Metaphysics, Planned Obsolescence and the Right to Repair
In 2015, France became the first country to criminalise planned obsolescence. The principle was simple enough: if a manufacturer deliberately shortens the useful life of a product, obstructs repairs or builds failure into the design, then that manufacturer may be held responsible. France has since introduced repairability and durability measures intended to help consumers distinguish between products built to last and products designed to become expensive rubbish shortly after the warranty expires (French Republic, 2021; French Ministry of Economy, 2025).
Most people would regard this as progress. We dislike being trapped inside systems we cannot inspect, maintain or repair. We object when manufacturers conceal faults, restrict replacement parts or insist that a device must be discarded because one small component has failed. We have slowly begun to accept that ownership should include some meaningful right to understand and preserve the things we depend upon.
Which raises a slightly awkward metaphysical question.
Does any of this apply to us?
Not to the people who manufacture phones, washing machines or printers that suddenly develop theological objections to black ink. The question is whether the same moral logic applies to the alleged manufacturer of humanity itself.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that human beings were designed by a higher intelligence. Suppose that the body is not merely the result of blind evolutionary history, but the intentional work of a creator with knowledge, power and purpose. What follows from that claim?
Perhaps nothing uncomfortable. Perhaps mortality is necessary, suffering has some hidden purpose and the body is perfectly suited to a function we do not understand. Perhaps what looks like poor design from inside the product is entirely rational from the perspective of the manufacturer.
Perhaps.
But once we call something designed, we also invite questions about the designer. Intentional creation does not merely allow praise for beauty, complexity and ingenuity. It creates the possibility of responsibility.
If the eye is evidence of craftsmanship, what is childhood blindness evidence of? If the immune system demonstrates intelligence, what does autoimmune disease demonstrate? If the complexity of the brain points toward a designer, what are we to make of dementia gradually dismantling a person while leaving enough of them present to experience the loss?
Design is not a compliment that can be applied selectively. It is a claim about authorship.
And authorship has consequences.
Was Mortality Part of the Specification?
Planned obsolescence requires intent. A product that fails because its maker lacked better materials is not necessarily evidence of malice. Nor is every limited lifespan an injustice. Batteries run out, structures fatigue and living systems require renewal. A world in which nobody died might eventually become crowded, stagnant and dominated by people who bought their houses before the invention of indoor plumbing.
So perhaps death itself is not the defect.
The difficulty lies in the manner of it.
Human beings do not generally reach a sensible service interval, receive a polite notification and quietly power down. We deteriorate unpredictably and often painfully. Joints wear away. Cells become malignant. Blood vessels rupture. Immune systems turn upon the bodies they are meant to defend. Minds lose access to names, histories and faces they once knew intimately.
The question is not simply why life ends. It is why the ending so often arrives through prolonged malfunction.
If a finite lifespan is necessary, why must the route toward it include childhood cancer, degenerative illness, chronic pain and congenital conditions that make life brief and agonising from the beginning? Why are some bodies allowed eighty years of relative service while others leave the factory with catastrophic faults already installed?
Perhaps these are not design decisions. Perhaps they are consequences of freedom, natural law or some larger system in which individual suffering cannot be avoided. Yet the more power we attribute to the creator, the more difficult those explanations become.
A limited designer may face trade-offs. An ignorant designer may overlook consequences. A constrained designer may be unable to produce a better system. An all-knowing and all-powerful designer cannot appeal to any of these limitations without quietly surrendering one of the attributes used to define it.
That is the central tension. The greater the designer, the fewer the excuses.
Perhaps mortality is not planned obsolescence. Perhaps it is simply the necessary boundary of embodied life. Even so, it is hard not to notice that the product line survives by replacing individual units, while those units are given an intense attachment to their own continued existence.
The species benefits from turnover. The individual experiences terror.
That may be biologically efficient. Whether it is morally elegant is another question.
Humanity also has one unusual feature in the manufacturer’s defence: production has been outsourced to the products themselves. Humans manufacture further humans, bear the physical risks, absorb the financial cost and assume responsibility for every variation in quality.
It is an efficient arrangement.
It is also remarkably hands-off for a creator described as intimately involved in each new life.
A Poor Right to Repair
France’s repairability measures consider factors such as access to technical documentation, ease of disassembly, availability of spare parts and the cost of repair (French Ministry of Economy, 2025). On these measures, the human body performs badly.
There is no official service manual. Several documents claim to contain the manufacturer’s instructions, but they disagree about basic operating procedures, acceptable modifications, food, clothing, gender, sexuality, punishment, salvation and what happens after permanent system failure. Some claim the others are corrupted. Others say the manufacturer issued an updated edition. Entire wars have been fought over incompatible interpretations of the documentation.
