Month: August 2018

Open Lifespan and knowing our age in Rawls’s Original Position

Another quick post, from the beach of Lake Balaton, stealing some precious family vacation time, also our train leaves soon for Budapest [1]. On the other hand I’ve been thinking on this topic for a while now. In our last post entitled Open lifespan as a coherent life plan enables super-agency we already mentioned one important concept of John Rawls, the concept of rational life plan. Today we go much deeper into Rawls, behind the life plan concept, at the heart of his foundational justice theory.
Our foreground argumentation deals with the Rawlsian ‘veil of ignorance’ in the ‘original position’: a thought experiment leading to a just society.
Our background deeper question: How would knowing our chronological age impact our impartiality, self-interest and our self-assessment?

Continue reading “Open Lifespan and knowing our age in Rawls’s Original Position”

Open lifespan as a coherent life plan enables super-agency

Similarly to my previous post, Open lifespan needs an open narrative: life as a series, the indirect philosophical background of this post is the meaning of life question. But the direct philosophical foreground is ‘agency'[1].

Introduction

In ‘Agency, Life Extension, and the Meaning of Life‘, professional philosopher Lisa Bortolotti argues that the so-called agency objection against a loosely defined life extension technology should be rejected.

Briefly put, the agency objection argues that one important component of the meaningfulness of human life is being constrained as an agent and since ‘life extension’ removes these constraints it undermines this meaningfulness of lived lives. Continue reading “Open lifespan as a coherent life plan enables super-agency”

Open lifespan needs an open narrative: life as a series

Trying a quicker, less detailed blog format now, maybe because I’m writing from the beach, by Lake Balaton, and using family vacation time. The philosophical background of this post is the ‘meaning of life’ question, and I will be dealing a lot later with this question in the context of open lifespan. The foreground is aesthetic, uses analogies from cinematography.

1. Closed Lifespan -> Closed Narrative -> Life as a Feature Length Movie

Philosopher Joshua Seachris thinks ‘narrative ending links closely with the meaning of life’.  Continue reading “Open lifespan needs an open narrative: life as a series”

Open or closed lifespan: that is the question, not mortality vs. immortality

Perhaps the most frequent, most misleading and hence, most annoying framing problem around biomedically achieved healthy lifespan extension is that the headline making machinery is using the term immortality without any restrictions when only discussing the first detailed technological plans and the articulating will behind breaking the closed lifespan barrier of ~120 years or so. What do I have in mind? Here’s some pointed questions to consider when deciding you might be one of the people tempted to scream immortality too soon: Continue reading “Open or closed lifespan: that is the question, not mortality vs. immortality”