This article contains an interesting review of a new philosophical work centred mainly around the SENS effort.

I have not had a chance to read the book yet, but the descriptions of its content give me mixed feelings.

Firstly, it seems fairly well researched. The description of the SENS strategy in the book, which made its way into the reviews (e.g. the stuff about removing cellular garbage), suggests that the author is under no illusions about what the SENS approach is.

On the other hand, I expect that the book might fail to break the habit, common in the media, of waxing philosophical about the ethics of life-extension, which in my opinion is a philosophical red herring. 

As I see it, the advent of human rejuvenation is a false cue for moral philosophy. It seems like a cue for philosophy, because each of us has already done a little private philosophy on our own, when considering our own mortality, and persuaded ourselves that our own senescence is a good thing, in order to help ourselves cope with its inevitability. And so later, when someone comes along and suggests that senescence is not quite so inevitable, our little private conclusions become superfluous, and we feel a great moral question has been raised, when nothing could be further from the truth. Our own private philosophy has had the rug pulled out from under it, and that's it.

Without doubt, mental efforts would need to be directed at managing the consequences of mankind’s increased capacity to rejuvenate itself medically, but the mention of “complicated moral questions”, feels wearily familiar. It seems to foreshadow one of those tiresome debates about whether we ought to extend healthy human life. You know the stuff – facile waffle about going ‘too far’ and ‘the right of generations to be born’. Such discussions are like lengthy, elaborate, erudite lectures on the ins and outs of Mussolini’s mass transit system.  

The book also contains talk of ‘immortalists’, a quaint character-study of Aubrey de Grey, giving the whole thing an ivory tower feel, detached from the quite ordinary healthcare ethics that motivate those behind the project.  

And it is a great shame that there does not exist any equal and opposite version of books such these, written from such an ethical angle.
 

Who knows, perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Read the original article at Istockanalyst (from Kansas City Star).