A few years back I used to play a verbal game called “Moral Choice”
with my children. I would imagine some type of moral dilemma, and ask
one of my kids what they would do in such a situation. For example,
I might ask them: if you and your friend were drifting on a raft in
the middle of the ocean, and you both were thirsty, but only had half
a bottle of water, would you drink it all?
Progress in technology is likely to create numerous new types of
ethical dilemmas. So let's play a futuristic version of the “Moral
Choice” game.
At age 85 you
have enough money to pay for either a life extension operation that
will extend the life of yourself, or an operation that will extend
your aged spouse's life. Which do you pick?
It is easy to imagine an operation of this type. Maybe scientists
have figured out a way to grow an artificial heart in a lab using
stem cells or 3D printing. Perhaps if you have a heart transplant
with such a heart, you will get ten years of additional life. Such an
operation is likely to be very expensive, and it is unlikely to be
covered by public health insurance such as Medicare. What if you can afford such an operation for you
or your spouse, but not both? Do you flip a coin to decide who will get
the operation? Or do you both decide to skip the operation?
At age 85 you
can use your last money on a therapy or operation to extend your
life, or you can skip it and leave an inheritance to your poor, needy
children. Which do you pick?
This is an ethical dilemma that will be all too common if they
develop expensive therapies or operations to extend the human life
span. Such therapies might be organ replacements or something like
nanobot injections, with the nanobots cruising around in your body
repairing cell damage caused by aging. Such therapies are likely to
be very expensive, and it is unlikely that they will be covered by
public health insurance such as Medicare (particularly since Medicare
already has financial problems that cause many people to wonder
whether it will be able to cover ordinary health operations). Given
the problems we are facing with rising student debt, horrendous
income inequality, and unemployment caused by automation, the number
of financially insecure young people (and middle aged people) may
grow much larger. So many millions of people may face a choice late
in life between using their last remaining funds for a life extension
operation, or skipping the operation and leaving the money for their financially needy children
to inherit.
You are a
doctor, and two of your patients request a genetic modification for
their newly conceived child, to make their child smarter or faster or
more creative. Do you make the modification, knowing that it may
backfire?
This dilemma is one reason why the appearance of superhuman persons
may not come until long after the technology is first available to
produce such persons. Even if doctors are 95% sure that a particular
genetic enhancement may result in a smarter or faster or more
creative child, they may decide not to make such an enhancement
because they are worried about a 1% chance that the child may end up
worse off than if the genetic enhancement had not been done.
Do you make heavy use of your air conditioner, if you are convinced that using the
air conditioner will hasten the day when we run short of fossil
fuels, causing energy shortages for future people?
Some people think that Peak Coal may come in the next few decades.
Imagine that it is the year 2040, and scientists have concluded that
production of coal is going to steadily decline. But by that year the
world's need for energy will have greatly increased. Besides mere
population growth, one reason may be that global warming may have
made the planet hotter, and people are using air conditioning more
and more. If you live in such a world, you may believe that every
time you turn on the air conditioner, you are increasing the energy
shortage problem, and are increasing the likelihood that some future
person may not have any energy to cool his hot house or heat his cold
house.
Do you use
technology to extend your life at a time when many people are hungry,
meaning someone will be more likely to starve because they won't have
the food you are eating in your extended life?
It will be great if we have a future of 150-year life spans and
abundance for all. But given all the problems on the horizon relating
to overpopulation, resource depletion, global warming, environmental
degradation, and energy shortages, it seems more likely that life
extension technologies will be introduced to a world in which a
significant fraction of the world's people are hungry, a situation we have today. Indeed, there
may at that time be an even larger fraction of people who are
hungry. So if you are 85, and want to use some life-extension
technology that will give you an additional thirty years of life,
you may in effect be taking food from the mouths of hungry people who
need that food just to live to the age of 50.
Is there any way out of this dilemma? Perhaps you could live on a
farm and grow your own food. But the modern person is almost addicted
to foods from around the globe, so this would be very difficult.
If you have a
tiny gadget allowing you to spy on your spouse or child, should you
use it?
In the near future we will have incredible spying devices, such a
pen-sized video recorder you can leave in your car or house to spy on
what your spouse or child is doing when you are not there. You could
pick up the pen-sized video recorder, connect it to your computer,
and then fast forward through video footage showing everything that
had happened in your home while you were not there. That would be a
good way to catch a spouse or child doing something you disapproved
of (such as a husband carrying on an affair with a co-worker, or a
child using drugs or cigarettes). But would it be ethical to use such a device,
seeing that it would violate the privacy of your family member?
To achieve life
extension, would you accept a transplant of an organ from a pig?
This question may seem frivolous, but it is not. It turns out that
the internal organs of some breeds of pigs are very similar to human
organs. Some companies are working on developing breeds of pigs that
could be used as a source of organs for human transplantation. In his
book Challenging Nature, Princeton professor Lee M. Silver
says, “Eventually, pigs could be engineered with heart, liver,
lungs, pancreas, kidneys, colons, and more that are not just
equivalent to but better than human body parts.” If you were very
old and a company were offering organ transplants from a special
breed of pig, and you thought it would extend your life, would you
take such a transplant? Or would you find the idea of being part
human, part pig too revolting?
To achieve life
extension, would you raise a headless human clone of your own body?
If you accept a transplant of an organ from a pig or another human,
there is always the risk of organ rejection. The safest way to get a
transplant would be from a clone of your own body. You could raise a
clone of yourself as you would raise a child, but then you probably
couldn't bear to tell the clone that it was time to give up its
organs. But what about the idea of raising a headless clone of
yourself, who receives nutrition from tubes or injections? This idea
has been seriously considered. Some have argued that since a headless
clone would not have any consciousness, the headless body would not
be a real person, so no one should have any ethical qualms about
using it as you wish. Others argue that such a practice would be
highly unethical.
____________________
Here are my own personal thoughts on some of these ethical dilemmas.
If the sunniest projections of the most optimistic technological
enthusiasts turn out to be true, and we end up seeing a future world
of superabundance and life extension, I might consider some kind of
life extension therapy for myself, if I thought that there was abundant
availability of medical treatment, and I thought my children were wealthy
enough to not need any inheritance from me. But if 25 years from now
we have a world suffering huge problems from energy shortages,
hunger, resource depletion, global warming and overpopulation, or a
world in which tens of millions in the US don't have adequate medical care,
my inclination will be to avoid any type of very elaborate and
expensive medical treatment to extend my own life so I have a lifespan in excess of the average lifespan. I tend to believe that in any world in which there are far too many people to match the
available resources, the average old person should just live a
natural lifespan, and then die in a natural way to make room for
somebody else, rather than consuming huge amounts of resources in a
frantic effort to live a few more years.
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