Double your life span: Walker on Singer on extended longevity

Mark Walker has an interesting article responding to an article published by Peter Singer in the 1990s, in which Singer considers the possibility of an anti-aging drug, and concludes that, on the scenario presented: "we should recommend against any further development of the anti-aging drug."

As one might expect, Singer's analysis proceeds along utilitarian lines. The particular scenario developed is not a super-optimistic one: the drug will enable us to live to about 150 - more or less doubling the normal life expectancy - but with an average level of happiness, during the second half of this long life, that is lower than the level experienced during the first half. More precisely, the level of health experienced will be that of someone in her 60s or 70s today. In addition, during the second half of life we will not experience it with the same "freshness" as younger people do. Singer deduces from this that individuals who take the drug will have less average happiness - averaged, that is, over a full (extended) life - than they did during their first 70 or 80 years. However, we may still imagine them as enjoying the extra years. They just don't enjoy the later ones quite as much as the earlier ones.

Walker offers an interesting analysis, in which he defends longevity research against Singer's attack, even on the assumption that it would lead to an additional 70 or 80 years lived in less-than-optimal health. He points out that the available empirical studies do not support the idea that people are less happy in old age than at earlier times, despite inferior health. In fact, the happiness curve seems to be U-shaped: actually at its lowest point when we are in our late 30s or early 40s. (This may seem surprising, since that is exactly when we are at our peak in many ways, but perhaps that itself creates pressures which are not yet experienced when we are younger, and which start to recede as we move deeper into middle age. I'll avoid any further speculation about such issues.)

I want to defend Walker's prolongevist position, though on rather different grounds. But first, here is the strength of Singer's case ...

Assume for the sake of argument that Singer is right about the facts. If we take the anti-aging drug we will typically live to be 150, and we will have happy lives for the second 70 to 80 years, but our lives will be less happy (perhaps not by much) through that period than during the first 70 to 80 years. It seems apparent that, once a society with this technology gets going, the average happiness being experienced per person in the society at any point of time will be less than is currently the case. If the population is kept constant - which might be required for Malthusian reasons, as Singer discusses - the total sum of happiness being experienced at any given point of time will also be less. Moreover, if we take a space-time block of the society's experience, the amount of happiness that exists in it will be less than in a space-time block of equal duration chosen from the history of our current society.

On grounds similar to these, Singer argues that we should not develop a drug with the specified effects.

Yet - and here comes my defence - this seems paradoxical. If I take the drug, I will be able to enjoy many extra years of happy life. It seems that this gives me a good reason to take the drug; those extra years of happy life seem to be something that it is rational for me to want, and taking the drug is a means to achieve that rationally-desired end. So, if I take the drug, no one need feel sorry for me. I have not done something self-destructive. It looks as if I am actually better off.

Nor is this a situation where it is collectively irrational for each person to take the drug. It is not as if a rational choice by each individual in isolation leads to an outcome in which each is worse off than if some other option had been chosen. On the contrary, if we all take the drug, each one of us is better off than she would have been if she had not taken it. This is not a prisoner's dilemma type of problem; it's not a problem of social coordination.

In other words, a society in which each person takes the drug is a society in which each individual is better off than he or she would otherwise have been - and each individual is also better off than otherwise-comparable individuals in our current society!

I think this thought experiment actually dramatises some of the problems underlying utilitarianism, for Singer has clearly (in my view) drawn a paradoxical and wrong conclusion.

First, note that it is rational for me to take the drug if it is available. It is also rational for me to hope that it is developed, so that I can take it. It is also rational for me to fear interference (for example, by the legislature) to stop the development of the drug. Indeed, it is rational for me to agitate against legislative interference.

Might it be that my actions - in agitating for the drug's continued development, and actually taking it if it becomes available - are nonetheless morally impermissible? No.

If I have a moral duty to maximise the average amount (or the maximum amount) of utility in my society, or the universe, at any point of time, or within any space-time block, yes, indeed, I have acted in breach of that duty. But where could any such duty come from? Why should I accept that it exists? It has not been commanded by God, or some other mighty being - and even if I'm wrong about that, why should we obey a mighty being's commands in circumstances wherein it's not in our individual interests to do so? It is not, moreover, written into the metaphysical structure of the universe, whatever that might amount to. We need to locate a naturalistic, human-level grounding for such a duty, and there's none at hand.

