Abstract
This chapter explores some of the similarities and differences between the ageing of people and of other things, in particular the artefacts that we create to serve our ends. When we describe people as ‘ageing’, we usually mean that they have arrived at a senior stage of life, often with the added implication that their health or capacities are declining. Many artefacts, too, possess something analogous to a life cycle, and the terms in which we describe their ageing typically refer to their gradual loss of functionality. Yet, the value retained by old people and old things is significantly affected by the fact that the former but not the latter are ends in themselves; therefore, only objects can wholly lose their worth and become disposable. Where old artefacts continue to be valued, or acquire the honourable status of ‘antiques’, this is commonly on account of the intimate reminders they provide us of now-deceased people.
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Notes
- 1.
The maximum lifespan of human beings is thought to be around 120 years (Cristofalo et al. 1999, p. 99). The oldest person whose age has been reliably recorded is Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122.
- 2.
This raises the obvious difficulty that persons with severe dementia are no longer rational beings and so appear to fail to meet what Kant regards as a necessary (as well as sufficient) condition for entry to the kingdom of ends. Yet, in effect, we grant them honorary status in the kingdom, in virtue of what they have formerly been.
- 3.
If similar doubts are not usually raised about the continuing identity of human beings in view of the parallel process of cell replacement, this is because mental continuity, most crucially in the form of memory, is generally assumed to be more important to the preservation of identity, or at any rate capable of taking up the slack. (The same is also true of at least the higher animals.) It cannot be taken for granted, however, that even mental continuity would be a sufficient preservative of identity in the more drastic scenario of the brain that has been replaced by a computer; here our current intuitions about identity may be inadequate to determine any firm conclusions.
- 4.
W.B. Yeats, ‘The Tower’, lines 1–4.
- 5.
For example, Shelley in his sonnet Ozymandias refers to Egypt as an ‘antique land’ – a land, that is to say, that is home to an ancient culture and a preserver of ancient things, such as the ‘two vast and trunkless legs of stone’ standing in the desert which form the focus of the poet’s meditations on time and transience.
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Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to David E. Cooper and to Michael Bavidge for their invaluable comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
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Scarre, G. (2016). The Ageing of People and of Things. In: Scarre, G. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Aging. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39356-2_6
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