Agency, Life Extension and the Meaning of Life more

Contemporary philosophers and bioethicists argue that life extension is bad for the individual. According to the agency objection to life extension, being constrained as an agent adds to the meaningfulness of human life. Life extension removes constraints, and thus it deprives life of meaning. In the paper, I concede that constrained agency contributes to the meaningfulness of human life, but reject the agency objection to life extension in its current form. Even in an extended life, decision-making remains constrained, and many obstacles to the fulfilment of an agent’s goals are preserved. Agents with longer lives are also presented with new challenges: for instance, it might be harder for them to avoid chronic boredom, and sustain their motivation to act in the pursuit of their goals. Although objections from agency and boredom are often used in combination to support the view that a much longer life is likely to bring misery or become meaningless, I argue that the acceptance of the boredom objection undermines the persuasiveness of the agency objection. Do we want to live forever? Maybe we do. But are we ready to face the consequences? Kafka is reported to have said that the meaning of life is that it stops. The idea is also suggestively explored in fiction. In Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Borges’s The Immortal, and Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2005), longer life spans are associated with dehumanising experiences which make people insensitive to moral concerns or apathetic. In movies as diverse as the black comedy Death Becomes Her (1992) and the arty sci-fi drama The Fountain (2006), the lesson is that the right thing to do is to accept ageing, illness, and ultimately death, rather than fight against them. In the play by Čapek, The Makropoulos “Agency, Life Extension, and the Meaning of Life” by Lisa Bortolotti, The Monist, vol. 93, no. 1, pp. 38–56. Copyright © 2010, THE MONIST, Peru, Illinois 61354. Introduction A GENCY, L IFE E XTENSION , AND THE M EANING OF L IFE * 1. Agency and Humanity AGENCY, LIFE EXTENSION, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE 39 Case (1922), the protagonist decides to let herself die after having lived for more than 300 years and having become bored with her existence. These fictional stories inspire arguments in philosophy and bioethics (e.g. Williams 1973; James 2009) against the desirability of extending the human life span, but also shape and reflect public perceptions of death and immortality which are found in the media (e.g. Than 2006; O’Neill 2006) and in popular science (e.g. Appleyard 2007; Chown 2007). In the recent philosophical and bioethical literature on life extension, a relatively short life span is regarded as essential to human life being meaningful. One family of arguments focuses on the claim that a significantly extended life would no longer be distinctively human: the brevity of life is regarded as an essential feature of humanity, and the value of what is human partly depends on the certainty and the proximity of death. In a fictional letter resisting the idea that immortality would be beneficial, a philosopher argues that the life cycle must have an end. Not only does a meaningful human life need to be mortal, but it also needs to be relatively short. The biological nature of human beings requires that they go through a life cycle that is characterised by the goods of sexuality, fertility and familial relationships, and by death. The brevity of life contributes to its value: Both of these points apply to life extension as well as to immortality, as it is brevity that matters, not finitude. I would like to distinguish claims about which conditions make life human from claims about which make it valuable, even if the two claims might not be independent. Even granting that the brevity of life is essential to humanity, this counts as an argument against life extension only if we assume that being human is a good thing. References to the intrinsic value of humanity are very common in the philosophical and bioethical literature, but should be treated as claims to support rather than axioms. Arguably, there is nothing intrinsically good in belonging to a biological species or some otherwise culturally defined group (see Bortolotti 2006). Even those who appeal to the special status of humans end up listing among the valuable goods of humanity capacities that are not species-relative or relative to a specific cultural group of beings. Human beings as we know them are creatures that can expect to live seventy years or so. Our lives are structured by that timetable. (Lenman 1995, 326) Value relates to scarcity. [. . .] What’s the big deal about hitting the bull’s-eye when you have a million throws? (Lenman 1995, 328) 40 LISA BORTOLOTTI Griffin is right that what is valuable in typical human individuals is intentional agency, broadly conceived as the capacity to have beliefs, desires, and preferences and to act on them in order to achieve one’s goals. Other goods that we value are self-consciousness and the powers of autonomy and reflection, and a rich emotional life which allows typical humans to develop complex and rewarding interpersonal relationships (e.g. Tiberius 2008). There is no good reason to believe that these cherished capacities and achievements could not be exhibited by beings belonging to a nonhuman species or a nonhuman culture, so I propose that for the rest of the paper we explore the value of agency as such rather than the value of being human. The importance of developing narratives about one’s life has recently been emphasised both in the psychological and in the philosophical literature (see McAdams 1993; Velleman 2003) in relation to the issues of