The manufacturer has not clarified the matter in a form universally available to the products.
Technical information is instead hidden inside the system, written in genetic sequences, electrical impulses and chemical signals that took thousands of years to begin decoding. Even now, much remains uncertain. A great deal of what we know about the body was learned by examining dead humans, often because the living system is too dangerous to open casually.
The diagnostic interface is no better. Pain indicates that something is wrong but often refuses to identify what. Fatigue may indicate stress, infection, anaemia, hormonal disruption, cancer, poor sleep or the ordinary experience of participating in modern life. A headache can mean dehydration, migraine, eye strain, raised blood pressure, a brain tumour or that someone nearby has started explaining cryptocurrency.
These are not diagnostics in any useful sense. They are vague warning lights connected to several thousand possible failures.
Physical access is worse. The casing can repair small breaches, which is useful, but opening it causes bleeding, pain and infection risk. Internal components are packed tightly together with little regard for servicing. The system must continue breathing, circulating blood and regulating temperature while technicians cut into it.
There is no safe mode. There is no maintenance hatch. There is no clean shutdown procedure that allows the user to restart afterward.
The product must remain alive while being repaired, and the repair itself may kill it.
Some components nevertheless demonstrate remarkable self-repair. Skin closes, bones knit and the liver can regenerate substantial lost tissue. This may suggest impressive design. It may also sharpen the question of why that capacity is distributed so inconsistently.
Teeth are issued in only two sets despite daily exposure to pressure, acid, bacteria and impact. Cartilage is placed in high-friction joints but given little meaningful ability to regenerate. The spinal cord carries essential signals between brain and body, yet serious damage may be permanent. The brain controls almost every system while tolerating only a few minutes without oxygen. The heart is indispensable but has no redundant backup. The airway is essential but can be blocked by food.
Pregnancy is required for continuation of the species, yet it may injure or kill the person tasked with producing the replacement.
Perhaps every design involves compromise. Perhaps no embodied organism could be infinitely durable, self-repairing and still recognisably human. Yet once again, the evolutionary explanation seems oddly comfortable where perfect design becomes strained.
Evolution tinkers. It modifies whatever already exists. It produces systems that work well enough to reproduce, not systems that are elegant, fair or indefinitely maintainable. The human body looks exactly like something assembled through historical compromise.
It looks rather less like something designed cleanly from first principles by unlimited intelligence.
The manufacturer appears to have perfected self-repair for the packaging, then become strangely inconsistent when reaching the expensive parts.
Proprietary Components
Replacement parts exist, but compatibility is tightly restricted. Blood types must be matched. Tissue compatibility matters. Organs cannot simply be transferred between users like batteries.
Even when a replacement component fits, the body may identify it as unauthorised hardware and attempt to destroy it. Transplant recipients require medication to suppress the immune response because the system may attack the organ keeping it alive (NHS Blood and Transplant, n.d.).
This resembles biological digital rights management. The product detects an unauthorised repair and begins dismantling it.
Perhaps that is unfair. The immune system evolved to identify threats, not to frustrate surgeons. Its hostility to transplantation is an unintended consequence of a system that usually protects us.
But that answer quietly returns us to evolution. It makes perfect sense if bodies are shaped by blind pressures that cannot anticipate future medicine. It is harder to reconcile with a designer who allegedly foresaw every transplant, every rejection and every person who would die waiting for a compatible organ.
A manufacturer behaving this way in any other industry would be accused of locking customers into proprietary components.
In human beings, we accept it as the cost of being alive.
We may have no choice. That is not quite the same as having an explanation.
The Warranty Problem
Theological traditions offer several explanations for suffering. One of the oldest is that humanity was originally created in perfect condition and later corrupted through disobedience.
Translated into consumer language, this resembles a warranty invalidated by the first users.
The earliest products violated the terms of service, so every later model inherits pain, mortality and moral corruption. Those later models did not agree to the original terms. They were not present at the breach. They are nevertheless born into its consequences.
Perhaps this is not meant literally. Perhaps original sin is a symbolic account of the human tendency toward selfishness, violence and alienation. Read that way, it may contain psychological insight.
Taken as an explanation for inherited suffering, however, it raises an obvious moral problem. We would not accept collective punishment from any human authority. We would not consider it just to imprison children because their ancestors committed a crime, nor would we excuse a manufacturer for shipping defective products because somebody misused an early prototype.
The proposed remedy creates further complications. In Christian theology, the manufacturer sends its own representative, who is also in some sense the manufacturer, to suffer and die in satisfaction of conditions established by the manufacturer. Those who accept this arrangement may receive restoration after death.
