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This paper examines the moral arguments offered by the most prominent figure in the anti-aging movement, Aubrey de Grey, and find the arguments lacking. De Grey’s understanding of moral rights is confused and incoherent. Furthermore, although his appeal to the “wisdom of repugnance” is intriguing, it too fails. An underlying problem of the moral arguments of the anti-aging movement is their reliance upon a deeply problematic notion of what is natural.

This paper examines the moral arguments offered by the most prominent figure in the anti-aging movement, Aubrey de Grey, and find the arguments lacking. De Grey’s understanding of moral rights is confused and incoherent. Furthermore, although his appeal to the “wisdom of repugnance” is intriguing, it too fails. An underlying problem of the moral arguments of the anti-aging movement is their reliance upon a deeply problematic notion of what is natural.

The name of the prize-The Methuselah Mouse Prize-may at first sound silly, but the cash award is not. The idea behind the prize is that once it has been demonstrated that the days of a mouse can be tripled and, thus, that mice are not doomed to short lives, then we humans will recognize that neither is our own aging inevitable. Once we see that aging can be reversed in mice, we will commit the resources to eradicate aging in humans. Currently we are in a “pro-aging trance,” but an old mouse would awaken us from our moral slumbers. As Aubrey de Grey and seven co-authors state in an essay in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, “We contend that the impact on public opinion and (inevitably) public policy of unambiguous aging reversal in mice would be so great that whatever work remained necessary at that time to achieve adequate somatic gene therapy would be hugely accelerated.”1 New research and new sources of funding for the research. And then, life extension-first to an average lifespan of one hundred and twenty years, then two hundred years, then, if not to immortality, at least to some five thousand years. Hence, the Methuselah Mouse Prize, to encourage researchers to reverse aging in mice with procedures that can be transferred to humans. The costs are small and the benefits huge; thus the urgency, thus the prize. The total value for extending the life of a mouse – five years is the current benchmark-is now just over one million dollars. That is not play money. Nor is the anti-aging movement a game.

The most prominent figures in the anti-aging movement are not quacks and kooks (whatever that exact distinction is), at least not obviously. They are respected scientists, engineers, and financiers. For example, Ray Kurzweil, the sixty-year-old author of Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (Rodale Books, 2004) and, more recently, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Penguin, 2006) is a member of the Inventors Hall of Fame, a 1999 winner of the National Medal of Technology, a recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT prize, a “modern Edison” according to The Christian Science Monitor. Kurzweil figures that if he can survive another twenty years or so, then his own death is not inevitable; he can be immortal.

There are three bridges to immortality, according to Kurzweil. The “first bridge” currently lies in our hands-eating well, exercising, and maintaining the appropriate health regimen that will get us to the “second bridge,” the biotechnological revolution. The third and final bridge to immortality is nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Kurzweil foresees a day when nanobots will be introduced into our bodies to locate and attack diseases and to reconstruct damaged organs. We can live forever. We are living in the midst of the biotech revolution, on the cusp of the nanotechnology revolution. Foreseeable developments in science and technology are making immortality feasible for this generation.

If that sounds too much like science fiction, like the sort of thing a lonely inventor just might dream up after too many hours alone in his lab on long winter evenings, then travel to Cambridge University in England to the Eagle, the same pub in downtown Cambridge where James Watson and Francis Crick sipped a proper pint of British ale as they progressed towards figuring out the structure of DNA or, as Watson himself put it, to discovering “the secret of life.” Today in the Eagle you meet neither Watson nor Crick but, instead, the poster-boy of the anti-aging movement, and the primary brain behind the Methuselah Mouse prize, Aubrey de Grey, who thinks he’s as close to discovering the secret of immortality as Watson and Crick were to discovering their secret in 1953.

De Grey is by training an engineer and an autodidact in biology and genetics, though a brilliant enough autodidact for Cambridge University to have granted him a PhD in biology for a book he wrote on mitochondria. De Grey, however, thinks like an engineer, not a biologist. His formal academic training was in computer science; he was in software design until his company went belly-up. His day-job now is rather unimpressive – he works in a small lab at Cambridge University as the computer support for a genetics research team. But his real work, his mission, lies in “fixing” aging, in approaching the problem of aging the way an engineer would. After much research on mitochondria, in 2000 he suddenly realized that “aging could be described as a reasonably small set of accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular changes in our bodies, each of which is potentially amenable to repair.”2

Since then, de Grey has determined that there are seven distinct components in the aging process-the seven deadly sins of aging, as he put it to Popular Science? Discretely address each of these areas and, voila!, immortality, or at least a longevity bordering on immortality. For example, cell loss is a problem. Despite cells kept in reserve by vital organs, over time a loss of cells impairs the functioning of these organs. But embryonic stem cell technology offers the promise of new editions of these lost cells. Identify the problem; then go to work on it. Another problem is cell senescence-cells that have stopped dividing sometimes hang around rather than dying. Some speculate that this may cause neighboring cells to become cancerous. So, we need some way to either kill these cells or encourage them to commit suicide. And so on, with each of the seven deadly sins of aging. Identify the problem, develop the technology to fix it, and one more hurdle on the way to immortality is crossed. (Interested readers can keep up with developments and news about SENS – Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence-at http://www.sens.org.)

