WARNING.

Abridged Wisdom Alert.

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Excerpted from "L'Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?" by Leon Kass

....The core question is this: Is it really true that longer life for individuals is an unqualified good?

…. How much more life do we want, assuming it to be healthy and vigorous? Assuming that it were up to us to set the human life span, where would or should we set the limit and why?

The simple answer is that no limit should be set. Life is good, and death is bad….most public advocates of conquering aging deny any such greediness. They hope not for immortality, but for something reasonable—just a few more years.

How many years are reasonably few? Let us start with ten. Which of us would find unreasonable or unwelcome the addition of ten healthy and vigorous years to his or her life, years like those between ages thirty and forty? We could learn more, earn more, see more, do more.

Maybe we should ask for five years on top of that? Or ten? Why not fifteen, or twenty, or more?

If we can’t immediately land on the reasonable number of added years, perhaps we can locate the principle. What is the principle of reasonableness? Time needed for our plans and projects yet to be completed? Some multiple of the age of a generation, say, that we might live to see great–grandchildren fully grown? Some notion—traditional, natural, revealed—of the proper life span for a being such as man? We have no answer to this question….

....lacking a standard of reasonableness, we fall back on our wants and desires….the simple answer is the best: we want to live and live, and not to wither and not to die. For most of us…. the desire to prolong the life span (even modestly) must be seen as expressing a desire never to grow old and die….

Some, of course, eschew any desire for longer life…. For them, the ideal life span would be our natural (once thought three–, now known to be) fourscore and ten, or if by reason of strength, fivescore….

....Who would not want to avoid senility, crippling arthritis, the need for hearing aids and dentures, and the degrading dependencies of old age? But, in the absence of these degenerations, would we remain content to spurn longer life? Would we not become even more disinclined to exit?….

Montaigne saw it clearly:

I notice that in proportion as I sink into sickness, I naturally enter into a certain disdain for life. I find that I have much more trouble digesting this resolution when I am in health than when I have a fever. Inasmuch as I no longer cling so hard to the good things of life when I begin to lose the use and pleasure of them, I come to view death with much less frightened eyes....

…. Perhaps mortality is not simply an evil, perhaps it is even a blessing—not only for the welfare of the community, but even for us as individuals. How could this be?

I wish to make the case for the virtues of mortality. Against my own strong love of life, and against my even stronger wish that no more of my loved ones should die, I aspire to speak truth to my desires by showing that the finitude of human life is a blessing for every human individual, whether he knows it or not.

He can "speak truth to his desires" till the cows come home, for all of me. Just stop speaking for all the rest of us.