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Edward Martinez

PHI 101-72398

An Argument Against Living Forever

The Elixir of LifeScotty owns an energy drink company. He knows that selling sugar, caffeine, and random vitamins in a can plus some really exciting branding is highly profitable. However, one day a laboratory technician at his company, Susanna, claims to have discovered the elixir of life -- a beverage which, if taken daily, will reverse aging, inhibit disease, and potentially lead to an indefinite life without old age. By drinking the elixir, a person could in principle life forever, provided they didn't do anything stupid to get themselves killed. Susanna's death-defying drink stands to make Scott a lot of money. However, Susanna refuses to give the secret to Scotty until he can demonstrate that this drink would be ethical. She is concerned that an unending life without death would be a bad thing, potentially making life itself meaningless. Scotty points out that this would clearly increase the total pleasure in the world and reduce the pain of death. However, Susanna is concerned that developing a virtuous life requires confronting death, and she's not sure that she could will for everyone to take the elixir for all time, since this would lead to an overpopulated planet. They turn to you for help. Is it ethical for Scotty to produce and sell the elixir of life?

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Introduction

The fear of death is something all self-conscious mortal beings have to deal with. Humans, in

particular, have come up with different ideas to comfort ourselves against the thoughts of our

impending death. As philosopher Stephen Cave put it, we follow, “Terror management theory…It's just

this. We develop our worldviews, that is, the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our place in

it, in order to help us manage the terror of death.” One of these immortality stories is the elixir of life ‒ a

medicinal substance that will grant immortality ‒ and that seems to be one of the biggest goals in

science today. But, we have to ask ourselves about the ethical side of creating and distributing such a

substance. In this paper, I argue that distributing an elixir of life is probably not ethical, because if it

were, then utility will not be maximized.

In the situation given, Scotty has the ability to produce and distribute the elixir of life, and thinks

it is right to do so because he is a Utilitarian. He views life as more pleasurable than death and so,

therefore living forever would be maximizing utility. Utility is, as Dr. Watson stated in his lecture, “The

pleasure of all the people of all time minus the pain of all the people of all time.” So, if life is more

pleasurable than death, then if everyone experiences life forever, then utility will be maximized.

Susanna, on the other hand, believes the deontological argument. Kant, a deontologist, held his

first formulation of the categorical imperative as, “Act only according to that maxim which you can at

the same time will to be universal law” (Watson). By this, Susanna thinks that she cannot will everyone

to live forever due to the carrying capacity of Earth and the virtuous point that confronting death is

good.

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Argument: Present

1. Assume: The world experiences maximum pleasure and minimal pain if everyone lives forever.

2. For something to be morally good, it must maximize the pleasure and minimize the pain for all

people for all time (Maximum Utility as described by Dr. Watson/Mill)

3. People should try to achieve something of moral value if and only if it is morally good.

4. (C1) People should try to achieve having everyone living forever.

5. If everyone lives forever, it is logically possible that such existences are painful.

6. Eternal painful existences do not maximize pleasure nor minimize pain for all people for all time.

7. Pain is more likely to happen than pleasure.

8. (C2) The world probably does not experience maximum pleasure and minimal pain if everyone

lives forever.

CONTRADICTION

9. People should probably not try to achieve everyone living forever.

C. It is probably not morally good to have everyone live forever.

Argument: Explain and Evaluate

Premise 1 is just the assumption that Scotty makes about the utility of eternal life, to be refuted

later. The world is defined on the standard view of philosophy, that is, the representable part of reality.

The world’s experiences are the sensations that the conscious beings within the world can have.

Pleasure can be defined as anything that conscious beings find fulfilling in their lives, which is kind of a

vague description in itself. Pain is the opposite of pleasure. Living forever entails that people, drinking

the elixir of life, grow to a certain point and stop aging, this means that people cannot die of old age,

although they can die due to other causes, like a car accident. This assumption serves to see if it leads to

a contradiction.

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Premise 2 is the definition of maximum utility. Pleasure is again vague as is its opposite, pain.

This is assuming that morality is based on maximum utility. This premise can be refuted easily by

believing a different ethical view, but because this is taking morality from Scotty’s point of view, I find

that it fits quite well to argue against his conclusion.

