Chapter 14 Immortality and the Exhaustibility of Value Michael Cholbi Suppose we approach the desirability of immortality as a comparative matter. In other words, let us treat the question of immortality’s desirability as the question of whether it would be better for us human beings to be mortal or immortal. Should we then rationally prefer immortality to mortality, or vice versa? Bernard Williams has argued against the desirability of immortality on the grounds that it presents us a dilemma: To the extent that we can envision an infinitely long life as our own, such a life would eventually become tedious. Given enough time and repetition, even the most pleasant or rewarding activities will lose their luster, making an immortal life an endlessly boring fate we should hope to avoid. Conversely, the only way to make an immortal life vivid and engaging would be for us to undergo sufficiently large changes in our personalities—changes in our values, interests, preferences, and the like—that the individual we would thereby become would become so different from us that we could not recognize their good as ours. Hence, even if that future individual is numerically identical to us, the life of that person could not be judged good from our point of view. There is thus no reason for us to hope that we might become that future individual. Immortality must therefore either be tedious or a condition with which we do not identify. Immortality, Williams concludes, is not desirable, and a fortiori, worse than the mortal existence with which we are all familiar.1 There is a great deal in Williams’ much-discussed argument that I will not engage here, including whether the dilemma he presents is genuine, his positions regarding personal identity, etc. Rather, I wish to draw attention to 221 Cholbi_9781783483839.indb 221 30-10-2015 12:23:04 222 Michael Cholbi a consideration relevant to the question of the desirability of immortality that Williams and his many commentators almost entirely overlook. Williams’ article (and the vast literature it has generated) focuses its attention almost exclusively on the question of whether an immortal life would result in the various goods that make life go well eventually losing their capacity to make our lives go well. As I shall put it, they have focused on whether goods are exhaustible. Whether our lives would “run out” of goods is obviously relevant to immortality’s desirability. But it overlooks the obvious point that our lives also contain bads of various kinds as well: heartbreak, headaches, rudeness, injustice, illness, annoyance, disappointment, boredom, and the like. Yet the recent philosophical literature has virtually nothing to say about whether an immortal life would result in the various bads that make life go badly eventually losing their capacity to make our lives go badly. But surely this latter question is equally germane to whether immortality is desirable or not. For the desirability of immortality (just like the desirability of mortality) turns on how good that condition is for us on balance, that is, on how good immortality would be taking both its goods and bads into consideration. Philosophers’ neglect of the potential bads of immortality is therefore no small omission— indeed, it amounts to overlooking half the equation. The purpose of this chapter is therefore to consider whether immortality would be more desirable than mortality once the bads of immortal life are taken into proper account. I first set the terrain for our investigation by outlining the four possibilities for how an immortal life could turn out with respect to the goods and bads that contribute to well-being. For the sake of argument, I assume, contra Williams, that the goods of human existence are not exhaustible and proceed to consider whether the bads of human existence are exhaustible as well. Section 2, while acknowledging that the evidence in question is not clear cut, offers empirical reasons to conclude that the bads of human existence are not exhaustible, that is, that we would never, even in an immortal life, reach a point in which all otherwise bad states of affairs fail to detract from our well-being. Our immortal lives would therefore resemble our mortal lives in portending a mix of good and bad states of affairs. Section 3 then offers arguments as to why we might nevertheless rationally prefer mortal existence to immortal existence, namely that a mortal existence, because of its finitude, offers us the opportunity to have a better life on balance than whatever the balance of goods and bads would inevitably turn out to be in a finite existence. My suggestion, then, is that however good an immortal life might be, a mortal life has a higher ceiling for well-being. Furthermore, a mortal life is such that agency plays a greater role in determining our level of well-being, and to the extent that agency is itself a component in well-being, mortal lives are superior to immortal lives. Cholbi_9781783483839.indb 222 30-10-2015 12:23:04 223 Immortality and the Exhaustibility of Value 1. EXHAUSTIBILITY OF VALUE AND FOUR