The Ethics of Cryonics
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So in order to understand whether death qua nonexistence is good or bad, we need to understand if there is something good or bad about nonexistence: if death always entails nonexistence, and nonexistence is always good (or bad), then death is good (or bad).
Around a century after the tragedians Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles lived in Athens, the philosopher Epicurus started what we now know as the Epicurean philosophy. Epicurus argued that death is not bad and should not be feared, but for crucially different reasons than the ones invoked by the tragedians. According to Epicurus in his Letter to Menoeceus, death should not be feared because once we are dead, we cannot experience anything:Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If Death is, then I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not? (Epicurus, v. 124–127, auth. trans. 2017)
Along the same lines, Lucretius, an Epicurean philosopher, argued in De Rerum Natura that death is mere nonexistence, and just like we do not worry about the nonexistence that preceded our birth, we should not fear the nonexistence that will follow our death (Lucretius, v. 830–839, auth. trans.). So, in the Epicurean tradition, the ontological equivalence between the nonexistence of the unborn and the nonexistence of the dead is the reason why death is not bad, and the fact a person cannot be harmed once he or she ceases to exist is the reason why death is not to be feared. Although the Epicurean approach has a powerful consolatory message for mortal beings like us, it has implications that are at odds with some of our basic intuitions, including the commonly shared view that killing is (at least prima facie) morally impermissible. If the ontological status of the unborn and of the dead is equivalent, it would mean that not procreating and killing are morally equivalent and both morally permissible.
Some Epicureans might be willing to bite the bullet and say that, indeed, there is no harm in killing someone, or that, more modestly, the immorality of killing is not explained by the harm inflicted on the murdered individual. But non-Epicureans disagree with the view that death is not bad by virtue of being mere nonexistence and that prenatal nonexistence and postmortem nonexistence are ontologically symmetrical.
I will now consider two strategies developed to resist the Epicurean argument; both strategies aim at proving (1) the asymmetry between prenatal and postmortem nonexistence, and (2) the badness of death against the Epicurean claim that death is not bad.
A Life Worth Starting and a Life Worth Living
Contemporary antinatalist philosopher David Benatar has argued, not too dissimilarly from writers in the Greek tragedy tradition, that bringing a new person into existence is harmful. Given that life entails suffering, being brought into existence means to be harmed; however, an individual who is not brought into existence cannot have an interest in existing, and therefore is not harmed by not being brought into existence (Benatar, 2008). Unlike the tragedians, though, Benatar does not consider death the second-best option for someone who is already born; and, unlike the Epicureans, he argues that there is an asymmetry between prenatal and postmortem nonexistence. After someone is born, they develop interests that, in order to be fulfilled, require them to stay alive. Once these interests develop, the bar for considering nonexistence (death) as a better option than existence becomes higher than it was before birth. So, if I am wondering whether I should have a child, and I can predict that my future child will experience over his or her life, say, 116 days of suffering, the conclusion I should reach is that conceiving would be immoral, no matter how much pleasure or happiness their life will predictably contain. Meanwhile, no potential child is going to be harmed if I do not conceive them, because one cannot harm someone by not bringing them into existence, given that one cannot harm someone who does not and will never exist.
Now, imagine that I am considering whether I should mercifully kill my neighbour (let us call her Dolores). She has been suffering for 116 days over the past two years already, and it is highly likely that she will suffer just as much over the next two years. According to Benatar (and common sense), killing Dolores is impermissible, because she (most likely) has an interest in continuing to exist. For instance, it might be that, although Dolores has been suffering due to a failed marriage, the death of a friend, and a long period of unemployment, she, nonetheless, has an interest in raising her children, getting her Master’s degree, or finishing a painting. Regardless of the specific motivations she might have to continue to live in the face of adversity, killing her would inevitably deprive her of the chance to pursue her interests, and would thus harm her.
One might argue that this hypothetical case is cumbersome, as it postulates an impossible comparison between the entirely hypothetical life of someone who has not been born and the empirically analysable life of someone who already exists. So let us now consider a different example in which we do not compare two different ontological statuses.
Suppose that I want to go on a last-minute holiday in Portugal. Shortly before I make arrangements for the trip, I check the weather forecast and realize that it is going to rain constantly throughout my planned time there. Given this bleak forecast, I decide to pick a different destination where it is not going to rain. Now suppose that, instead of booking last minute, I had booked my flight and accommodation in Portugal six months before the departure day. I have already invested time, money, and energy into organizing my trip, choosing the places to explore, making arrangements with friends travelling with me, and so on. Given this upfront investment, I would probably go through with the trip to Portugal even after finding out that it will be raining throughout my stay. Once I have invested resources in my trip, I have a fairly strong interest in making the most of it and following the plans I have made. So there is an asymmetry between the “good weather threshold” that has to be met in order to book my holiday and the “good weather threshold” that has to be met in order to cancel my holiday. In the first case, the foreseen rain is a sufficiently good reason for not going to Portugal; in the second case, the rain is not a sufficiently good reason for cancelling my trip to Portugal. This “threshold asymmetry” mirrors the asymmetry between the “good life threshold” required to consider a life worth starting and the “good life threshold” that would have to be met for someone to choose to die.
