If the very expensive life extension you envisage is available to all, one might defend it as a permissible collective choice. Of course, there would be fewer births, and fewer deaths, each year -- perhaps just 20 million annually instead of 125 million on the assumption of a steady human population of 10 billion. (Currently, there are about 131 million births and 57 million deaths each year.) Such scarcity of children would change our social world considerably. But I do not see how it would be wrong for humankind to move in this direction. Serious moral problems arise when we envisage the (more likely) possibility that such expensive life extension would be available only to a minority while its great cost would contribute to most people on earth leading short and miserable lives. To a large extent, this sort of dramatic inequality in health and life expectancy is already a reality today. About one fifth of all human lives are cut short by poverty-related causes before the age of 5. One important...

It all depends on the mental competence of the other person. If he's not very competent (a child, perhaps, or mentally disabled), then we may interfere with him even to prevent minor harms. One should never interfere with the freedom of fully competent adults in order to improve their quality of life. Still, when a person's quality of life becomes very low, her mental competence may come into question. It is very hard to think rationally when one is in severe pain, for example. And in such cases it may be justified, then, to take care of someone against her own will. Here we still face the question of WHO is so justified. A good candidate is a family member who intimately knows the person and what she would wish if she were feeling better. A poor candidate is some stranger, driven perhaps by moral or religious values that the person does not share. So, when a normally competent adult is in such bad shape that his capacity for decision-making is impaired, then others who know him well may interfere...

Yes you are. Your decision to deny others access to the life-savingdrug has led to their death. But how serious is your responsibilityfrom a moral point of view? That depends on the circumstances. Perhapsthe medicine was in short supply and you needed what you had for yourown survival or that of your family. In this case, I think you didnothing wrong. Or perhaps the medicine was in short supply and youchose to give it to those who could pay you the most. This way ofrationing your supply is not beyond moral criticism, but at least yourdrugs saved as many people as possible and so your conduct did notincrease the number of deaths beyond what was unavoidable. Nowconsider drug companies in the real world. They patent their medicinesand then enjoy exclusive rights to sell them at monopoly prices, whichcan be 400 times higher than the marginal cost of production. There aregeneric producers in developing countries which produce much cheaperversions of the same drug for sale to the poor. But the...