The Moral Case for Anti-Aging

Perhaps the moral case for anti-aging is perfectly obvious. That, at least, seems to be the view of “Righteous Indignation” who wrote in response to the critical comments of the Technology Review’s editor, Jason Pontin, about Aubrey de Grey and anti-aging:

Posted 2/3/2005 11:20:19 AM by Righteous Indignation

Subject: A simple fact

Jason Pontin, know that to oppose Transhumanism is to support SUFFERING and DEATH! Period. Transhumanist s are morally and rationally right, regardless of the accuracy of their (often quite reasonable) technological assumptions and predictions. Just because there’s a chance that we may never win this battle against entropy doesn’t mean we should meekly surrender and let ourselves be slaughtered like so many sheep.

What you undoubtedly see as “mature acceptance of the inevitable” is in fact just cowardly, cynical defeatism. I pity you for being trapped in such a depressing, perspectiveless worldview.

Aubrey de Grey is not a moral philosopher, but his mission is driven by moral concerns and commitments. His justification for his war on aging, while substantively the same as that of “Righteous Indignation,” is a little more carefully articulated. He appeals to three general moral considerations in making his case: (1) the repugnance of aging; (2) the moral right to make the most fundamental choices about one’s life; and (3) the moral right of a healthy human being to keep on living.

De Grey’s appeals to rights are seemingly straight-forward. He assumes that there are such things as human rights, apparently natural moral rights, and that chief among these moral rights is the right to life and the right of a healthy human to keep on living. However, he does not interpret these rights the way they might most typically be understood by rights theorists – as negative rights, i.e., as rights to non-interference such that to have the right to life is to have a right to your neither harming me nor interfering with my innocent pursuit of what is required for my life. Understood in this way, the right to make the most fundamental choices about one’s life and the right to keep on living would prohibit others from interfering with me as I make fundamental choices and as I keep on living unless I am harming or threatening to harm others in those choices and in my keeping on.

De Grey’s interpretation of these rights as positive rights or benefit/entitlement rights, that is to say, rights to the assistance of others in the acting out of that to which one is entitled, is based on his rejection of the moral distinction between acts and omissions. Thus, “. . .there is no moral distinction between action and inaction, in particular between acting to shorten someone’s life and not acting to extend it,” confirmation of which he finds in “the widespread legal concept of criminal negligence.”4

Instead, de Grey asserts, “…the right to live as long as you choose is the world’s most fundamental right.”5 Again, de Grey:

The reason we have an imperative, we have a duty, to develop these therapies as soon as possible is to give future generations the choice. People are entitled, have a human right, to live as long as they can; people have a duty to give people the opportunity to live as long as they want to. … If we hesitate and vacillate in developing life -extension therapy, there will be some cohort to whom we will deny the option to live much longer than we do. We have a duty not to deny people that option.6

To be human, thus, is to have the right to live as long as you choose. For us-and we may well wonder who the relevant “us” is-to fail to attempt to develop lifeextension therapy is to violate the rights of some (future) individuals to choose whether to live longer. We have a duty not to violate this right to choose of these future persons. Therefore, we have a duty to attempt to develop life-extension therapy.

Now there is much that is bewildering in this account and not just because rights talk is, in general, perplexing. But let us assume, for the moment, that there is some fundamental right for each of us to live as long as we choose. Who possesses such a right? Well, persons are the best candidates for such rights, and de Grey surely assumes that it is human persons who possess this right, and not members of any other species. But, in fact, this right, if it exists, doesn’t belong to just any human persons, it belongs to persons who exist. It does not belong to former persons-my parents have both died and, in dying, they have lost any rights they may have had. Potential persons, that is to say future persons, possess, if any, only potential rights. But de Grey seems to think otherwise. He assumes that it is not just persons and not just potential persons who possess the right to live as long as they choose; possible persons, those who might someday exist, possess this right: “If we hesitate and vacillate in developing life-extension therapy, there will be some cohort to whom we will deny the option to live much longer than we do. We have a duty not to deny people that option.”7

