Are you immortalized? Never mind, you are still a moral person!
Posted by attilachordash on August 18, 2006
The first generation of partially immortalized people will form a minority. Then questions will emerge about the social status of human beings under continuous regeneration treatment.
In current moral philosophy, there exists a received view of the moral person, which was worked out in John Rawls’s Theory of Justice. The moral person could only be the subject of rights and duties. It is a range property: a person is a moral person or not, there is not any hierarchical moral difference between moral 
persons. According to Rawls’s definition there are two necessary conditions of being a moral person: the person must have a capacity to form, pursue and revise a conception of the good and ii., be capable of having a sense of justice. Rawls, John: Theory of Justice, 1999.,p. 442. He defines goodness as rationality: if a man is capable of forming a rational plan of life, then „a persons’s good is the successful execution of a rational plan of life” Rawls, John: Theory of Justice, 1999., p. 380 The presupposition of this condition is lifetime perspective, taking the life of one person as a temporal whole. With the pimm thought experiment an argument could be formulated against this „plan of life” criterion of Rawls’s definiton of a moral person.
i., Because of the unforeseen duration of one‘s lifetime, one‘s unlimited lifespan, the person under treatment is not able to consider his/her life as a temporal whole, so per definitionem he/she cannot form a rational plan of life.
ii., Immortalized persons are moral persons. We could not think intuitively that they are not moral persons just because they are under treatment.
Conclusion: „the plan of life” necessary condition of being a moral person is too strict, and a weaker condition is needed.
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