I love the smell of hubris in the morning

Alley-oop:

After nine years of research and collaboration, a group of entrepreneurs and scientists – many known to h+ readers –- are disclosing their plan “to start saving up to 100,000 lives lost to aging every day, by 2029.” A Longevity Summit in November 2009 -- organized by Kekich -- brought together a number of researchers on human aging and longevity for a discussion on the state-of-the-art research, the implications of their discoveries, and round table, cross-disciplinary discussions that may lead to new and accelerated results.

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The goal of the summit was “to devise scientific and business strategies with the goal of demonstrating the capability to reverse aging in an older human by 2029.” Many at the conference believe that humans are approaching something Aubrey De Grey calls “longevity escape velocity” (see the h+ article “Aubrey de Grey on ‘The Singularity’ and ‘The Methuselarity’” in Resources). This is the point at which the yearly advances in procedures for extending human life expectancy result in adding one year to the human lifespan –- potentially making death-by-aging a choice rather than a date with destiny.

I don't feel the need to explain why, if this is not just snake oil and hooey, it is bone-chilling even in comparison to the usual raft of fucked-uppery that lurks in my RSS feed. You can see in this piece, and I suppose that you could predict even before reading it, that a set of values utterly non-salutary to the social good has informed the decision to develop these God-and-the-universe-defying techniques. "'Devise scientific and business strategies,'" is about as far as you need to go in the second paragraph to realize that this will not be available either to us or the likes of the sunken-stomached villagers from the beginning of Temple of Doom.

And even if it was, why? Why the fuck would anyone ever think that this was a good idea? The problem is not that we can't keep enough people alive. It is not even nearly that. Not that the poor will be the ones living forever. But who is supposed to be the benevolent immortals who watch over them? I can't discover any language in the above piece, or on the Manhattan Beach Project's website, that does not suggest that anyone who can pay for these procedures will get them. Think about what that means. We could live in a world of an undead Republican party. Monsanto's Hugh Grant will have all the time in the world to patent every living variety of plant and animal. People for whom it should not currently be legal to breathe will never go away.

And it's all because the only mediating good we can think of, the only thing we can possibly lay hands on to distribute a very strange and (I would think) mixed honor such as this one, is money. We are so reduced in our capacity for complex ethical thought and discussion that we can't even begin to come up with a better rationing system. Hey, just bought a Porsche? You seem like the kind of guy who'd like to see the sun implode 50 G's from now.

Two nights ago, over burgers and Belgian fries with sweet garlic mayo, I had the old technology-versus-ethics discussion with a friend of mine who is studying to become an engineer. Engineering is what I would call an enabling profession: though not inherently evil, by abandoning completely the question of ethics in favor of transactional technical improvements, it allows people with bad ideas to carry them out with a maximum of efficiency and a minimum of conscience. My friend is, thankfully, not of this stripe, though his fellow students, who he mentioned in our discussion, were more typical of the genre. When confronted with any sort of social problem, their response was inevitably "Science will cure this." Technological progress is of course infinite and will always deliver the right sort of tool to ameliorate the negative externalities of my decision-making. Nothing else is needed.

It occurred to me then, as it has in the past, that while we are spellbound by the rapid evolution of articulate mechanism, we've abandoned entirely any hope of a similar progress in ethics. It's an old story, but the logic of the economist has won the day: in order to shield ourselves from the oddly venomous accusation of idealism, and this is especially true in the case of tertiary institutions, we take the cynic's view that man is essentially anti-social, in the sense that his choices are weighted in favor of positive individual, and negative social, outcomes. By negative social outcome I mean the result of an action that reduces the welfare (and of course 'welfare' is difficult to operationalize, requiring as it does the selection of some indicators of well-being over others) of more than one other. We're selfish and cruel and violent, and we won't waste time getting one over our fellow man, etc. The magic of technological progress is that it can address this failing by handling the effects of our behavior outside of ourselves. We are therefore free to act as we always would, while our material and institutional arrangements pick up after us.

This sort of thinking is rife with absurdity, but that is really unsurprising because at its heart it is remarkably shallow. I won't discuss, for instance, negative feedback (incremental improvements in technique allowing poorer behavior, requiring further improvements, and so on), though it is itself a fascinating consequence of this strain of ethical nihilism. No, my interest is really in the idea that ethics can ever be set aside. You see, it's not that that idea of coordinating our decision-making based on a set of maxims, either received or heuristic, is so outlandish. No, what is outlandish is to suppose away these maxims in the first place.

