From The Quest for Immortality to The Right to Die

Back in September, during a military parade at Beijing, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin were caught on a “hot mic” moment discussing organ transplants as a means of prolonging life and even achieving the goal of immortality. Silicon Valley is also dreaming dreams of immortality, whether through trying to reverse the process of aging by an insane number of supplements, blood transfusions and punishing exercise regimes, or through Black Mirror-like thought experiments about uploading human consciousness onto computers.

At the same time, legislation is being put into place in the UK Parliament to recognise the right to assisted dying, albeit only for those who are terminally ill and with six months or less to live. This would allow those who fulfil the conditions of the law and want to end their lives at a moment of their choosing, under medical assistance, the ability to do so.

Philosopher Bernard Williams warned that the desire for immortality is misguided, arguing that living forever would only lead to boredom and the loss of the will to live. Others like Samuel Scheffler have argued that mortality is an intrinsic feature of being human — to desire immortality is not to desire a human life with no end, it’s to desire the end of one’s humanity.

But does tampering with our mortality either way fundamentally change what it is to be human? Is not knowing when we’re going to die a fundamental aspect of our mortal nature? Or is having the ability to tweak our ending, either by indefinitely extending it into the future or bringing it about much sooner under controlled conditions, ultimately the gift of our human and technological evolution?

About the Speaker:

Paul Sagar is Reader in philosophy at King’s College London, working in the history of political thought and contemporary political theory. His most recent research has been focused on the idea of “basic” human moral equality, a necessarily interdisciplinary line of enquiry presented in his book Basic Equality (2024). As well as his academic writings, Paul also writes for more popular audiences. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Aeon, The Political Quarterly, Unherd and The Critic.

His most relevant pieces to this discussion are "On going on and on" and "I changed my mind about killing myself".

The Moderator:

Alexis Papazoglou is Managing Editor of the LSE British Politics and Policy blog. He was previously senior editor for the Institute of Arts and Ideas, and a philosophy lecturer at Cambridge and Royal Holloway. His research interests lie broadly in the post-Kantian tradition, including Hegel, Nietzsche, as well as Husserl and Heidegger. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The New Republic, WIRED, The Independent, The Conversation, The New European, as well as Greek publications, including Kathimerini.

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The Philosopher is the longest-running public philosophy journal in the UK (founded in 1923). It is published by the The Philosophical Society of England (http://www.philsoceng.uk/), a registered charity founded ten years earlier than the journal in 1913, and still running regular groups, workshops, and conferences around the UK. As of 2018, The Philosopher is edited by Newcastle-based philosopher Anthony Morgan and is published quarterly, both in print and digitally.

The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.