Ethics
Life extension, overpopulation and the right to life:
Correspondence to:
Dr D E Cutas, Philosophy
Department, University of
Gothenburg, Box 100, SE 405 30
Sweden; daniela.cutas@filosofi.
gu.se
Received 7 November 2007
Revised 6 February 2008
Accepted 3 March 2008
J Med Ethics 2008;34:e7 (http://jme.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/34/9/e7). doi:10.1136/jme.2007.023622
against lethal ethics
D E Cutas
ABSTRACT
Some of the objections to life-extension stem from a
concern with overpopulation. I will show that whether or not
the overpopulation threat is realistic, arguments from
overpopulation cannot ethically demand halting the quest
for, nor access to, life-extension. The reason for this is that
we have a right to life, which entitles us not to have
meaningful life denied to us against our will and which does
not allow discrimination solely on the grounds of age. If the
threat of overpopulation creates a rights conflict between
the right to come into existence, the right to reproduce, the
right to more opportunities and space (if, indeed, these
rights can be successfully defended), and the right to life,
the latter ought to be given precedence.
Many objections have been and continue to be
formulated against life-extension, some of which
are concerned with the issue of overpopulation.
Other objections, very incisive, are formulated in
terms of the ‘‘unnaturalness’’, intrinsic wrongness
or social uselessness of living beyond a certain limit
now acknowledged or expected in humans,1 in
terms of the ‘‘boredom’’ that immortals would
experience,2 in terms of the impossibility of
retaining the same ‘‘self’’ over a long period of
time,3 in terms of the ‘‘fair innings’’ that older
people are supposed to have had, and the list
continues. According to another type of objection,
the prospective beneficiaries of life-extending
therapies are ‘‘burdens’’ to the society around
them and particularly to their close families. This
last argument sometimes contains (and is related
to) the overpopulation argument: the success of
life extending therapies increases the number of
older people, thus depriving others (the young(er))
of many goods. The successful application of such
therapies would lead to crowding, would be a
burden on resource allocation, would demand the
imposition of heavier taxes and create higher
unemployment if presumably the empowered
older population would desire or need to be
professionally active for longer. In the present
article I will deal strictly with the objections in
terms of overpopulation and related difficulties;
therefore, my conclusions will not concern most of
the other objections, at least not directly.
Moreover, I will not make any claims regarding
resource prioritisation: what I do claim, however, is
that when resource allocation decisions are made,
age alone cannot legitimately be a determining
factor. Therefore, even when facing an overpopula-
tion threat, the development of therapies aimed at
alleviating the diseases of old age or prolonging the
life span should be treated with equal considera-
tion as any other treatments.
In this article I will assume that overpopulation
is a serious threat. Using this assumption as a
starting point, I will show that demanding a halt
in the quest for life extension is not an ethically
legitimate solution. The practical aspects of
the degree to which keeping the death rate up
would relieve overpopulation have been discussed
previously by Max More,4 i therefore I will not
approach them again here. In order to discuss the
ethical appropriateness of opposing life extension
therapies in the name of overpopulation relief, I
will approach the issue of the moral rights and
obligations involved in the relation between life
extension and overpopulation relief.
RIGHTS
Whether we argue that there is a positive (which
requires an effort from the duty-bearer to create
the conditions for the exercise of the right, and to
assist the rights-holder in the fulfilment of her
right) or a negative (a liberty from interference)
right to life, the least it requires us is not to kill,
and not to deny people the option of having their
lives extended. If the right to life does not become
exhaust with the passing of time, then the
requirements of the right to life make the
argument from overpopulation irrelevant: even if
extending life span does prove to create over-
population-related problems, and as long as there
are other ways of relieving overpopulation, which
involve less serious rights violations, the problems
must be addressed without violating the right. I
will indicate at least one other option to relieve
overpopulation, other than the halt of life-exten-
sion therapies and research, and which is ethically
more acceptable.
