Longer Lives for Some / Better Lives for All: Sonia Arrison’s Piece on Life-Extension Technology in the Wall Street Journal

by Matt B. on August 28, 2011

Interesting review of life-extension technologies in the WSJ.  A few small quibbles, though.  The author, Sonia Arrison, writes:

Arguments against life extension are often simply an appeal to the status quo. If humans were to live longer, we are told, the world, in some way, would not be right: It would no longer be noble, beautiful or exciting.

But what is noble, beautiful and exciting about deterioration and decline? What is morally suspect about ameliorating human suffering?

The answer is nothing. Everything that we have, socially and as individuals, is based on the richness of life. There can be no more basic obligation than to help ourselves and future generations to enjoy longer, healthier spans on the Earth that we share.

I’m not sure if anyone’s arguing that deterioration or decline are noble, exactly. What can be noble, however, is accepting the inevitably of death and living life in a way that reflects that awareness.

As to the final paragraph, I agree that helping people live longer, healthier lives is a worthy goal.  But I’m concerned with access: at least in the near-term, I can imagine that life-extension technologies will disproportionately benefit the wealthy and privileged (even if they do eventually make their way to poorer populations).

And it’s that meantime that’s interesting: alleviating the suffering of the destitute strikes me as more urgent and more ethically compelling than extending the lives of the already healthy and well-to-do.  To the extent that we can do both, great.  But to the extent that resource constraints require a choice, I’d want to foreground the avoidable suffering that’s all around us.

  • Josh

    Re: investing in life extension benefiting the rich at the expense of the poor, Arrison also mentions a study showing that there are economic benefits to a longer-lived population– does that mitigate this concern for you at all?  More generally, so long as there are wealth disparities, there will be access disparities.  Would you argue against public funding for research into cancer or heart surgery when immediate needs could have been addressed with the same funds?  What about putting a man on the moon?  :-)

  • http://thewheatandchaff.com Matt Bieber

    Re: the economic benefits of a longer-lived population, I’d be interested in knowing how those benefits are distributed.  Average per capita income growth doesn’t necessarily mean that the folks at the bottom are receiving any of that growth.

    I take your more general point.  I suppose what I was trying to articulate was less about how we choose to allocate funds – at least in the short term, our politics doesn’t always permit fund re-allocation across wildly different domains – and more about how we choose to think of the problems that are arrayed in front of us.  I’m a little concerned that in getting as excited as we (legitimately) should about these new technologies, we’ll lose sight of the very real and very pressing work of alleviating the injustices and suffering that exist right now.

  • Josh

    Ah, good point.  Re: getting overly excited, I had thought you were thinking about policy decisions.  Now I’m not sure which resource constraints you have in mind.  Are you concerned that people will donate to life extension research instead of Amnesty International– that kind of thing?  Or more opinion-wise, as in reading and writing about life extension instead of suffering?

  • http://thewheatandchaff.com Matt Bieber

    Yeah, thanks for pushing back on the resource allocation point.  I suppose I am thinking about this more in terms of cultural priorities, though not entirely; resource allocation will always be tied to cultural priorities, of course.  

    I can easily imagine media coverage of life extension technology as promising a new future for “us” without much awareness of the fact that billions of people are living wildly deprived lives right now, and that just living like “we” do would already be an infinite improvement on their current lot.  Improving that lot in solidarity with those people strikes me as a more “basic obligation,” to use Arrison’s words, then figuring out how to extend the lives of rich, healthy, relatively long-lived folks.  

  • Josh

    All the kids on the block didn’t get the sweet-ass 21-speed Huffy that Stevie Hill got, but we all looked at it admiringly. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t ours, and if Stevie told us he was saddened that we didn’t have one too, we woulda smacked him.

  • http://thewheatandchaff.com Matt Bieber

    You and Stevie Hill were living on the same block, with the same relative surplus of luxuries.  You had everything you needed.

    That’s not at all comparable to the difference I’m talking about – the difference between our lives of abundance and the lives of the 1.4 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day. (And that’s adjusted for purchasing power. Think about what you can buy in the U.S. for that amount: that’s what we’re talking about here.)  

    You haven’t really responded to my basic suggestion, I don’t think – that there might be something more morally urgent about helping to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings than the kinds of things Arrison’s talking about.

  • Josh

    Hmm, that didn’t work out so well.  Let me try a different tack: what’s valuable to you about reminding us that cutting-edge life extension technologies are going to be available to rich people before poor people?

  • http://thewheatandchaff.com Matt Bieber

    That’s not primarily what I was after; I was mostly trying to respond to Arrison’s claim – see above.  But I can see how you took in the direction you did.

