McMahan’s Revised Possible Goods Theory narrows down the range of counterfactuals against which it is reasonable to assess the badness of death to those that are not only possible, but indeed plausible, that is, that are consistent with living for a limited period of time under normal circumstances. It also explains why, given the current human lifespan, death at 10 is worse than death at 90.
However, even if it puts the badness of death in the right perspective—neither overestimating nor underestimating its badness—McMahan’s theory does not help us to answer the question about whether pursuing indefinite life extension would be worthwhile. So we need to continue our inquiry.
Epistemic Disagreement About Plausible Counterfactuals
Consider this sentence: had Epicurus never died, he would still be alive. This is, of course, a tautology. We can easily conceive of an alternate universe in which humans live for thousands of years, and in which Epicurus is still alive. However, when Epicurus died (in our current universe) in 240 BC, cryonics and life extension were merely conceivable, but not possible or probable.3 Epicurus did not have a real possibility to live for more than 80 years, just as he did not have a real possibility to have wings. Both facts are bad if we assume that Epicurus would have enjoyed living for thousands of years and flying on wings, but they are not bad in the same way that the death of Epicurus at the age of ten would have been bad.
But how should we assess the badness of someone dying today, or ten years from now, as opposed to living for thousands of years? After all, if one considers indefinite life extension possible or even probable, the counterfactual life against which they assess the badness of death suddenly becomes extremely long and valuable. In this view, when a person of any age dies, the counterfactual life of which they are robbed measures not in years or decades, but in centuries and millennia. But as we have seen, counterfactuals need to be plausible if we are to take people’s deprivation of them seriously, so these greatly increased stakes only matter insofar as they are plausible. Thus, we must look more closely at the arguments supporting the plausibility of life-extension technology.
All but the most pessimistic of critics would agree that our odds of someday attaining millennial lifespans are higher today than they were in 240 BC. A growing number of people today consider indefinite life extension as not merely conceivable, but realistically possible and, in some cases, even quite probable.4 To date, however, most of the technologies required for indefinite life extension do not really exist in the same way that, say, in vitro fertilization (IVF ) or quantum electrodynamics can be said to exist. Whereas IVF has produced hundreds of thousands of children, and quantum electrodynamics has given us transistors (which made computers resource-efficient and hence affordable), indefinite life-extension technology has so far only yielded a few hundred frozen corpses, some interesting proofs of concept, and a lot of hopeful extrapolation. But given the fact that a growing number of experts reckon life-extension technology will become available at some point in the not-too-distant future, it is not irrational to consider this outcome as at least being more probable today than it was in the past, even if it is not considered very probable in absolute terms. There are technologies that are not available yet, but that we are reasonably confident will be available in the next few years, and such confidence about their future availability affects their epistemic status. For example, it would be absurd to say that, since human clones do not exist yet, they must be as improbable as humans with wings. We are reasonably confident that—barring ethical or legal constraints—human clones are way more likely to be born within the next decade than, say, human-albatross chimaeras. However, some people think that indefinite life extension is as likely to happen as human cloning, whereas some other ones consider it as unlikely as winged humans.
The disagreement about indefinite life extension’s expected odds of success is likely to produce disagreement about the badness of death at an old age, seeing as the counterfactual life that the cryonicist has in mind is significantly longer than the counterfactual life in the mind of the cryo-sceptic. From the cryonicist perspective, if someone dies at the age of 5, they lose about 80 years of probable life and some thousands (or more) years of possible life. The person who dies in their 80s has not lost many years of probable life, but they have also lost some thousands (or more) years of possible life. To the cryo-sceptic, instead, the five-year-old has lost many probable decades, whereas the 80-year-old has used almost the whole potential, and has lost almost nothing, given the very low chances that indefinite life extension will become available.
However, if deprivation of a future life is bad, then there is no reason why such deprivation should ever cease to be bad, even if the degree to which it is bad decreases. So even from the perspective of the cryo-sceptic, it is difficult to argue that death is not bad when it occurs at an old age. The fact that some people die at a very young age makes their death worse than the death of people who die at a very old age. But the fact that the people in the first group had it worse than people in the second one does not mean that the people in the second group did not suffer any harm. If life is always better than death, as Nagel suggests, then there is no limit to the number of years that it would be good to live, and there is no reason to think that the death of even decrepit people is not bad.
Death as Deprivation of Negative Counterfactuals
The problem with Nagel’s conclusion that death is always bad because life is always good, however, is that the premise that life is always better than death, and that death always deprives us of something net positive, is at odds with the fact that sometimes people choose to die because their life is unbearable to them. Indeed, one’s life might be unbearable and not worth living even if one does not choose to die (if one does not find the courage to commit suicide, say) and even if they cannot choose to die (such as with a neonate born with a serious and unbearably painful disease). Nagel builds his argument on the premise that the counterfactual life one loses by dying is a life one would want to live, even if it involved suffering. But people who choose euthanasia, for instance, choose death over a life of suffering. To them, death is better than life because the counterfactual life they would live (had they not opted for euthanasia), would be a life they do not want to live.