A duty like this might seem to make sense as the content of a (non-morally) good moral norm that we have adopted in order to give expression to our sympathies - except that the norm would go too far, since the particular case we're considering is one in which there's nobody to feel sorry for! Every actual person involved is better off, by taking the drug, than he or she would otherwise been. Far from feeling guilty at doing what is in our interests, we can be pleased that we have acted in a way that has not placed any individual in a position where we need look on her with pity. If we ever reach a position in history where we have agitated successfully for the development of the drug, all the other people who will thus have an opportunity to take it will have reason to thank us for our efforts. We will not have frustated their life plans or caused them suffering; we will have helped them achieve something that they (rationally) value.

This thought experiment helps show the difference between utilitarian approaches, which try to maximise happiness (in the sense of pleasure, or preference-satisfaction, or something similar), and my more sceptical and pluralist approach to morality, which regards moral norms as justified to the extent that they protect us from things that we fear, help us to preserve things we value, help us to give expression to our sympathies, and so on. On this approach, a set of moral norms that actually becomes a new thing to fear is given a low or negative rating. This approach treats morality as our servant - it is something that human beings collectively invented to meet a variety of widespread human desires and interests. It is not a set of highly abstract, objective requirements, such as a requirement, from "out there" somewhere, to maximise the total or average utility in the universe, or in some part of it.

(I don't deny that there may sometimes be justification for a moral norm requiring us to do certain things that only "harm" people whose very existence is contingent on the action prohibited by the norm. But I think that, in so far as such norms really can be justified, they need to be grounded in something other than an abstract requirement to maximise overall utility. For example, they might be grounded in a desire for future human societies to flourish in certain ways, or a desire to avoid situations where individuals will experience actual suffering or be stuck with lives that are, in some sense, limited or blighted. The appeal will most likely be to our sympathies and/or to certain perfectionist values.)

If we agitate for the anti-aging drug, and take it once it is available, we thereby act rationally. We also act consistently with any set of positive moral norms that we have good reason to commit ourselves to (or assign a high justification rating), given the sorts of beings we actually are, with the sort of psychology that we actually have. If we develop the drug, every actual person who takes it will be better off, and no one need, as a result of taking the drug, turn into an appropriate object for our compassion. Even on Singer's not-very-optimistic scenario, agitating for the anti-aging drug's development is the rational thing to do, and it is at least morally permissible if not morally required.

New IEET office space in Second Life

Thanks to Giulio Prisco for creating this.

It just needs a bit of extra decorating, I think. That and a few more people to come along and hang out with the coolest crew of philosophers, futurists, and policy wonks you'll ever find in SL.

I sure do know the Bible

You know the Bible 100%!

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

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Huffington Post on enhancement and transhumanism

Over at the Huffington Post, R.J. Eskow blogged earlier this week about enhancement technologies and transhumanism, commenting specifically on my piece about Fenton and Habermas from last weekend.

Eskow's discussion - entitled "Homo Futurus: How Radically Should We Remake Ourselves - Or Our Children?" - is quite sympathetic, and Eskow makes clear his general inclination to side with individual liberty against social restrictions, though he also worries that this is not a simple matter, once children are involved. It's one thing to support individual liberty against the state, but what about when it is the liberty of parents versus the interests of children? He expresses the fear that so-called liberal eugenics could become libertarian eugenics.

I actually agree with the direction of this, though Eskow's discussion seems to be placing me in the "libertarian" category, which would be rather misleading. It's possibly understandable, because this category does, indeed, seem to be where a lot of transhumanist discourse used to belong, and much of it doubtless still does. E.g., when I was signed up to the Extropians mailing list a few years ago, many of the participants were forthright libertarians of the Ayn Randian variety, and saw no role for the state to restrict their proposals to alter themselves or their children, if the technology became available. This was, it seemed, a belief that we should have total freedom to pursue our personal transhumanist aspirations, no matter what the consequences for others or for society as a whole.

