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British-American philosopher who founded extropianism, wrote the principles that gave transhumanism its first organized programme, and led Alcor from 2011 to 2020.
Max More is a British-American philosopher who gave Transhumanism its first systematic statement as a philosophy rather than a collection of enthusiasms. His 1990 essay defined the term in its modern sense, his Principles of Extropy set out the movement's working commitments, and the Extropy Institute and its mailing list served as the organizing node for early transhumanist thought. From 2011 to 2020 he was chief executive of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
Born Max T. O'Connor, he read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, where he was involved in early British cryonics organizing, and moved to the United States for graduate work in philosophy at the University of Southern California. He changed his surname in 1990, choosing a word that named what he was arguing for. His doctorate, completed in 2010, was on the nature of death and the conditions for personal survival — the philosophical question underneath the practice he would later run as a business. See Personal identity and continuity.
With Tom W. Bell he founded the magazine Extropy in 1988 and the Extropy Institute in 1992. The institute ran conferences through the 1990s and closed in 2006, More's stated reason being that its ideas had propagated into enough other organizations that a dedicated body was no longer needed. He co-edited The Transhumanist Reader (2013) with Natasha Vita-More, to whom he is married.
"Extropy" is not a physical quantity; More used it as a name for the opposite tendency to entropy — growth in order, capacity and intelligence — and explicitly warned against treating it as a scientific term. The principles state a stance rather than a doctrine. The version he published in 2003 lists perpetual progress, self-transformation, practical optimism, intelligent technology, open society, self-direction and rational thinking.1
Two features distinguish them from the surrounding futurism. The commitment to open society and decentralized decision-making was a deliberate rejection of the technocratic planning that had characterized earlier futurist movements. And practical optimism was defined against both pessimism and blind faith: More's formulation asks for optimism as a working method that motivates action, not as a prediction about outcomes. Later readers frequently miss the distinction.
His 1990 essay "Transhumanism: Towards a Futurist Philosophy" separated the transhumanist project from religion and from technological determinism,2 framing it as an extension of Enlightenment humanism that declines to treat current human biology as final. "A Letter to Mother Nature" (1999) restates the argument as a list of proposed amendments to the human constitution — to lifespan, to the vulnerability of the body, to the limits of cognition and emotional range. It is the clearest short statement of what Human enhancement means to its advocates, and of why bioconservatives find the framing objectionable.
Terminology"Extropy" and "extropian" predate "transhumanism" in wide use, and the two were briefly rivals. Transhumanism won as the general label; extropianism survives as the name for More's specific libertarian-inflected version of it.
More's most cited contribution to policy argument is the proactionary principle, formulated in 2004 as a counter to the Precautionary principle.3 Its core claim is that inaction is itself a choice with costs, and that any assessment of a technology must weigh the harms of restriction — including the lives not saved by a delayed therapy — against the harms of proceeding. It asks for symmetrical treatment of errors of commission and omission, decisions proportionate to the evidence, and revision as evidence accumulates.
Critics point out that symmetry is easy to state and hard to apply: the benefits of a new technology accrue to identifiable people while the harms are often diffuse and delayed, and the principle supplies no method for comparing them. It has nonetheless become the standard reference point for arguments that precaution is not automatically the conservative option, and it recurs in debates over Access and inequality, Human germline editing and Differential technological development.
More became chief executive of Alcor in 2011, taking over an organization with a history of litigation, internal conflict and public ridicule. His tenure emphasized operational discipline: standby and stabilization procedures, documentation, financial structures intended to outlast the organization, and a communications posture that stated the odds rather than promising revival. He has been consistent that Cryonics is an unproven medical bet with no demonstrated success, that no cryopreserved mammal has been revived, and that the case rests on the argument that a preserved patient is not yet information-theoretically dead rather than on any track record. That framing — cryonics as an ambulance to a hospital that may not exist — is largely his. He stepped down as CEO in 2020 and remained affiliated with the organization.
The extropian mailing list, running from 1991, was disproportionately consequential relative to its size. Its participants included figures who went on to found or shape artificial-intelligence safety research, digital-currency design and academic futures studies; Nick Bostrom and others were active on it before establishing more formal institutions. That heritage is now double-edged, since the list archive has also supplied material used to criticize its participants decades later.
More's philosophical work is little cited in academic philosophy, which has mostly engaged transhumanism through Bostrom, Julian Savulescu and their critics rather than through the extropian texts. Within the movement his standing is different: the principles remain the closest thing transhumanism has to a founding document, and the tension he built into them — between self-direction and collective risk, between practical optimism and honest accounting of failure — is the same tension that divides Effective accelerationism from AI-safety-oriented Singularitarianism today. Neither side has resolved it, and More's framework does not tell them how.
statementMore, M. "The Principles of Extropy," version 3.11. Extropy Institute, 2003.↩A movement document written by its own author and revised repeatedly; it records a stance, and contains no claim that could be checked.
paperMore, M. "Transhumanism: Towards a Futurist Philosophy." Extropy, 1990.↩Published in the magazine More himself edited, so it is a founding statement of the movement rather than an independent assessment of it.
bookMore, M. "The Proactionary Principle." Extropy Institute, 2004; revised in More, M. and Vita-More, N. (eds.), The Transhumanist Reader, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. ↩