Thank you, Dávid Mező, for this immortal question.
Unsurprisingly, we are living beings that are born, develop, reproduce, and die. This seems almost a necessity. However, we sometimes hear in the media about astonishing advances in the genetics of senescence and the medical treatment of ageing. The subject, if not yet topical today, will most probably be soon: Could we finally find our Holy Grail and become immortal beings (or almost)? Hence your question, which I propose we divide into two parts. We can ask ourselves, on the one hand, whether ageing is a disease; and, on the other, whether we have reasons (moral or otherwise) to fight it. These two issues are separate, as there are diseases that are not medically treated (e.g. a common cold) and non-diseases that are medically treated (e.g. abortion).
So, is ageing a disease?
Some argue that ageing is not a disease and shouldn’t be medically treated because it is a natural process and, more precisely, a universal and inevitable process. The question then becomes whether the conditions of universality and inevitability are enough to say that ageing is not a disease. This does not seem to be the case. Indeed, high blood pressure, sore throats, colds, tooth decay, and depression are all nearly universal in their distribution and seem to be inevitable phenomena, yet it would be difficult for us not to view them as diseases. What’s more, we seem to forget that all diseases are somewhat natural, and yet we fight them nonetheless.
So there seems to be no good reason to believe that ageing is not a disease. But are there any good reasons to believe that it is a disease?
Ageing is generally associated with a deterioration in the body’s general capacities: psychomotor, immune, or reproductive. When we classify these processes, we do so based on reference classes. For ageing, we generally consider the class of people over 60 years. But this seems somewhat question-begging. Doesn’t choosing this specific category of people presuppose that there are significant changes compared to other classes (of young and adult people, for instance) and, thus, that ageing is a disease?
So we are at an impasse. It is neither easy to say that ageing is a disease, nor that it is not. This deadlock has important implications in the way that it determines the funding of several research projects on life extension therapies and the treatment of the several diseases linked to ageing.
The second part of the question is even more complicated. Even if ageing were to be defined as a disease, there could be various reasons for not favouring its treatment, such as problems related to overcrowding and access to resources, inequality in treatment, prejudice towards older people, boredom and the loss of meaning that a longer or immortal life could cause…
In conclusion, the battle of science against ageing is likely to continue for a long time to come.
What do you think? Is ageing a disease worth fighting? Let us know in the comments.
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Image: L’Inhumation précipitée, by Antoine Wiertz (1854)
I studied in Geneva and Paris (University of Geneva and École Normale Supérieure) and I specialized in the philosophy of emotions, especially in the relationship between affective states and memory. My master's thesis dealt with nostalgia and represented an attempt to establish a general philosophical theory of this rich and complex emotion. Other areas of interest include moral emotions, metaethics and metaphysics, with a penchant for fictionality. I do not have any specific philosophical arguments in mind; however, I find that the works of Russell, Popper and Kripke are a must-read.