One argument in favor of limited life spans

Last time I ran into that argument, Fidel Castro was the example given. My reply was this:

If you heard a proposal to kill Fidel Castro, would you approve? Maybe. (Though even that's not quite as simple as it sounds, when you consider things like precedent and ethical prohibitions.)

If the proposal involved dropping a hydrogen bomb on Havana, would you still approve? Of course not!

This, I claimed, sufficiently refutes the idea that getting rid of a handful of bad apples justifies the death of everyone.

It gets rid of good leaders, too. As Marcus Aurelius put it when I asked him about it, "I just don't know what would've happened to Rome if I'd had a finite lifespan."

Think of it as preventing the long-term operation of differential compound interest.

Another argument against a universal cull: it is also an absolutely reliable way of getting rid of saints.

We could get rid of bad leaders by launching a coordinated nuclear attack on the relevant country. This is pretty reliable. Why not? Because if collateral damage. But that argument also applies to banning longevity tech.

This might not be a good enough reason to oppose longevity tech, but I don't think it's easily disposed of.

I think it is quite easily disposed of. Either the lifespans available at the present day just happen to be exactly what they should be, to be a suitable last resort for culling the truly evil by culling everyone, or they should be less, or they should be more. The first is merely status quo bias, the second requires implementing some shortevity measures (e.g. spread cholera everywhere and outlaw treatment for it), and the third requires longevity research.

Inevitable death might even work the other way also. I wonder if any attempts to overthrow Mugabe have been deterred by the thought that he will probably be dead within ten years anyway?

A relevant cartoon. (Mostly just the last few panels.)

/me shrugs

Bad leaders can also have equally bad successors.

Death gets rid of good leaders and bad leaders equally. Other methods are more likely to get rid of bad leaders. As such, death of leaders would result in an increase in the density of bad leaders.

I think it suffers from the same lack of data that other similar arguments have. Do we know for certain that bad leaders are capable of remaining both bad and in leadership for multiple centuries at a time? We've never seen it done.

Arguably, the reason bad leaders persist as long as they do is the fact that the populace does not have sufficient motivation and knowledge to oppose them. Immortal citizens could be expected to be exceptionally zealous about protecting their freedoms. They would also accumulate experience over time and thus be harder to fool.

It will be interesting to see what happens to science when old, respected and wrong scientists don't just die out.

On the other hand, average lifespan and science have both advanced tremendously in the twentieth century. So we may need actual data.

This problem can be solved by using two referents for "immortality." That is, it is possible to stop people from dying by age or disease in such a way that they can still be shot.