To try to avoid a new misunderstanding, I never saw claims that extreme made by the leadership of the Extropians group (I'm not, for example, attributing them to Max More), but they were, and probably still are, quite common at the grass-roots level.

Now to my own case. Whatever credentials I have as a transhumanist are actually rather blurred - I've been willing to accept the label when it's applied to me. In some contexts, I've even been willing to apply it to myself as shorthand, or to express solidarity with my transhumanist friends - whose general attitudes to technology do strike me as more rational than those of their opponents. But there are always caveats, whether or not they are always stated.

I don't actually buy wholesale into some body of theory called "transhumanism"; I'm choosier than that, and I'm unconvinced of the merit of many of the specific proposals that emerge from more clearly self-identified transhumanists. Anyway, even if I do count as a transhumanist, this can only be because the words "transhumanism" and "transhumanist" now signify a much wider range of positions than the Randian techno-libertarianism that I associate with Extropian circles. Indeed, some of the leading figures in the World Transhumanist Association are left-wing political activists, as well as being interested in technologies that could alter human capacities.

I replied to the Huffington Post piece with a few comments to try to clear up any misconceptions about where I stand on all of this. What I say below is an edited/expanded version of what I wrote over there.

For a start, I don't think the choice is necessarily between liberal eugenics and authoritarian genetics (which Eskow seems to have understood me as saying), where the latter refers to the government-mandated genetic programs of the past. While the distinction is an important one to make, there are many positions in between, and even liberal eugenics could take more or less "libertarian" forms.

Also, I'm really not fond of the word "libertarian" without qualifications attached to it. The attitudes that I take to some issues are libertarian in a popular sense, i.e. they put a high value on individual liberty. But I tend to think of myself as an Enlightenment or Millian liberal, rather than as a libertarian. "Libertarianism" sounds too much like the position of Rand, say, or Robert Nozick - positions that I repudiate. I don't belong to their "taxation is theft" camp. In practice, my economic positions tend to be centrist and pragmatic, but in principle I am prepared to support very large redistributions of wealth if needed to meet the kind of social democratic objectives that I favour. (Mill himself did not argue for a minimal state, though he did argue for freedom of speech, in particular, and against the use of the criminal law in the absence of fairly direct harms to others.)

The regulation of enhancement technoloiges that I'd want at the end of the day might not be all that libertarian, even in a popular sense. In the context of genetic engineering of children (the technology that Eskow focuses on), I do worry about micro-managing how kids turn out. In another context, I support Richard Dawkins in deploring religious indoctrination of young children, and I am no believer in absolute parental rights to control how kids turn out - irrespective of the interests of society at large or the kids themselves. I also worry about impacts on democratic equality. Finally, I worry about issues of safety and efficacy.

However, I think it's important to criticise opponents of genetic technologies when their arguments overreach or they start to favour overly broad restrictions. I especially think it's important to keep the heat on arguments that seemingly valorise "the natural". Attempting to improve on our evolved nature would be difficult, and should be approached with caution. We could go badly wrong here. But it is best, I think, if we refrain from arguments that have anything to do with the supposed inviolability of nature, or of a specific human nature. In any event, when poor arguments are put along those lines I'll continue to criticise them.

Comet McNaught

One of my life's disappointments was back in 1986 - after growing up looking forward to the return of Halley's Comet that year, I was saddened (like many other people) when the comet was basically invisible to the naked eye, at least in light-polluted cities. My friends and I tried to sight it, and we may have kidded ourselves that we saw something ... but we really, couldn't make out a goddamn thing that night 20-odd years ago.

The discovery of Comet McNaught makes up a bit for that disappointment way back in the past. When we observed it from the beach a few nights ago, it was faint - but clear enough once you found it, a nice discernible smudge in the night sky. If I don't last long enough for the next return of Halley's Comet in 55 years or so, at least I've managed to see one comet with my own eyes, viewing it without any instruments so I could get the impression of it in the whole sky: a smudgy-but-glinting anomaly that would once have struck sky-watchers as a strange, unaccountable portent.

