I have claimed that transhumanism arises strictly from love of life. A bioconservative humanist says that it is good to save someone’s life or cure them of debilitating syndromes if they are young, but once they are “too old” (the exact threshold is rarely specified) we should stop trying to keep them alive and healthy. A transhumanist says unconditionally: “Life is good, death is bad; health is good, death is bad.” Whether you’re 5, 50, or 500, life is good, why die? Nothing more is required.

Similarly, love of life is not commonly understood as a motive for saying that, if someone is sick, and we can cure them using medical nanotech, we really ought to do that. Instead people suppose that transhumanists have a taste for technology, a futurism fetish, that we just love those pictures of little roving nanobots. A personal taste, and an odd one at that, but how else would you explain transhumanists’ strange and unusual moral judgments?