'Life-Suspending Technologies, Cryonics, and Catastrophic Risks' by Andrea Sauchelli in (2024) 30 Science and Engineering Ethics comments
This paper explores one way of empowering future generations by giving them causal efficacy over at least some members of their previous generations. Such an empowering, I argue, would be beneficial, as it contributes to diminishing a catastrophic and existential risk factor, namely the expressions of insufficient concern that some present influential individuals and institutions demonstrate towards the welfare of future people—a form of what I call ‘generational egoism’. The type of technology analysed in this paper, which would reduce the temporal parochialism of the present generation, can be characterised as a life-suspending or life-extending technology, and cryonics is one of the most well-known examples.
Although this essay focuses on the risks posed by climate change, I find it useful to deploy the broader concepts of ‘catastrophic’ and ‘existential risk’ to discuss the range of benefits related to cryonics or other relevantly similar life-suspending technologies. The reason is that such technologies may mitigate not only climate change-related risks but also risks of a broader and more heterogeneous category, namely, those risks related to some present individuals’ or collectives’ lack of (sufficient) concern for future people. More specifically, my argument includes the claim that in the case of certain catastrophic and existential risks, a general attitude—a form of generational egoism—is at least a risk factor, where a risk factor is something that causally increases the likelihood of a risk (see final appendix). In the case of an attitude or motivation being a risk factor, I will mean that such an attitude or motivation underlies actions increasing the likelihood of certain risks. However, under specific circumstances, some features of this attitude can become a security factor (i.e., something that causally decreases the likelihood of a risk). Cryonics or other similar life-suspending technology, which can give rise to such circumstances, may thus be considered a security factor for at least certain catastrophic and existential risks or risk factors. If I am right, insofar as we are interested in promoting what is beneficial to humanity, we would have a good (defeasible) reason to invest more widely in developing and making more available such technologies.
Unfortunately, at least in the academic philosophical literature, the ethical and practical impact of such technologies seems to be severely under-researched. I think that this is unfortunate and that, since life-suspending technologies would be extremely beneficial to humanity, they deserve more discussion. This paper is structured as follows. The first section briefly introduces the notions of catastrophic and existential risks. The second section of the paper clarifies what is meant by ‘cryonics’. The key aspect of cryonics relevant to this paper is that it may allow people existing at a certain time to somehow recommence or restart their lives at a later time, perhaps even significantly later (e.g., at a time significantly distant temporally from when they started the procedure). I wish to emphasise that cryonics (1) is here discussed qua life-suspending or life-extending technology—any other technology with the same functions would play the same theoretical role in this paper—and (2) need not be understood as a technology primarily intended to enable humans to achieve immortality. Even if we could never become immortal or everlasting, we would still have reasons to develop and make life-suspending technologies widely available. The third section outlines the general argument that cryonics is a security factor for a heterogeneous set of catastrophic and existential risks. The fourth section focuses on one of these risks: climate change. In the same section, I articulate in more detail some aspects of the problem of climate change that relate to its intergenerational character and that would be mitigated by the widespread use of cryonics. Some objections are then discussed in the final section.