Kids, clones, and rights.

I'm currently reading Beyond Bioethics, the extensive report on proposed regulation of reproductive technologies, prepared by Francis Fukuyama and Franco Furger and published late last year. I lost patience on about page 64, when I reached its exposition of the moral principles on which it relies.

The first of their principles might at first seem uncontroversial - it's the widely accepted principle of regard for the health and welfare of children. Who could object to this? No one wants to see children abused or neglected, or even held back from developing their theoretical potential. At the same time, society does not insist that every possible effort be made by parents to develop or enhance their kids' natural talents. If Adrian and Belinda encourage young Cassie to aim at a relatively undemanding and low-paid career, when she may have the innate talent to be a nuclear physicist, society as a whole does not criticise this in any serious way.

Perhaps we actually should hold parents to a more exacting standard. It saddens me when children are held back in developing their talents or their knowledge of the world. It is especially galling to see kids being taught that the world is only 6000 years old, or that it is under the control of a powerful being who detests homosexuals, or any of the other kinds of implausible and destructive claims with which kids are frequently indoctrinated. It's difficult to make teaching these things a crime - what with the issues of freedom of religion - but educated people can recognise it as harmful and reprehensible, and be a lot more forthright in condemning it.

At the other extreme, we don't want developing the talents of children to become a tyrannical, all-consuming regime - either for the parents or for the children themselves. In practice, we tend to adopt a rather lenient standard: children should be nurtured, treated kindly, and brought up to be good, well-adjusted citizens who can play a productive, non-violent role in society. And that's about it. Parents are given extensive discretion within those broad boundaries. We want them to provide for their kids' health, to meet basic standards for cooperating, and assisting, with their kids' education - standards that have gradually been raised over time, no doubt - and to teach the social skills that are essential for their kids to become ... well, socialised and civilised.

If parents manage to do just this much, we are more or less content. If they do more than this, they are praised; but we seem to regard it as an example of supererogatory virtue rather than as a matter of meeting essential obligations. In other words, we don't demand that every child be given the optimal environment for the development of her talent, well-being, and possible success in life. It's just that the more parents actually provide this - especially against the financial odds - the more we tend to praise them. Thus, in the near future, some kinds of genetic enhancement of children might justifiably be looked on as praiseworthy, but the failure to use them might not disadvantage kids so gravely as to amount to the breach of an obligation in the strict sense. If, at a date farther in the future, the use of genetic enhancements became more easy and widespread, it might then make sense for it to be regarded as obligatory; that would depend on the circumstances.

Fukuyama and Furger reason in a very different manner. They point to the undoubted value we place on children's psychological welfare - and immediately draw the wild conclusion that every child has a "right" to a biological mother and father. Putting it another way, if Belinda (say) gives birth to a child who does not have a biological father, then the child's "right" has been violated. This could be a text-book example of how talk about moral rights quickly becomes absurd - as Jeremy Bentham realised long ago. Once we start using rights talk, we tend to lose the plot.

There are two kinds of moral rights that actually make sense, though I'm not sure that talking about them as "rights" is very productive. First, there are things that societies have good reason not to prevent their citizens doing (even if preventing them might have good overall consequences), because those things are so important and personal to individuals. These could be classed as negative rights. There are also some social resources that are required by any individual, in order to lead a decent life in her society (as judged by standards that make sense within the society concerned). We typically expect our societies - particularly wealthy Western ones - to ensure that at least a basic level of resources is available to each citizen. Hence, we can talk about positive rights.

But keep in mind the whole purpose of ascribing rights of these kinds. It is impossible for a child to have either a negative right or a positive right to two biological parents. If a child is born without having both a biological mother and a biological father, it simply makes no sense to say that her "right" has been violated, since the course of conduct that would have allowed the right not to be violated would inevitably have involved that particular child not being born at all! Putting it another way, you can't protect Cassie the Clone's exercise of personal freedoms, or her interest in leading a minimally decent life, by ensuring that she never comes into existence in the first place. It makes no sense.