POSSIBILITIES FOR THE GOODNESS OF AN IMMORTAL LIFE Let us begin by mapping the logical possibilities for how an immortal life could turn out in terms of the goods and bads it could contain. Williams and his defenders endorse what I will call the Exhaustibility of Goods (EG) thesis: There is some quantity G of the goods that ordinarily contribute to human well-being beyond which they would no longer contribute to well-being. Beyond G, whatever ordinarily makes for a good life—attending cocktail parties, reading mystery novels, having sex, climbing the Andes—no longer makes a positive difference to how our lives go. If G exists, then we have reason to live up to the point where G is reached, but no further. G represents, we might say, the plateau of a mountain: our lives contain goods that enable us to reach this eudaimonic plateau, but further goods fail to raise the quality of our lives overall, and as Williams sees it, being at this plateau turns out to be tedious and bad in its own right. Defenders of the desirability of immortality, on the other hand, discern no such plateau. Clearly, with respect to the goods that contribute to human well-being, immortality would be better if the exhaustibility of goods thesis is false—if we would never reach G simply because G does not exist. Our well-being has no plateau. A good bit of the recent debate about the desirability of immortality has therefore concerned itself with whether the EG thesis is correct.2 In contrast, with respect to the bads that detract from human well-being, immortality would be better if the Exhaustibility of Bads (EB) thesis: there is some quantity B of the bads that detract from human well-being beyond which they no longer detract from well-being were true. If the EB thesis is true, then at some point, bad things or events eventually lose their power to make our lives worse. There are thus four possibilities that bear on whether immortality would be on balance desirable for us: Exhaustibility of bads T Exhaustibility of bads F Exhaustibility of goods T Exhaustibility of goods F A C B D Of these four possibilities, B is clearly the best in regards to the desirability of immortality. According to B, no matter how long we might live, the various goods we experience and encounter will continue to make our lives better, whereas the various bads we might experience and encounter are such that they eventually lose their eudaimonic sting. Under B, we would reach a point Cholbi_9781783483839.indb 223 30-10-2015 12:23:04 224 Michael Cholbi past which continuing to live is literally all to the good. Conversely, C is clearly the worst as regards the desirability of immortality. Under C, that which ordinarily makes our lives better eventually loses its power to do so, whereas that which ordinarily makes our lives worse continues to have the power to do so indefinitely. Notice that our existence in C is not boring. It is instead miserable, and say what one will about misery, it is not boring. Possibilities A and D are more equivocal: Possibility A seems close to Williams’ vision of immortality. We live long enough so that the goods that would otherwise make our lives go well no longer do so. But fortunately, we also live long enough so that the bads that would ordinarily make our lives worse no longer do so either. A, thus, seems genuinely tedious. In some respects, A resembles the condition of indifference recommended by Buddhism and Stoicism. This tranquility suggests that while A hardly seems appealing to us mortals, it is still better than C (and of course worse than B). What of D? In D, both the goods and bads of life continue to contribute to well-being more or less as before. In this regard, D seems closest to mortal life as most of us experience it. Mortal life contains good and bads, and our overarching aim as human beings is to live lives in which the difference between the former to the latter is as large as possible. And there is no reasonable prospect that we will live so long that either all goods become matters of indifference to us or that all bads become matters of indifference. Evaluating an immortal D-life is thus more complicated than evaluating A, B, or C. D is clearly better than C but not as good as B. Whether we should rationally prefer the equanimity of A to the greater tumult of D seems to turn in part on the comparison just mentioned, namely, how much of the inexhaustible goods and bads our lives contain. D will be better than A if a D-life is good overall, worse than A if a D-life is bad overall. We can therefore rank the desirability of these immortal lives as follows: Either: B > D > A > C (if D-lives are good overall) Or: B > A > D > C (if D-lives are bad overall) The desirability of immortality thus seems to depend on the truth of our two exhaustibility theses. If we knew which of A, B, C, or D, is true, we would be able to answer the question of the desirability of immortality, for we would then know what the consequences of being immortal would be for our wellbeing, all other things being equal. 