personal identity and autonomy. Some conditions that are accompanied by a failure of memory (e.g. Alzheimer’s disease, other forms of dementia, amnesia) have been found to undermine the sense of identity of the subjects, their social integration by preventing them from constructing narrative conceptions of themselves, and their autonomy as agents (see Kennett and Matthews 2009). Self-narratives are regarded as largely successful ways of bringing coherence to an agent’s past experiences and informing and shaping her future thought and action. One common argument for the view that significantly longer life spans would compromise agency is that increased longevity would threaten the development of personal narratives that are central to the attribution of meaning to one’s life. If human beings were to live much longer than they currently do, then their lives would no longer be amenable to being structured narratively. This is because stories must have a plot development, and an end in sight. In a very long life, various stages of the narrative may appear as discontinuous and fall short of forming a coherent whole. This 2. Agency and Self-Narratives We value our status as human beings especially highly, often more highly even than our happiness. This status centres on our being agents—deliberating, assessing, choosing and acting to make what we see as a good life for ourselves. (Griffin 2001, 310–11) AGENCY, LIFE EXTENSION, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE 41 would negatively impact on the meaning agents attribute to their lives, and would have far reaching consequences for their personal identity and their potential for autonomous agency. For this argument against life extension to work, one needs to identify which feature of narratives contributes to meaningfulness, and then establish that life extension threatens that feature. One possibility is that narratives emphasise the coherence of life goals in the trajectory of an individual life, and that such coherence is necessary for a life to acquire or preserve meaning via its contribution to an agent’s sense of self and purpose. In a significantly longer life, it is possible that coherence of life goals would be harder to maintain, because longer-living agents may live to develop diverse life goals which do not nicely fit in one overarching project. But this observation cannot by itself constitute an argument against life extension. First, some broad coherence of life goals may be necessary for an agent to develop a sense of self, but even coherence does not rule out change or even transformation in the agent’s values and perspective. After all, the best stories have twists, and one precious feature of agents is that they adapt and adjust to ever changing circumstances by balancing conservative and dynamic tendencies. A richer account of the relationship between coherence of life goals and meaningfulness is needed before discontinuity in self-narratives can provide an argument against the desirability of life extension. Second, self-narratives can sometimes be deceptive because agents artificially integrate seemingly diverse life goals and experiences in a general plot, acting on self serving biases or attempting to reduce cognitive dissonance (see examples in Aronson 1999). These phenomena are not confined to psychopathological cases. A life event is not always meaningful in itself, but depends on a narrative structure that lends it context and sees in it significance that goes beyond the event itself. (Gallagher 2003, 349) To some degree, and for the sake of creating a coherency to life, it is normal to confabulate and to enhance one’s story. Self-deception is not unusual; false memories are frequent. (Gallagher 2003, 348) [. . .] this value attached to narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, 42 LISA BORTOLOTTI The argument from life extension to meaning deprivation is that, if human beings were to live much longer than they currently do, then the satisfaction of their life goals would no longer be constrained. Suppose it is true that the presence of constraints on decision making and the necessity to overcome obstacles make the achievement of life goals valuable, and that the exercise of agency is central to character development, and to public and personal conceptions of the self. Then living longer would deprive human lives of meaning by depriving agency of its constraints. It is not difficult to find support for some version of the agency objection in the literature. According to Nozick (1981), meaning can be found in the attempt to transcend the limits of one’s individual life, and death is one of these limits. If there are no limits, the search for transcendence becomes unnecessary, and meaning is lost. In the recent bioethical literature, arguments against life extension have been based on the thought that, by removing some of the obstacles and limits to what humans can achieve, 3. Agency and Meaningfulness This fictive character of coherence in self-narratives might not belittle the importance of developing such narratives for agency, autonomy, and their wider epistemic benefits, but suggests that when coherence is lacking from a third-personal point of view, first persons can be creative about the categories under which particular events are subsumed into subplots (Bortolotti 2009). This form of reconstruction is particularly evident in people affected by serious memory impairments, such as déjà vécu (Moulin et al. 2005) and Alzheimer’s disease (Örulv and Hydén 2006), where confabulation compensates for lack of psychological continuity between present and past experiences. If this relatively innocuous form of confabulation is used in relatively short life spans, it may also contribute to unifying the self in longer-living agents. In sum, there do not seem to be compelling reasons to believe that a longer life would lose narrative structure or cohesion, but other important features of agency might fail to contribute to meaningfulness in extended lives. Now I turn to these other concerns. fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary. (White 1987, 24) AGENCY, LIFE EXTENSION, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE 43 human nature itself would be compromised, and with it autonomous agency (Fukuyama 2002; Habermas 2003; Sandel 2007). A different approach to life extension and to the ethics of enhancement can be found in Harris (2007). Here are some examples of how life extension is perceived as undermining the meaning of human lives on the basis of considerations about agency. In order to assess the argument that life extension would compromise a feature of agency that contributes to the meaningfulness of human life, we need to think about what this feature of agency is; whether it is true that it contributes to meaningfulness of life; and whether it is plausible that extending the life span would compromise such a feature of agency. Working towards one’s desired goals requires the overcoming of obstacles and contributes to a sense of achievement and self worth. Agency would not play this role unless agents were constrained. Striving to achieve one’s goals is a paradigmatic way of acquiring or manifesting virtues such as constancy, integrity and determination, and recent empirical evidence also suggests that it is a source of happiness. Haidt (2006) argues that happiness does not lie in the satisfaction of one’s It is precisely because we cannot play through an endless series of choices, an infinite series of possibilities, that the choices we do make become so important to us; those choices establish the character and identity of our lives; they allow certain things to show up as valuable. (Malpas 1995) The argument is [. . .] that an endless life would entirely foul the meaning of each and every endeavor we engage in as persons. Our finitude is so deeply rooted in our being that it necessarily structures the meaningfulness of our lives. On the condition of an infinite amount of time in existence nothing would matter for persons. [. . .] Finitude is the necessary condition for the possibility of human endeavors. One cannot engage in human endeavors without being an agent and having an identity but engaging in endeavors allows for the development of agency and identity. (Pauley 2007, 43–44) Many of our greatest accomplishments are pushed along, if only subtly and implicitly, by the spur of our finitude and the sense of having only a limited time. A far more distant horizon, a sense of essentially limitless time, might leave us less inclined to act with urgency. Why not leave for tomorrow what you might do today, if there are endless tomorrows before you? (Kass 2003, 185–86) 44 LISA BORTOLOTTI desires, but in the pursuit of one’s goals. More surprisingly, psychologists revealed that an individual’s happiness does not seem to be irremediably compromised by adversities such as bereavement and debilitating illness. People have an incredible capacity to endure adverse conditions and “bounce back,” thereby returning to the state of well-being in which they were before the adversity struck, after a reasonable amount of time (Haidt 2006, 138; Carel 2007, 102–104; Martin, 2009). Going back to the role of self-narratives, having overcome problems and reacted to adversities in a successful way becomes part of an individual’s life story and self-conception, and later events in life which are positive are seen by the agent, and by others, as the outcome of the personal transformation that the initial problems triggered (e.g. a change of attitude towards life brings about a change of career or leads to a new relationship). This integration of the encountering of obstacles and of their removal in the story the agent tells about her life makes it possible for the agent to impose on her many and apparently disconnected experiences a sense of achievement, fulfilment, and purpose, and to see episodes of suffering, disappointment, and failure in a better light. In line with the results presented by Haidt on well-being, Carel (2007) suggests that the conditions of being chronically ill or permanently disabled allow people to develop a creative response to adversities in their lives. These adverse conditions induce in the agent a form of alienation from her own body, generating the need for finding solutions to novel problems. For instance, something as trivial as reaching the second floor of a building with no lift could become an obstacle for someone with an illness or a disability. Engaging in problem solving and finding a solution to new problems make life meaningful. The plausibility of the view that constrained agency contributes to the meaningfulness of human lives makes the agency objection attractive. Moreover, the agency objection to life extension is more robustly grounded than other common objections that seem to invest either nature or humanity with value without any convincing justification (e.g. “Life extension is against nature”). Agency is correctly invested with moral significance: it is the power to transform the surrounding world into a world where the agent’s goals are fulfilled, in a condition in which, given limited time and capacities, the desired ends outstretch the available means, and both sustained effort and creative responses to novel problems must be AGENCY, LIFE EXTENSION, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE 45 demonstrated. That said, the agency objection is not immune from challenges. There is some tension in the very thought of objecting to life extension on the basis of considerations about constrained