What I take it that sensible people really want is for their society to pursue a reasonable, and rather modest, policy objective. We want to ensure that all children are born in circumstances where they have good prospects of being nurtured and socialised, at least to a certain acceptable level. For example, we want to ensure that children are not born facing inevitable poverty and hardship - though the humane way of accomplishing this is by making economic redistributions to impoverished parents, not by making it a crime for poor people to satisfy the urge to have children.

Imagine that there's a prospect that a child who will not have two biological parents of the usual kind might be brought into the world (e.g. little Cassie, who was born by an advanced method of reproductive cloning). The question for society to consider is not whether some supposed right of the child has been violated in bringing about her very existence. It is simply whether or not whoever rears the child is in a position to nurture her according to society's relatively forgiving standards: e.g., is there a good prospect that Cassie will be treated kindly and grow up to be a well-adjusted, productive, non-violent adult? If "Yes," that is the end of the matter; society as a whole has no good reason to interfere. In practice, the adults concerned will usually be best able to make the required judgment.

Fukuyama and Furger are correct to identify the importance we assign to the welfare of children, but they are wrong to analyse the issue using the rhetorically charged, yet intellectually misleading, language of moral rights. The idea that you have a right to be biologically related to certain kinds of people in certain ways - even if your very existence would thereby be in violation of the "right" - is intellectually incoherent. It is inconsistent with the original point of talking about rights, which is to protect people's freedoms and to ensure they have a safety net of basic resources. Nonsense, I say. Nonsense on stilts.

Fenton to Habermas and biocons: Human nature is not fixed

The November-December 2006 issue of The Hastings Center Report contains an important article by Elizabeth Fenton, entitled "Liberal Eugenics and Human Nature: Against Habermas", the thrust of which is to attack - and demolish - the distinction made by Habermas and other bioconconservative thinkers between the natural and the artificial.

While Fenton also makes reference to the views of George Annas and Francis Fukuyama, she concentrates on those of Jurgen Habermas, who has presented what she describes as a "subtle and complex" argument for the prohibition of so-called liberal eugenics.

In the context of this debate, liberal eugenics is the practice of parents selecting some of the genetic characteristics of their own children, within some limits. The usual limits that are proposed relate to the avoidance of harm to the children, though some philosophers and bioethicists also discuss other possible constraints that cannot easily be brought under that heading. For example, Nicholas Agar, who has defended liberal eugenics, opposes the (hypothetical) use of genetic technology to select the sexuality of children, not because this would be harmful to the children themselves but because of the possible social ramifications (e.g. for the position in society of homosexuals).

In any event, liberal eugenics would allow parents considerable scope to select their childrens' genetic potentialities. It stands in contrast to authoritarian eugenics: historical attempts by the state to control the distributions of genetic traits across an entire population.

As Fenton reconstructs Habermas' argument, it relies on the assumption that there is a fixed, and morally normative, human nature, which would be disrupted if parents could choose (some of) their children's genetic traits. In response, Fenton makes several telling points, that at the least require some more sophisticated reply from biocons like Habermas:

• First, we cannot look on human nature as something fixed and stable - it is open to modification, and possibly even to improvement. We cannot be sure that any set of identifiable core characteristics of humanity merits protection from change.
• Habermas is wrong to ground a concept of "human dignity" in the current concept of what it is to be human.
• The claim, made by Habermas, that liberal eugenics would fundamentally alter the relationship between parents and children is "overblown": on the one hand, there is an inherent inquality between parents and children in any event; and on the other - provided that they possess subjectivity similar to that of other human beings - genetically modified humans will be as well placed as the rest of us to claim political equality in their moral communities.
• It is difficult to draw a line between the natural and the artificial, and wherever the line is drawn it is not of moral significance. Something else needs to be relied on to make distinctions of good and bad.
• The concept of a fixed and normative human nature is at odds with liberal conceptions of autonomous agency and the value of individual freedoms.
• There is a contradiction in the claims by Habermas and other bioconservatives that liberal eugenics is intrinsically morally wrong, while at the same time they want its regulation or acceptance to be determined by a democratic process. The latter claim appears to undermine the former. (I add that if the criterion is harm rather than inherent moral wrongness, as any Millian liberal should argue, precisely the same problem arises: it is either harmful enough to require prohibition, or it isn't.)

