Aubrey de Grey at Cato Unbound
An article by Aubrey de Grey appears at Cato Unbound, hammering on the basics: "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."