You Are How Old?

"For most people, chronological age corresponds well with emotional and biological age and thus it is often unproblematic that legal age equals chronological age. But this is not always the case."
"Psychologists and medical doctors should be consulted to find out how serious an age change candidate is [along with establishing motivation for the amendment in the birth date]."
"While we can stop whisky from aging by bottling it, we cannot stop humans from aging [but genes, epigenetic changes, lifestyle can influence outcomes], so why should legal age match how long a person has existed for? Why not match legal age with how able and functioning the person actually is?"
"We live in a time when you can change your name and change your gender. Why can't I decide my own age?"
"These are questions that I think biologists and medical doctors should consider together with philosophers and bioethicists."
"Chronological age does not always matter. So why are we so obsessed with it?"
Joona Rasanen, Finnish bioethicist, University of Oslo

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According to this doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, there are moral arguments of a compelling nature to be made permitting people to turn back their age legally, where three set conditions are met:

• The individual feels unreservedly that his/her "felt" age has a meaningful difference from his/her chronological age;
• The person's biological (physiological) age -- the age that person's body and mind by objective measures -- actually differs from legally documented age;
• The individual may be risking ageism such as workplace age discrimination.

The recently released study, published in the Journal of Medical Ethics boosts the belief that 'you are as old as you feel' could be carried forward to a legal recognition of a person's choice to alter their documented age. Legal age, argues this philosopher, need not match chronological age. How swiftly our arteries clog, our bones decay and our cells and organs become health-compromised with age can be attributable in part to the choices we make in life, as well as environmental influences and exposures, beyond diet and exercise.

His argument reflects an experience by Emile Ratelband who sought a legal ruling in his bid to alter his age by reducing it from his actual 60s to his proposed 40s. In so doing, he was willing to forgo the $1,500 Euro monthly pension allotted the elderly in exchange for the legal right to alter his birth date. Having worked as a fashion retailer, tour guide, pancake baker, real estate developer and politician, he states: "My feeling about my body and about my mind is that I'm about 40 or 45". A Dutch court turned him down.

Mr. Rasanen pointed to ageism in society and at the workplace, using as an example that employees at Google, Intel, and IBM, along with a number of other high-tech companies sued for age discrimination. "Young people are just smarter", Mark Zuckerberg was once heard to say in an unguarded moment of communication. As a 'young person', it is unsurprising given the attitude of the young toward the more mature among them, that he would express such an opinion, which facts often belie.

There is always the critical issue of when age in and of its effects on the human body make a truly aged individual inappropriate to hope to be employed in some critical positions that impinge on the safety of others; pilot comes to mind. With an age alteration, each candidate, stresses Mr. Rasanen, would ideally require testing and evaluation.And with the message that an entire new bureaucracy would of necessity have to arise out of what seems like an egotistical whim, one must ask: 'why bother'?

The new method to determine biological ageing could help researchers discover what keeps some people looking and feeling younger   123RF.com

"[The law likes] bright lines and ease of application. 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 you went from 62 to 25, literally, in all aspects of biology ... it might even require the creation of a new person, meaning a new identity."
"If I reversed myself to 25-years-old, it's not like it's me any more. 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."                                Bioethicist Arthur Caplan, New York University