A University of Oslo scholar says a moral case could be made for allowing people to legally change their age if their biological and emotional age doesn't match their chronological age
Last December, 69-year-old Emile Ratelband lost his court battle to make himself legally 20 years younger, partly to make his Tinder profile more appealing. A Dutch court ruled that while the motivational speaker and self-described “young god” was entirely at liberty to feel, and act, 20 years younger than the years he has actually existed, there was no valid argument for recalibrating his birth certificate.
Now, however, a new paper argues there is nothing morally wrong or logically implausible about allowing legal age changes in cases in which a person’s biological age (the condition and health of his or her body) doesn’t square with their chronological, or literal age in years.
“For most people, chronological age corresponds well with emotional and biological age and thus it is often unproblematic that legal age equals chronological age,” Joona Räsänen, a Finnish bioethicist and doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, writes in the Journal of Medical Ethics.
“But this is not always the case.”
Räsänen believes compelling moral arguments could be made for allowing people to rewind their legal clocks, at least in cases where three conditions are met: When the person genuinely feels that his or her “felt” age differs meaningfully from his or her chronological age; the person’s biological or physiological age (“the age one’s body and mind appear to others by objective measures”) differs from the age on his or her legal documents; and the person is at risk of ageism, particularly workplace age discrimination.
Age change should never be undertaken lightly, Räsänen stresses. Rather, “psychologists and medical doctors should be consulted to find out how serious an age change candidate is,” as well as his motivations for wanting his birth date amended.
The philosopher argues that legal age shouldn’t be forced to match chronological age. In a recent related blog post, he uses a whisky analogy: Ten years ago someone gave him a bottle of 21-year-old scotch. The scotch is still 21 years old, not 31.
“While we can stop whisky from aging by bottling it, we cannot stop humans from aging,” Räsänen acknowledges. However, diet, exercise, decent genes and epigenetic changes that happen within our bodies all influence how quickly our arteries stiffen, our bones crumble and our cells and organs deteriorate.
“So, why should legal age match how long a person has existed for?,” asks Räsänen in his blog. “Why not match legal age with how able and functioning the person actually is?”
In an email interview, Räsänen said his aim is not to defend Ratelband, the Dutchman who sought to legally delete 20 years from his passport. (“We live in a time when you can change your name and change your gender,” Ratelband said, to the outrage of the trans community. “Why can’t I decide my own age?”)
Räsänen isn’t arguing from the analogy that because sex change is permissible, so, too, should age change. He has not seen Ratelband’s medical records, nor does he know how serious the Dutchman is, although Ratelband did tell Business Insider he was willing to forgo his $1,500 Euro monthly pension in exchange for a new birth date. (According to his website, Ratelband has also taken turns as a fashion retailer, tour guide, pancake baker, real estate developer and politician. “My feeling about my body and about my mind is that I’m about 40 or 45,” he shared with the Washington Post
But ageism is an undeniable phenomenon, Räsänen argues. Employees at Google, Intel, IMB as well as a slew of other companies have recently sued for age discrimination. Facebook CEO (and Harvard drop out) Mark Zuckerberg once famously blurted that “young people are just smarter.” A 2017 investigation by ProPublica and the New York Times alleged Facebook itself, as well as dozens of leading U.S. employers, placed targeted recruitment ads on Facebook that could only be seen by younger users.
Some age limits exist for valid reasons, Räsänen writes in the Journal of Medical Ethics. A 90-year-old pilot arguably might pose a safety hazard. However, “not all old people pose safety risks and not all jobs are of the sort where people’s lives might be in danger.”
Räsänen says every age change candidate would need to be tested and evaluated, though he can’t offer definite answers as to exactly, how. “These are questions that I think biologists and medical doctors should consider together with philosophers and bioethicists.”
Still, his support for legal age change dovetails nicely with the narrative coming out of Silicon Valley, where immortalists are sinking millions into human life extension, from young-blood transfusions and “rejuvenation” tune-ups that would return us to the biological fitness (inside and out) of a 20- or 30-year old, to cryonics — the freezing of human corpses in the hope of being able to defrost and resurrect them in the future. As a thought experiment, Räsänen asks, “What if sometime in the future the technology makes it possible to freeze living people so that their aging process is reduced significantly?”
Suppose that a 30-year-old woman is frozen for 100 years with technology that reduces her aging to 10 per cent of normal. “When she wakes up after 100 years, her body has only aged by 10 years. Should she be treated under the law as a 40-year-old, or a 130-year-old?”
Frozen corpses aside, Räsänen believes that, should legal age change be permitted, it shouldn’t be fluid — people shouldn’t necessarily be allowed to go older. Some might want to “age” in order to drink or drive sooner, collect retirement benefits earlier or get a decade or two of people telling them how fabulous they look for their age. None of those reasons would satisfy his “criterion.”
In addition, people seeking to change their age to younger “have been younger before,” he says, “therefore they know what it feels like.” It would not be a huge leap into the unknown.
NYU bioethicist Arthur Caplan agrees that the calendar in terms of lifespan is less important than biology. He is also convinced science will one day come up with an objective, holistic measure of aging “that says your biological age is X.”
He gets why the law is different in terms of why it cares about age. The law likes “bright lines and ease of application,” Caplan says. Legal age is also less an individual measure and more a social or cultural one, he adds. “It’s why we decide that most people, roughly speaking, are mature enough at 18 to do things like get married. It’s also fine to call you 70, because it triggers privileges to social programs and ticket discounts, some of it awarded just because you’ve been on the globe for a certain period of time, not because of your biology.”
If those chasing eternal life do ultimately find ways to reverse aging — ‘if you went from 62 to 25, literally, in all aspects of biology” — that would require more than a fudged birth certificate, Caplan says. “It might even require the creation of a new person, meaning a new identity.”
He explains it this way: “If I reversed myself to 25 years old, it’s not like it’s me anymore. I have a history, but most of that is irrelevant. I may want to start again and declare myself Arthur Caplan, part two, or Arthur Caplan, beta.”
More practically, it’s not clear how letting people hit “reset” would reduce ageism at a societal level. But Räsänen says he has yet to hear a convincing argument against the case for age change. “Chronological age does not always matter. So why are we so obsessed with it,” he asks.
Räsänen is 30.