What sort of person could have a radically extended lifespan?
The literature on human enhancement is awash with discussions about whether it really would be desirable to increase our lifespan, cognitive power, physical strength (etc.) above and beyond that which we currently consider to be healthy or normal. Almost all of these discussions hang on the question...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
BMJ Publ.
2018
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| In: |
Journal of medical ethics
Year: 2018, Volume: 44, Issue: 4, Pages: 217-218 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (kostenfrei) Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | The literature on human enhancement is awash with discussions about whether it really would be desirable to increase our lifespan, cognitive power, physical strength (etc.) above and beyond that which we currently consider to be healthy or normal. Almost all of these discussions hang on the question of whether it makes sense to draw a morally relevant distinction between those interventions that count as therapies and those that count as enhancements. Roughly, therapies are interventions that aim to restore health or normality to capacities or functions that are diseased or otherwise operating at a sub-normal level; enhancements aim to improve on the healthy or normal level of functioning.Focusing on the case of lifespan enhancement, Andrea Sauchelli considers the desirability of enhancement from a perspective that is independent of the debate about the therapy/enhancement distinction. His starting point is an argument from Walter Glannon, who holds that ‘deep life-extending technologies’—Sauchelli’s term for ‘those technologies that purport to eliminate, in principle endlessly, the physically and/or mentally corrupting effects of the process of ageing’ (insert page ref. to Sauchelli’s article)—cannot coherently be desirable for beings like us, that is, persons. Glannon’s argument is, roughly, that any person X considering using deep life-extending technologies would be so psychologically dissimilar to the person Y whose mental life is a technologically-extended continuation of X’s mental life that X and Y cannot be said to be the same person. Glannon believes that a person literally cannot survive too large an increase in lifespan, where ‘too large an increase’ is one that renders the subject of the later stages of that lifespan so psychologically dissimilar to the subject of its earlier stages that the two subjects are not the same person. As Sauchelli notes, Glannon’s argument is premised on a psychological theory of personal identity of the … |
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| ISSN: | 1473-4257 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of medical ethics
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1136/medethics-2018-104840 |