There is a tension in our attitudes toward death: On the one hand, many, perhaps most, believe that we must accept mortality with equanimity. Attempts to radically extend human life are viewed with suspicion. What kind of person, the thought appears to be, would attempt to overcome biological limitations? Someone exceedingly greedy, surely. Or worse, someone forgetting himself, like the character Braddock from Fitzgerald’s story “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” who tries to bribe the Almighty with a very large diamond. Research on life extension has, for many, the flavor of a Faustian bargain. (Ultra-wealthy anti-aging champions such as Bryan Johnson seem to fit this schema and may provide support for it in the popular imagination, if unwittingly.)

On the other hand, however, we don’t want anyone to get too cozy with death either. While we may, if grudgingly, accept behaviors that increase the risk of death — think car racing or climbing the Himalayas — we don’t think it quite proper to assume control over the end of our lives, especially when that end isn’t otherwise imminent. I suspect, in fact, that widespread qualms about physician-assisted suicide have less to do with alleged worries about murderous doctors or relatives and more with the background assumption that death must come for us when it will, and not when we choose. We thus seem to embrace two injunctions that pull in opposite directions: “Accept mortality” and “Don’t choose death.” Should we or shouldn’t we want to die?

Perhaps the two directives can be reconciled by appealing to the idea of a natural human lifespan. We can say that a mature and virtuous person aims to live........

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