2. THE INEXHAUSTIBILITY OF BADS As I have pointed out, almost all recent philosophical discussion about the immortality’s desirability has focused on the question of the exhaustibility Cholbi_9781783483839.indb 224 30-10-2015 12:23:04 225 Immortality and the Exhaustibility of Value of goods. I propose, however, that we grant for the sake of argument what Williams denies, namely, that the EG thesis is false and so we do not have reason to expect immortality would become tedious because the goods that make our lives go well have been exhausted. I shall therefore ignore scenarios A and C, wherein the EG thesis is true: Exhaustibility of bads T Exhaustibility of bads F Exhaustibility of goods T Exhaustibility of goods F — — B D Setting aside A and C necessitates a reconsideration of how good the remaining scenarios, B and D, are. B continues to be the best possibility, while how good D is will depend on the difference between goods and bads in a life: B > D (with the gap between B and D determined by how good D-lives would be overall) The immediate question at hand, then, is whether B is more likely than D, or vice versa. Note that this involves ascertaining whether the EB thesis is true or false, that is, whether the bads that make life worse for us are exhaustible or not. If they are exhaustible, that is, if the EB thesis is true, then immortality looks very attractive indeed: It conforms to scenario B, the best of our four possibilities. If on the other hand the bads of existence are inexhaustible, that is, if the EB thesis is false, then immortality conforms to scenario D. Evaluating that scenario (as we shall see) is tricky. Before proceeding to consider the truth of EB, we need to pause briefly to consider the “metaphysics” of well-being. As I have expressed it, the questions addressed in this chapter concern the desirability of immortality and mortality. This naturally suggests that whether immortality is better than mortality or vice versa is determined by looking to people’s desires—that how good a person’s life is turns on the degree to which her desires are satisfied or frustrated. That claim in itself raises questions (whether the desires are a person’s actual desires, her rationally informed desires, etc.). Furthermore, some philosophers would contest the thesis that a person’s well-being hinges on the satisfaction or frustration of her desires. Physical pain is undesirable and we generally do not desire it. But its undesirability may not be best explained by the fact that we do not desire it. Pain feels bad. That is what renders it undesirable and why we do not desire it. Some philosophers would account for this by saying that pain is objectively bad or contrary to our interests. While I am sympathetic to these critiques, exactly how we understand the ingredients of well-being does not impact the arguments I henceforth offer. Thus, we can rest content with saying that some state of affairs is good for a person if is satisfies her desires, and bad for her if it frustrates her desires. Cholbi_9781783483839.indb 225 30-10-2015 12:23:04 226 Michael Cholbi So are life’s bads inexhaustible or not then? Unfortunately, an obvious a priori argument to settle this question does not seem forthcoming. The best approach is to investigate the question in a piecemeal empirical fashion, considering the various bad things in life and asking ourselves whether, for each instance of them we are subject to, they forever retain their power to make us worse off or if we become inured to, or somehow inoculated against, them. We thus attempt to consider whether, in an immortal life, bads would lose their power to harm us. Before doing so however, it is worth noting how high a bar advocates of the EB thesis must clear. According to the EB thesis, there is some quantity B of the bads that detract from human well-being beyond which they no longer detract from well-being. So to affirm the EB thesis is to claim that each and every bad, each and every state of affairs that contributes to making our lives worse, at some point exhausts its capacity to make our lives worse. It is not sufficient to prove the EB thesis if merely some bads would lose this capacity. I find the prospect that every bad loses this capacity implausible. Begin with physical pain. While we have some power to become accustomed to, for example, chronic pain, I doubt that this acclimation to chronic pain eliminates its painfulness altogether. The fact that individuals with chronic pain often have to increase their dosages of pain medication is an indication that we do not acclimate to pain fully. Furthermore, how we might become accustomed to physical pains that are causal byproducts of our body’s normal operations is mysterious. We cannot, and probably should not, want to become inured to hunger pangs and the discomforts of unsatisfied sexual desire. Immortality enthusiasts will point out that many of the pains found in mortal life would be avoided in an immortal life. Exactly how we might achieve immortality can only be speculated upon, but one of the less implausible scenarios is the identification of cures or treatments for all endogenous and