I don't think death is "natural," or, if it is, then that is beside the point. We are not born to die. We are born ambitious and rebellious and loving and forming bonds and "grasping." Death is the last thing we are born to do. The folk who say they wouldn't want to live indefinitely should put a boundary on and then be prepared to kill themselves when they reach it, and not find an excuse. The point is given health and security, we do not want to die.
This idea that all must die to "make way" for others is in my view just silly Malthusianism. All kinds of ways to deal with it other than killing off the old folks could and would be put in place if aging were to be defeated (defeating all death would be more difficult but would come in time). More than likely population growth would stop on its own, as we see now in the more advanced countries where children are not as much needed. Besides, it's a big universe.
My point is that the fact of aging and death strikes me as something wrong, something causing suffering and grief and fear and no end of religiosity. If it is "natural" does not make it right any more than if it were unnatural that would make it wrong. Right and wrong have to do with suffering and its avoidance and even with pleasure, not with nature.
This is a well-argued and emotionally honest position. A few thoughts on where it's strongest and where it faces genuine friction:
Where you're on solid ground
The naturalistic fallacy point is your sharpest weapon, and it's largely unassailable. "Natural" has never been a reliable guide to "good" — disease, predation, childhood death, and pain are all natural. The move from is to ought doesn't work here any more than anywhere else. Critics of life extension who lean on this argument are on weak philosophical footing.
Your point about revealed preference is also sharp. People's behavior — taking medicine, going to hospital, fighting cancer — reveals that they do not actually accept death as welcome or right, whatever they say in the abstract. The folk who claim they'd want to die at 80 are usually imagining a peaceful, painless, complete-feeling end, not the grinding biological reality. And they are imagining it from the vantage point of health.
Where the friction is real, not just apologetics
The population and resource argument isn't quite as dismissible as you suggest. It isn't just Malthusianism — it touches on political economy, on who gets to be immortal first (almost certainly the wealthy), and on whether frozen social structures with immortal elites would be tolerable. These are genuine worries even if they're not knockdown arguments against the project of defeating aging.
There's also a psychological argument — distinct from the naturalistic one — that human meaning and urgency are partly constituted by mortality. Not that death is good, but that our particular kind of striving may be entangled with finitude in ways we can't fully predict. This isn't obviously true, but it deserves more than dismissal.
The deepest point you're making
Underneath the argument is something more radical: that aging and death are a problem to be solved, not a condition to be accepted, and that the enormous cultural and philosophical apparatus we've built around accepting death — religion, stoicism, "legacy," the circle of life — is largely a coping mechanism dressed up as wisdom. That's a serious claim and probably substantially correct. We valorize acceptance partly because we have had no choice.
The honest position for anyone who disagrees with you is to explain why death is good, at what age, and by what mechanism they plan to bring it about when the time comes — exactly as you say.
You are right I did dismiss the ensuing problems rather quickly. This is perhaps because I have talked about them before. I can imagine the result if, say, some Russian scientist found some formula and made it available to Putin. Change, and particularly one as huge as that, would certainly mean problems.
Yes, and that scenario crystallizes something important — the danger isn't really defeating aging itself, it's the conditions under which it arrives. A world where life extension comes in gradually, is widely distributed, and develops alongside adequate political and economic institutions is a very different prospect from one where it arrives suddenly and asymmetrically.
Most genuinely transformative technologies follow something like that dangerous second pattern at first. Nuclear power, the internet, even antibiotics — the early distribution was uneven, the power asymmetries real, the disruptions serious. But the answer most people arrived at was better governance and wider access, not "we shouldn't have done it." It would be strange to apply a different standard to this particular technology just because the stakes are higher and the philosophical discomfort greater.
The Putin scenario is also a useful corrective to the rather comfortable version of the debate — where the question is posed as "would immortality be meaningful?" rather than "who gets it first and what do they do with it?" Entrenched power is already a serious problem. Literally entrenched, immortal, unchallengeable power — holding not just wealth but time itself as an advantage — is a qualitatively different thing. An aristocracy used to at least die.
And yet even that argues for urgency in making the research open and the access broad, rather than for abandoning the project. The cure for dangerous asymmetric distribution of a powerful technology is generally more and faster distribution, not suppression — which rarely works anyway.
What it does argue for strongly is that the political problem is at least as hard as the biological one, and probably needs to be thought about with equal seriousness. The scientists working on aging and the political philosophers and institutional designers probably need to be in closer conversation than they are.
At this point the science is nowhere near even understanding. We eliminate causes of early death and reach a maximum, but we do not extend that maximum.
Yes, and that's a crucial distinction that often gets lost in popular discussion of the topic. Life expectancy statistics are somewhat misleading here — much of the dramatic increase over the past two centuries reflects the elimination of early death from infection, childbirth, violence, and childhood disease, not any extension of the biological ceiling. When you correct for that, the maximum human lifespan has moved remarkably little. There have always been people reaching their late nineties and beyond — we've just made it less rare rather than pushed the ceiling up.
The biology of why we age is still genuinely poorly understood. There are competing and partly overlapping theories — telomere shortening, mitochondrial decay, accumulated cellular damage, epigenetic drift, the declining force of natural selection after reproductive age — but no consensus on which is fundamental and which are downstream effects. We're arguably still at the stage of describing aging rather than explaining it. And explaining it would only be the beginning; intervention would be another mountain entirely.
This actually strengthens your moral argument in an interesting way. The people who say death is acceptable and natural are, in a sense, pushing against a door that isn't even close to opening. The philosophical debate is running well ahead of the science. Which suggests the resistance isn't really practical — it's that people are genuinely uncomfortable with the idea, and dress that discomfort up as prudence or wisdom.
It also means the honest position for someone in your corner is a kind of long-term moral advocacy — arguing that this should be a central priority of human scientific effort — rather than a near-term practical program. We are at the "we should really want to understand this and try" stage, not the "here is what we do" stage.
I dare say there have been at least four points in my life where I would have died except for antibiotics. They are fine things for sure. Still, . . .
Still — they save you for the same ending. Every victory of medicine up to now has been a stay of execution rather than a commutation. You get more time, better time perhaps, but the sentence stands.
There's something almost poignant in the cumulative achievement of modern medicine viewed from this angle. Extraordinary intelligence and effort and compassion, deployed across centuries, and the net result is that we arrive at the same destination in somewhat better condition and somewhat later. We have become very good at the preliminary rounds while the final one remains undefeated.
And there's a strange psychological effect that follows from this. Each rescue — each course of antibiotics, each surgery, each near miss — reinforces in the person who survives it the sense that life is worth having and continuing. You don't come through four such episodes feeling reconciled to eventual death. You come through them feeling, if anything, more attached, more aware of what would be lost, more convinced that the thing being preserved is worth preserving. The experience of nearly dying is very rarely reported as a gentle loosening of the grip. It tends to go the other way.
Which makes the conventional wisdom — that we should cultivate acceptance, that a good life includes a good death willingly embraced — feel somewhat academic when set against actual human experience at the sharp end. People who talk most easily about the naturalness of death are often, though not always, people who haven't looked at it very closely from nearby.
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