What indication is there that living longer would serve the greater good? People living longer = fewer births assuming stable population, and a greater percentage of life spent in older years. Even if you can make those older years healthy, you'll never be able to capture the uncomplicated wonder and joy of childhood and adolescence. You'd literally be trading a teenager's first crush for an 80-year old's third marriage. The aggregate joy of society will go down if SENS is successful.
I'm just going to have to guess that you aren't very old. I'm only 47, but I have to tell you that at least for me life just keeps getting better every year. I wouldn't trade this year for another year of my teens. I wouldn't trade this year for 10 more years in my teens.
Gradually losing health is unfortunate. I have to watch what I eat and be careful with my lifestyle due to chronic illness. My vision has degraded pretty badly and I'm forced to use a really gigantic font when I'm programming (you don't want to know how much time I spend fiddling with my colours!). These things pale in comparison to simply knowing what makes me happy.
I've worked hard to learn to be happy. Again, at least for me, I don't think happiness is something that is given to you. It's something that you make yourself. I suppose some people have a talent for it, like everything else, but it's something that you can work on and get better at. Without trying to sound arrogant there is no way that a child can have the kind of happiness that I have every day, because they simply do not have the experience to do it. They have a tumble of conflicting emotions which they have no control over. You couldn't pay me to do that again.
This. I enjoyed my childhood, and I wouldn't trade it for anything, but adulthood is so much more fun in a hundred different ways. If yours isn't, consider what it would take to fix that.
(If possible. I realize that isn't an option for everyone, and some people are working as hard as they can just to reach a secure position in life where they don't have to worry about basic needs. But this applies for those groups as well: if you had a thousand extra years to work with, as a start, you'd have a lot more time to enjoy the secure lifestyle you've worked so hard for, not just to pass that more secure position on to your children.)
I'm 31, with a toddler. I can't compare anything I do with the joy she gets out of the most mundane things. The first time she tasted chocolate? Blows me going to Alinea out of the water.
I'm not trying to disagree with you, I have a 7 month old son, but what about the joy you felt seeing her being born? I know that isn't a mundane thing and that you likely won't have it but a few more times but there are experiences that children can't have, that are, at least, as transcendent as a child's first taste of chocolate.
But that's precisely the thing. In a stable population, births per year are inversely proportional to life expectancy. So whatever joy seeing a child born brings to people, there will necessarily be less of that per year aggregated over the whole society. A society where everyone lives longer is necessarily one with a smaller proportion of joyful idealistic children and a higher percentage of cynical jaded older people.
> People living longer = fewer births assuming stable population
That's a big assumption, and one that seems rather unlikely to hold or to suddenly change.
> You'd literally be trading a teenager's first crush for an 80-year old's third marriage.
If you're going to blatantly invoke imagery like that, then how about preserving the wisdom of experience? How much more might we advance the state of the art in every field if the experts in those fields are still around, healthy, and making new discoveries?
And there are plenty of 80-year-olds still enjoying their first marriage.
Youth is a wonder largely because of aging; eliminate aging and you get the pleasures of youth when you're a hundred.
Personally, I'm satisfied with "death is bad; stopping death would be good". Simplistic yet still incredibly true.
>How much more might we advance the state of the art in every field if the experts in those fields are still around..
That will also keep bad guys around indefinitely. I think we can agree that things can be better. (I mean things like, environmental issues, corruption and foreign policies). But one cannot really hope to change the viewpoints/values/priorities of people already in power. Our only hope is the new generations, which we can hope to bring up with better values, which will eventually replace them.
Imagine if Hitler could live indefinitely or created an army of clones. Imagine every corrupt/powerful person in the world right, has the capability for doing this.
The point I am trying to make, is good cannot do good, when evil forces are in power. And the only thing that prevents evil forces in power indefinitely, is natural death. (We can all agree that things like democracy are not really doing a good job at that, right?)
Uh, that's the whole point of caring about the greater good: to help people live longer. If you're having some sort of existential crisis wherein you honestly can't see any reason people should live, then take some time to reassess your priorities in depth.
Because you're questioning the only real moral principle humanity has.
It depends on what you believe. If you believe that there is life after death, and it's a better one, then living longer on earth isn't necessarily better. I think if you talked to a lot of people who are actually elderly and actually nearing natural death, some of them would wish for another lifetime's worth of years (if it came with renewed health), but some of them would be ready to move on.
No, it doesn't depend on what you believe, it depends on what is actually true. There is no rational justification for believing things that are not true, so there's no way to effectively argue for them.
In your knee-jerkiness you have missed the point. The point is that people who believe in life after death may not desire to live longer. Regardless of whether there actually is life after death, what people believe about it affects their decisions.
This is probably not the place to argue about the existence of God, but I will say this: your reasoning is circular. "There's no rational justification for it, so it's not true; and since it's not true, there's no rational justification for it." You have made up your mind already, so you don't even realize when you beg the question. In fact, many people do see rational arguments in favor; just because you disagree with them doesn't make them irrational. And your stated arguments are, in fact, irrational.