Christine Overall addresses the matter of the
right to life in the context of life extension, but she
writes that we do not have a positive right to life,
that is, an ‘‘entitlement to all possible assistance to
preserve, enhance, and extend life’’ (pp109, 193),5
whose acknowledgement would ‘‘devour
resources’’ (p116).5 However, positive rights need
not be absolute rights, but rights that require more
than non interference. Whether or not we have the
right to be provided with the means to life-
extension, forbidding it, in principle, can be
described as a violation of a negative right to life,
the right not to be prevented from continuing
one’s life. Thus, either as a negative or as a positive
right, the right to life seems to support at least
i
As More4 explains, correlating life extension treatments with
improving access to healthcare and education for contraception may
well have better overall results than refusing to treat old age
diseases for fear that people will live too long and crowd the planet.
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 Ethics
allowing (the negative version), if not providing when
accomplishable (the positive version) access to life-extension
therapies.
But is there a right to life and if there is, where does it come
from, why do we have it, and do we cease to have it as we grow
old?
The right to life is beyond doubt an extremely popular
concept. Hundreds of books and articles explore and defend it,
and there are countless organisations and charities, as well as
laws, defending it; a mere Google search for ‘‘right to life’’ will
give hundreds of thousands of results. However, the over-
whelming majority of these publications, organisations, institu-
tions and Google results, do not have anything to do with life
prolonging interventions in the sense that interests us in this
paper. Instead, the right is generally invoked in relation to issues
such as abortion, embryonic stem cell research, embryo
experimentation and euthanasia—in most cases as the basis of
objections to some or all such practices. It is as if the most
passionate proponents of the right to life only uphold it when it
is of no meaning for its holder (the embryo, the irreversibly
comatose human being), or when it is not wanted by its holder
(the terminally ill person asking to be allowed to die).
According to both the two most popular theories of rights,
the interest theory and the choice theory, persons are rights
holders: only persons within the choice theory, and persons as
well as other beings who have interests (some of which entitle
them to make claims against others) within the interest theory.
As the arguments lead to more generous conclusions within the
interest theory, let us take a look at the more restrictive theory,
namely the choice theory. According to the choice theory of
rights, the relation of justification of rights begins with
autonomy: autonomous beings only are bearers of rights.
Because one is autonomous, one is also able to claim rights, to
exercise them, or to waive them: indeed this power is central to
the conception of rights as protected choices.6 It follows that we
can uphold the right to life of persons at least as a result and a
condition of autonomy. As stated in a classical text in the
philosophy of rights,
[i]t is possible to approach the right to life as an aspect of, as
being involved in, other rights. Thus it obviously is presupposed
in the right to liberty, and equally, in the right to be self-
developing and self-perfecting. If someone deprives us of our life,
he deprives us of our liberty and the possibility of our being self-
perfecting, and indeed, of our other rights as well.7
Thus it does not have to be the case that the right to life is
argued for ‘‘for life’s sake’’, or as an absolute right in any way: as
McCloskey conceded, it does not have to be absolute, inviolable
or inalienable. It can be trumped. Is it, then, rightfully
‘‘trumpable’’ in the struggle for earthly space?
First of all, we must note that overpopulation at this moment
is not as crude as to demand the sacrifice of some persons’ lives
in any ethically defensible way. We do not have to oppose rights
to life of present persons endowed with a ‘‘normal’’ life-span,
against each other. Should it become the case that today’s
increase in life expectancy would require people to reproduce
less (More’s4 suggestion), making it such that some members of
the future generations would not be born, again we do not have
a defensible reason for the infringement of the right to life of
present persons. Whether or not future generations can
correctly be said to have any rights, they surely do not have
the right to be conceived, simply because without conception
there are no rights, and there will be no rights holders who
could be said to have the right to come into existence.