Not only can the badness of a counterfactual life make suicide or euthanasia rational; in some extreme cases, it can even make homicide an act of compassion. For instance, if I am involved in a car accident and my car catches fire while I am trapped in it, and I cannot be rescued, someone shooting me and sparing me the agony of a slow death would not be harming me; on the contrary, they would actually be doing me a big favour. Given an extremely bad counterfactual, death is not bad. So for death to be bad qua deprivation of life, we must assume that the life in question is at least a decent one. The cryonicist would generally agree that merely adding years to one’s life is not valuable unless that life is at least worth living. This is why rejuvenation is a key step in the life-extension process and also in the perspective of being cryopreserved. Living for centuries without extensive rejuvenation (to the extent that it would even be physically possible) seems like a truly gruesome fate, as one’s body and mind would slowly degrade with no guarantee of a merciful death around the corner.
The issue of negative counterfactuals, and the goodness of death against some extremely negative counterfactuals, opens up a new set of questions. At some point in the future, an agreement will likely be reached with respect to the possibility of achieving immortality; however, this would not solve the disagreement about the desirability of immortality. As the conservative motto goes, “just because something is technically feasible does not imply that it is also morally permissible”. Two people could agree that death is bad, and that indefinite life extension is a real possibility, and yet disagree about the desirability of immortality.
Immortal people would have the obvious advantage of never being deprived of the goodness of life, and they would have many more
chances to become what they want to be, to achieve their goals, to cultivate their relationships. But what if they found out that life necessarily becomes less good, and more burdensome, as time advances? What if there is something inherently boring, or tiring, or sad, or painful about existing for millennia and beyond? If so, we would have a different kind of reason to argue that cryonics and indefinite life extension are not a good investment. In the following section, we will explore this set of arguments.
Death as Frustration of Desires
As we have just seen, the problem with the deprivation account of death as formulated by Nagel is that it assumes that death is always bad because it always deprives of some net value (living). A different view based on a more modest formulation would be the following: Death is bad if it deprives someone of a life they would have preferred to keep living.
Once we introduce preferences into the picture, however, we have to abandon the assumption that death (qua deprivation of life) is intrinsically bad, and we need to rethink the badness of death as frustration of our preferences or desires to keep on living. The advantage of this preference-based approach is twofold: (1) It reconciles the intuition that death is normally bad with the intuition that it is reasonable for someone to choose death under certain circumstances; (2) it does not need to rely on some overly complex comparison of postmortem nonexistence and counterfactual existences in order to prove the badness of death. However, there are some difficulties also with this approach, as we shall now see.
According to philosopher Bernard Williams, there are at least two orders of desires: the conditional and the categorical ones (Williams, 1973). Williams argues that death is bad because it frustrates the categorical desires an individual might have. Before we delve deeper into this matter, let us first clarify the difference between these two categories.
Conditional desires are contingent upon the fact that one is alive. The desire to have food and water, for instance, is due the contingency of being a biological organism that requires food and water to survive. If the brain of such a being were uploaded onto a digital substrate, such as a computer or a robot, those specific conditional desires would disappear (and new ones, such as the desire to be connected to electric power, would perhaps arise). We do not normally consider it a pity that a recently deceased person will no longer be able to keep breathing air and drinking water. According to Williams , conditional desires do not propel our existence; they do not provide us with strong enough motivation to keep living. In other words, if all of one’s desires were merely conditional, they would lack a motivation to continue to exist.
Categorical desires, meanwhile, are the ones that would (likely) be present regardless of one’s substrate—that is, desires that are not merely contingent upon the factors that keep one alive. It is these desires that make us fear death more than anything. While it may seem like only grandiose desires would fit this criteria, this is not so; while Napoleon surely had a categorical desire to win each and every battle in his career as a military commander, his more modest desire to be loved and recognized by those closest to him was no less categorical. A less ambitious person may have the categorical desire to see the Great Barrier Reef, try all the ice cream flavours in the world, or learn to reverse-parallel park. Regardless of the specific contents, such desires motivate us—to different degrees—to keep living.
Bernard Williams famously discussed immortality and longevity in an essay published in 1973 entitled “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality”. Williams introduced a fictional character, Elina Makropulos, who gives the title to the essay.5 One day, Elina’s father gives her an elixir that extends her lifespan by 300 years and that can be taken several times. She takes the elixir once, lives up to 342 years, and eventually decides not to take a second dose because, in Willliams’ words, “Her unending life has come to a state of boredom, indifference and coldness. Everything is joyless: ‘in the end it is the same’, she says, ‘singing and silence’.”
