Abstract
If humans eventually attain the ability to create new life forms, how will it affect the value of life? This is one of several questions that can be sources of concern when discussing synthetic life, but is the concern justified? In an attempt to answer this question, I have analyzed some possible reasons why an ability to create synthetic life would threaten the value of life in general (that is, not just of the synthetic creations), to see if they really give us reason to worry. The main conclusion is that it is unlikely that a future human ability to create life will really have a great negative impact on these characteristics of life. It therefore seems unlikely that the value of life will be negatively affected by the ability to create synthetic life, though it is possible that the properties in question will be less salient in the synthetic life and thus that the value of the synthetic life will be lower than that of existing life, which in turn can lead to a disturbing difference in value between different kinds of life.
Highlights
Will the value of life be negatively affected if human beings acquire the ability to create life from non-living material? In this article, I will take a close look at some phenomena that have three things in common: They are closely associated with life, they are commonly seen as conferring value to the entities that possess them, and they may be negatively affected by a human ability to create life
The purpose of this investigation is to find out whether each of these properties of life are threatened by a future human ability to create life, and if that will threaten the value of life
The study concludes that even though some of these properties may be questioned in the new life forms, this will not affect the value of existing life or of life in general
Summary
Will the value of life be negatively affected if human beings acquire the ability to create life from non-living material? In this article, I will take a close look at some phenomena that have three things in common: They are closely associated with life, they are commonly seen as conferring value to the entities that possess them, and they may be negatively affected by a human ability to create life. This means that as long as it is voluntary to learn about life to the degree required to recreate it (which would reasonably far exceed what, for example, may be required to graduate high school even with top grades), and as long as it is all about the personal feeling of mystery, it will be easy to opt-out of this knowledge for those who so desire and continue to marvel at the mysteries of life It is a different issue if one’s valuing of life is diminished by the mere knowledge that someone knows enough about life to recreate it. If we still accept that the degree of human influence determines how natural something is, and that being less natural makes something less valuable – two assumptions that as we saw, are far from obvious – the question remains what this means for the value of life if and when we learn to create synthetic life. That the most important question is how we treat the life we create, not how it has come about (Douglas et al, 2013; Cabak Redei, 2021)
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