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Secondly, if we are to take the right to life seriously, we
cannot surrender it to the interests of future generations, or of
present persons, to having more resources. One of the reasons
for this, and perhaps the most compelling, is the fact that the
success of such a claim would demonstrate too much. Indeed,
we and future generations just may be much better off without
many of our contemporaries who are consuming more resources
than autonomous older people do: we would be better off
without, for instance, many people with severe disabilities.
Christine Overall is one of the authors who emphasised this
very aspect. She writes that although she too accepts
that the costs of overpopulation within the contemporary
human species may indeed be serious and that these problems
may be exacerbated by the fact that human beings live longer, at
least in the West, than they did in past times, I do not find it self-
evident that we must let people die for the sake of alleviating
overpopulation and certainly not that the burdens of so doing
should fall disproportionately and necessarily on older people […]
it seems just as practical to call on those with disabilities or
severe illnesses to pass on, or perhaps those who carry genetic
liabilities or those who cannot prosper because they are too poor
to afford food or medical care. (pp55–6).5
As long as the proponents of the legitimacy of the claim that
older persons ought to die for the sake of sparing resources and
space are not prepared to claim that people from these other
categories should also be sacrificed, we cannot take their
proposal seriously. The underlying distinction between these
categories can be identified in the argument from the ‘‘fair
innings’’: older people who have already lived to the end of the
‘‘normal’’ lifespan have had their share of life and opportunities,
so they ought to let others live too. However, and Overall also
stresses this, we cannot assess and decide on the share of
opportunities and quality years that people have had and lived,
simply on the basis of their age, and this is especially so because
many people have not had access to opportunities, or have lived
their lives for the benefit of others (Overall’s example is that of
older women—which constitute the largest proportion of older
people). Refusing to acknowledge this is ageism, so long as
morally justifiable reasons cannot be advanced for the distinc-
tion between older and younger people, to show that the former
are less entitled to life. Surely then, it cannot be the quantity of
life that one has had, since different people have different lives,
which can be more intense in the cases of some, or more
burdened, more satisfying or more frustrated. Deciding on how
much life is enough is likely to result in more injustice for people
who, although they have lived for many years, have had fewer
opportunities and fewer chances to flourish. The value of
persons’ lives cannot be dependent upon the quantity of life at
one end or the other, but on their respective capacities to value
their own lives, whatever the content of that which they
actually value. For a detailed source of this argument see Harris.8
The right to life, thus, cannot become exhaust once a certain
number of years of life have been reached.
Older people, it could be argued, have a moral duty to die
even in the absence of other people’s alleged rights to their
deaths. However, in such an endeavour, we would have to
confront the same problem: if older people have a duty do die,
why don’t other people, whose existence creates ‘‘difficulties’’,
also have it? Yet those who oppose life extension because of
immortals (or longer-lived) creating ‘‘difficulties’’ do not also
advocate for the moral obligation of the other above-mentioned
groups to die. It is important here not to lose sight of the fact
that life extension is not advocated as the prolongation of frail

and disabled old age, but as the delaying of the debilitating
effects of ageing.9 ii Thus the immortals would not be old and
dependent people being kept alive in a state of powerlessness
and dependence, to the detriment of the living standards and
life opportunities of all, but active people able to function for a
longer while than they do today. They may thus prove to be less
of a burden than other people whose death no opponent of life
extension demands. Various authors have suggested possible
solutions to the issue of the increase in numbers of the ‘‘mouths
to feed’’,iii subsequent to the success of life extension therapies.
Such are post-retirement employment, voluntary work (Overall,
p209),5 periodic retirement.10 It has also been argued that in fact
life extension would be economically sound, or even that it is
the rational thing to do to enhance the economy.11 12 I will not
dwell on these aspects here, as our concern in this paper is not
with whether life extension creates any difficulties (which of
course it does), but with whether any of the difficulties thus
created can legitimately require older people’s demise.