age-related conditions. Our immortality is thus likely to be “contingent.” We would be able to kill ourselves or one another, but not die from internally generated bodily conditions. Immortality would entail there being no cancer or diabetes, no arthritis or Alzheimer’s. I concede that the absence of such conditions would diminish physical pain overall and might greatly mitigate chronic sources of pain. Still, it would not eliminate all pain, and a fortiori, gives us no reason to think that the badness of what pain would still exist for immortals would be exhaustible. So too for various psychological bads. No doubt rejection, abandonment, and other psychological harms become easier to address with the perspective afforded by maturity. Time heals all wounds, it is said, so perhaps an immortal life would result in all such wounds being healed. But life offers us many opportunities to be rewounded, and in an immortal life, there would be indefinitely many such opportunities. And even if every such wound heals Cholbi_9781783483839.indb 226 30-10-2015 12:23:04 Immortality and the Exhaustibility of Value 227 eventually, there may be no time at which all our wounds are healed. Over an immortal life, we might find it especially disheartening that we may prove susceptible time and again to the same psychological injuries. Talk of an “inner child” should not be taken literally. But it is plausible that early life experiences establish patterns of action and reaction that prime us for certain kinds of psychological damage across our lifespans, even if those lifespans are of potentially infinite duration. I fear, then, that our human condition too much resembles that of Charles Schulz’s Charlie Brown. His repeated humiliations and sufferings—Lucy pulling the football away just before his kick, the little red haired girl ignoring his entreaties—become familiar but no less dispiriting. While an immortal life might afford us the opportunity to thwart the effects of these harms, they would likely never disappear entirely. Of course, Charlie Brown is a selfloathing depressive (“I only dread one day at a time”), so perhaps we ought not take our cues from him in answering this philosophical question. We humans are remarkably adaptable and resilient, surprisingly able to maintain our level of well-being in the face of adversity and challenge. This is one of the chief findings of the psychological literature on the “hedonic treadmill.” Unfortunately, that same literature suggests that the hedonic treadmill runs in both directions: Just as negative events do not undermine our well-being as much as one might expect, so too do positive events not permanently augment our well-being as much we might expect.3 At best then, the evidence for the exhaustibility of two categories of bads, physical pain and psychological injury, is equivocal, certainly not compelling enough in my estimation to conclude that these two categories clearly are exhaustible. And there are other bads where the case for their inexhaustibility is still more compelling. Positional goods are goods whose value derives in part from their scarcity and their association with status, rather than from their inherent properties. A positional good derives some of its value from the fact that if you have it, others cannot. Memberships in selective country clubs, ownership of a first edition of a novel, a spot on the Supreme Court: Certainly there may be inherent value in being a member of Augusta National, having a first edition of The Sound and the Fury, or being Chief Justice. But part of the reason people strive for these goods is because of their rarity and exclusivity. Their possession or enjoyment marks one out special or elite, the best of the best. But for each individual who possesses or enjoys such a positional good, there is someone (in fact, many people) who is denied such a good. For those denied them, these function as positional bads. Every attorney or legal scholar who wishes to serve on the Supreme Court but cannot suffers a positional bad. And there will be many more people for whom this serves as a positional bad than the one fortunate individual who enjoys this positional good. Cholbi_9781783483839.indb 227 30-10-2015 12:23:04 228 Michael Cholbi Positional goods and bads would not disappear in an immortal life. Indeed, given human competitiveness and status seeking, immortality (assuming that immortality becomes a universal property shared by all humans rather than a condition of only some) might exacerbate the pursuit of positional goods. Immortality would be a great leveler in some respects. Differences in longevity and health would presumably be smaller, for example. But the very fact of immortality serving to erase many differences could well motivate immortals to find additional paths by which to differentiate themselves from one another. That the Greeks and Romans depicted their immortal gods as all-too-human, as petty, vindictive, and scheming, is telling. These very human gods, immune to the ravages of age, the passing of time, and the threat of death, spend their existence