How do we make a longer life a moral one?

Moral Maze

BBC

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.4 • 623 Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 2022

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We can add ten years to our lives if we chose, we’re told this week by scientists who have measured the effects of tweaking our lifestyles. The downside is we’ll need to give up meat and eat a lot of lentils to do it. Oh, and start very young. It won’t be easy – but is there a moral imperative to do it? Elsewhere, science is forging ahead with new, possibly less onerous ways to help us live longer. Researchers in Japan this week unveiled a serum that can halt aging, though so far only in mice. And Silicon Valley is reported to be full of start-ups working on rejuvenation techniques. But is a longer life a more moral life? If we get those extra years will they be worth the effort? Was Kingsley Amis right when he wrote: "No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home" ? Or is it irresponsible to indulge in life-shortening activities that you happen to enjoy, if they increase the reliance you may (sooner than you hope) be placing on the state?

As a society we’re living longer than our parents, and much longer than our grandparents. But there are wide disparities. On average the rich make older bones than the poor, and a BMJ article this week deplored the fact that life expectancy is actually in decline in many deprived communities in the UK. Perhaps we have a collective moral duty to even that out, but it will be expensive. Who’s going to pay for the pensions and the care homes? Is the individual ambition to live to 100 intrinsically selfish and immoral when it imposes such burdens on others? With Repotting Your Life author Frances Edmonds; Longevity expert and London Business School Professor Andrew Scott; Director of the Free Market think tank IEA - Mark Littlewood and Political Economist Jeevan Sandher.

Produced by Olive Clancy

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:05.0	Good evening. The Japanese have a word for it, Uruguay, which has come to mean the harm
0:10.3	inflicted on a country by its old people. Lots of Japanese are old. Soon it said nearly half the
0:16.1	population will be over 65, most economically unproductive, with millions suffering chronic and expensive diseases like dementia.
0:23.8	It's not quite so marked here, but almost every country is experiencing dramatic increases in life expectancy.
0:30.5	And still we want more. Every week there are new studies that purport to show how we can prolong our lives still further.
0:37.2	The latest include drinking three cups of real coffee, no more, no less a day,
0:42.1	having more hot baths, and eating a particular kind of mushroom,
0:45.7	which works on animals, apparently, makes every mouse a Methuselah, by all accounts.
0:50.8	It's routinely portrayed as a boon, but is it?
0:53.7	For the individual, do we get more out of
0:55.8	life by living longer, put more into it, for that matter? What about society as a whole,
1:00.5	with fewer and fewer younger people coping with more and more geriatrics, using up resources
1:05.4	and hogging the wealth? Is longevity good for us? That's our moral maze tonight, the panel.
1:30.5	Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and interreligious studies at Edinburgh University, the feminist author Ella Weillan, the historian Tim Stanley, and Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation. Matthew, you're, I think, the oldest of theists here. Are you looking forward to long old age?
1:39.2	Well, yes, I am. You know, I'm 61 and I have two reasonably healthy, active, lively parents. And I feel incredibly privileged about that. And I'd like everyone to have that privilege.
1:46.6	Ella, I hesitate to say you're young enough to be his daughter.
1:50.4	Well, I'm excited about getting old. I think we should look at longevity with a positive lens,
1:55.2	but the problem is we malign old people left right and centre these days. We call them all kinds
1:59.8	of B words, bed blockers,
2:02.0	burdens, boomers. And I think actually we should start flipping the switch and celebrating
2:07.2	old life more and perhaps reining in some of the brattish behaviour of my generation.
	...

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