What is an ethical principle? First, none of what I am going to say here will be noticeably profound, and a lot will be left unsaid. For a deeper treatment of ethics I suggest the old masters or, in a pinch, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Naturally there are other ways in which to regard the use-value (or essential and immutable inutility) of ethical principles; I've chosen this particular interpretation because it is germane to my subject. To borrow language from Michael Walzer (Spheres of Justice, by the way, was the only good book that I read for class at McGill), an ethical principle is a mediating good. A quality that is valued under a particular system of ethics can be thought of as a 'good' that opens up access to other 'goods.' 'Good' is to be taken in a broad sense as denoting both the economic sense of a material good or service, as well as goods acquired or enjoyed socially but not essentially objectified, such as markers of status. Aristocratic birth under the medieval social consensus (to which only a few consented), which allowed exclusive access to land, is a good example of this. There are many more: rhetorical finesse in Rome, small feet for Chinese women of the Song through Qing dynasties, bear skins for Norse berserkers (which, in fact, means exactly that), and maleness across a majority of agricultural and post-agricultural societies are all mediating goods. The plurality of mediating goods has been a fact of human existence since a time that Dave knows a lot more about than me.

At least, it has been a fact until now. In contemporaneity it has the honor of being perhaps the only mediating good of any consequence goes to money. Today, we use, for practical as well as ideological reasons, money for the valuation of most other goods. And this is exactly where the issue of ethics crops up, whether we like it or not. Because what those who scoff at ethics as a means for achieving positive social outcomes forget is that all transactions require a mediating good, and so we will fall back on one whether we like it or not. In other words, our decision-making is implicitly ethical, whether or not you call it that: if I choose to accept money in an exchange, I do so not just for practical reasons--money guarantees very narrowly my survival--but because I am following an acquired maxim that money is important, and therefore more of it is a good thing for me. Money is an ethic just as virtue or small feet is. And because the value of it is transparent to us does not mean that its importance is not artefactual, just like any other mediating good. It can be competed against by other mediating goods.

Which is exactly why ethical progress is such a vital tool for effecting positive social outcomes, and why disavowing it has been unquestionably disastrous. We are engaged in a ceaseless struggle with technological progress because it appears to be an externality-generating nightmare, and we don't seem to see that the problem is that it lacks an appropriate set of mediating goods to restrain the development of, and access to, it. No single good should ever be in that position, and money is a poor choice for a monopoly: that it is quantifiable begs hoarding and therefore inequality, and its acquisition is strongly weighted towards secondary mediating goods--avarice, atomism in decision-making--that themselves produce negative social outcomes. Fundamental to all positive social outcomes is a 'fair' distributive heuristic. Either we all benefit from our good decisions or we all suffer from our bad. By emphasizing any one mediating good, we invite a catastrophic concentration of access to other goods, and eventually a severe overabundance of externalities that lead to social failure. With a Gini score worse than Turkmenistan's, the United States, for one, fits that bill swimmingly.

But this talk is all so vague, you'll inevitably complain: I've proposed no alternative, which begs the question of whether or not there could be one. What proof is there that ethical progress is even possible--that, in other words, the development of socially-positive mediating goods is possible? The best answer to turn to a cross-cultural survey of decision-making arrangements. Though it may seem trite given how often people inclined to agree with my position turn to it, there is a reason that Scandinavian social systems work, and that reason is not merely a fiat of institutional design. Scandinavians aren't led around by a perfect combination of social mechanisms and incentives. Those are helpful, but in reality they are an expression, and a reinforcement, of a substratum of mediating goods--of ethical principles--that distribute fairly, with reference to the constraints of environment and technical progress, access to social goods. And it's not just the chicken Swedes who've accomplished that. A vast collection of ethical consensuses (again, not always consented to) have served, to more or less successful degrees, to mediate access to important goods given their social environments. Say what you want about medieval Christianity, but, in the face of barbaric violence and the ruination of the Roman Empire, it managed to challenge the dominant contemporary mediating good, violence, strongly enough to reestablish something of a social order, even if we wouldn't necessarily want that order for ourselves. Islam in Spain functioned oppositely, but to similar effect: it eliminated the profession of the Christian faith as the dominant mediating good, and all of the ethical baggage that came with it, allowing for some degree of social pluralism and with it access to a host of intellectual goods that brought about a renaissance in thought.

If we can be immortal--it feels absurd to write that, even though I recognize that it isn't anymore--then immortality is a new good. It is, of course, a very idiosyncratic good, and, just in its social bearings, one of tremendous profundity. To allow access to it through a single mediating good is dangerously unsound. To have that good be money, which is already so unevenly distributed, is plainly criminal and moreover borderline psychotic. Money is useful, if not extremely so, in the limited sphere of rationing material goods. It requires something more substantial to make decisions of immortality's calibre. If we have to choose who lives forever, I'd rather, and I think we can all agree here, it be a Martin Luther King, Jr. than a Warren Buffet. But as things stand, it will be the other way, and, believe me, if such a thing as the end of aging is possible, it will be. It took one lifetime to make the fortune, after all. Imagine how many could be spent enjoying it.