LAUSR

The ethical challenges posed by the advances in the understanding of ageing are the subject of very welcome controversy across political and social, economic and environmental dimensions. But the challenges are not just a matter of how our societies would manage the material consequences of such dramatic changes. They are also challenges to our conception of the shape of our lives and for what it means for our lives to flourish. How do we reconcile a radical conceptual change in our thinking about ageing that many would have us enthusiastically embrace with what may be a deeper truth: that it is not merely our bodies, but we who age? And that perhaps to be particular human beings whose lives have value worth engaging in scientific research to cherish and preserve we need to age? Like many ethical controversies produced by scientific and technological change, these issues are liable to produce a profoundly uncomfortable sense of moral vertigo. Most of our ordinary ethical decisions take place on relatively stable ground in which moral concepts have relatively firm connections with facts of nature and of the human condition. Profound changes of the kind associated with aspects of antiageing research, precisely because they challenge our view of what the facts are, and promise or threaten to revise the human condition, shift the entire pattern of connections between moral and everyday concepts. This poses a problem not just for what we are to think but about the means by which we think about these matters. Default ethical thinking about anti-ageing is most often couched in Utilitarian terms. Utilitarian moral thinking – which requires us to try to figure out the likely net effect of our decisions on total human welfare – is an essential and useful ingredient in ordinary public policy making. It is a moral methodology perhaps especially appealing to scientists. Given an ethical problem, can't we weigh scenarios, probilify and calculate the optimal ethical result? I think we need to be reminded that here Utilitarian approaches are unlikely to help us face these challenges and not only or primarily because the calculations are hard. Why? First of all, the debates are subject to what we might call the problem of perspective instability. Rational but rival estimations of consequences about anti-ageing begin from different and incommensurable domains: there are the perspectives of the individual and their loved ones, that of society, the economy and culture, and, not uniquely compare climate change but still profoundly, that of the species as a whole, both now and into the far future. It is hopeless to pretend, in regard to such profound questions about the human condition, that we have any already available principled way of managing these perspectives which needs merely to be applied smartly and in the light of known or acquirable evidence. Our moral concepts simply do not form so well-ordered a system and were not built to handle questions which put the very notion of the human into contention. (A sad truth is that some highly developed societies cannot even manage these different perspectives to agree about the economics of health care under present conditions.) Thus, in the case of anti-ageing, the fact that, if asked, an individual may always want to live another day, does not trump the issues of any harm done to humanity as a species by enabling that preference of all current members of humanity to be indefinitely fulfilled. Equally, questions of justice – for example, issues of equality of access to the technology or intergenerational equity do not consistently override individual choice. Some think that absolutely nothing could be worse than individual deaths, that preventing them constitutes an unconditionally overriding moral imperative. (For a discussion see Farrelly, 2008). They hold that this is the moral justification for research into extending health spans since, they hold, such research will inevitably lead to radical extension of life spans amounting to the abolition of death. Others hold that the desire to live, though a biological imperative, cannot in itself constitute an imperative which overrides more objective and, as they see it, more rationally founded considerations. They may claim that we don't generally think that the existential interests of an individual unconditionally outweigh those of the species and that the interests of humanity should be thought of as something more than the sum of individual interests. Again, it is instructive to compare the ethics of climate change. It may be thought that individuals have a right to basic energy utilities. Yet the net effect of fulfilling all such individual rights is to produce a tragedy of the planetary commons. The point here is that Utilitarian thinking, as a moral methodology, does not help us all in knowing which amongst these perspectives to adopt or how to manage the conflicts. A second difficulty with simply trying to calculate likely results is the tendency of some thinkers about the issues to engage in what might be called change squaring. Thus, typically, Malthusian style objections to the development of these technologies – on grounds of population growth and finite resources are met with promissory notes of new profound changes dicussions e.g. in Lain and de Grey, 2016). If we are concerned about the effect of anti-ageing on population issues, we are told that such problems will fade away once we can increase food production, live underwater or colonize Mars. If we fret about how