Just like people who would use rejuvenating medicine in order to extend their life well beyond current boundaries and perhaps even achieve immortality, Elina Makropulos does not become decrepit, but stays biologically young for about 300 years. So in imagining her life, we should not picture a sort of Methuselah, unable to perform even the most basic of activities; otherwise her choice to refuse to take the elixir would be quite understandable. Moreover, when she decides to die at 342 years of age, she has not been living an extremely long life compared to what cryonicists and indefinite life-extension enthusiasts hope to achieve, so Williams’ arguments would also apply to cryonics and rejuvenation techniques that fall short of the best-case scenarios envisioned in the context of cryonics and life extension.
Williams identifies three undesirable features in Elina Makropulos’ life, all of which are meant to show why a very long or immortal life would be undesirable. We will start with lack of categorical desires in the remainder of this chapter paragraphs, before moving on to boredom and unrecognizability in the next chapter.
According to Williams , an indefinitely long life would be undesirable because all categorical desires would eventually be fulfilled, after which one would only remain with uninspiring conditional desires. Such a life would ultimately become unbearable due to the existential boredom, emptiness, and apathy that would come to pervade it.
Now, there are some problems with Williams’ view. The first problem is that it is not obvious or uncontroversial that categorical desires are the only thing that propels us towards the future life. We can imagine a life wherein categorical desires are entirely absent, and yet the subject is happy and would rationally want their life to continue. Imagine, for instance, that a patient suffering from near-total paralysis decides to spend most of their life under the effect of some intensely pleasurable and side effect-free recreational drug. We would think that such a person has no categorical desires, but, nevertheless, given the well-being experienced thanks to the drugs, her life feels pleasant and worth living. It seems that, to Williams , such a scenario would be inconceivable because one could only want to keep living in order to fulfil their categorical desires; yet it is not difficult to suppose that at least some people could find such a life worth living.
Another problem with Williams’ argument is that its implications are at odds with commonly shared views on the badness of killing people or animals who temporarily or permanently lack such desires, either because they suffer from depression or other mental disabilities or because they are members of species whose individuals do not have the mental capacity to formulate categorical desires. If categorical desires were all that mattered, we would have to consider it morally permissible to murder a considerable number of humans and even more nonhuman animals just for fun. People might have different views about the moral status of animals, and many people consider it is morally permissible to eat them in order to meet some nutritional needs or gustatory desires. Others might find it permissible to kill people with no categorical desires if they ask to be killed. But killing animals or some groups of people for no reason at all or just for fun is not morally justifiable within any widely recognized ethical frameworks (those who do find it permissible are generally considered to suffer from mental disorders like sadistic personality disorder or psychopathy).
Jeff McMahan (1988) points out that even though the badness of death cannot be entirely explained by the fact that it frustrates the victim’s desires, such frustration is an important part of the reason why death is bad when it interrupts a life worth living; as he writes, “death frustrates the victim’s desires, retroactively condemns to futility her efforts to fulfil them, and generally renders many of her strivings vain and pointless”. Moreover, as we saw before, the badness of someone’s death is measured against the quality and the quantity of goods they would have experienced if they had survived, and the way that one measures such loss depends in part on how much the subject wanted to have such goods or fulfil such desires. In this per
spective, the death of a person who only has the weak desire to, say, try different ice cream flavours should be perceived as less bad than the death of someone with more complex and numerous desires (such as the strong desire to write a book, create a family, find a cure for cancer, etc.)
A third problem is that it is not obvious whether categorical desires would necessarily be depleted over a very long or immortal life. We can imagine an indefinitely long life during which categorical desires never disappear, but merely change object, intensity, or both. We can, for instance, imagine someone having the categorical desire to help their family throughout their whole life. Although the objects of that desire will inevitably evolve as various family members change, die, and are born, one would probably never lose the desire to be there for their family.
Overall, given that barely anyone has ever lived for much longer than a century, it is hard to predict whether Williams’ assumption is correct. We cannot predict whether categorical desires would be depleted over a very long life.
A possible alternative may be to move away from the assumption that the only life worth living is the one sustained by categorical desires, and towards considering pleasure or even happiness as not necessarily associated to desires and to the satisfaction of those desires. Contemporary philosophers John Martin Fischer and Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin (2014) have argued that Williams appears to view life as a sort of library filled with a large yet finite number of books (a metaphor for categorical desires). Given an infinitely long life, one would eventually read all of the books in the library, and thereafter run out of projects. However , Fischer (1994) has also argued that some kinds of pleasures are repeatable: “such activities (and others) might well reliably (and repeatedly) generate experiences that are sufficiently compelling to render an immortal life attractive on balance”. The kinds of activities that Fischer has in mind involve more basic pleasures, such as sex, food, listening to music, exercising, and so on. Unlike activities that stop providing pleasure once the set goal is reached, such as learning new skills or perfecting old ones, repeatable pleasures sustain their pleasurable effect over time. According to Fischer , then, an eternal life in which both repeatable and self-exhausting pleasures coexist would not become unbearable, because one would always experience the satisfaction of some desire—be it conditional or categorical.
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