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Is life good? Is being alive to find out a good thing? Is preventing suffering and death just as good? Does a value judgement even matter? Some people, when presented with the obvious moral imperative to healthy life extension, are apparently hazy on the answers:
I'm also not going to argue that extending the human life span is a bad thing. What I am going to do, though, is demand that some argument be put forth that it is a good thing.
This is only to be expected, I suppose, in a varied world that includes attitudes like those put forward by Leon Kass or similarly minded folk. Yet it never ceases to amaze me that people require a justification for individual choice. Make no mistake, choice is precisely what the future of healthy life extension is all about; it is the creation of a choice - whether to age, whether to suffer, whether to die - where no choice previously existed. In this respect progress towards real, working anti-aging medicine is no different from every other aspect of technological progress - we are all transhumanists, expanding the bounds of the possible, discarding bad old limitations.
There should never be any argument over whether people can collaborate to make a choice for their own lives and bodies - the most basic of property rights, the necessary foundation of a truly free society - and there needs to be no further justification than "we want to and we are capable."
Technorati tags: bioethics, libertarian, life extension
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Posted by Reason
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