Immortality - Lecture notes 23 PDF

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Immortality 11/28/16 Should we want to live forever? - We have considered whether death is bad for us. Let’s assume that it is, at least sometimes: when we are taken from the world with more to do, give and experience - Does that mean that we should want to live forever? Think of the best possible outcome in that regard; we’re not talking eternal ageing, or ‘life’ I some minimal sense. o Maintain some level of physical and mental fitness o More than minimal life Ethical reasons not to live forever - There might well be ethical reasons not to live forever - Perhaps resources simply won’t stretch if we all get immortality o The world is already suffering from the effects of too much human activity. Can it really stand to have seven billion (and counting) infinite lives imposed on it? o On the other hand, being the only immortal seems like it might get pretty lonely  Nobody would be able to understand your experiences, and you would constantly have to watch friends and family age and die while you carried on. - It also seems somewhat unjust to allow some people to live forever when others so not even live to old age - Perhaps we should say that if not everyone can get immortality, nobody should be allowed to have it (although that isn’t a principle we apply to most medical treatments) Is immortality fundamentally undesirable? - Imagine that we could somehow get around these problems: perhaps we can find a way to colonies other planets, while the birth rate naturally goes down significantly - And we are thus able to ensure that many people can access immortality - Is immortality still prudentially undesirable? A Dilemma - Williams: immortality presents us with a dilemma. If we change too much, there’s no point to immortality because we won’t identify with our future selves o Ask us to image a moment of choice  Example:  A cure for aging or stay the same  He says as some point you are are going to fail to identify yourself in the future  If we don’t change, on the other hand we will succumb to interminable boredom; life will seem to us to be meaningless o So even if it is bad for us to die at the moment, it would be much worse to carry on forever

Self-identification - Williams might be right that we need to identify with our future selves. If your personality changed drastically every night, you might live very differently - But we already undergo quite drastic changes across our lives; the only difference is that they are gradual. - Should you, in your late teens/ early twenties, want to live to eighty? You might well be quite different then. Williams view seems to imply that we shouldn’t want to live until eighty - Perhaps Williams’ worry gives us a condition for desirable immortality: we should care about existing so long as we can identify with the person we will become. - But part of identifying with yourself is caring about that person desires and values (with some exceptions). You might save things that don’t mean all that much to you now, but which you know you will appreciate when you are older - At 20 you should care about making it to 150 even if you cannot identify with that person, so long as you can identify with yourself at 80, and believe that at 80, you will identify with yourself at 150. o Since you are 20 and care about yourself at 80 and at 80 your care about yourself at 150. There is and indirect reasons that you care about yourself now at 20 that you care about yourself at 150 Boredom - The other strand of Williams’ worry is that immortality will lead to boredom - Williams suggests that there are broadly two kinds of desires: ones that we have conditional on being alive, and ones that give us a reason to live. These are ‘categorical’ desires - Most of us have enough categorical desires that the question of ‘whether to live’ doesn’t occur to us. A life without such desires even if it was not uniformly boring would lack any subjective meaning, and not be worth living Categorical desires - Do we necessarily run out of categorical desires? - We have already seen that, so long as the change was gradual one might form new CD without failing to identify Surviving on non-categorical desires - Neil Levy: some CD (reasons to live) are not exhaustible in the way Williams assumes because they are open-ended, e.g. the pursuit of justice - John Martin Fischer: Some desires are such that they can be sated, but renew themselves, such as the desire for delicious food, or witty conversation. An Escape Route - Fischer: even if immorality would become tedious or depression eventually, immortality is not invulnerability

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In Williams’ paper, he imagines a character called Elena Makropulos. She gives up immortality by refusing to take another draft of a potion made by her father. So long as immortality required ‘repeat intervention’, it would be easy to get out of. Hauskeller: Even if it is strictly true that we could opt to end with immortality, this is not a good choice to have to face. A desire for immortality might not be driven by a desire to live but by a fear of death In such a situation, we might be reluctant to actually choose death, even if it would be better for us: it is better to have the choice forced on us by death that we cannot ultimately control...