One argument in favor of limited life spans
It’s the only absolutely reliable way of getting rid of bad leaders.
This might not be a good enough reason to oppose longevity tech, but I don’t think it’s easily disposed of.
It’s the only absolutely reliable way of getting rid of bad leaders.
This might not be a good enough reason to oppose longevity tech, but I don’t think it’s easily disposed of.
Last time I ran into that argument, Fidel Castro was the example given. My reply was this:
If you heard a proposal to kill Fidel Castro, would you approve? Maybe. (Though even that’s not quite as simple as it sounds, when you consider things like precedent and ethical prohibitions.)
If the proposal involved dropping a hydrogen bomb on Havana, would you still approve? Of course not!
This, I claimed, sufficiently refutes the idea that getting rid of a handful of bad apples justifies the death of everyone.
It gets rid of good leaders, too. As Marcus Aurelius put it when I asked him about it, “I just don’t know what would’ve happened to Rome if I’d had a finite lifespan.”
Think of it as preventing the long-term operation of differential compound interest.
On the other hand, good governments tend to be stable under changes in leadership, while bad governments are often unstable when they lose their leader. At least that’s true these days, when dictatorships are mostly bad governments and good governments typically take the form of a democracy which regularly changes its leadership with little change to the government.
Another argument against a universal cull: it is also an absolutely reliable way of getting rid of saints.
We could get rid of bad leaders by launching a coordinated nuclear attack on the relevant country. This is pretty reliable. Why not? Because if collateral damage. But that argument also applies to banning longevity tech.
This would make great rationality quote :-)
I think it is quite easily disposed of. Either the lifespans available at the present day just happen to be exactly what they should be, to be a suitable last resort for culling the truly evil by culling everyone, or they should be less, or they should be more. The first is merely status quo bias, the second requires implementing some shortevity measures (e.g. spread cholera everywhere and outlaw treatment for it), and the third requires longevity research.
Inevitable death might even work the other way also. I wonder if any attempts to overthrow Mugabe have been deterred by the thought that he will probably be dead within ten years anyway?
Furthermore, a unaging Mugabe would know this, and might be a better leader to prevent a revolution robbing him of 1000 years of life.
Very true. It’s obvious to most political analysts that African countries are in trouble because each set of leaders that comes into power goes for the short-term gains. To a leader with sufficient longevity, one has to think this would eventually become evident. Sort of the “immortal bandit” version of the “stationary bandit” theory.
A relevant cartoon. (Mostly just the last few panels.)
/me shrugs
Bad leaders can also have equally bad successors.
Death gets rid of good leaders and bad leaders equally. Other methods are more likely to get rid of bad leaders. As such, death of leaders would result in an increase in the density of bad leaders.
I think it suffers from the same lack of data that other similar arguments have. Do we know for certain that bad leaders are capable of remaining both bad and in leadership for multiple centuries at a time? We’ve never seen it done.
Arguably, the reason bad leaders persist as long as they do is the fact that the populace does not have sufficient motivation and knowledge to oppose them. Immortal citizens could be expected to be exceptionally zealous about protecting their freedoms. They would also accumulate experience over time and thus be harder to fool.
Immortal citizens might also be less inclined to risk their lives fighting in a civil war to overthrow a bad leader.
It will be interesting to see what happens to science when old, respected and wrong scientists don’t just die out.
On the other hand, average lifespan and science have both advanced tremendously in the twentieth century. So we may need actual data.
The standard pseudo-Kuhnian claim that science needs people to die out in order for new ideas to be accepted isn’t actually supported when one looks at many examples of new theories coming into play. For example, Einstein’s work was accepted by many older physicts who had all their lives worked with Newtonian mechanics. Furthermore, part of the reason some of the older ones don’t adopt new ideas is that they are simply set in their ways and have trouble learning new ideas and methods. If we do a good enough job with preventing the negative aspects of aging, that won’t be an issue since brains will still be flexible.
It is not in the least bit clear to me that the meaning of “old” can be assumed to stay constant as lifespan increases. It might turn out, for example, that scientists who live five hundred years on average don’t become old in the sense you mean until their fourth century or so.
Of course, nothing like that will be true for statistical lifespan increases primarily driven by lowering child mortality, so I’m not sure what data we could gather prior to actually having life-extension capabilities.
People do seem to become more entrenched in their opinions with age, but I’ve often reflected on the fact that given their ages and the dates of discovery of much of the material they taught, many of my college professors must have revised their course curriculums dramatically over the years to reflect changes in scientific knowledge.
Maybe we can administratively limit the number of years people spend doing science, in the same way as the presidents are limited to at most two successive terms in office.
We pretty much do already. How much science does the typical University scientist do as their career progresses? As in so many fields, people get promoted out of their field of competence and into management.
I was thinking about political leaders.
Yes (just picture the Immortal Mugabe or the Immortal Kim Jong-il), but I think it applies rather further.
This problem can be solved by using two referents for “immortality.” That is, it is possible to stop people from dying by age or disease in such a way that they can still be shot.