agency. If the value of agency is that humans have to strive to achieve their goals, then why oppose an attempt by human agents to extend life, given that this goal will also presumably require a considerable effort and creative responses? This point teaches us that the agency objection is not an objection against the means by which we could achieve the goal of extending life (e.g., that the enterprise will require resources better employed elsewhere, or that it will constitute an act of arrogance), but against the consequences of achieving the goal for the individual. Once humans achieve the target of extending their life spans, they will not be better off because their lives will be deprived of meaning. If it turns out that life extension deprives individual lives of meaning, then its desirability is compromised prior to raising concerns about societal implications, such as widespread longevity generating overpopulation, disincentives to reproduce, or stagnation of ideas, and concerns about fairness in the distribution of this newly acquired resource. Human agents have limited time to achieve their goals, as their lives end on average after 80 years (in well-off industrialized countries), and can end much earlier if conditions emerge where they are made vulnerable to illness, poverty, violence, adverse climatic conditions, and so on. This means that human agents need to make choices about which of their goals they wish to achieve in the time at their disposal. There is no doubt that the postponement of death would weaken the force of this constraint. In this life Emma needs to choose whether she wants to be a heart surgeon or an astronaut because there is probably not enough time to train for both professions and to exercise them both in her lifetime. But if she had 200 years to live, and if her quality of life were good for most of those 200 years, she could perhaps be a heart surgeon and an astronaut, and experience the joys and setbacks of both career paths. Although the idea that longer life spans remove the need to make some life-defining choices seems plausible, living longer or even forever would not change the following aspects of autonomous agency. Some choices are more important than others, and it does matter when agents make them. Even longer-living agents may also have to make choices at 4. Life Extension and the Constraints to Agency 46 LISA BORTOLOTTI any one stage of their lives, and some of these choices could be important to the person they are or the person they want to be (e.g., which party to vote for at a general election; which person to date; which subject to study at university). Psychologists often talk about self-defining beliefs, or life goals, in order to focus on those beliefs that are central to the conception of oneself as an individual, and on those goals that are likely to determine the shape of one’s life. These beliefs and goals are involved in what Sartre called “radical” choices, such as that of the young man who is torn between staying with his mother and helping her through her illness, or joining the French resistance during the Second World War (see Fernández 2009). Choices that involve personal values will still be facing agents with extended lives, even in less dramatic circumstances. It is worth pointing out that having more time at one’s disposal does not necessarily mean that one has also greater control on the shape one’s life is going to have, because that also depends on external circumstances, and on the actions and decisions of others. Some goals come with their own in-built “expiry date.” For the achievement of these goals, it is irrelevant whether the agent has a longer or shorter life—it is a big deal to hit the bull’s-eye, even when you have a million throws, if it matters that you hit it sooner rather than later. Unless one can travel back in time, there is only one chance to talk to a stranger before she gets off the bus and disappears from sight. There is only one chance to win the 2012 Olympics 100-meter race, or to make a good impression on the first day at work. In the novel On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan tells the story of two young people who quarrel on their wedding night. After a heated discussion she walks away, she leaves the hotel room where they were staying, and they never meet again. Many years later, he regrets not having stopped her from leaving on that night. Some opportunities are missed and do not come back, no matter how long one lives. Some choices turn out to be a “mistake” or to have unpleasant consequences, such as losing job security as a result of joining a company that is financially unstable. The agents’ reaction to setbacks caused by what appear to be bad choices affects their self-confidence, their future decisions, and other people’s perceptions and judgments. There is no reason to believe that these circumstances would stop occurring if the life span was extended. Thus, the importance of making good choices would not lose value for longer-living agents. Similar considerations apply to AGENCY, LIFE EXTENSION, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE 47 circumstances in which the consequences of agents’ choices are irreversible. Suppose that Jim decides to have a child, and as a result of this decision he has a child. Later on, he changes his mind about wanting to be a father, but the fact that his partner gave birth to a child who is genetically related to him is something he cannot undo, although of course he can decide to stop playing the social role of a father with respect to the child. An extended or even immortal life would not be deprived of regrets and longer-living agents would have lives whose shape is determined by failures that have pervasive and long-term effects. The list of constraints that apply to current human agents and would also apply to longer-living agents can continue, but the trivial observations above about the importance and value of choices should be sufficient to illustrate that in a longer life there would still be limitations to individual agency and to the fulfilment of an agent’s goals. An agent would still have preferences that are incompatible and incommensurable, and on which immediate action is required, and would not be able to go back in time and reverse the consequences of all decisions she previously made. A case of in-built expiry date for goals that presumably will be affected by life extension is that of goals indexed to life stages: suppose you want to sing in a rock band in your teenage years; be a young parent; spend your retirement on the coast. In a life with limited temporal boundaries, where death is postponed but not removed, these desires might still make sense, although the duration of stages such as adolescence would perhaps change proportionally to the expected length and quality of one’s life. It is possible, of course, that in an immortal life one might lose grip on the idea that life has such well-defined stages and that one activity is desirable at one of these stages but not at others. We need to know more about the features of the immortal life to establish whether it would still be appropriate to divide life in stages with specific characteristics: presumably, infancy and childhood will be there always, but would one continue to live forever with the same capabilities and quality of life of a thirty-year old or an eighty-year old? These are open questions, and the answers are going to be relative to technological advances as well as changes in culture. Independent of the details of the prolonged or immortal life, a point worth raising is that extending life might not automatically involve extending memory capacities, or cognitive capacities in general. If memory were still 48 LISA BORTOLOTTI subject to degradation in time, questions would emerge about psychological continuity and personal identity. Suppose we adopt a criterion for personal identity that involves a high degree of psychological continuity and attributes an important role to memory in the construction of a personal narrative encompassing past and present experiences. Then the question is whether the longer-living agent without memory enhancement would be a unique agent or a series of physically continuous but psychologically discontinuous agents. Bernard Williams (1973) prospects a scenario in which, instead of living one long life, agents would live many shorter lives, in each of which their life goals would be significantly different. In the literature on immortality, Williams’s account of personal identity has been challenged because he seems to make continuity of life goals a necessary and sufficient criterion for personal identity, whereas it would be more plausible to make some room for reorientation of personal goals within an agent’s life. But the question is still a legitimate one: what would the effects of extended life with unchanged memory capacities be? Even assuming that the result of life extension would be the creation of a number of physically continuous agents with minimally overlapping memories and goals, it is not obvious that this would be a bad thing, or that these mini-lives (as Williams calls them) would be deprived of interest or meaning. In this scenario, agency would remain largely unchanged from how humans currently experience it, with the difference that the life of a person would not terminate with death, but with the fading of relevant memories and the exhaustion of relevant life goals. Within the life of a person, the necessity of choice or planning would not become necessarily redundant, and all the limitations to agency that make it valuable would still apply. One could take this point even further and claim that the mini-lives scenario is already instantiated (to some extent) in the lives of actual human agents. I do not remember what my goals and aspirations were when I was six, and the beliefs I have now about my younger selves are not based on information present in available episodic memories, but on testimony or inference. If longer-living agents were to preserve the cognitive limitations of contemporary humans, they would often fail to achieve their goals by failing to identify the most suitable means for the pursuit of those goals, due to the limitations in their instrumental rationality, and they would still be constrained by ignorance of relevant information and less-than-optimal inferential proc- AGENCY, LIFE EXTENSION, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE 49 esses. Unless enhancement technologies add to the quality of reasoning in humans, these limitations would not disappear in longer or immortal lives and would present obstacles to decision making and goal satisfaction. Limited time and limited cognitive capacities are not the only reasons why human agents can fail to obtain the targets they initially set for themselves. Agents can stop pursuing what they once desired because they no longer see those ends as desirable, or because they cannot bring themselves to pursue those ends, even if they continue to see them as desirable, due to weakness of will, apathy, chronic boredom, depression, etc. How would the postponement of death impact on psychological motivation? In order to answer this question, I shall introduce another standard objection to the desirability of life extension and immortality from the perspective of individual happiness, the boredom objection. The boredom objection, as the name suggests, is based on the thought that long-living agents will reach a point when they prefer to let themselves die rather than go on living, because plagued by a very pervasive and pernicious type of boredom. As a consequence, they will feel detachment from and indifference to the entirety of their experiences (Williams 1973; Nietzsche 1974). Thus, the efforts to extend significantly the human life span are misplaced. What causes boredom? In line with considerations about agency which we have already discussed, Williams argues that what makes us appreciate the variety of experiences in our lives is the desire to satisfy our life goals, that is, those goals whose attainment is so important to us that it is a sufficient reason for us to want to continue to live. This suggests that each individual finds rewarding only a limited range of experiences, based on the life goals that the individual wishes to achieve. In a longer life, agents will grow tired of the experiences they initially found rewarding, either because they have already satisfied the relevant life goals, or because they have become frustrated with their many unsuccessful attempts to satisfy them. If they identify new life goals and, as a consequence, start appreciating new types of experiences, then life will not be boring for them, but then the issue is whether they will continue to be the same agents, if they can be said to genuinely survive a radical shift of life goals. Notice that the structure of this argument bears resemblance to that of classical theological debates about the nature of heaven. Is it desirable to go to heaven? It would seem it isn’t. If we do not significantly change 5. Motivation and Boredom 50 LISA BORTOLOTTI when we go to heaven, we will not be likely to enjoy the same activity forever (no matter how pleasant), as we need a variety of stimuli to be kept engaged. Thus, heaven will be boring. If we do significantly change when we go to heaven, and become the sort of agents who can enjoy the same activity forever, then heaven will not be boring, but there won’t be a unique ‘we’. We wouldn’t really survive, as we would have to become a different type of agent in order to appreciate the gifts of heaven. The dilemma can of course be attacked on a number of issues: for instance, Chappell (2007) argues that there are activities that are good candidates for being eternally rewarding, even for creatures like us. The boredom objection has been very influential, and also widely criticized. For arguments against the necessity of boredom in the immortal life, see the responses to Williams’s argument by Wisnewski (2005), Levy (2005), Kekes (2002), and Quigley and Harris (2009). I am sympathetic to these criticisms (but see James 2009 and Burley 2008 for a defence of Williams), and I have argued elsewhere that Williams’s conclusion that chronic boredom is necessary in the immortal life is not plausible given the best available accounts of the onset of chronic boredom in contemporary psychology (see Bortolotti and Nagasawa 2009). Here I am not going to assess Williams’s argument in details. Rather, I am interested in how the boredom objection relates to the agency objection. Can the boredom objection be combined with the agency objection to challenge the view that life extension would be beneficial to the individual? Or is there a tension between the two objections? There is one way of reconstructing the boredom objection that seems to support the claim that in a longer life agency would be compromised. With significantly more time at their disposal, agents satisfy to exhaustion their life goals (and are left with no motivation to continue to live) or fail to achieve their life goals (and become frustrated by their many unsuccessful attempts). In either case, if boredom ensues, it is likely to affect the quality of the agents’ lives and their capacity to enjoy new experience and be engaged in activities they find rewarding. In particular, the capacity to develop new life goals after having exhausted one’s previous goals, or after having become disillusioned about the probability of satisfying them, requires strong motivation that might be precluded by a persistent state of boredom and detachment. AGENCY, LIFE EXTENSION, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE 51 But this reconstruction is only superficially satisfactory. If we keep in mind the spirit of the agency objection, i.e. that constrained agency makes life meaningful, then the boredom and agency objections seem to pull in different directions. Suppose we concede that chronic boredom is a more concrete possibility in a longer life, and poses more serious threats to agents’ motivation by affecting negatively the capacity to pursue one’s life goals or develop new ones. This modest conclusion can be accepted, and it strikes us as plausible, even if Williams’s contention that boredom is necessary feature of an immortal life is rejected. This means that living longer potentially makes things harder, rather than easier, for agents, creating rather than removing constraints. Consider the following case. Alan loves playing golf. This is not just a hobby, but he is motivated to play long hours every week because he wants to become a very proficient player, participate in tournaments, and achieve fame as a golfer. Let us suppose (rather unrealistically, but to make the case simpler) that this is the only life goal Alan has. In a few hundred years, if not less, Alan becomes a very proficient and successful golfer. Will he still find his life interesting and meaningful? He has achieved his life goal and he has become so good at playing golf that the challenges that motivated him to train long hours, read about golf, etc. no longer entice him. Alan has two options. He can identify a new life goal for himself to satisfy or find new interests in golf. This could happen if the game developed (as it is likely to happen) with slightly modified