Should You Choose to Live Forever? (Stephen Cave and John Martin Fischer)
OVERVIEW
Should You Choose to Live Forever? is part of the Little Debates About Big Questions series, where two experts debate one philosophical question. In this book, the debate is between Stephen Cave and John Martin Fischer on whether immortality would be good or bad. Here’s a teaser:
Why you should not choose to live forever – Stephen Cave
“Life is good, and more might be better, but unending life would be too much.” For Cave, immortality presents several negatives:
· The individual considerations of boredom, ennui, meaninglessness, and procrastination (prudential)
· The societal considerations of overpopulation and social injustice (ethical)
· The planetary considerations of environmental collapse (ethical)
In short, true immortality (never being able to die) would be undeniably bad, and radical life extension would probably be bad. We’d be bored out of our minds and overpopulated to the brink of disaster (remedied only by unethical “tactics” like euthanasia, forced sterilization, forced abortions, or infanticide). Cave also suspects radically long lives would exacerbate and amplify the social injustices we are already ill-equipped to fix (after all, who benefits from the “haves” being able to have forever? Who benefits from old ideas and old biases never being replaced?).
No, you should not choose to live forever.
Why you should choose to live forever – John Martin Fischer
Imagine your life is going well. If asked whether you’d want to live for one more week, what would you say? Probably, “yes.” If it’s reasonable to assume that every week, “yes” would be your answer, then it’s reasonable to assume you’d want to live a very long time. Fischer doesn’t argue that true immortality would be good, but rather that radical life extension could be favourable given the right circumstances. He’s not worried about boredom (pleasurable experiences are often repeatable), and although he doesn’t see a way out of overpopulation or social injustice, he’s optimistic that we’d be able to figure it out.
Yes, you should choose to live a radically extended life, given the right circumstances.
Cave contends that Fischer has an overly long list of things that would need to be going very well for radical life extension to be positive (and that we don’t have a great track record of creating those right circumstances). Fischer, in turn, doesn’t deny the difficulty in establishing suitable conditions, but doubles down that that doesn’t mean radical life extension would always be bad. Fischer fancies himself an immortality optimist but also an immortality realist.
So, should you choose to live forever? The final answer is: maybe… probably not.