A good last word from Ronald Bailey in the Cato Unbound discussion:

My vision of a future in which effective longevity treatments are available is one in which individuals get to choose to use them or not - no government gets to decide how long its citizens will be allowed to live. That would truly be tyranny. In the meantime, if Callahan chooses to go "gentle into that good night" I wish him well of it, but his job is to warn us the dangers he sees arising from radically extended lives and that’s all very well. He should allow the rest of us to ignore his advice and find out for ourselves whether he is right or wrong. Let us learn freely from trial and error as people always have done.

Freedom and choice are two vital portions of the fundament of a society worth living in. The freedom to be alive, and work on remaining that way, is the greatest of all freedoms - for without life, there is nothing: no possibilities, no human action, no building of a better world. We forget, in our comparative comfort, that to be able to choose to live another day in good health and do your part to move humanity into a better era is a luxury, considered in the grand scheme of human history.

We should value the freedom to remain alive and healthy far more so that we presently do, and thus rationally choose to work hard to extend that freedom for as many and as long as possible - in other words to work to defeat aging in addition to all other threats to life and health. This should go without saying, as an axiom of the human condition, and it is a great pity that that is not the case.

Posted by Reason at December 21, 2007 9:21 PM | TrackBack (0)