idling, conniving ways to outdo their fellow immortals. Their lust for positional goods makes them narcissistic and vengeful. In a similar vein, we might fear that positional goods would have a greater, and largely detrimental, role in the economy of goods for immortals than they do for us mortals. All told, these considerations speak against the truth of EB: Again, what is at issue is whether all the bads that detract from well-being eventually lose their capacity to do so. Even if some might, and even if immortality might eliminate some of the bads of human existence, it is unlikely that all the bads of life would exhaust their badness. Hence, repeated exposure to these bads over an immortal life would not eventually culminate in these bads not making us worse off. The Exhaustibility of Bads thesis is almost certainly false. We are left by process of elimination with scenario D, wherein neither the goods of human existence nor the bads of human existence are exhaustible: Exhaustibility of bads T Exhaustibility of bads F Exhaustibility of goods T Exhaustibility of goods F — — — D 3. A CASE FOR THE MORTAL LIFE To this point, I have granted immortality enthusiasts the assumption that the goods that make our lives go well would are not exhaustible and so we would not “run out” of these goods even in an infinitely long life. I then considered whether the bads of human existence are similarly exhaustible, and concluded that they are not. Unhappily, all this effort returns us to a familiar mire: scenario D, which as I noted earlier, most closely resembles our mortal existence in containing a mix of goods and bads. Yet the relevant question Cholbi_9781783483839.indb 228 30-10-2015 12:23:04 Immortality and the Exhaustibility of Value 229 has shifted in a substantive way to whether an immortal or an immortal life offers the better mix. One way to address this question is to imagine the domain of goods and bads as a space with one axis representing those states of affairs that make our lives better and another representing those states of affairs that make our lives go worse. Within a finite, mortal life, an individual presumably only encounters a section of that space. Any given mortal human being, even one who experiences all of the types of goods and bads there might be, only experiences some of the possible tokens of good and bad. AQ: There is an instruction to insert Table 14.4, but the relevant table is not provided. Please check and provide. How a person’s mortal life goes overall is thus determined by the differ- AQ: Citation ence between goods and bads (Diagram 1), by how vertically oriented the for Diagram corresponding rectangle is. W1 has had on balance a good life (the good- 1 has been ness extends further than the badness). X1 has had on balance a bad life (the introduced in the badness extends further than the goodness), not as good as W1’s. Y1’s life, sentence represented by a square, is neutral, neither good nor bad on balance—better “How a person’s…” than X1’s, not as good as W1’s. In contrast, immortality would presumably ensure that each and every Please check. individual experiences all possible goods and bads. One reason to think immortality is desirable is that it provides us limitless time to experience all those things that make life go well. In favor of immortality, it might be said, we miss out on none of life’s pleasures. But if that line of reasoning is AQ: There compelling, then the thought that limitless time will also result in our experi- is an instrucencing all those things that make life go badly should be no less compelling. tion to Immortals would have infinity of time to experience goods and bads, after all. insert Table So against immortality, we also miss out on none of life’s sufferings. Every 14.5, but the relevant mortal life will come to have the same geometry: table is not provided. Please check and provide. Cholbi_9781783483839.indb 229 30-10-2015 12:23:04 230 Michael Cholbi Diagram 2 hints at why we might rationally prefer mortality to immortality: whatever the difference between the actual goods and bads of human existence is, if our lives are infinitely long, we will inevitably have lives corresponding to that difference. Finitude, in contrast, holds out the prospect that different individual lives will have different mixes of good and bad, at least some of which constitute a larger difference between good and bad than that afforded by immortal lives. The life of W1 is better than the life of W2, for instance. For a while shorter, its difference between goods and bads is superior. Note that I am not claiming that W1 is superior to W2 because W2 ends up with the same well-being profile as X2, Y2, etc. The superiority of W1 does not consist in the fact that W1 outdid X1 and Y1. The reasons to prefer W1’s life to W2’s rest on a comparison of W1’s well-being qua mortal to W2’s well-being qua immortal, not on a comparison of W1’s well-being with other mortal lives W1 might have had. The lives of immortals will therefore be, from the standpoint of personal well-being, far more heterogeneous than the lives of