Morality

Richard asked me an interesting theoretical question the other day.

It was about draining life from someone to restore your own. I will try to explain it as clearly as possible and avoid any stupid loopholes. After all, the objective here is not to win or do something fiendishly clever. It is simply a question of morals.

The question was something like this:

If you could steal some one's life force just by touching them, and restore your own life by the same amount, at a speed of one year per second... what would you do?

We explored this question and expanded on it:

The life drained is measured in years. Draining one year from someone will shorten their natural life by one year while extending your own; essentially restoring a year to you. E.g. if you were seventy-five and drained ten years from a thirty-year-old, you would be restored to the age of sixty-five and your victim would be accelerated to the state of a forty-year-old.

• You only have to touch your intended victim
• There is no obvious or flashy effect other than accelerated ageing in your victim and rejuvenation in yourself
• You drain life at a rate of one year per second
• Draining too many years from someone can kill them, leaving them an empty and withered husk
• You cannot drain more life out of someone than their naturally remaining lifetime
• The amount of years someone has left is defined by their natural lifetime and death by natural causes (i.e. oxidization and the natural breakdown of major organs)
  
• If you were heavily wounded you could regenerate yourself by draining life from a victim - the rate of regeneration would be equal to that of natural healing; to heal something like a severed limb you would have to drain a great deal of life force from a victim, potentially killing them
• Your mind and mentality would be restored along with your physical body; so you would not become a senile teenager if draining many years from someone after becoming senile due to ageing, but you retain your memories and mental ability unless you revert yourself to a young child or infant
• You don't have to drain someone just because you're touching them - it's a conscious and deliberate act
  

So, theoretically, you could just drain a single year out of a random person in the street on an annual basis... and live forever. Or at least live until you run out of people to drain. You could still be killed by normal means (being shot, falling down a cliff, being set on fire) and being left without a chance to restore yourself. In essence you'd be some kind of super-creepy vampire, but you can be slain by methods that would kill a normal human being.

When asked if I'd implement an ability like this, my knee-jerk reaction would normally be "No way!" or "Of course not!" but I took a moment to think about it and, to be perfectly honest I have to say that I'd be very, very tempted to use a power like that to extend my own life and vitality. At some point I think I said something along the lines of "Shit... I think I'd end up using a power like that!"

I don't think of myself as someone who is afraid of mortality. Something as unavoidable and certain as death is nothing to be afraid of in my book because you can't do anything about it. But suddenly, presented with this theoretical predicament... I found that I might actually implement an ability that might prolong my life almost indefinitely. To be clear, I wouldn't go around taking years and years of life off people and leaving them to wither away into nothing. Maybe just a year here and there from people I'd arbitrarily judge as having enough to share.

What scared me the most about this question was my answer. No reason to avoid it or deny it. I said I would end up using a power like that. Damn.

To further this, I consider myself to me a person of high morals. And I would take this twisted vampirism for no other reason than the selfish promise of eternal life. Because right now I view the continuity of my own life as preferable to death. So what if that offer was made to someone with much more flexible morals? You might see a madman willing to decimate populations in order to attain immortality!

I mean... what would you do?