Open Thread, February 15-29, 2012

OpenThreadGuy

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Hello there, I'm the guy who wrote the stuff you linked to.

I think it might be worth noting the Rawlsian issue too. If we pretend life is in a finite supply with efficient distribution between persons, then something like "if I extend my life to 10n then 9 other peeps who would have lived n years like me would not" will be true. The problem is this violates norms about what a just outcome is. If I put you and nine others behind a veil of ignorance and offered you an 'everyone gets 80 years' versus 'one of you gets 800, whilst the rest of you get nothing', I think basically everyone would go for everyone getting 80. One of the consequences of that would seem to be expecting whoever 'comes first' in the existence lottery to refrain from life extension to allow subsequent persons to 'have their go'.

If you don't buy that future persons are objects of moral concern, then the foregoing won't apply. But I think there are good reasons to treat them as objects of full moral concern (including a 'right'/'interest' in being alive in the first place). It seems weird (given B theory), that temporally remote people count for less, even though we don't think spatial distance is morally salient. Better, we generally intuit things like a delayed doomsday machine that euthanizes all intelligent life painlessly in a few hundred years is a very bad thing to do.

If you dislike justice (or future persons), there's a plausible aggregate-only argument (which bears a resemblance to Singer's work). Most things show diminishing marginal returns, and plausibly lifespan will too, at least after the investment period: 20 to 40 is worth more than 40-60, etc. If that's true, and lifespan is in finite supply, then we might get more utility by having many smaller lives rather than fewer longer ones suffering diminishing returns. The optimum becomes a tradeoff in minimizing the 'decay' of diminishing returns versus the cost sunk into development of a human being through childhood and adolescence. The optimal lifespan might be longer or shorter than three score and ten, but is unlikely to be really big.

Obviously, there are huge issues over population ethics and the status of future persons, as well as finer grained stuff re. justice across hypothetical individuals. Sadly, I don't have time to elaborate on this stuff before summertime. Happily, I am working on this sort of stuff for an elective in Oxford, so hopefully I'll have something better developed by then!

You lose me the moment you introduce the moral premise. Why is it better for two people to each live a million years than one to live two million? This looks superficially the same sort of question as "Why is it better for two people to each have a million dollars than for one to have two million?", but in the latter scenario, one person has two million while the other has nothing. In the lifetimes case, there is no other person. The moral premise presupposes that nonexistent people deserve some of other peoples' existence in the same way that ex... (read more)

3lsparrish14y

I appreciated the level of thought you put into the argument, even though it does not actually convince me to oppose life extension. Thank you for writing (and prezi-ing) it, I look forward to more. Basically, the hidden difference if you put me and 9 others behind a veil of ignorance and ask us to decide whether we each get 80 or one gets 800, is that in that case you have the presence of 10 people competing and trying to avoid being "killed" whereas in the choice between creating one 800 year old versus 10 80 year olds is conducted without an actual threat being posed to anyone. While you can establish that the 10 people would anticipate with fear (and hence generate disutility) the prospect of being destroyed / prevented to live, that's not the same as establishing that 9 completely nonexistent people would generate the same disutility even if they never started to exist.

6Kaj_Sotala14y

I find this argument incoherent, as I reject the idea of a person at the age of 1 being the same person as they are at the age of 800 - or for that manner, the idea of a person at the age of 400 being the same person as they are at the age of 401. In fact, I reject the idea of personal continuity in the first place, at least when looking at "fairness" at such an abstract level. I am not the same person as I was a minute ago, and indeed there are no persons at all, only experience-moments. Therefore there's no inherent difference in whether someone lives 800 years or ten people live 80 years. Both have 800 years worth of experience-moments. I do recognize that "fairness" is still a useful abstraction on a societal level, as humans will experience feelings of resentment towards conditions which they perceive as unfair, as inequal outcomes are often associated with lower overall utility, and so forth. But even then, "fairness" is still just a theoretical fiction that's useful for maximizing utility, not something that would have actual moral relevance by itself. As for the diminishing marginal returns argument, it seems inapplicable. If we're talking about the utility of a life (or a life-year), then the relevant variable would probably be something like happiness, but research on the topic has found age to be unrelated to happiness (see e.g. here), so each year seems to produce roughly the same amount of utility. Thus the marginal returns do not diminish. Actually, that's only true if we ignore the resources needed to support a person. Childhood and old age are the two periods where people don't manage on their own, and need to be cared for by others. Thus, on a (utility)/(resources invested) basis, childhood and old age produce lower returns. Now life extension would eliminate age-related decline in health, so old people would cease to require more resources. And if people had fewer children, we'd need to invest fewer resources on them as well. So with life extens