Is Life Good?
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
I think it boils down to freedom of choice as well. The basis of western civilization is individual rights, and thus many centers of decision making.
Many people have their idea of utopia but to make everyone else do what they want, they need a jackboot on everyone's throat.
So with life extension if someone believes it is a bad thing, that only should have relevance for their own decision on whether to extend their own life. And they can try to persuade others to do the same if they want.
I love life and will choose to extend it if the means are available. But if someone hates life I wouldn't want to force them to extend their suffering.