Considering the Ethics of Extending the Healthy Human Life Span

To suffer or become incapacitated is to diminish the utility of being alive. The way to minimize this loss is to work towards removing the causes of suffering and incapacitation. The greatest such causes are medical, and of those, aging is by far the largest. Similarly, to die is to suffer the loss of all that one might have been and done after that time. It is a tragedy that any individual ceases to exist. The way to minimize this loss is to work to remove the causes of death. The greatest such causes are medical, and of those, aging is by far the largest. Ethically, the case for working to extend healthy human life spans by treating aging as a medical condition is very straightforward. Objections are trivial in the face of more than one hundred thousand deaths every day, tens of millions every year, and the ongoing suffering of hundreds of millions more. Will life-extension treatments be prohibitively expensive? The diabetes drug metformin is a classic candidate for a possible anti-aging pill. And the cost of this possible wonder drug? Retail costs for 60 tablets of 500mg of metformin (a 1-2 month supply) range from $9 to $16, even without insurance. Other potential life-extension molecules are similarly cheap. Glucosamine costs as little as ten cents a pill, has been the subject of several recent studies showing it decreases all-cause mortality by as much as 39%, and may be as effective for longevity as exercise. What about newer anti-aging medicines? Is t...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs