The morality of immortality

It’s been something that’s been bugging me for a while now. It started with a discussion on an atheism forum, where trashing moral theories is a favorite past time. While having denounced the deeply ingrained idea of a supreme entity as unnecessary some time ago, I still had trouble accepting that there could never be a widely accepted normative moral theory (i.e. a set of moral imperatives that most rational human beings could agree on).

I have come to believe that any species that does not place value in its long term survival is doomed to fail, so I set out to provide a logical argument to support the view that the minimum set of rules that we should all abide to should be one that ensures a sustainable way of life. Many of us comprehend the inherent failings of capitalism, a system focused on the next financial cycle. The basic idea behind my investigation was to prove that any moral theory that ignores the long term implications of our actions dooms us to extinction. So I started decomposing the essence of normative moral theories, in terms that an engineer like myself could make sense of. The result was not as easy to read and understand as I hoped for, but at least it made sense to me.

Having decomposed normative moral theories (NMTs) into something I could grasp, it should be fairly straightforward to put forth my own understanding of what a sustainable NMT would be and to show that any NMT that did not take into consideration my arguments would lead to an unsustainable way of life. In essence, I thought that it would be relatively easy to show that rational beings that do not care for their own or their fellow’s well-being are doomed to failure and that ignoring the effect of our actions to the environment that sustains us can’t be justified under any conditions.

Of course, thinking about a more or less obvious statement and putting forth unquestionable arguments to support it are completely different beasts, so it would really take an entire book to convince anyone that a long-term viewpoint is absolutely necessary. In fact, I am not even sure the argument can be made in a way that any rational critic would have to accept it. Maybe one day I will have both the time and the energy to delve into it further, and come up with something that few will ever read and probably no one will be affected by, or maybe not. But I do believe that a one-way street does exist, no matter how wide and all-encompassing it may be. It is the way of sustainability, based on the idea of full exploitation of all available potential, be it the potential of a Chinese farmer’s child to be the next Einstein or the potential of an obscure rainforest bug to provide the cure of a yet unknown disease.

I hope I can one day delve into these thoughts a bit more deeply, but if I don’t I am convinced that humanity will discover their truth one day. In fact, maybe someone I haven’t even heard of has put them forth more eloquently than I possibly could. In any case, unless we start thinking about what our actions mean for the people who will inhabit this place a million years from now, I believe we are doomed into a well-deserved extinction. And we are simply not built to accept such a fate.