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Longevity vs. Reproduction

It has already been established that we are not morally obliged to see that potential people become manifest through reproduction or gestation. It is not immoral nor unnatural to prefer your own long life over that of the existence of embryos or possible children and grandchildren; the living human being is more important than any potential human being.

Unfortunately, there is a strand of thinking characterized by the Catholic philosophy of "natural law", which maintains that whoever deliberately frustrates the design of nature is perverse and thus wrong. For example, the use of the genitals for any other purpose than procreation is wrong: masturbation, homosexual relations, and heterosexual activity that does not attempt at procreation is wrong. What the "natural law" argument fails to account for is the biological and tactile-kinesthetic fact that genital activities can create pleasure and/or intimacy between people, which are valuable and useful experiences that are an aid to human relations and survival. Therefore, sexuality is not just a matter of reproduction and the genitals are not exclusively for procreation. Sexual activity is an important aspect of human experience and though reproduction is an important part of that aspect, it is not the sole purpose and meaning of it.

Reproduction is not a moral obligation, whether with regards to creating new and valuable human life, or with regards to one's "biological destiny" as a "naturally" breeding and moribund being. However, reproduction is pragmatic in many ways and can be life enriching by enabling many possibilities for self-esteem, meaning, and sharing in a mutual group life. Partially for these reasons, reproduction probably would not stop if people's lives were extended by many years, especially as these years may well be spent youthful and fertile. A world of extremely long-lived human beings, who only met with death through irreversible killing or suicide, would eventually overpopulate the Earth if people continued to procreate human beings who were also long-lived. In this case, reproduction would be a problem which human beings would have to address. Short of finding enough resources and space to support more and more human beings, the species would need to make individual choices regarding whether they would opt out of reproduction, at least for a time. This does not mean that long-lived humans should never reproduce, as a sterile, finite group of long-lived individuals would spell doom for the species as a whole. Reproduction allows for the continual existence of human beings as a species, whereas long-life allows a continued existence for individual human beings, so in such a scenario people would have to be capable of managing the fundamental exigencies of birth and death or else these exigencies could become out of control, resulting in too few or too many people.

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