mortals, thus affording mortals opportunities for lives that are better on the whole than the lives that immortals are essentially fated to have. I am not claiming here that the biographies of all mortals will converge, as Borges depicts in his famous short story “The Immortals.”4 Rather, my claim is that whatever the distribution of possible goods and bads that determine personal well-being, immortals will eventually converge in their experiences of these possible goods and bads such that the qualities of their respective lives will be effectively identical. The finitude of mortal lives, in contrast, enables us to exceed our eudaimonic destiny. Mortals confront only a subset of possible goods and bads. It is thus available to mortals to craft a life that surpasses the threshold of well-being that each and every immortal converges upon. This underscores a second reason to prefer mortal life to immortal life: Agency matters more in shaping the well-being of mortals than in the shaping of immortals’ well-being. Immortals would presumably be able to make Cholbi_9781783483839.indb 230 30-10-2015 12:23:04 Immortality and the Exhaustibility of Value 231 choices and actions in the pursuit of their well-being. Nevertheless, the efficacy of that agency will be restricted to the local and immediate. For in the long run—and we must keep in mind that forever is the longest run possible—any immortal will come to experience whatever possible goods and bads there might be. An immortal may at time t choose to do A in order to realize good G (or avoid bad B). And her choices and action may enable to realize G or avoid B for the moment. But her exercise of her agency in the moment only forecloses eudaimonic possibilities temporarily. She will be made to experience those momentarily foreclosed eudaimonic possibilities somewhere down the line. In some ways, this is a comforting result: the failed pursuit of G at t does not entail that she will not later enjoy G. Conversely, the failure to avoid B does not entail that she will not latter suffer B. G and B are nigh, come what may. Mortals, on the other hand, can exercise their agency and genuinely foreclose possibilities for good (and for bad!). Their time, after all, will run out, and many possibilities relevant to their well-being will be realized or avoided by their agency before their deaths transpire. A mortal who at time t chooses to do A in order to realize good G (or avoid bad B) may well succeed in realizing G or avoiding B. This does not of course mean that her failure to do so affords her no future opportunity to realize B again or that she will not be compelled to avoid B again. But it at least holds out the possibility that she will die without either outcome eventuating. The second reason, then, to prefer mortal life to immortal life is that mortality makes agency matter more. Our agency has greater shape and efficacy in a mortal life; how our life turns out depends much more on what we choose and do. Unfortunately, a full defense of the value of agency is beyond the scope of my discussion here. However, I take it to be intuitively attractive that to the extent we are agents capable of choice and action, we desire for that choice and action to make a larger, rather than a smaller, difference in the world, and in particular, in how our own lives unfold. If our agency makes a minute difference to our well-being—and I have argued that it would make a very modest difference to our well-being in the very long run of an immortal life—we would likely view our capacity for agency as more a curse than a blessing, a largely impotent power whose presence in our psychology is a source of resentment instead of empowerment. As Samuel Scheffler has recently proposed, valuing things at all involves resisting the notion that the passage of time has “normative authority,” that is, that our own concerns and cares ultimately determine what occurs and survives.5 If my arguments are correct, then in an immortal life, the infinite passage of time would largely determine how good our lives go. Time would have “normative authority,” and indeed essentially the same normative authority, over our well-being, whereas our authority in that domain largely disappears. That, I believe, is Cholbi_9781783483839.indb 231 30-10-2015 12:23:04 232 Michael Cholbi not how we hope for our agency to relate to the world and to the shape of our lives. 4. OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED AQ: There is an instruction to insert Table 14.6, but the relevant table is not provided. Please check and provide. If I am correct, then even under the optimistic assumption that the goods of human existence are inexhaustible, we still have rational grounds for preferring mortality to immortality. The bads of human existence are similarly inexhaustible, and so the question turns on the balance of goods and bads in mortal versus immortal lives. Immortal lives, I argued, would be heterogeneous in their evaluative profiles because an infinitely long life entails that individuals will undergo all possible human goods and bads, whereas in a finite, mortal life, individuals can exercise their agency and thus shape a life that is better than the life they would have as immortals. I conclude by addressing three objections to the reasoning I have offered in defense of the claim that we have reason to prefer mortality to immortality. The first objection is that even if mortality makes possible lives like W1, mortality turns out to be riskier than immortality. Y1 may be no less likely than W1, and Y1 looks worse overall than W2, X2, Y2, etc. Those who are risk averse might well prefer immortality to mortality because however well one’s immortal life goes, that outcome is effectively locked in. Of course, my view entails that just so far as goods and bads go, a nontrivial portion of mortal lives will turn out to be worse on balance than any immortal life. But here again agency enters the picture. Many of us, I suspect, might rather have a life that is a bit worse overall if that life is, to a large degree, shaped by exercises of our own agency. We object to paternalism precisely because we see others exercising their agency on our behalf as both dangerous and intrusive—dangerous because they are likely to err in deciding what’s good for us, but also intrusive because of our sense that certain core decisions fall within our individual spheres of sovereignty or authority.6 No doubt sentiments vary in this respect. Just as people vary with regard to how much stimulation or excitement they need to maintain their well-being, they likely vary with regard to how much risk they can tolerate or how much they want their own exercises of agency to determine their level of well-being. Personality makes a difference here. Still, many of us will find it more rational to prefer the chance at a life better than that assured to us by immortality, especially if our own agency has a role to play in making that life better. The second objection is that my argument controversially assumes that the ratios of available goods and bads are the same in mortal and immortal lives. Why should we not assume that immortality would bring about some transformation in the goods and bads available to us, and in particular, why Cholbi_9781783483839.indb 232 30-10-2015 12:23:05 Immortality and the Exhaustibility of Value 233 should we not assume that either (a) the vertical axis, representing possible goods, will extend further, (b) the horizontal axis, representing possible bads, will shrink, or (c) both? If immortality positively shifts the differences between goods and bads, then even if I am correct that mortality makes our agency matter more to our well-being, an immortal life might well be better than all (or most all) mortal lives. If Diagram 3 is an accurate representation of immortal life then it is apparent that lives W3, X3, etc., are better than many of the lives in Diagram 1. Immortality then looks like a very attractive proposition. But why should we suppose that immortality will shift the balance of pos- AQ: The citation for sible goods and bads at all, and if so, in a positive direction? Certainly immor- Diagram 4 tality would likely result in some of the bads that make mortal human lives is absent. worse being effectively eliminated: grief at the deaths of loved ones, degen- Please check erative diseases, and so on. Yet, unless immortality significantly modified and provide. human nature, many of the bads of mortal life, especially those due to human ignorance or bad character, would likely persist even if we were immortal. As we saw earlier, a convincing case for the EB thesis cannot be made. Moreover, some of the bads that plague mortal existence (e.g., positional bads) might be even more prominent in an immortal life. Finally, we should keep in mind that our discussion has assumed all along that the central claim of Williams’ rejection of immortality is mistaken, that is, we have assumed that the goods that contribute positively to human well-being do not exhaust Cholbi_9781783483839.indb 233 30-10-2015 12:23:05 234 Michael Cholbi themselves, and as a consequence, we need not fear immortality becoming tedious. Should that assumption turn out to be incorrect, then the shifting from mortal to immortal lives would be negative rather than positive. On the whole, then, I do not perceive persuasive reasons to suppose that immortality will shift the balance of goods to bads in a comparatively positive direction from the balance of goods and bads possible in a mortal life. Indeed, given these considerations, there is a nontrivial chance that immortality would result in a negatively shifted distribution of goods and bads: AQ:There is an instruction to insert Table 14.7, but the relevant table is not provided. Please check and provide. That of course casts immortality in a still less flattering light. Finally, it may be claimed that I am overlooking the benefits of contingent immortality. As I noted earlier, it seems likely that any immortality we could enjoy would be contingent, wherein we would not die of endogenous causes but could be killed. Defenders of contingent immortality may point out that it