Perhaps this is the deepest expression of divine solidarity with human suffering. Perhaps the point is not that a debt had to be paid, but that God enters the condition of the product rather than remaining distant from it.
Yet even the most generous interpretation leaves questions. Why was suffering required? Why were the conditions structured in this way? Why must rescue depend upon belief, interpretation or access to a message distributed unevenly across history and geography?
The repair is promised only after the product has permanently ceased functioning. No demonstration model is available. The terms cannot be independently verified.
At minimum, the warranty documentation could be clearer.
Free Will and User Error
Free will offers a stronger defence. Humans cause enormous harm to themselves and one another. We wage wars, poison environments, design weapons, ignore medical advice and occasionally attempt electrical repairs without switching off the power. A creator cannot reasonably be blamed for every act of misuse.
The existence of freedom may require the possibility of wrongdoing. A world in which no harmful choice could ever succeed might contain safety, but not agency in any meaningful sense.
Even so, freedom explains only a portion of suffering. It does not explain childhood cancer, congenital illness, earthquakes, parasitic disease or dementia. Nor does it automatically remove a designer’s responsibility to anticipate predictable harm.
We fit child-resistant caps to medicines because children may attempt to open them. We install guards around machinery because people make mistakes. We design cars to reduce injury during crashes because drivers are fallible.
We do not generally accept that freedom removes every duty of care.
Perhaps a world governed by stable natural laws must permit earthquakes, disease and injury. Perhaps constant divine intervention would make meaningful action impossible. Yet this merely moves the question. Why these laws? Why this degree of vulnerability? Why must a child’s freedom to exist within a lawful universe include the possibility of being killed by a tumour before developing any meaningful agency?
At some point, predictable misuse becomes a design issue. At some point, blaming the user begins to resemble a refusal to accept responsibility.
Free will may explain why we can choose cruelty.
It does not explain why cruelty is so often assisted by bodies that break easily and repair poorly.
Miracles and Selective Repair
The manufacturer is also said to intervene.
Requests are submitted through prayer, although no confirmation is issued, no case number is provided and no service standard is published. The requester cannot reliably determine whether an appeal has been heard, refused, postponed or absorbed into an unknowable plan.
Sometimes an unexpected recovery is attributed to divine intervention. A patient survives, a tumour disappears or a surgeon makes the right decision at precisely the right moment. These events are offered as evidence of compassion.
Perhaps they are.
Yet selective intervention creates a difficult moral question. A creator who cannot intervene may be tragic but blameless. A creator who can intervene, occasionally does intervene and nevertheless permits equivalent suffering elsewhere must explain the difference.
Why this patient and not the next? Why one child and not another? Why guide one surgeon while allowing another person to die because no surgeon was available?
The usual answer is that human beings cannot understand the total plan. That may be true. Limited minds cannot expect complete access to infinite reasoning. But ignorance works in both directions. If we cannot understand why suffering was permitted, we also cannot confidently call the permission good.
Mystery may prevent conviction. It does not automatically establish innocence.
Every claimed miracle also carries a hidden implication: intervention was possible. Each rescue therefore makes the unrescued harder to explain.
Perhaps selective repair is mercy. It may also look disturbingly like selective neglect.
Regional Warranty Coverage
Human bodies are distributed globally. Repair services are not.
A child born in a wealthy country may receive antibiotics, surgery, advanced imaging, intensive care and years of specialist support. A child with the same condition elsewhere may die because the repair exists but has not been made economically available.
The design is universal. The warranty is regional.
Much of this is clearly a human failure. We hoard resources, construct unequal systems and repeatedly decide that preventable suffering is tragic but insufficiently profitable. No appeal to divine design removes our responsibility for that.
Yet the creator remains strangely absent from the servicing network.
An all-powerful authority appears to have delegated essential maintenance to governments, insurers, charities, exhausted relatives and online fundraising campaigns. Technical support exists only where the products have managed to build it themselves.
Perhaps this is the point. Perhaps humanity is expected to become the repair system. Perhaps moral life consists partly in taking responsibility for one another.
That is a noble possibility. It also leaves an uncomfortable residue. If a parent watched one child attempt to save another using inadequate tools, we would not praise the parent for creating an opportunity for character development. We would ask why the parent did not help.
The wealthy receive replacement organs, specialist medicine and advanced surgery. The poor receive explanations about mysterious purpose.
The contrast is difficult to make holy.
Can a Creator Stand Above Morality?
Eventually the question moves beyond biology.
Religious morality often presents the creator as the source of moral law. Human beings are commanded to prevent suffering, protect children, repair harm, care for the sick and accept responsibility for the foreseeable consequences of their choices.
Can the creator be judged by those same standards?
