Why and How Some People Object to Longevity Research
Methuselah Foundation chair Aubrey de Grey appears in Cato Unbound to explain why and how many people object to extending the healthy human life span - very much against their own self-interest:
Cancer is undesirable. Heart disease is undesirable. So are type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer's and a thousand other debilitations that predominantly afflict those over the age of 40. Is it not then bizarre that we should have any hesitation in declaring that aging in general, being the molecular and cellular root cause of all these phenomena, is just as deserving of the attention of our medical research efforts?There is, in fact, a simple psychological explanation. Until very recently, aging has been regarded by all credentialed biogerontologists as far too complex to be substantially postponed within the lifetime of anyone currently alive. Indeed, this remains the majority view, with the present author one of a still rather small (though growing) minority who perceive a way forward. This being so, it makes good psychological sense to find some way to convince oneself that aging is all for the best, and thus to put it out of one's mind, rather than to spend one's life preoccupied with one's grisly and inescapable fate. The fact that such rationalizations are stunningly irrational from a purely objective standpoint is irrelevant.
...
When thoroughly cornered on the question of whether the defeat of aging would be a good thing, [apologists for aging] generally turn as a last resort to the cry "Okay, but first things first!" The fact that efforts to postpone human aging will definitely not bear much fruit for at least a few decades is held as a reason to deprioritize such efforts in favor of combating already preventable problems.
It is trivial to expose the ethical bankruptcy of this position. We lock people up for the same amount of time if they kill people with a gun or with a booby-trap bomb, even though the interval between the murderer's action and the victim's death differs by several orders of magnitude in the two cases. The same irrelevance of that interval applies to the saving of lives, since action and inaction are morally indistinguishable. We are close enough today to defeating aging that serendipity does not define the timeframe: the sooner and harder we try to do it, the sooner we'll succeed. Thus, our inaction today costs lives - lots of lives.