age of 32 wasn’t a tragedy. Or in 1850s, when the life expectancy at birth was 40 years. I should include the caveat that life expectancy numbers are slightly misleading because these awfully low life expectancies are mostly due to high child mortality, if one got to middle age, one had a decent chance of making it to old age. But with that caveat, it’s still true that people are living longer and that lifespan is going up, which means that our standards for what constitutes a “full life” are not fixed. While de Gray talks about “radical life extension” and Methuselah-like 1000 year lives, in the short to medium term, we are talking about lifespan gains of 15-30 years. Against that tableau, Callahan and Schuab’s arguments against life extension fall apart. Who are they to deny the possibility of a longer life — to those who want it? How odd would it seem to those who came before us that there are people who seriously think that we shouldn’t try to live longer?

The deal breaker for the pro-mortalists is the option of choice. If you are like Seneca or Callahan and think that the problem with our lives is that we don’t live them to the fullest, not that they’re too long, then you don’t have to take advantage of increased life expectancy. But why can’t those who want, as Ronald Bailey put it, to pursue “an ever-increasing menu of life plans and choices” do so? Even putting aside the specific claims and counter claims made by both sides, it’s important to look at what the pro-mortalists have to disprove: that the extension of the human life span, whose average has almost doubled in the last 200 years, is fundamentally undesirable and we should arbitrarily decide that for the first time in human history, we should make a society-wide decision to stop living longer. That’s quite the burden to overcome and neither Callahan nor Schuab do so very well.

Stem Cell Triumphialism

With the creation of pluripotent stem cells from adult skin cells, the Bush administration and their backers on the inane stem cell policy got really, really lucky. Triumphianlists like Krauthammer would like you to think that the policy — which banned federal funding for the creation of new embryo lines from which to extract stem cells — was at all relevant to the recent discoveries. But it wasn’t, they didn’t pump up funding for the skin cell research or anything of the sort, they instead were winging it and their policy was more than just a neutral ban on federal funding for new stem cell lines or embryo-destructive research, it instead hampered other research, as the Times editorial on the subject explains:

His new policy, portrayed as a statesmanlike compromise, permitted federal support for research using only a small number of stem cell lines that already existed, crimping the field from the start. Worse yet, scientists had to ensure that no federal money ever came near their privately supported embryonic stem cell research. No sharing laboratories or equipment that were bought, even in small part, with federal funds. No collaborating with federally supported scientists. It was a mess that persuaded many scientists to avoid the field altogether.

The policy was still a bad one, and the recent discoveries are not a vindication of it. Could you imagine if we applied this logic to all government funding for research? The government could then arbitrarily refuse to fund any research program or treatment they could think up some vacuous objection to, and then yes, it would encourage other research. It’s pretty obvious why that isn’t the best way to fund research. Michael Kinsley has more wise words to say on the subject

Why should “horrible and lamentable sacrifices” take place?

James Poulos, in his contribution to the entire eugenics debate, expresses a common theme among many conservative intellectual types:

(4) Cultures need, I think, to recognize the possibility that some sacrifices are horrible and lamentable but must nevertheless take place. They cannot be ironed out of life. There is an irredeemable tragic aspect that will not be banished until the day heaven descends to Earth. This is a dark possibility but it cannot be brushed under the rug. It reveals certain truths about the human condition that optimistic absolutists on the right and the left both dislike. We are so jaded and accustomed to false reverence, both among religious types and anti-religious types, that we find it hard to conceive of a situation where someone would experience genuine grief and guilt for doing something they knew was wrong (and not in the legal sense) but nevertheless resolved that they had to do. In the end, is it not unhealthy for the scope of a culture’s morality to be defined by the scope of its law?

Leon Kass often takes a similar line in his debates over various types of genetic enhancement and biotechnology.  My simple question to James, Kass and anyone else who says this is why?  Why do we need to recognize “horrible and lamentable” sacrifices? Why do we have to accept the “irredeemable tragic aspect” of existence?

In a broad sense, we should accept certain “tragic” aspects of our existence - that we will die, that you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might just find, you get what you need - but it’s too easy to talk about abstract tragedies of our life on earth.  It’s not so easy to take this theorizing and actually apply it to the concrete situations that one thinks about.  Why should Tay-Sachs, down syndrome and spinal bifida be a tragic aspect to our lives?  The individuals suffer, the families are unfairly burdened, and most importantly, it doesn’t have to be that way.  There’s nothing about the “human condition” that mandates that these diseases exist, that people ought to have them.

I feel that Poulos and many others may be expressing a deep truth about what it means to be human (I think the tragedy of existence is that we’re condemned to be free, but that’s another post), but that deep truth can’t face the immediate truth - that a world without these crippling genetic diseases would be better than a world with them.  I fail to see how Tay-Sachs illuminates any truth about the human condition, except that we humans have the capability to insure that many fewer families and individuals suffer through the ravages of the cruel genetic lottery.