Fountain of Youth Argument

dawnmathieson · **Posted:** Fri Apr 22, 2011 12:50 am

This may be in edit. I will always try to refine my arguments.

Imagine you found a fountain of youth. The natural human instinct would be to take its water yourself and to give some to your loved ones. However, drinking from the fountain of youth cannot be universalised as a principle, a. If every human lived infinitely and in reasonable health then we would likely destroy the planet at a greatly accelerated rate and end up killing the human race along with it. You could adequately argue that giving immortality to the entire world would actually be an immoral act by most ethical theory. Surely, it is at the very least undesirable to share the Fountain of Youth with the world.

Now this causes quite a problem. If we apply this principle to the prolonging of human lives we reach a similar barrier. For example, the advancement of medical research has definitely increased the life expectancy. i would desire the best level of treatment for myself and loved ones and hope we all lived to a very old age. If everyone on the planet lived to a very old age there would undoubtedly be many problems including food shortages. Desiring old age for myself and loved ones but not for everyone is an immoral desire but a natural one. Our desire for health care and cures to be readily available for us and our loved ones is arguably less of a moral one and more of a selfish one. This draws up many questions as if we cannot justify the right to life universally or by utilitarian principles how can we justify it at all? Thank you to Arising UK for his points on restricting the number of 'mouths to feed' being justifiable x

Typist · **Joined:** Wed Feb 24, 2010 11:12 am **Posts:** 3330

We can only hope that as we grow older, we might grow wiser.

Perhaps 200 year old people would have gotten the consumer culture out of their system?

dawnmathieson · **Posted:** Sat Apr 23, 2011 6:04 pm

Typist wrote:

We can only hope that as we grow older, we might grow wiser.

Perhaps 200 year old people would have gotten the consumer culture out of their system?

Unfortunately i doubt that. Everytime we do an action we rewrite our neural pathways and adapt to it. Our brains give us pleasurable drugs when we do day to day activities so we keep doing them. We eat a good meal we feel happy. We have a shower we feel happy. We talk to a friend we feel happy. The more we do an action the more our brain adapts to produce 'happiness' when we do it. This is how people become addicted to things as regardless of the thing itself the body produces happiness everytime we do it because it assumes that it is a beneficial action. In this way people can become addicted to anything at all. We can even become addicted to pain if the associations are right and we experience it enough. Most people are addicted to consumerism and we are addicted to money. We get a buzz from acquiring currency without necessarily needing the end product of buying something we want. We get a buzz off of buying something we want without needing to use it. Money is an addiction just as much as anything else. In this way, consumerism would be so ingrained into our brain by that age by the repetition of action that it would be even worse than it is now x

Alchemyst · **Posted:** Wed May 18, 2011 12:22 am

If the fountain of youth made us all immortal then we would have no logical need to reproduce, so it might work out if we could somehow overcome our natural instinct to have children. Well, that's probably just the woman's instinct!

There is a contradiction in our society whereby we seek to increase life expectancy through health care but simultaneously regard an ageing population as problematic.

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