While many expect happiness to decline in old age, research into well-being and happiness suggests otherwise. Happiness is U-curved, with the bottom of the U, the unhappiest part, experienced in middle age, and happiness increasing thereafter. This surprising diachronic phenomenon presents ethical questions concerning the way we perceive our own and other people's lives, and how individuals and society ought to respond to ageing. I claim the U-curve could influence, inter alia, our attitudes to our own ageing, debates concerning prioritisation of the elderly in health decisions, and attitudes towards end-of-life decisions. As an example of how the U-curve can influence the conclusion of an applied ethical problem in population ethics, I revisit Peter Singer’s claim that substantially extending later life would reduce total utility. With some qualifications, I defend Mark Walker’s claim that, in undermining the crucial empirical assumption that life gets worse as we age, the U-curve casts doubt on Singer’s critique of life extension.

In the future, advances in genetic modification techniques will make it possible for us to change ourselves dramatically. Should we apply these techniques to ourselves? Should we apply them to our children? In answering these questions, we are hampered by the fact that the interests of an organism are determined by its design, at least in part. Having interests is a matter of possessing features, such as the ability to feel pain and pleasure, by which an organism can be concerned about itself. So choosing our design based on our interests seems circular. Still, we can take it for granted that we will wish to change our welfare apparatus, and that of our children, only in peripheral ways, and give preference to options that make our lifetime welfare level higher than other options. Several sorts of enhancement would benefit us. For example, if we can avoid senescence, we should extend our life span.

This chapter focuses on the novel of the twenty-first century to suggest that we are seeing now a new way of understanding the forms in which the novel pictures the world. The chapter opens with an exploration of the terms in which climate change and advances in the medical creation of artificial life have together shifted our understanding of the relationship between nature and culture. In light of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s argument that the eco-crisis sees the collapse of culture into nature, the chapter suggests that the contemporary novel is involved in the picturing of a world that becomes thinkable when the opposition between nature and culture has been overcome. It then goes on to read this new kind of world picturing, as it comes to expression in twenty-first-century novels by three of the major writers of the contemporary novel – Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee and Don DeLillo. It is possible to see in these writers, the chapter argues, the culmination of the prosthetic imagination as I have traced it through the history of the novel, a culmination in which the capacity to picture the world is won from the novel’s intimacy with the resistance of our bodies and environments to the forms in which we seek to make them imaginable and habitable.