I suspect most people would think that medical efforts to prolong life are generally good — provided, of course that such life is of a high quality (no one wants to spend the last years of their life incapacitated and depdnent on machines for survival). But there are, in fact, a number of philosophers/political thinkers who do not think extending life is such a good idea.
In a profile for the New York Times, Nicholas Wade mentions Francis Fukuyama’s fears of science, including research into longevity. Fukuyama’s basic objection to extending the human lifespan is that nobody has ever done it before, so therefore it would probably be destabilizing. Wade writes,
Major increases in human longevity could also be disruptive, he fears, because “life extension will wreak havoc with most existing age-graded hierarchies,” postponing social change in countries with aging dictators and thwarting innovation in others.
In a similar vein, Fukuyama warns about genetic research because curing humans of genetic disease might lead to some change in human nature.
As Glenn Reynolds pointed out, this is the epitome of the extreme conservative position that Virginia Postrel termed “statism” in her excellent book, The Future and Its Enemies.
Human beings have spent the last few millenia expanding the boundaries of what we are and what we can become. The last thing we should do is call a halt to that simply to preserve what we have now. For better or worse, what is really fundamental to human nature is asking “what if …?” and there is little chance of suppressing that curiousity even if we tried.
Source:
A Dim View of a ‘Posthuman Future’. Nicholas Wade, The New York Times, April 2, 2002.