Should people die

From Wise Nano

1 Should people be required to die?
2 Arguments in favor of death by denying the technology
3 Arguments in favor of death by mandatory age limit
4 Answers to arguments in favor of death
5 Arguments against death
6 Answers to arguments against death
7 Old, discredited arguments against medical advances
8 Links
- 8.1 Anti-death
- 8.2 Pro-death

Should people be required to die?

Recent studies of the medical issues involved in disease and aging indicate that we will eventually be able to fix these problems. This raises the question: What arguments speak in favour of lots of people living past 100, maybe 120 or even 200, i.e. attaining longevity, and what are the arguments against it? What speaks for and against dying, i.e. not reaching one´s potential age either because of a mandatory age limit or because of being denied the required technology, although available?

Arguments in favor of death by denying the technology

Eliminating death will upset society.
Some may be depressed or in pain and prefer to die.
Death is natural.
Eliminating death will stop evolution and make us devolve or ossify, because currently we have no sufficient model of what has to be done to substitute evolution for design. It is currently also unknown how complex this problem is or if it is tractable at all.
Some may be satisfied with their lives; feel "done;" want to die. Also applies to death by age limit.
Some religions say better things happen after death. Also applies to death by age limit.
Death gives life meaning. Also applies to death by age limit.
Death clears space for future generations. Also applies to death by age limit.
Death allows/forces people to live life to its fullest. People will try to find the purpose of and meaning for their lives.

Arguments in favor of death by mandatory age limit

If people are aware of how much life they have remaining, they might live their life more conscious and might thus ultimately be happier than when just living along a life that might as well continue for millennia.
Eliminating death will upset society if it is only made available to the rich.
Given an age limit, people will not be productive at their last years of lives. There will be a point such that whatever they do will not matter as they know when they will die.

Answers to arguments in favor of death

Offering death as the 'solution' to life might be considered hostile to many. Subverting the majorities will to live, with 'The Final Solution', could be as much "playing the devil" as some would accuse scientists of playing God. Humanity is not a wheat field which must lay fallow in order to harvest a better crop. A diverse amalgamation of both the old and the new, will combine expirience and innovation in new and interesting ways; so long as the "I know better" attitude does not extend to how long someone should live as well as how. Those who want death are welcome to it. Longevity does not imply invincibility. Let those who would so academically discuss forced termination upon determined maximum life spans, be the first to take the plunge into the great unknown.(for the betterment of their peers of course)
Long life will have time to find its own meaning.
Reducing birth rate by 1 will make the population grow more slowly overall, even if everyone lives forever. Also, this measure not necessarily has to be enforced, because technically advanced civilisations tend to have lower birth rates because children are not needed as an "insurance".
Technology (especially nanotechnology) can make space (reduce our ecological footprint) faster than we can reproduce. Technology will make it cheap (sustainable) to send as many people as necessary into space, if we start to run out of room here.
The desire to live is a natural instinct for every organism that evolved to reproduce multiple times.
Biological evolution has already been superceded by cultural evolution and medical intervention.
The Christian religion also teaches that all life is valuable [1] and some texts about God's Kingdom can be creatively interpreted to mean that achieving immortality is a proper thing to do.
Which is better: to deny treatments to everyone forever, or to invest heavily, drive the price down, and make them available as soon as possible?
If someone wants to die, they can. In some cultures, this invokes a horror of suicide; but this may be a fair tradeoff for removing the horror of death by other means, which is also prevalent in these cultures.
If someone is in mortal pain, surely healing is preferable to death; advanced medicine implies that almost everyone can be healed.

Arguments against death

Death costs us the dead person's accumulated wisdom and knowledge.
Today, the last few years of life are associated with extremely heavy medical bills; health extension could avoid that cost. Cancer and chronic diseases are also huge contributors to medical cost.
Recent research has suggested that increased longevity around 30,000 BC was responsible for human success. "Increased longevity, expressed as number of individuals surviving to older adulthood ... We believe it is a critical demographic factor in the development of human culture." "We May Owe it All to Longevity"
It is usually considered immoral and unethical to kill a human being against its will or force it to commit suicide, irrelevant of its age.
Emotional ties to friends and relatives lead to a preference of life over death.

Answers to arguments against death

Ethics and morals change. Some of the arguments outlined above are rooted in the Western tradition of favouring the individual over and possibly at the expense of the group, known as Individualism. If it turns out a 1000-year old beings are in total a greater burden on society than 10 100-year olds, then over time new ethics in favour of a general, mandatory age limit might evolve.
There are opinions, ideologies that deserve to be lost forever, because their realization is overly harmful to other people or the environment; for example, National Socialism led to World War 2 and the Holocaust. People usually evolve their mindset within the first few decades of their life and keep it for the rest of their life. Changing it afterwards is possible, but not the rule.
Having to relearn lost knowledge with each generation has the advantage of permanently putting handed-down knowledge into question, possibly leading to less superstitious beliefs and correction of popular - but factually wrong - knowledge.
If social conditions do not change - because of longevity - technical advancement and resulting new requirements might still render a static society unfit for survival.
Without death we would have to resort to some form of technical personality design to adapt to changing social conditions.
As for most properties of organisms, "more" does not always equal "better". There are only rare examples of multicellular organisms with longevity potential, like certain trees. It remains to be seen whether life-spans measured in centuries or even millennia are beneficial to large portions of humankind, but accordingly a direct observation would take centuries or millennia to complete. Social model predictions over such long time intervals are almost certainly not accurate enough to forgo direct observation.
Creating unchangeable facts long before having explored their consequences is a habit that has created many problems for humans and is reason for caution.
A society with a different mindset, which can be observed in Eastern cultures, might agree on an mandatory age limit if it were considered being more beneficial to the society than limiting to the individual.

Old, discredited arguments against medical advances

The use of anesthetics in surgery was opposed on the grounds that if someone was going to die, it was better to die aware and in pain than unconscious.
Smallpox vaccination was opposed on the grounds that it took away from God the power of life and death.