Theli

With all our advances in medicin and cloning technology, we seem to be nearing the point where we can cheat death. Meaning that people will never grow old and rarelly ever die.
But because of the explosion in population we would eventually almost cease to give birth to new babies.
My question now would be, is this morally justifiable?
Do notyet-born people have any right to live?
This question has probably been posted before, but feel free to post your arguments anyway.

And please keep this discussion within the morality topic, and not straying into genetics.

Psycho Economist

Are you asking if we have an obligation to bear offspring... even under the most extreme scenario of population pressure... so that hypothetical, unconceived organisms may experience life?

If that is the question, then clearly not. (From a metaphysically naturalist perspective, anyway.) If human self-awareness is an emergent property of our biology, there cannot be transcendental realm populated by human proto-souls waiting around to be put into zygotes.

I hope you can clarify your question... perhaps tease it out of your scenario description.

Theli

This was not the question, you read things into it that weren't there. The extreme population pressure is a product of one of the decisions, it is not a given base.
The question was not if we should stop breeding if we ceased to age, the question was if we should stop our aging at all, knowing the consequence.

Tom Sawyer

Knowing all the consequences, I'd like to both stop aging and have children. None of us are going to be actually immortal - we'll all end up dead one day, whether it be a few decades from now or a few millenia from now and we'll still need to pass on our genes.

There would be a fierce competition for resources if everyone lived for centuries and still kept on having children, but most of us here are in well-protected, technologically advanced nations, so we'd likely end up fine.

Keith Russell

Greetings:

Even if we defeat death, human life won't be eternal.

People would still each have a beginning.

Keith.

Psycho Economist

It has to be a personal, individual choice. I can't imagine, in a world / solar system / galaxy of finite resources, that we'd permit (legally, or normatively) people to breed and "be immortal". Whether people "should" or not is really moot, and so are the consequences. Either they'll cultivate immortality responsibly, or the consequences will solve the immortality problem for them (e.g. war, new diseases).

But I think that without life being relatively brief, people would tire of it. They'd go off their life-extension treatments and succumb, waste their thousand-year savings on drugs and O.D., have fatal accidents defying death or outright commit suicide.

Either way, it'd make a damn good sci-fi story (and not just as a plot device like in the Mars Trillogy).

Theli

peteyh...

And face the consequences? Overpopulation, and all that implies.

But if we stopped aging, and all the common deadly deceases like cancer and AIDS was cured the death-rate would decrease dramaticly, and to match that we would have to limit the birth-rate aswell. Almost stopping it completely.

A condition for being involved in a moral debate is that you must actually have a moral sense yourself.
If you are trying to make a point that being imortal (almost) and having offspring is not morally justifiable, then I appologize.


Keith...
Thank you, Keith.


Psycho Economist...
Ofcourse noone should be forced to live 20.000 years, so the choice of death would have to be personal.
What I was mostly interested in was the idea that we would choose our own existence over some unborn who never gets the chance to live. We are pretty much filling the slot. What is the philosophical difference between killing someone for personal gain, and denying someone a life for personal gain?
Is there any? (not counting technicalities)

Psycho Economist

Simple: someone who's never been conceived hasn't been deprived of anything. There's no person there to deprive. Are celibate people today depriving their million potential children of the right to exist? Are people who use birth control? Do people with children deprive the lives of all the potential zygotes that could come from their thousand other ova that went unfertilized, and the trilions of other sperm that never saw an egg?

Like I said before, there isn't a soul languishing in limbo because "mommy" and "daddy" didn't conceive when they got it on.

But then again, I'm generally for metaphysical naturalism. There are some that do believe, as the song goes, "Every sperm is sacred, Every sperm is great, If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate..."

Seraphim

Why could anyone want to live forever?

There will a time where a person will get bored so much for doing everything there is to do and more than he will simply wanna die and get out of this misery of existing?

Demosthenes

What makes you think that's true? As of now, nobody has lived beyond 130 years so how can you say with any definite consensus that after some time time, everybody would be so "bored to death and miserable"?

I imagine that would occur if one were to remain exactly the same with the same desires and ambitions for a long long time. Personally, if I were to be given a chance at an indefinite life, I would be seeking out new experiences, desires, and remaking myself over time. Afterall in a mere space of 20 years, I have changed nearly beyond recognition from a toddler to a full grown man.

Yes eventually, one would tire of living and perhaps he would then choose to stop living, but that isn't the point. The point is that living and dying is under our control(at least within a reasonable degree of control in face of natural accidents/random occurances), there would be no absolute death at end of some predefined length of time. Theorically, death can be postponed indefinitely.