​

Unfortunately, in the case of aging, this opinion is merely a handling of the topic by people, who  are not competent enough and don’t take all the society in consideration. They claim they do, but they don’t really. As a matter of fact, the ethical position is on the transhumanist side. We believe the life of a person is the most important thing, and it is worth fighting for regardless of the situation.

A person’s life is the ultimate value. Callahan, on the contrary, states that, basically, people shouldn’t be alive if they are over 75 years of age, because they are too expensive to be alive for the country. Well, apparently, this doesn’t concern Mr. Callahan’s life, which is too precious for the country that his ethical position makes an exception and lets him perform a heart surgery at 80 and be perfectly fine with it.

What is obscure for Daniel Callahan is the fact that even if the current biomedical advances are not yet powerful enough to cure aging and prolong the youthful state of the body, they definitely will be in the future. There’s a good chance researchers will come up with ways to cure emthysema and heart failure, meaning not only alleviate the ill health, but get rid of the causes of those nasty diseases.

I believe it will be possible to return people to their youthful state by applying gene therapy, various drugs, maybe stem cell therapies and other things that scientific progress will come up with. But in order for the science to move along and give us the gifts of not getting old and maybe even reversing old age and bad health, biothicists like Daniel Callahan should stop thinking about themselves and start thinking about the society.

I’m pretty sure Callahan doesn’t think he’s going to live much longer, and he is trying to make longevity seem like an undesirable thing – a world populated with oblivious elderly like in Swift’s Gulliver’s travels, so that he doesn’t feel bad for himself. But by doing so, he is making this sick dream of a 18th century schizophrenic writer a reality. He is slowing down the progress by making other believe that life shouldn’t be extended.

Life should be extended. It’s the most ethical thing to do. There is always hope that science will come up with the solution to your particular situation and your health problems will be gone. The future is worth fighting for, so don’t give in to the “oh, there’s nothing we can do about aging” mood and start learning about all the exciting research news on longevity, post about the importance of aging research in social media and meet with like-minded people online and in real life. These simple steps can be a great counterbalance to all the Callahans in the world.