But one could argue that the asymmetry between these thresholds is better explained by psychological biases like the status quo bias (the tendency, when faced with potential change, to prefer keeping things as they already are) or the sunk cost fallacy (the tendency to keep investing time or resources in a hopeless undertaking: since one has already invested a lot, giving up would feel like a waste) (Kahneman, 2011). So it may be that one prefers to keep living not because they have developed interests or because they have good reasons to do so, but because they rationalize their current circumstances or their preference for continuing what they have started, even though it would be objectively better for them to quit.
It is hard to tell whether someone continuing to live in the face of serious objective difficulties is just being biased, or whether they are actually showing extraordinary resilience. In most cases, it would not make much difference, because the result would be the same: a person wants to keep living, hence we should let them live. However, we want to understand whether there is an asymmetry between prenatal and postmortem nonexistence, so we will now turn to a second argument that attempts to explain how such an asymmetry may arise.
Whose Nonexistence?
One interesting account of prenatal versus postmortem nonexistence is put forth by contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel, who argues that postmortem nonexistence is the time during which a now deceased person would counterfactually have been alive (Nagel, 1970). There is an identifiable subject, Dolores, whose life we can imagine continuing had death not occurred.
However, if we think of prenatal nonexistence, we cannot think of it as a time during which an identifiable subject would have lived, had they been born earlier. An individual cannot be considered an individual, identifiable subject until they are,
at the very least, an embryo (but probably even at a later stage, e.g. when twinning is no longer possible). It is not possible to turn the clock back to a time before a person’s embryonic stage and realistically imagine the counterfactual life of that not-yet-conceived someone. For instance, the lay thought experiment if I were born ten years earlier is absurd; I am myself because I was conceived at that exact moment and by those exact parents. Any individual conceived by my parents ten years before they conceived me would, in effect, be my older sibling—not a decade-older version of me.2
So, as Nagel argues, the difference between prenatal and postmortem nonexistence can be explained by the fact that before a certain point (be it the development of self-consciousness, birth, or conception) there is no subject to whom we can attribute a counterfactual existence. However, we can easily imagine how someone’s life would have kept unfolding had they died later.
Nagel refers to the hypothetical case of future people revived after cryonics to prove that nonexistence after “death” is not bad per se, but is bad when not followed by existence. If one comes back into existence after cryosuspension, then they can restart the life they had interrupted, in much the same way that people who are in a comatose state for some time can resume their life when they eventually wake up again. As Nagel observes, the inconveniences of not existing for a long time would not outweigh the fortune of continued, albeit interrupted, existence (ibid., p. 77). However, if revival never becomes available, cryosuspension and postmortem nonexistence would turn out to be equivalent.
Thus, what differentiates postmortem nonexistence from its prenatal counterpart is its being ascribable to a precise subject who would still exist if death had not occurred, while what makes postmortem nonexistence different from cryonics is its being irreversible.
Yet even this conception of death—as the irreversible state of nonexistence of an identifiable individual—fails to explain why death should be considered bad. It explains why not-conceiving, cryopreserving, and killing someone are morally different even if they all imply nonexistence, but it still does not add any normative qualification to the description of death as nonexistence. Indeed, a Greek tragedian could still claim that “death is good because it is the irreversible nonexistence of an individual” while a modern novelist could say “death is bad because it is the irreversible nonexistence of an individual”. Either claim could be true, but they cannot both be true. So we need to understand whether postmortem irreversible nonexistence entails some further fact that we can consider necessarily good or bad, or at least that would make death necessarily worse or necessarily better than life. In the next paragraph, we will consider a different account of death that might provide us with a better answer to the question about the badness of death.
Death as Deprivation
Nagel argues that death is bad because it deprives us of the capacity to experience anything, let us call this the “Deprivation Theory”. According to Nagel’s Deprivation Theory, “[i]f we are to make sense of the view that to die is bad, it must be on the ground that life is a good and death is the corresponding deprivation or loss, bad not because of any positive features but because of the desirability of what it removes” (ibid., p. 76). So, even if the sum of the painful experiences in my life had to greatly outweigh the happy ones, death would still be bad: merely experiencing life, irrespective of the content of such experiences, according to Nagel , “is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive” and “[t]herefore life is worth living even when the bad elements of experience are plentiful, and the good ones too meagre to outweigh the bad ones on their own. The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its consequences” (ibid., p. 76).
