I Don't Believe in a "Full" Life
On disability, transhumanism, and life being "good enough"
There is a common sentiment in bioethics that treating diseases and preventing disabilities is good, but enhancing ourselves beyond some idealized, platonic form of “the healthy human body” would be unethical.
This view of ethics is deictic. It’s pointing to this platonic ideal as its lode stone. Like the needle on a compass, the “ethical” direction changes as you slide past. Not yet at the ideal? Keep going. Beyond the ideal? Turn around.
But this framing implies two things: both a ceiling, beyond which we shouldn’t try to enhance ourselves; and a metric, where falling short of achieving it implies that your life is now “not good enough” or “not full.” Through no fault of your own, just by accumulating enough misfortune, you may find yourself unable to live “a full life” compared to others. Like the bundle of grapes hanging over Tantalus, that platonic ideal becomes permanently out of reach.
I reject this entire framing. I reject the idea that there is some ideal platonic form of “the healthy human body” or “the full human life” that everyone should strive for (but not exceed).
My values are directional: there is a single direction for “good things” (up) and that’s it. I am not bound by any particular spot on the y-axis.
Life does not need an upper bound. The minimal possible life that is just barely “good enough” to be worth living is at the bottom, and then everything good on top of that minimum just makes things better and better.
Fortunes come and go. People find love, develop their passions, and start families. Those same people also experience loss, illness, and disability. Some events bring both good and bad things, while others are just tragedies with no silver lining. Lopping a few points off the total “life is good” score doesn’t mean that life isn’t still worth living.
Something can be worth a different number of “goodness points” to different people. For example, I have hobbies that bring a great deal of joy to my life, which other people don’t care about at all. That’s fine.
Meanwhile, other things are near-universal values—e.g. not having a terminal illness. (You can’t have a “good” life if you’re dead, by definition.)
What does it matter if your score is a little different than mine? It’s not a contest. Nobody’s keeping score. There’s no cosmic bean counter judging us both from the sidelines. Life is whatever you make of it.
We are all “disabled” if we define disability by our ability to fly. No human body has wings; we have to build machines to fly us around instead.
...But it would be really awesome if we did have wings. We build airplanes because flying is good. Being born as a flightless land mammal doesn’t change that “flying = good” value judgment.
We are all “disabled” if we define ourselves by the standard of having four arms instead of two. When I’m confronted with a problem that requires more than two arms’ worth of dexterity, I have to figure something out. I get some clamps to hold something in place, I make two trips while bringing the groceries inside, or I ask for help. My husband and I have a running joke in our household where we often call out to each other for help with a “four-armed problem.”
...But it would be awesome if we did have four arms. My values don’t change just because my genome’s body plan only gives me two arms and two legs. Being a tetrapod doesn’t change my “more dexterity = good” value judgment.
The limits of our biology should not limit our values. They should not limit what we consider good in life.
After all, the future is boundless. There is no ceiling. Why would I quibble over a few goodness points in 2025, compared to how good life will be for our descendants? They will look back and think of us and our standard of living the way we think of cavemen now.
With an unbounded standard for what life could be, the idea of “a full life” becomes meaningless. Full? Compared to what? How do you calculate the “percent fullness” of a chunk of infinity? If you try, you just round off to 0% full. I’m sure in the far future, when all of humanity is miles above both of us on the “life is good” y-axis, they’ll wonder how we ever managed to carry on and be happy. But even they will round off to 0% full, compared to the column of infinity that awaits above.
On the scale of the far future, we are standing at the bottom of an abyss, watching mountains drift by.
Let’s build a plane and go catch some.