Ageing causes suffering, and relieving suffering is what medicine is for

The argument

Proponents of this position argue that the case for pursuing immortality is the case for medicine, extended consistently. Ageing is the process that brings on frailty, dependence, dementia and the diseases that end most lives, and each of those is something medicine already treats as an enemy. On this view there is no principled line between curing a disease of old age and addressing the ageing that produces it; the difference is one of ambition rather than of kind. Anyone who accepts that it is good to treat the illnesses of later life, they argue, has already accepted the premise that makes the larger project worth attempting. The argument then presses on the apparent naturalness of death. Proponents note that almost everything medicine does interrupts a natural course, from infection to failing organs to the complications of childbirth, and that nobody regards those interventions as presumptuous. Treating ageing as uniquely off limits, on this account, is a habit of resignation rather than a moral judgement, and a habit formed when nothing could be done about it. Where something can be done, they argue, the burden shifts to explaining why this particular source of suffering should be left alone. Defenders of the position are usually careful to distinguish what is being sought. The aim, as they describe it, is not an endless existence in decline but an indefinite healthy span, in which a person remains able to do the things that made life worth having and dies, if at all, by choice or accident rather than by decay. On that framing the project promises what medicine has always promised, namely more years in which a person is themselves, and the only novelty is that it declines to set an upper limit in advance.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics answer that the analogy with medicine breaks down where treatment becomes transformation. Medicine aims to restore a person to a normal span of health; abolishing the span is a different undertaking, with consequences for population, inheritance, the renewal of institutions and the willingness of generations to make way for one another. They also question the promise of indefinite health, arguing that treatments are far likelier to extend the period of dependence than to remove it, so the realistic result is more years of frailty rather than fewer. Others object to the priority itself: resources spent chasing an indefinite span are resources not spent on the many people who die young of causes already well understood.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics object that ageing is the background condition of a human life rather than a disease, so making it a target changes medicine's aim rather than extending it. [Rejecting P2] They argue that earlier interventions restored a normal span whereas this one abolishes the span, which is a difference in kind and not degree. [Rejecting P3] They doubt that an indefinite healthy span is achievable, suggesting the likelier result is a longer period of dependence. [Rejecting C] They conclude that the project departs from medicine's purpose instead of continuing it.