We have a duty, de Grey maintains, to provide the option to live longer to persons who may exist at some future time, not only to persons, not only to persons and those who are in the process of realizing their potentiality as persons, but to persons and potential persons and possible persons. The extension of rights to possible persons, “persons” who may, but just as well may not, someday exist-well, this is puzzling. I have no biological grandson of whom I am aware, but to be on the safe-side, let’s think about a person who might someday exist, my biological great-grandson. It is possible that someday there will exist a person who is my biological great-grandson, just as it is possible that there will never exist a person who is my biological great-grandson, de Grey seems to think that that this person who may or may not someday exist-my biological great-grandson-has rights against me such that I have an obligation to bring it about that he can choose how long to live should he someday exist. And perhaps, too, the Great Pumpkin, who may or may not exist, has rights you and I have failed sufficiently to attend to.

But de Grey may be wrong about who possesses the fundamental right to live as long as he or she chooses, yet correct about there being such a right. Perhaps this right belongs to all existent persons-not possible persons, not even potential persons, but actual persons. Most of us don’t recognize such a right, but of course it doesn’t follow from that that no such right exists. If there is such a right, notice how different an imperative this yields for us! Why expend any of our resources upon possible persons when there are existent persons and persons in potentia who are unable to exercise this right because of our current distribution of resources. If de Grey is correct about this right to choose to continue to live as long as we like, doesn’t justice require that our energies be devoted not to the development of life-extension therapies, but to the distribution of life-saving therapies to all those persons whose current choices about how long to live are not realized, in short, to the more traditional understanding of the medical imperative? Even if there were a right to choose to continue to live as long as we like, wouldn’t that place anti-aging research near the bottom of our priority list?

Of course the most basic question is this: why should we even assume that there exists a right to live as long as you choose? What would it mean to have such a right? If there are, in fact, rights, and rights not derivative from duties, then I suspect these rights are far less extensive than this one. They are much more like a simple right to life-a right to non-interference and, perhaps, the entitlement right to what one needs to survive for a good while, although not for as long as one might wish to survive. De Grey’s first moral appeal, thus, fails, but perhaps his second appeal is the more persuasive.

De Grey claims that even as a child he recognized that aging was something that needed fixing. His language about aging and death is vivid: aging is “repulsive,” and death from aging is “barbaric.” If you hear echoes of the language of Leon Kass here, that is perhaps not entirely accidental. On his website de Grey writes, “I fully agree with Leon Kass and other bio conservatives”-something that would make Kass and other bioconservatives shudder, I think-”that there is a concept of the ‘wisdom of repugnance’-that ultimately what is good and bad is defined by what feels natural and unnatural.”8 What follows from the wisdom of our feeling repugnance when we consider aging and its effects, according to de Grey, is that we should cure aging as soon as possible. De Grey continues, “I consider that saving lives is natural, and conversely that standing by and not doing life-saving research as quickly as possible is repugnant. It’s not natural to condemn people to an unnecessarily early death.”9

Three things in this brief argument call for comment: (1) the moral relevance of the distinction between action and omission; (2) “nature” and its relation to moral norms; and (3) the wisdom of repugnance.

First, let us note de Grey’s insistence that in failing to do the life-saving research we “condemn people to an unnecessarily early death.” For de Grey there seem to be but two options-we are either killers or we are life-savers. Some of us are guilty of killing innocents by doing something to bring about their deaths; others of us are guilty of killing the innocent aging by failing to do something that would interfere with and prevent aging and death. Again, de Grey: “Roughly two people die every second, worldwide, and more than half of those people die of causes that young people more or less never die of. So we’re talking about the fact that aging kills one person a second, it kills a hundred thousand people a day, it kills thirty million people a year. This is a serious number of people. And saving lives is good.”10

And, of course, killing is not. Again, de Grey: “To stand back and (by one’s inaction) cause someone to die sooner, when one could act to let them live a lot longer at no (or even at some modest) cost to oneself or anyone else, is arguably the second most unnatural thing a human can do, second only (and then by a very small margin) to causing someone’s death by an explicit action.”11

We’ll come back to this talk of what’s natural and what is not in just a moment, but first let us concentrate on this acts and omissions issue, and what follows from this, a conflation of duties not to harm others and duties to benefit others. Note that de Grey assumes that there really is very little, if any, moral difference between acting to bring some state of affairs about and failing to act with the result that the same state of affairs occurs. The result is the same in both cases-x occurs-so why think the means by which ? is brought about is morally relevant? If two different actions (or omissions) lead to the same resulting consequences, and if the goodness or badness of the action is determined solely by the consequences of the action, then there is no moral difference between the two actions. Thus, if one person a second dies from aging because you and I failed to act to prevent the death, and if Malcolm the murderer kills a person, what’s the moral difference between Malcolm and us?

