Article Text
Abstract
Räsänen draws a distinction between chronological age and biological age and argues that biological ageing is (sometimes) desirable. To demonstrate this, he asks us to consider the case of April, who like Karel Čapek’s Elina Makropulos, has stopped biologically ageing. Unlike Makropulos, though, April’s biological ageing was halted before puberty, so she will never mature into adulthood. Räsänen contends this case shows ageing can be desirable, but this equivocates between maturing and ageing. Here I argue biological ageing, or the wear and tear normally associated with chronological ageing, is prima facie undesirable, but that maturing can be prima facie desirable.
- Disabled Persons
- Ethics
- Moral Status
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Contributors Ws is the sole contributor to this work.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Linked Articles
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Is ageing undesirable? An ethical analysis
- Moral case for legal age change
- The International Olympic Committee Consensus Statement on age determination in high-level young athletes
- Age-dependent prognostic value of exercise capacity and derivation of fitness-associated biologic age
- Biological ageing and the risks of all-cause and cause-specific mortality among people with diabetes: a prospective cohort study
- What a drag it is getting old: a response to Räsänen
- Impact of screening on cervical cancer incidence in England: a time trend analysis
- Epigenetic clocks in neurodegenerative diseases: a systematic review
- Assessing the impact of adjusting for maturity in weight status classification in a cross-sectional sample of UK children
- Are objective measures of physical capability related to accelerated epigenetic age? Findings from a British birth cohort