According to Longtermism, our acts’ expected influence on the expected value of the world is mainly determined by their effects in the far future. There is, given total utilitarianism, a straightforward argument for Longtermism due to the enormous number of people that might exist in the future, but this argument does not work on person-affecting views. In this paper, we will argue that these views might also lead to Longtermism if Prudential Longtermism is true. Prudential Longtermism holds for a person (...) if and only if our acts’ overall influence on that person’s expected well-being is mainly determined by the acts’ effects in the far future. We argue that (due to a small chance of anti-ageing and uploading) there could be an enormous amount of prudential value for some contemporary person in the far future and that value may be so large that it dominates their overall expectation of lifetime well-being. (shrink)

Cryopreservation presents the possibility of circumventing irreversible death through the body’s extreme cooling. Once cooled, this ‘cryon’ is then stored at sub-zero temperatures until medical kno...

This essay examines the fantasy of life extension enabled through the transfer of one’s consciousness to new, cloned bodies in the event of disease, accident, or old age. This vision has recently been dramatized in both fiction and film, bearing witness to the power of this imaginary scenario. This eventuality would raise wide-ranging ethical issues, which speculative bioethics should begin to contemplate. Interestingly, it is young adult fiction that has recently provided an extensive and consistent cluster of novels dealing not (...) only with this topic but also with the interrelated notion of clones purposely grown to replace a loved one, with a concomitant array of further ethical concerns. These and related topics will be examined here through the lens of fiction and recent theoretical work on future biotechnological scenarios. (shrink)

Cryonics is the preservation of legally dead human bodies at the temperature of liquid nitrogen in the hope that future technologies will be able to revive them. In philosophical debates surrounding this practice, arguments often focus on prudential implications of cryopreservation, or moral arguments on a societal level. In this paper, we claim that this debate is incomplete, since it does not take into account a significant relational concern about cryonics. Specifically, we argue that attention should be paid to the (...) potential implications of cryopreservation for the mourning processes of surviving loved ones. Cryopreservation increases the likelihood of disruption of the practical and mental tasks involved in a successful mourning process, which can negatively impact survivors of the cryopreserved patient. To illustrate my argument, we will draw on a case study from the 2019 documentaryHope Frozen. We aim to introduce this concern, in order to gain a more complete view on the potential implications of cryopreservation. (shrink)

The human issue with the concept of finality constitutes a fundamental platform for the philosophical concept of transhumanism. This paper addresses the historical-philosophical perspective of transhumanism with emphasis put on the 18th and 19th centuries, whereby possible anticipatory actions with respect to transhumanist thought are analyzed. In this sense, the need for a philosophical reflection on transhumanism is justified. The main part of this paper is aimed at philosophical and ethical questions related to cryonics as being one of the most (...) dominant and feasible transhumanist practices. The characteristics and critical analysis of cryonics focuses on the problem of understanding death from a philosophical standpoint. (shrink)