How Long Should we Live for?

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I'll be there from around 7pm if anyone would like a social chat before we get started. Please arrive in time for a prompt start at 7:30.

Medical advances, coupled with healthier lifestyles, have extended average life expectancy in the UK from around 69 in 1950 to 79 for men and 83 for women.

Against this background there are those who wish to extend their life indefinitely by various means including:
Gene Therapy to slow the speed of biological aging by preventing or repairing age-related genetic damage.
Cellular Rejuvenation which aims to reverse aging and disease by resetting damaged DNA, clearing out dead cells, and restoring youthful function to tissues.
Cryonics – a few wealthy people have their bodies/brains preserved through freezing in the hope that they can later be brought back to life and cured of their ailments.
Digital Immortality – attempting to upload our brains into computational systems, leaving the biological body behind entirely.

Less dramatically, some of us already achieve a degree of immortality through our lifetime influence as parents, teachers, scientists, artists, philosophers etc. That, like simply passing on one’s DNA, is prone to error and obviously doesn’t come with the first person perspective of being alive.

Other people take an opposite view. They accept their mortality, but do not want to experience the final stages of inevitable decline. Instead they seek medical assistance to die at a time of their choosing. Assisted Dying is a controversial practice that has become legal in many western countries over the last 30 years. (Attempts to change the law in the UK have so far failed.) Switzerland, where assisting suicide for non-selfish motives has never been illegal, is the only country in the world to accept foreign nationals for an assisted death at organisations such as Dignitas and Pegasos. Pegasos is perhaps the most controversial as it believes that “it is the human right of every rational adult of sound mind, regardless of state of health, to choose the manner and timing of their death". [my italics]

So how long should we live for?

• To what extent should we be able to choose (or refuse) life extending treatments?
• To what extent should we be able to choose (or refuse) life ending treatments?
• Is it ethical for life extending treatments to only be available to those who can afford them?
• Is it ethical for those who have parented children to seek to live forever (or even for what used to be two lifetimes)?
• Should there be any limits on medical research continually curing lethal conditions, and hence extending life expectancy as long as possible?
• One argument against the introduction of assisted dying is the risk of people being coerced into requesting an assisted death. Is there a similar risk of coercion which applies to persuading people to accept life extending treatments? If so, does this risk apply to current life-extending treatments such as heart surgery and cancer treatments?
• Similarly, another argument against assisted dying is that people may feel a duty to die. Do life extending technologies, (even current ones), run the risk of people feeling a duty to live?
• And underlying all of these issues, what are the criteria that make people feel that their lives are worth living? What can we learn from the Japanese concept of Ikigai, (discussed in the final part of the Hannah Fry ‘The Future’ episode on longevity – link below)?

Some optional (but useful) preparatory reading/watching:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_extension
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002wb6b/the-future-with-hannah-fry-series-1-1-the-150year-life
https://pegasos-association.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai

Hope to see you there.