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 out roughly the span characteristic of our species and then die a natural death. On this view, one should accept temporal finitude without actively seeking to bring death about; open the door when the Grim Reaper comes knocking without trying to lure him in; face the inevitable without claiming authority over the schedule.

A crude version of this position can be easily shown to be implausible: medicine is, after all, in a clear sense, unnatural. But the proponent of the natural lifespan view need not bite this particular bullet — she can argue, instead, that medicine ought to ensure we get the number of years we are “owed” (by whom?) by correcting genetic errors or counteracting the effects of harmful environments without feeding fantasies of living for thousands of years.

But just why should we prefer a natural lifespan and a natural death? I will take the first question first.

It has been suggested that a much longer life would get tedious or meaningless or both. Philosopher Bernard Williams, in “The Makropulos Case,” gives arguments to that effect. The title of Williams’s essay is a reference to Elina Makropulos, a fictional character courtesy of writer Karel Čapek. Čapek’s Makropulos acquires the gift of life extension and initially takes advantage of it, but after living for several centuries, she becomes apathetic, as if “frozen” in boredom. At 300 plus, she is so jaded that she laughs when another character burns the document containing the secret to much longer life.

I suspect that this view expresses what is sometimes called an adaptive preference: that is, a tendency to see the attainable as better than the unattainable, as the fox does in Aesop’s “sour grapes” fable. We don’t know how to radically extend life, so we might as well tell ourselves we prefer to die at 80 or 90 anyway.

Another argument put forward sometimes urges us to consider the interests of the unborn. When do they get to live?

This question is well-intentioned but misguided. No merely possible person is owed a chance to be born. A merely possible person isn’t someone, and so isn’t someone to whom things may be owed. (Think of all your merely possible siblings or children. Who are they? How many of them are there?) The people who die every day due to old age, by contrast, are quite real.

But the most important point I wish to make in response to the “pro natural lifespans” position is this: Our intuitions of what lifespans are “fair” for us to expect are anchored in our evolutionary history, which is an accident. We could have evolved to live for thousands of years, like bristlecone pine trees, in which case we’d think it perfectly fine and not greedy at all to live that long; or we could have evolved to live for several months, like many mice, and then wishing to live for 80 years may have seemed to us terribly selfish, nay Faustian.

I conclude from here that virtue does not require embracing current lifespans.

But does it prohibit desiring death on a given day? Is it somehow wrong to end one’s life? Must one die only when one doesn’t want to?

It is difficult to see why. Since death is irreversible, it ought not to be chosen lightly, but is it true that it should never be chosen at all?

In opting to die, a person may hurt loved ones, of course. This is not a trivial matter. But loved ones, in turn, ought to consider the person’s own preferences. (Entrepreneur Salim Ismail reports that his father chose euthanasia and spent the last days of his life in a blissful state. Ismail asked the attending physician about this, and she said that 20,000 people had had the procedure and that most of them were in a similarly happy state, adding, “We think it is because they have agency.”[1])

Perhaps, the thought is that it would be somehow bad for society if people were allowed to die when they wished. That, however, is a peculiar argument. For we probably all agree that we cannot impose on someone a day full of experiences that the recipient does not wish to have. To deny a person the right to end her own life is to impose on her many such days.

I suspect it is true, then, that the tension in our attitudes toward death has its root in a certain “naturalness” heuristic. It seems to us against nature’s injunctions for a person to end her life, much as it seems to us that 90 years is a good life span and that desiring 900 is greedy. This is how we’ve saddled ourselves with the view that a mature and virtuous person embraces mortality but doesn’t, on any given day, choose death. It is not my purpose to reject the naturalness heuristic. There is wisdom in it, no doubt. But here as elsewhere, a good and helpful rule of thumb may, when too rigidly applied, cease to be a heuristic and become a superstition.

[1] See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iWSNwIRazc, 46:30.

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