Another right that is sometimes mentionediv as creating the
duty to die of older people is the right to reproduce. Many of us
have a strong interest in reproducing, and too much reproduc-
tion can (also) crowd the planet. In democratic societies it is
however not considered morally legitimate to restrain people’s
liberty to reproduce and to be parents, absent compelling
arguments to the contrary, for example, parental abuse. Past
attempts to deny people their liberty to reproduce are not
popular. However, as More4 insists, population growth is much
more closely related to fertility rates than to longevity, therefore
if in the name of overpopulation relief it can be legitimate to
question to right to life of persons, it must also be legitimate to
question their right to reproduce.
While I do not deny that the interest that people may have to
become parents is indeed worthy of moral consideration, I
cannot see how and why, in case it conflicts with other people’s
interest to go on living, it would demand that existing people
die, that is, that the interest that people have in parenting can
trump the interest of other people in continuing their lives.
Firstly, this is because living is often a much stronger interest
than parenting (maybe except for cases of people who are
willing to give up their own life for the sake of reproducing. But
surely such can only be a personal decision and not a
requirement for all), and secondly because the loss of a life
one does not wish to lose is more of a tragedy than not
experiencing parenthood (again, with the above-mentioned
amendment of people for whom reproduction is more impor-
tant than their own lives). The determinant reason for this is
that whilst the loss of life deprives us of everything (among
others, as McCloskey7 was arguing, of our autonomy, but also
of the satisfaction of most human interests), the failure to
reproduce deprives us of only one aspect out of our alternatives
to personal flourishing (with the amendment).
ii
And, as points out gerontologist Tom Kirkwood,9 research in the US shows that
whilst we live longer and longer, the period of disability at the end of life is getting
shorter, and that therefore ‘‘the health span may be lengthening even more than the
life span’’. In her book, Overall5 also discusses the matter of the dependency of the old
(pp208–11).
iii
I thank an anonymous reviewer of the journal for pointing this out to me.
iv
For example, by Woods J Engineered death, cited in Overall5 (p137). Woods’
proposal is that we might have to set ‘‘some definite upper limit on the duration of
one’s right to life’’. For discussions of the tension between life extension and
reproduction, see also Overall (pp137–40), Harris12 (pp76–7), More4 (pp169–85) and
Kirkwood9 (pp243–56).
J Med Ethics 2008;34:e7 (http://jme.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/34/9/e7). doi:10.1136/jme.2007.023622
Ethics
Besides the ageist flavour, the arguments in terms of the right
to reproduce and the rights of future generations assume that,
firstly, life extension would be indefinite and immortals would
be invulnerable, and secondly, that killing people may be an
optimum solution in the race for space, whilst other solutions
(such as the halt of reproduction) are unconceivable or more
problematic. However, invulnerability does not appear to be
even foreseen by scientists anywhere in the near future (if ever),
which means that ‘‘some’’ reproduction is likely to remain not
only possible but necessary to human survival, and therefore a
decision between not allowing people to live longer lives (and
continuing to reproduce) and halting reproduction altogether
(and living longer) is not the priority at the moment.
CONCLUSION
In this paper I have argued that, assuming that overpopulation
is a real problem we are being confronted with, this does not
justify not allowing people to seek to live lives longer than
average. It is important that we do not fall prey to ageism in
thinking that older people have had enough life and that
therefore in the name of our competing interests (or of those of
future generations) we can demand that, once they lived as
much as most people live, they stop living. The right to life
entitles us not to have meaningful life denied from us against
our will, and does not allow discrimination solely on grounds of
age. Whether we agree that there is a positive or a negative right
to life, the least it requires us is not to kill, and not to deny
people the option of having their lives extended (even if it might
not require us to provide them with the means to do so). If the
right to life does not have a deadline, then its requirements
make the argument from overpopulation irrelevant: even if
extending life span does prove to create overpopulation related
issues, these have to be address without violating the right.
Neither the right to come into existence nor the right to
reproduce can rightly trump the right to life of present rights
holders.
Competing interests: None.
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