• Ethics

In a sophisticated student essay, Isabelle L Robertson considers the possibility of using germline editing to extend the human lifespan. There is a longstanding debate in the bioethics and enhancement literature about the ethics of human lifespan extension, but much of this debate is in fairly abstract terms, in that the ethics tend not to depend very much on exactly how lifespan extension is achieved. Robertson’s contribution is to argue that it can matter very much how we extend the human lifespan, and that doing so by editing the human genome would be unethical.

Robertson notes that an intervention that enabled people to live ‘a full generation longer (15–25 years) than those in the same birth cohort’, even if safe, would not be an unmitigated good. In the elderly, loneliness is linked to a number of risks to physical and mental health, and outliving one’s peers contributes to loneliness. People with enhanced lifespans, if in a relatively small minority, can be expected to outlive more of their peers and for longer, and so to experience a significantly reduced quality of life in their later years. For an individual weighing up whether or not to extend their own lifespan using drugs, this need not present a problem: one could choose to extend one’s life if one thinks the benefits of doing so outweigh the drawbacks, otherwise one could abstain. Extending lifespan through germline genetic editing, however, would take place when the human whose lifespan is to be extended is an embryo. As such, the subject is not able to choose whether or not to extend her own lifespan, taking into account the benefits and drawbacks of doing so. Extending someone’s lifespan in this way commits her to all the good and bad that a longer life entails, whether she likes it …