Everyone has the right to life. That implies everyone who wants to live has the guarantee from society they can do it, even if the cause of otherwise not living is natural (example: dying by ageing).
Thatās not what is ordinarily meant by āthe right to lifeā. (See Judy Thomsonās famous paper, āA Defense of Abortionā, which argues that the right to life is really just the right not to be killed unjustly. It is not violated by, e.g., unplugging yourself from someone who depends upon your organs to live.)
I think we should want society to offer just those rights that would best promote overall flourishing. A guarantee against premature death obviously doesnāt meet those criteria. (Suppose we could save one personās life at the cost of trillions of dollars, leaving nothing for education or other important āquality of lifeā improvements.)
More generally, you seem to be thinking of death as an absolutely bad thing: something to be avoided at all costs. That seems mistaken to me. Death is better understood as a merely comparative harm: a shorter happy life is not as good as a longer happy life would be (all else equal). But thatās no reason at all to prefer that the short happy life never exist at all.
Thatās not what is ordinarily meant by āthe right to lifeā. (See Judy Thomsonās famous paper, āA Defense of Abortionā, which argues that the right to life is really just the right not to be killed unjustly. It is not violated by, e.g., unplugging yourself from someone who depends upon your organs to live.)
I think we should want society to offer just those rights that would best promote overall flourishing. A guarantee against premature death obviously doesnāt meet those criteria. (Suppose we could save one personās life at the cost of trillions of dollars, leaving nothing for education or other important āquality of lifeā improvements.)
More generally, you seem to be thinking of death as an absolutely bad thing: something to be avoided at all costs. That seems mistaken to me. Death is better understood as a merely comparative harm: a shorter happy life is not as good as a longer happy life would be (all else equal). But thatās no reason at all to prefer that the short happy life never exist at all.