Now there is something to this observation if we are talking about intentions. Malcolm the murderer intends to kill Anne and, thus, he buys an especially sharp saw. But let us imagine that your Uncle Uriah, the billionaire inventor of the palm printer, who you know has listed you as the prime beneficiary in his will, is coming to visit you. Your bills are weighing heavily upon you and Uncle Uriah is a bit of an old git anyway. So, during dinner, as you notice him beginning to choke on a fish-bone, you excuse yourself to go to the kitchen to re-fill the water glasses, intending for the natural act of choking to take its course, though not in your presence. If the intent is to bring about some immoral state of affairs, say Uriah’s early death so you can benefit from his billions, it is morally irrelevant whether you intend his death by doing ? or by failing to do y. In this case, the facts are such-you know that Uriah is choking, you are trained in applying the Heimlich maneuver, you are the only person there who can save him, you would like for him to die, etcetera-that your omission is the intentional cause of his death. You are guilty.

But is this relevant to the case of aging? Only if it could plausibly be argued that we intend for the elderly to age and to die before their time. But that is, of course, nonsense. Most of us probably have no relevant intentions at all with respect to age-related dying. We haven’t thought much about the issue. We don’t personally know many people who are in the process of age-related dying (unless, of course, we are all in the process). There doesn’t seem to be much we could do about the problem. There are many worthwhile things each reader could be doing instead of reading this essay. There are hungry we could be feeding, and lonely we could be befriending. There are parents who would welcome a phone -call, and siblings who could use a message from us. (There are, as well, concertos worthy of being listened to, and sculptures worthy of being attended to, but that is perhaps a different matter.) I was well aware of all this before putting my fingers to the keyboard, but it is preposterous to suggest that I intend for readers not to feed the hungry or befriend the lonely, absurd to think that I intend for you not to contact your family. On almost all of these matters I have no intention at all. My intentions certainly do not run through your actions. Nor do they run through all I do or fail to do.

Now perhaps the more critical distinction is not that of act and omission, but the closely related distinction between foresight and intention. Implicitly, I’ve suggested that some omissions are acts through which intentions run every bit as much as actions themselves, and that what matters more than whether the act is an action or omission is what the agent is doing in either acting or failing to act, what is going on with the agent and what should be going on with an agent in such circumstances. Of course, some may argue that I bear the moral responsibility for all foreseeable consequences of any action or inaction I consider, and not just for my intentions. There’s little that can be done to argue for such a claim, I think; it is more an intuition or assumption. But it is an assumption that has unwelcome implications. If one is morally culpable for all that one foresees, and not just for all that one intends, then there is no moral difference between the suicide and the martyr: the martyr may reasonably expect that her failure to apostatize will result in her death, just as the suicide may reasonably foresee that the handful of pills may kill her, and so, those like de Grey may maintain, each is equally responsible for her death. But, as the philosopher Alan Donagan has pointed out, this position entails that the martyr is not only a suicide, but a persecutor as well, since she foresees that her refusal to apostatize will not only lead to her own death, but she also foresees that her omission of apostatizing will result in the death of a confessor.

This assumption that we are responsible for all the consequences of our actions/ inactions that we can foresee is an assumption that moral theory certainly can do without and an assumption that promises to paralyze and cripple the moral agent by the weight it places upon her shoulders. All of us are aware of the inordinate suffering in Africa at this very moment-genocide, hunger, AIDS, war. None of us is, at this moment, doing as much as we might do to address these problems. I don’t want to deny that we may, indeed, bear greater moral culpability than we typically acknowledge, but to really believe that I am as responsible for occurrences elsewhere, for events and states of affairs that have no connection to actions over which I have control, is to treat myself as a god, rather than a human, and in the absence of godlike powers to correct what is wrong in the world, what am I to do with that responsibility? How could I not but find it crippling?

Better, I think, to recognize the moral distinction between acts and omissions, intentions and foresight, to acknowledge that we may be differently related to states of affairs brought about by our actions and inactions and those states of affairs that are foreseen, but not caused by us. Better, in short, to recognize that just because we are aware of the large numbers of deaths daily “caused” by aging, we do not necessarily bear responsibility for those deaths. They are not our doing. Now it may be, of course, that we do have some duty to prevent harm and to remove danger to those who are aging, some duties of beneficence. But failure in those duties is not morally equivalent to killing others or, even to failing to save a life that is now before me.