There are two problems with Nagel’s views expressed in these claims. First, it is difficult to explain how a dead person could suffer from any form of deprivation. Dead people cannot experience anything (as Epicurus also argued). The second problem is that we have fairly compelling evidence that life is not always a net positive, as we can infer from the fact that some people choose to end it.
The Harm of Deprivation
Let us start with the first issue: how can one be deprived of something (i.e. the good that life is) when one no longer exists? If someone deprives me of my laptop, I experience the inconvenience of losing my data or having to spend money to buy a new one. But if someone takes my laptop after I am dead, I am no longer a subject who can experience such deprivation.
Nagel argues that there are certain forms of deprivation that can affect someone even if they never experience their effects. Let us consider a variation on the examples originally suggested by Nagel , and imagine that someone surreptitiously gave me an imaginary “regression pill” that caused me to look, behave, experience the world as a five-year-old for the rest of my life (though it does not affect the number of years I am going to live overall). After unknowingly taking the pill, I would lose my capacity to do philosophy, travel by myself, and achieve any of the goals I have set for my future life. I would have different conversations with people around me, I would have different friends and hobbies, and I would not be able to reconnect to my previous self in a meaningful way. My psychology would be altered in such a dramatic way that my family and friends would perceive me as a different person. In sum, although biologically I would still be alive, the person that I currently am would no longer exist; at best, just a small part of my original self would continue to exist.
Assuming that most people want to follow a normal developmental trajectory through their life (one that involves growing older, not younger), it would be reasonable to argue that the regression was a bad thing for me. But how so?
One could argue that, since there is obviously nothing intrinsically bad in having the psychology of a five-year-old, or in merely being five years old, the pill did not harm me. However, the quality of my life after the regression is not the only element we would need to take into account in order to assess whether my regression was bad or not. Indeed, even though the “old me” no longer exists and thus cannot process what happened, and even though the “new me” is happy, it would still be true that I was deprived of the life I had planned to live. So even if my old self would disappear and would not be able to process such events, and even if my new self were happy, it would be reasonable to say that the pill overall harmed me because it deprived me of the possible, normal, and desired development of my life. So I can be deprived of something even if I no longer exist, because what I am deprived of is the life I would have lived if the pill were not given to me. Similarly, if death is bad because it is deprivation of a future life, it can be bad for a person who no longer exists.
The Plausible Counterfactuals
Let us assume that the above arguments are correct: that death is bad for an individual because it deprives them of their counterfactual life and all the potential value therein. But how do we navigate the countless counterfactuals that we can imagine for each event that takes place in this world?
Nagel argues that “[c]ountless possibilities for continued existence are imaginable, and we can clearly conceive of what it would be for him to go on existing indefinitely. (…) Death, no matter how inevitable, is an abrupt cancellation of the indefinitely extensive possible” (ibid., pp. 78, 80).
I want to suggest that, by including into the possibilities that death would prevent all those that are “imaginable”, Nagel is overestimating the badness of death. To start with, although countless, some possibilities are precluded at a metaphysical level. I cannot say: had I not taken the regression pill, I would be Bertrand Russell, because A (me) can only be A and not B (Bertrand Russell). I cannot conceive of being myself and Bertrand Russell at the same time, just like I cannot conceive of a square that is also a circle. It would be false to claim that the person who gave me the regression pill deprived me of a future life as Bertrand Russell. That pill deprived me of many things, but being Bertrand Russell was surely not one of them.
L
et us focus now on conceivable possibilities. Now, of course the fact that something is conceivable does not make it a plausible counterfactual. For instance, I can imagine a universe wherein humans have wings, and say: if humans had wings, they could enjoy flying. These counterfactual humans are conceivable, but they do not represent a plausible term of comparison for humans. This counterfactual world is so distant from ours that it would be odd to claim that the misfortune of Dolores having to die in her 30s is the misfortune of missing out on a life with wings. Dolores having wings was merely conceivable, but not really possible, whereas her living up to 80 was not merely conceivable, but also possible or even probable (given basic facts of human biology). Her death should rightly be considered worse than her missed opportunity to enjoy winged flight. We may still deem it bad that Dolores never had the joy of flying with her wings, but we would still have to say that her early death was worse than her missed opportunity to live her life with wings.
In order to overcome such difficulties, Jeff McMahan has proposed a variation of the Deprivation Theory formulated by Nagel : the Revised Possible Goods. According to McMahan , “the relevant alternative to death for purposes of comparison is not continuing to live indefinitely, or forever, but living on for a limited period of time and then dying of some other cause”. According to this account, the badness of death can be measured “in terms of the quantity and quality of life that the victim would have enjoyed had he not died when and how he did ” (McMahan, 1988).
So, just like the badness of the regression pill can be measured in terms of the quality of the life I would have enjoyed had I not regressed to the age of five, the badness of death should be measured against the quantity and quality of life one would have had, had they not died.