entails only that we may live forever, not that we must. As a result, contingent immortals could take advantage of the very facts that (I have claimed) make mortality preferable to immortality. Suppose that a contingent immortal reached a point in her life when she had enjoyed many of the possible goods of immortal existence but few of its possible bads. She had been lucky in that regard. At that point, it could well be rational for her to engage in suicide: after all, by living on, she is more likely to reduce her overall quality of life, given that she is more likely to incur more bads than goods. Through her own agency, she could, in other words, end up with a life like W1. I do not deny this reasoning. But it gives us no reason as such to prefer an immortal life, even a contingently immortal one, to a mortal life. Suicide is no less available to mortals, and they could well opt to end their lives at a given point on the grounds that living further is likely to make their lives worse overall. (Indeed, this seems to be precisely what many suicidal individuals actually believe they are doing.) Suicide enables us to exert control over the times of our deaths, and given what I have said about the heterogeneity of immortal lives, it could well be rational for contingently rational individuals to use their agency to exert such control, and in so doing, they might achieve what mortals can achieve through that same exercise of agency. Cholbi_9781783483839.indb 234 30-10-2015 12:23:05 Immortality and the Exhaustibility of Value 235 5. CONCLUSION Taking full account of how bad states of affairs play out in immortal (and mortal lives) thus makes immortality less rationally preferable on the whole, even if we concede (as Williams does not) that the various goods that contribute positively to human existence will not eventually run out. I have not argued that every mortal life is better than every immortal life. Demonstrating that would be impossible. Rather, my arguments indicate that a mortal life is the better bet. If it were up to us whether we were mortal and immortal, and we knew (in a fashion akin to John Rawls’ famous veil of ignorance) nothing about the particulars and idiosyncrasies of our lives—nothing about our personalities, abilities, tastes, upbringing, social environment, etc.—we would have a plausible basis for opting for mortality over immortality. There is no particular reason to think that the distribution of possible goods and bads would be distributed more in our favor in an immortal life than in a mortal life, and we have good reasons to prefer the chance to do better than we would inevitably do in an immortal life, particularly if we do better because we have wisely and effectively exercised our agency. Regardless of whether that conclusion has been convincingly demonstrated, it is apparent that a narrow focus on comparing goods in mortal and immortal lives cannot settle the question of immortality’s desirability. We must also compare the bads in mortal and immortal lives as well. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Williams 1973. Fischer 1994, Chappell 2007, Burley 2009. Brickman and Campbell 1971, Frederick and Loewenstein 1999. Borges 1949. Scheffler 2013, p. 61; Cholbi 2015. Feinberg 1989: 52ff., Shiffrin 2000, Cholbi 2016. REFERENCES Borges, Jorge Luis. (1949). “The immortals.” Originally appeared in The Aleph. Reprinted in The Aleph and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 2004), pp. 3–19. Brickman, P., and Campbell, D. (1971). “Hedonic relativism and planning the good society.” In M. H. Apley (ed.), Adaptation-level Theory: A Symposium (New York: Academic Press), pp. 287–302. Burley, Mikel. (2009). “Immortality and Meaning: Reflections on the Makropoulos Debate.” Philosophy 84, 529–47. Cholbi_9781783483839.indb 235 30-10-2015 12:23:05 236 Michael Cholbi Chappell, Timothy. (2007). “Infinity Goes Up on Trial: Must Immortality Be Meaningless?” European Journal of Philosophy 17, 30–44. Cholbi, Michael. (2015). “Time, Value, And Collective Immortality.” Journal of Ethics 19, 197–211. ———. (2016). “Paternalism and Our Rational Powers.” Mind, forthcoming. Feinberg, Joel. (1989). Harm to Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fischer, John Martin. (1994). “Why Immortality Is Not So Bad.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 2, 257–70. Frederick, S., and Loewenstein, G. (1999). “Hedonic Adaptation.” In D. Kahnemann, E. Diener, and N. Schwartz (eds.), Well-being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (New York: Russell Sage), pp. 302–29. Scheffler, Samuel. (2013). Death and the Afterlife. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shiffrin, Seana. (2000). “Paternalism, Unconscionability Doctrine, and Accommodation.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 29, 205–50. Williams, Bernard. (1973). “The Makropoulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality.” In Problems of the Self: Philosophical Papers, 1956–1972 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 82–100. 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