De Grey could, of course, concede this, and argue that although we are not guilty of violating a fundamental moral duty not to harm others, we are guilty of violating a duty to do good to others. Given the low cost to ourselves of developing life-extending therapy, and given the great benefit our success in the development of life-extending therapies might have in the removal and prevention of the harms of aging, perhaps we have a significant duty of beneficence to engage in the development of such therapies. This would be an interesting argument, but it is only as plausible as the claim that agerelated harms are so significant compared to other harms we might remove or prevent that our energies are well-directed in this area. And why should we think that?

Nature and Repugnance

A second aspect of de Grey’s repugnance argument has to do with what is natural, and perhaps that explains the magnitude of the age-related harms. We can easily imagine arguments against the anti-agers that it is not natural to live to be one hundred and twenty or two hundred years old, and certainly not five thousand years old. De Grey’s response is to redefine what is natural: causing someone’s death by an explicit action is unnatural, and causing someone to die sooner when one could act with the result that they might live longer is only by a very small margin less unnatural.

Furthermore, de Grey argues,

It’s clearly unnatural for us to accept the world as we find it: ever since we invented fire and the wheel, we’ve been demonstrating both our ability and our inherent desire to fix things that we don’t like about ourselves and our environment. We would be going against that most fundamental aspect of what it is to be human if we decided that something so horrible as everyone getting frail and decrepit and dependent was something we should live with forever.12

De Grey’s appeal exemplifies the “wax nose” character of the arguments that appeal to nature – you can mold and make almost anything you like natural or unnatural. So, for de Grey, it is natural for us to want to fix things that are problems for us, aging is a problem for us, so fixing aging is natural. Likewise, apparently, it is unnatural to cause someone’s death by an explicit action as well as to “cause someone to die sooner when one could act with the result that they might live longer.” In what sense of “natural” are these natural? How could we tell whether the desire to fix things that are problems for us is natural? Perhaps the desire to have problems fixed is natural, but there would appear to be va st numbers of people and even significant periods of time in which the desire to fix problems, as opposed to having them fixed, has, to say the least, not been expressed. By contrast, we would be hard-pressed to find any period of time in which there weren’t plenty of folks interested in the “unnatural” act of killing others. So, if what is natural is determined exclusively by numbers, then de Grey has not identified that which is natural. And if what is natural is not determined by majority vote, then how are we to determine what is natural?

De Grey’s appeal at this point is to the “wisdom of repugnance.” Consider aging, “the brutal bombardment by the silent artillery of time”, as Abraham Lincoln put it. Isn’t our abhorrence, our repugnance at aging, indicative of the unnaturalness of aging and death? Doesn’t this repulsion that we feel upon considering aging provide sufficient warrant for declaring war upon aging? De Grey insists that if we will just for a moment step outside our culturally constructed “trance” with respect to aging, we will feel repugnance. You and I and a significant number of a large cross-section of groups will respond to aging in terms of moral repulsion. “It’s barbaric.” “Grotesque.” “Revolting.” I, myself, find this rather unlikely. Most of us, I think, would feel sympathy for those withering into age-related problems. Most of us, all things being equal, would prefer a rather short period of infirmity prior to our deaths. But do we really think of death as “barbaric” and aging as repugnant? Indeed, what sort of person would?

Well only a person who is alienated from his or her nature as a creature, I think, only a person who thinks of herself as other than her biological self. This is tricky business, but we should say two things here: We are never only creatures but we are always creatures. What it means to recognize ourselves as creatures is to see that we, like dogs, cats, ferns, and mitochondria have a beginning and an end, that aging and death is a part of normal species functioning for creatures. That aging and death are no more repugnant than eating and being nourished or sex. Furthermore, to think of aging and death as fitting and appropriate to other species, but not to the human species, is to misunderstand human nature and our identities as biological creatures, a misunderstanding that has not bode well for the created order in the past, does not now bode well for the world in which we live, and promises future harm to our wounded world.

Recall the joke about whether God is an electrical, a mechanical, or a civil engineer. Perhaps the repugnance some may feel at a sewer running through a recreational area may lead to designs for a new, improved human body. But that’s the engineer’s thinking, not the biologist or the naturalist, and the engineer’s shudders may tell us much more about him, than about what is natural.

Thomas D Kennedy.  (2009). ANTI-AGING, RIGHTS AND HUMAN NATURE. Ethics & Medicine, 25(1), 21-29,3.  Retrieved June 20, 2009, from Research Library database.