Premise 3 is the meaning of morality, in terms of a normative (‘should’) sentence. “Morally

good”, itself, is an unclear phrase, but most people would generally accept this premise anyways.

Premise 4 is a sub-conclusion from the previous premises, and is essentially the end of Scotty’s

argument. Due to Premises 1 and 2, living forever is morally good and by Premise 3, people should aim

for this. Perhaps, if Premise 1 were not an assumption and true, and the argument ended here, then

Scotty’s argument would be both sound and valid for his ethical view.

Premise 5 acknowledges that pain could still exist even with minimal deaths caused by living

forever as defined in Premise 1’s explanation. For example, if a sadist tortured people without killing

them to fulfill his needs then pain exists. “Logically possible” means without contradiction, and those

scenarios do not contradict. Most, if not all, people, would also agree that this happens and will

continue to happen in a similar form.

Premise 6 takes such situations as those in Premise 5, and translates them as events in terms of

utility. If a person were trapped by a sadist and tortured daily, given a few days to recover (meanwhile

the sadist tortures another victim), and tortured again, I doubt that this person living forever would

maximize utility.

Premise 7 takes into account that there are many factors that must line up in order for pleasure

to occur. “Likely" means that one event is more bound to happen than the other. To illustrate, you could

be feeling pleasure one moment watching a movie at home with family, in just the perfect sitting

position on your usual spot on the couch (when all the factors are right) but then you begin to feel a

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pain in your lower back, or you spill your drink, or the power goes out, or a meteorite destroys your

house, etc. Because there are more specific things that must occur for pleasure to happen, pain is more

probable than pleasure.

Because of Premises 5 through 7 are true, Premise 8 must be regarded as true, through

transitive argumentation. However, this contradicts the assumption from the beginning of the

argument. This means that the assumption is probably not the case (probably, not completely sure

because Premise 7 does not guarantee that pain will happen).

Premise 9 shows that because of the contradiction, then C1 is also probably not the case because

it is directly connected to the assumption. Therefore, we arrive at the final conclusion, by Premise 3,

that it is probably not morally good to have everyone live forever.

Possible Objections

The easiest objection is to Premise 2, simply by stating that morality is not defined in terms of

utility. The best response I can offer on this topic is that we cannot really know what morality is, so

perhaps this premise should be labeled as a sub-assumption. We can note, however, that Susanna does

show that it is possible to argue the same case from the deontological point of view and the virtue

ethicist point of view. If there were no facts of the matter about ethical statements, then this would not

be a question to begin with. If morality is defined by the Utilitarian perspective, then it is also clear that

Premise 3 is hard to object, unless someone were to say that people could try to achieve something that

is not morally good. Were this claim to be true, however, a sadist torturing another person for his own

pleasure would be morally justified, a conclusion which obviously contradicts almost all reasonable

notions of right and wrong.

An objection can be made to Premise 6 by stating that perhaps, over time, the repeated pain of

the tortured person becomes numbed as their brain begins to rewire their perceptions of it, thus making

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the experience a minimal pain for that person and maximum pleasure for the sadist. To this, I say that

there are conceivable ways that could maximize utility more, like providing a life-like robot for the sadist

to torture, instead of a person. And, in the case that utility doesn’t relate to morality, then causing harm

to a person would easily go against morality despite the sadist getting pleasure.

Another likely objection is to Premise 7. It can be said that although there are more instances of

pain in the world than of pleasure, those instances are usually of a lesser degree. You sitting down and

watching a movie with family is pleasurable, and surely a spilled drink or a small ache is not going to ruin

the moment, therefore the perceptions of pain are not as likely to happen as the perceptions of

pleasure. To this, I argue that pain is still pain whether we can perceive it or not, just as numbers are

numbers although we cannot perceive them.

Conclusion

This argument clearly shows that it is probably not ethical for people to attempt to have others

live forever with the elixir of life. Although it may seem like the right thing to do at the moment to

maximize the pleasure in the world, there are also a lot of people who could experience maximum pain

from the same substance.

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Works Cited

Cave, Stephen. “The 4 Stories We Tell Ourselves about Death.” TED.com. TED Conferences, LLC, Jul.

2013. Web. 27 Nov. 2014.

Watson, Jeffrey. “Ethics: Part 2.” Introduction to Philosophy. Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ. 20

Nov. 2014. Lecture.