What trade-offs would we make between the quality and quantity of our lives? IEET Fellow Russell Blackford is hoping for some illumination in the way we think about these trade-offs, and how those intuitions will shape public support for age-retarding therapies and the Longevity Dividend they could create.
Person W lives for 50 years and is almost blissfully happy. He or she has an average happiness of 9/10 across their entire life.
Person X lives for 80 years. For the first 50 years, he or she has an average happiness of 9/10. Then they live for another 30 years at an average of 8.5/10 (not so close to bliss, but still very happy). Thus, person X gets everything person W gets and more ... but is less happy on average over their total life.
Person Y lives for 35 years at 8.4/10 (yay, that’s very happy!) and then 50 years at 9/10.
Person Z lives for 85 86 years. He or she has 50 randomly-distributed years at 9/10 level happiness. They also have 36 randomly-distributed years of 8.4 happiness.
All right, got it? Whose life would you prefer to have? W? X? Y? Z? It is by no means obvious to me that the best life to choose is that of person W, even though this person’s life is the one of greatest average happiness across an entire lifetime. Indeed, it seems obvious to me that it’s better to be person X, but maybe you’ll all disagree with me. But what about person Y, and if you like that, why not person Z? And of course, we could come up with a more systematic set of comparisons if we were being scientific.
Are these even the relevant comparisons we should be making? Is it relevant to your choice if I tell you that one of the above lives (but still with the average figures I’ve provided) includes times of horrible pain or mental suffering? If it’s relevant, what effect does it have on your choice?
New scenario:
Person X lives for 75 years. Overall, she is very happy through that time. Let’s express this by saying that she has an average happiness level of 8 (out of a blissfully-perfect possible 10) for those 75 years.
Person Y, thanks to advanced technology, lives for 150 years. For the first 75 years, she is just as happy as Person X: i.e., she enjoys a very good average happiness level of 8 out of 10 for those 75 years. In the second 75 years, her happiness drops off for various reasons (e.g. the technology keeps her relatively youthful, but it is not perfect so she gets more illnesses than she did during the first 75 years). Nonetheless, things continue to go pretty well for her, and she experiences a not-bad average happiness level of 7 out of 10 for the second half of her long life.
If I could offer you Person X’s life or Person Y’s life, which would you take? Person Y gets everything that Person X gets and more, but on average (i.e. averaged over their respective entire whole lives) Person X is happier. Which do you want?
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