  • Josh

    There are about 6 things going on up there, all of which I’m trying to engage.  So, here we go again, one more time for the people!

    So at the very end of an article telling us all (and all of us) about new life extension technologies and their ramifications, Arrison makes a flashy value statement, that life extension is the most basic obligation.  It’s a bit overdrawn, but in fairness, she’s trying to mount a defense against critics who don’t value life extension at all (admittedly, a thin characterization of the opposition). 

    In response, you say that while you value life extension, you disagree with her flashy statement–when resource constraints force a choice between life extension and ameliorating suffering, you’re with suffering.  So far all this makes sense to me, but it does feel a bit Debbie Downer, even a bit of a cheap shot at Arrison– the statement with which you take issue was the tiniest part of an otherwise informative article that did a nice job of tilling up some of the larger issues at stake.

    You mentioned resource constraints as motivating your preference, so I drilled down on that, but it turned out you weren’t referring to public or private resources, but cultural priorities, which are connected to the former (and I think are what I meant by opinions).  That’s a little confusing, though, because it was near-term resource constraints that forced the choice between life extension and reduced suffering to begin with.  I understood how tangible resource constraints could do that (though not how you balanced short-term vs. long-term gains there, hence the questions about econ. benefits (which, after all, could benefit poor people in a progressively taxed state, but admittedly need not), and cancer/heart surgery), but without them, it seems like you’re just saying you value ameliorating suffering over life extension in some more general way— which is fine, but kind of a lot of digging to get there.

    But then you paint this critical picture of reporters triumphantly heralding a bright future for “us”, without sufficient awareness of the billions of people not included in that us, whose wildly deprived lives are separated from ours by an infinite gulf.  Raising up those billions is a more basic obligation than [ignorantly parading around, feathering, and] extending our already long lives, you say. 

    Well, Harumph!  I reserve the right to have uncurbed enthusiasm about living as long as possible, and I think most any viewer of those reporters, no matter how poor, would have a similar view.  Loving life entails wanting it to keep going for Pete’s sake!  It’s an incredibly widespread human aspiration–natural even.  Or even if it’s no longer a natural instinct in us, it is in everything else alive.  Along those lines, seeing someone quite old and still in good health is moving, in a way that has an exact affinity with seeing a man on the moon– the one pushes the boundaries of human life in time, the other in space.

    Your reaction to the article didn’t seem to see much of this, so of course I have to reach for the big guns to shift perspectives into a wider, fuller space where I hope you can take a breath of fresh air and a richer view on things.  Instead you pit me and my childhood friends against 1.4 billion angry poor people.  All this, because Arrison thinks helping people live longer, fuller lives is the best thing.  Sheesh.

    But fair enough, more lemons for my lemonade.  I will open a stand on my old block, and split up the proceeds between the two values, until all the kids, everywhere, or at least more of them, can open their own stand, take a swig, and dream of living longer.

  • http://thewheatandchaff.com Matt Bieber

    That’s what they call an ole’ fashioned clock-cleaning.  White flag, sir.  Lovely-ly done.

  • Lava

    The relish with which you make lemonade suggests it may be a more satisfying beverage to you than, say, orange juice. So at least give Matt his due for handing you the lemons.

    I agree that there was some fuzziness in Matt’s original reference to “resources,” later defined as “cultural,” and how they should be expended on life extension vs. alleviating suffering. In addition, I’m generally not so egalitarian that I’d want to deprive some people of a benefit just because not everyone can access that benefit right away — unless I were engaged in some kind of strategic move to try to get that benefit more widely distributed. And in that latter qualification lies part of what I think Matty was getting at with his post, and with which I agree: it’s all too easy to extol “societal” advances without asking which segments of society will gain. “Cui bono?” should be a fundamental question posed in journalism. But when the “cui” is comprised of the higher echelons of society, the question often doesn’t arise. So I think Matt is on to something significant and important, even if he phrased it fuzzily on the first pass.

  • Josh

    There is a distinctive relish in making lemonade.  You can eat an orange like an apple; you don’t have to do anything special to juice ‘em.  Lemons are different.  You have to work to sublimate their bitterness into a refreshing beverage, which makes it all the more satisfying. 

    With respect to the fuzz, I agree that journalism that doesn’t ask “who benefits?” would be better off if it did.  I don’t see Arrison as in arrears on that point.  My point is that you don’t have to deal in lemons to be attuned to injustice, and that a preoccupation with them can blind you to other values.  Like oranges.

  • Lava

    Actually, yeah, you do have to deal in lemons to be attuned to injustice. And what about a preoccupation with making lemonade?

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