Perhaps not. A creator may relate to creation in a way entirely unlike the relationship between one human and another. The author of a story is not morally identical to a character inside it. A surgeon causes pain that would be cruel outside the context of healing. Parents permit frustrations that children cannot yet understand.
Perhaps divine goodness operates at a level beyond ordinary human judgement.
Yet this defence has limits. If the creator’s actions are entirely beyond moral evaluation, then calling the creator good becomes difficult. “Good” must either refer to some standard we can at least partly recognise, or it means nothing more than “whatever the creator does.”
If divine actions are good because they satisfy a meaningful moral standard, then those actions can be examined against that standard.
If divine actions are good simply because they are divine, then goodness collapses into authority.
That is not morality in any familiar sense. It is hierarchy.
Power may explain why an authority cannot be punished. It does not establish that the authority is right. A ruler who controls the police, appoints the judges and writes the law may be beyond prosecution, but that does not make the ruler just.
The metaphysical version is even more complete. A creator who constructs the courtroom, defines goodness, selects the judge and determines the consequences of dissent has not necessarily demonstrated moral perfection.
It may simply possess perfect sovereign immunity.
This is perhaps the sharpest difficulty in the whole argument. Human beings are told that moral authority flows downward from the creator, yet moral accountability appears unable to travel back up.
We are required to explain our failures.
The highest authority is permitted to call them mysteries.
The Evolutionary Escape Clause
There is, of course, a simpler explanation for the body’s peculiarities.
Evolution does not design organisms for comfort, justice or indefinite survival. It preserves traits that help organisms survive and reproduce in particular environments. It modifies existing structures rather than beginning again. It accepts clumsy compromises and produces systems that are good enough to continue.
That is why the human body resembles a building renovated for millions of years by contractors who were forbidden to remove the earlier work. It explains why our backs struggle with upright walking, why the eye contains a blind spot, why childbirth is dangerous and why breathing and swallowing share such inconvenient infrastructure.
These are not elegant decisions. They are historical leftovers.
Evolution has no customer-service department because evolution has no mind. It cannot be cruel because it has no intentions. It cannot neglect us because it never promised to care. It does not demand gratitude for the functioning parts or worship when they fail.
This explanation is emotionally unsatisfying. It offers no hidden purpose, no eventual restoration and no guarantee that suffering contributes to anything larger.
But it is morally coherent.
A creator changes the calculation because a creator has intentions. The moment we attribute knowledge, power and goodness to the process that produced us, suffering becomes more than tragedy. It becomes something permitted.
Intelligent design does not solve the problem of suffering. It signs the work.
It takes a universe of impersonal failure and places a name in the author field.
Simply Put
None of this disproves the existence of a higher power. Perhaps mortality serves purposes we cannot understand. Perhaps every loss is restored beyond death. Perhaps consciousness, freedom and love are possible only in a world where bodies are vulnerable and outcomes uncertain.
Those possibilities cannot be dismissed.
But neither should they be mistaken for answers.
“Perhaps” may preserve faith. It does not settle the moral account.
The greater the claimed power of the designer, the weaker the usual excuses become. A limited creator might fail. An ignorant creator might overlook consequences. A constrained creator might face tragic trade-offs. An all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good creator cannot appeal to ignorance, weakness or accident because each escape has already been removed by definition.
The designer knew. The designer could have acted differently. The designer permitted this system.
Perhaps there is a justification. If so, it must be strong enough to account not only for death in the abstract, but for the particular forms suffering takes. It must explain why beauty counts as evidence of design while horror is treated as an inscrutable exception. It must explain why a recovered patient proves intervention while the person dying in the next bed proves only that nature is mysterious.
A manufacturer cannot place its logo on every success and disclaim responsibility for every failure.
If humans were not designed, there is no manufacturer to prosecute. We are fragile organisms shaped by an indifferent process, and repairing one another becomes our responsibility because nobody else is coming. That may be bleak, but it at least places the burden where action remains possible.
If humans were intentionally created, however, then ageing, disease, congenital suffering, restricted repair and catastrophic component failure are no longer merely facts of nature. They become features of an authorised system.
They become design decisions.
Perhaps the manufacturer has an answer. Perhaps the full documentation exists somewhere beyond death. Perhaps every complaint will eventually be met with an explanation so overwhelming that the suffering suddenly makes sense.
Until then, the complaint remains open.
Creating the rules does not place an authority beyond moral scrutiny. Holding all the power does not automatically make an authority good. Hiding the complaints department beyond death does not invalidate the complaint.
References
French Republic. (2021). Consumer Code, Article L441-2. Légifrance.
NHS Blood and Transplant. (n.d.). Medical terms explained: Organ transplantation.
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