The purpose of this paper is to look into the question of whether considerable life extension should be seen as a form of human enhancement. Human enhancement, generally, refers to enhancing physical, psychological, and moral human capacities beyond the average or "normal" level. Much of the recent literature focusing on considerable life extension has been related to the human enhancement debate. I will examine whether considerable life extension and human enhancement are connected. I argue that they are not connected to each other in the way that is presented by many philosophers such as John Harris, Nick Bostrom, and Nils Holtug, as well as Savulescu, Kahane, and Sandberg. Sometimes considerable life extension should be seen rather as a part of preventive care. Considerable life extension can result simply from preventive care. If we define considerable life extension as enhancement, it is interesting because it is related to many ethical questions. A quite common view, for example, is one that states that treatment should be supported financially (at least, partly) by society, whereas enhancement should not. However, claiming that there is no strong conceptual link between considerable life extension and enhancement does not mean that the former should automatically be covered by public healthcare or insurance policies. The aim of this paper is not to present a strong view for or against the ethical desirability of considerable life extension. I argue that the importance of the human enhancement framework has been overstated in the case of considerable life extension. My point is simply that it is unclear why the possibility of radical extension in human life should be primarily discussed in the sphere of human enhancement.

The ethical desirability of considerable life extension by medical technology has become an increasingly discussed topic in bioethics during recent years. Immortality can be seen as a maximum of life extension. Because of this, many authors use the term ‘immortality’ for referring to a lifespan that is considerably longer than our current one. However, being literally immortal would be very different from living for hundreds, or even thousands, of years. The arguments that have been made about the metaphysical questions about immortality need to be clearly distinguished from the bioethical discussion on life extension. What is true of immortality is not necessarily true of a considerably extended human life. In this paper it is argued that immortality in its literal sense should be separated from the discussion on the ethical desirability of considerable life extension more explicitly than is done at the moment. Referring to immortality not only causes conceptual confusion but sometimes affects the argumentation as well.

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