rules that would privilege different skills and would take some adjusting to, or if the experience was made significant in other ways, for instance if Alan decided to train other people and use his expertise to help them become proficient. In either case, Alan as an agent will have to get out of his comfort zone, and in some circumstances he will have to overcome obstacles. Adapting to life situations and developing creative responses seems to be an integral and extremely valuable feature of contemporary agency. We saw before, when we reviewed Carel’s ideas about the impact of illness and disability, that new obstacles can make life more challenging, but also more meaningful and not necessarily less enjoyable. The development of creative responses to life situations might become a necessary skill for all agents in an extended life, and not just for those afflicted by sudden setbacks, illness or disability. Assuming for the sake of this argument that 52 LISA BORTOLOTTI Summary and Conclusion the boredom objection works, in that the modest claim is plausible, having to sustain motivation proves to be more testing in a very long life than in a shorter one. The threat of boredom makes it the case that additional obstacles need to be overcome by longer-living agents in order for them to develop new life goals, or maintain their motivation to achieve their previous life goals. The agency objection in its crudest form has the following structure: (2) Significant life extension removes all obstacles to achieving life goals. There are obvious problems with the argument above. Premise (1) is implausible, as presumably there are other aspects of human life that make it meaningful, apart from constrained agency, and these other aspects might even be sufficient for life to have meaning. Premise (2) is simply false, as I showed in the previous discussion of life choices and goal satisfaction that some constraints will be preserved in a longer life. A more sophisticated version of the agency objection takes the previous considerations into account: (1*) There being obstacles to achieving life goals contributes to the meaningfulness of life. (2*) Significant life extension removes some obstacles to achieving life goals. (3*) In so far as agency is concerned, a significantly extended life is less meaningful than a shorter life. (3) A significantly extended life lacks meaning. (1) Without there being obstacles to achieving life goals, life lacks meaning. In the argument above, premise (1*) is plausible, given what we said about the aspects of agency that contribute to one’s sense of self and one’s AGENCY, LIFE EXTENSION, AND THE MEANING OF LIFE 53 sense of fulfilment. Premise (2*) is true, in so far as there are some cases in which it would be no longer necessary in an extended life to prioritise some choices. But the conclusion does not seem to be supported by the premises, unless we accept two implausible assumptions. One is that the meaningfulness of life is directly proportional to the extent to which agency is constrained. The other is that a longer life presents fewer obstacles to the achievement of life goals than a shorter life. The former assumption is too simplistic and would lead to the judgment that, ceteris paribus, given that having less time at one’s disposal is regarded as a constraint, lives that are shorter and in which agents are aware that their lives are temporally constrained to that extent, are more meaningful than lives that are not so constrained. The latter assumption does not take into account that longerliving agents can encounter new and different obstacles to the achievement of their life goals. Both of the assumptions made in the sophisticated version of the agency objection rest on the view that the meaningfulness of life admits of degrees. I find this view plausible, but have no time to defend it here. Authors who believe that meaningfulness in life is an on-off notion will have independent reasons to reject the agency objection as formulated above. In the previous discussion I explained why I want to resist the agency objection. I showed that the constraints that apply to an extended life are different from those that apply to a shorter life, but are not necessarily fewer or less significant. In particular, one obstacle for longer-living agents is represented by the difficulty in sustaining the motivation to achieving their life goals. Will an extended life be more vulnerable to chronic boredom? If the fear of chronic boredom is justified, then it is because we fear that the exhaustion of life goals or the frustration at failing to satisfy life goals will undermine agents’ capacity to develop new goals or their motivation to continue engaging in the activities that previously made them happy and gave meaning to their lives. The spectrum of boredom is not supporting the agency objection, as it suggests that in an extended life agents would have to overcome new obstacles. To sum up, considerations based on the nature of agency provide no convincing reasons to believe that significant life extension would be undesirable for individuals. In particular, the relationship between constrained 54 LISA BORTOLOTTI agency, chronic boredom, and the meaningfulness of life is a complex one. As far as agency is concerned, further difficulties on the route to achieving life goals might add to the meaningfulness of life rather than subtract from it. University of Birmingham A CKNOWLEDGEMENT Lisa Bortolotti *I acknowledge the intellectual support of the Death and Dying in the Twenty-First Century Research Group based at the University of Birmingham and the financial support I received from the Australian Government as an Endeavour Research Fellow from July to December 2008. 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