Longevity vs. Quality of Life
Agamben, Bioethics, and Anti-Aging
Yesterday, I wrote about the fallacy that better tech can “deliver presence.” Today, I want to follow it up with a reflection on quality vs. quantity of life. Consider this a kind of multi-dimensional trolley problem.
One of the big frontiers in tech is “anti-aging.” Minimally, this looks like fighting senescence. Maximally, it looks like extending longevity to the point of so-called “immortality.”
If tech can get people to live an extra 20 or 50 years and to have those years be qualitatively better than what we currently get, I’m generally for it. But, seeing so much anxiety, depression, and despair in the world, even as tech improves, makes me skeptical that the problem of aging is the problem.
If I could help people work through their heartbreak, melancholy and agony, I’d consider that a bigger win for humanity than extending life.
To be crass, why do we want more portions of food we aren’t eating? Shouldn’t we focus on making the food more delicious first? (I realize it’s a false binary and that we should do both; but assuming, one has to choose where to put their limited focus…)
If you take my argument to its logical conclusion, though, it leads to a troubling place. So much of society is already currently oriented around the value of extending life regardless of its quality. To suggest that we should consider the worthiness of life invites accusations of eugenics and death panels. Who gets to judge what makes a life worthy? And even if you say that only the individual gets to judge—their body, their choice—this seems to misrepresent the value of life as being entirely and reducibly subjective. Why should I be the sole judge of my life’s worth and meaning? Even if we assume (methodologically) an atheistic world, the presence of others who find my life meaningful should count for something.
Giorgio Agamben, following Roman law, introduces a distinction between “bare life” (Zöe) and “quality of life” (Bios). Longevity investors follow the idea that more bare life is marginally better (or simply more attainable) than more bios. If you agree with this, then you should theoretically want people to live for hundreds of thousands of years. Only the recognition that quality of life also matters puts a limit on optimizing for life extension. But if you over-emphasize quality of life, you may end up devaluing life extension so much that you regress to pre-modern conditions in which mortality rates were much higher. Utilitarianism might give different answers to these questions depending on how we define our terms, but while utilitarianism may be a lesser evil instrument for social policy, it can’t answer the meta-question of how we as individuals should weight quality of life relative to quantity of life—which is a metaphysical and phenomenological problem.
The extreme anti-longevity argument is that it is good and important to know how to die, not just how to extend life. The extreme pro-longevity argument is that the ability to have more years doesn’t mean we are forced to opt-in. If you want a shorter life that’s your choice. But why not let the people who want to live for aeons decide what they want. All else being equal, more is better.
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