Fenton does not attempt to argue that liberal eugenics is morally acceptable. She confines herself to the more modest point that, if it is morally wrong, its wrongness must consist in something other than its supposed unnaturalness. Even that, however, is an important point which can never be made, and given intellectual support, too often. Fenton is someone who gets it.

She concludes that there may be shared characteristics which separate human beings from our environment at a point in time, and that these may define us uniquely at the time ... and may be of moral significance. But there is no imperative to preserve them - they should not be granted intrinsic value or be protected from change. "For whatever they are," Fenton says, "they are open to change and improvement; to deny this is to deny humanity its most cherished freedom - the freedom to evolve."

Something a bit lighter

Over summer, I'm trying to get back into shape - instead of just complaining about being out of shape. Having bloated out to almost 190 pounds (sorry to those folks who think in kilograms), I've now managed to drop down to less than 180.

Fifteen years ago, my best weight was about 170 pounds, as in this pic - but I'm just not that heavily muscled now that I'm in my middle age (dammit) and not up to the sort of training I was then.

Grrrr, I probably need to get down to something more like a slim 165. Wish me luck people; that still doesn't sound easy. Maybe I need a sponsor or something.

The genetic fallacy fallacy

Richard Garner, in his interesting book Beyond Morality, discusses what he calls the genetic fallacy fallacy.

We all know the genetic fallacy, of course: the idea that a belief is not proved to be false simply because it was formed by a method that is unreliable. Thus, I may come to the conclusion that God exists and loves me, based on my wish that this were so and because I would be comforted by having a heavenly father to give me love for as long as I need it - and in all the circumstances of my life. Love from such a being might seem of far greater value to me than love from the merely mortal (and perhaps sometimes fickle) beings whom I encounter here on Earth. Perhaps, when things are going well for me, it does seem as if I am blessed with the love of such a powerful and benevolent being.

That is hardly a reliable way to reach any conclusions about the existence of a deity, much less about that deity's attitude to me. Yet, the fact that I may have reached my conclusions in such an unreliable way does not demonstrate that they are actually wrong. My beliefs might just happen to be true. They might even have some independent compelling justification ... perhaps something I'm not even aware of.

But that does not mean that the historical source of a belief is never relevant to whether we should accept it. In the absence of some independent evidence and argument in favour of a belief, surely we have less reason to accept it if we can give a debunking explanation of how someone came to adopt it. As Garner says, if someone's ability to form reliable beliefs on the subject concerned was impeded - e.g. "by drugs, madness, fear, or ignorance" - knowledge of the fact is going to affect the reliability of the person's testimony.

Much of the commonsense wisdom passed down through the centuries and millennia is, at least, the product of ignorance, and often of wishful thinking, or of our attraction to ideas that simply sound noble or "catchy" in some way. When we encounter ideas that are widely held, but with no evidentiary justification in sight and plenty of psychological explanation as to why the world might have looked the way it did to the people concerned, then we have every reason to be sceptical.

AJOB article on personhood

My article, "Differing Vulnerabilities: The Moral Significance of Lockean Personhood", has now appeared in the American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB - Neuroscience), as one of several responses to a major new article on neuroscience and personhood that appears in this issue of AJOB. My article is a (slightly qualified) defence of Locke's concept of personhood and its deployment in much contemporary work in practical ethics - as in the writings of Peter Singer, for example. By "Lockean personhood", I mean a cluster of related psychological properties that includes rationality, self-consciousness, and awareness of oneself in time (as a being with a past and a future).

I argue that what makes this cluster of properties so important is its relationship to certain kinds of vulnerability that we respond to sympathetically. Creatures that are sentient, but are not persons, cannot be vulnerable in these particular ways - e.g. they cannot experience having their hopes for the future shattered by misfortune, because they are unable to form such hopes. (Entities that are not even sentient most definitely cannot be vulnerable in such ways.)