Those temporary social issues (and they will be temporary, just while society adjusts) cannot possibly compare to the travesty of a hundred thousand people dying every day.
Consider, however, whether you'd choose to die if you had an alternative, or whether you've simply accepted something horrific because you don't think you can do anything about it.
If you do not die and plan to stay on Earth, then you will have a (probably very negative) impact on other people's lives. They can choose not to accept it.
Where else could you possibly go? Sending you anywhere else (like a terraformed Mars) might cost more resources than would keeping you alive on Earth for hundreds of years.
It really, really doesn't. Note the first item "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", or the equivalents in other fundamental statements of rights.
If your society attempted to commit mass murder, your society would be removed by force and replaced by one that did not.
And if that sounds like hyperbole, so does the concept that all societies would intentionally withhold a cure to the single most deadly affliction humanity suffers from: aging.
Death is not an unmitigated evil, nor is eternal youth an unmitigated good. I don't think that's a radical argument.
I agree. Discussing ways to solve those problems would be an aspect of the former, which is completely reasonable. However, at the point where you suggested that society could ban life extension, you started arguing for the latter.
Follow your argument to its logical conclusion. What are you proposing, and what would the effect be? You suggested intentionally withholding a cure for a degenerative disease (namely, aging). How else could that possibly be interpreted?
> Death is not an unmitigated evil, nor is eternal youth an unmitigated good. I don't think that's a radical argument.
It's safe to say that's our fundamental point of disagreement.
Personally, I plan to address that disagreement by continuing to donate to fund the development of effective treatments for aging, as well as the development of longer-term cures for mortality. At the point where those treatments become more widely available, arguments against them will start looking a lot sillier.
In some respect, it's no different than if everyone died at fifty years of age. That's a travesty, yet something close to that was the norm for millennia. We expect more now.
People not dying is the "travesty", and preventing death is probably one of the worst things you could do to humanity.
What a gain it would be to have people continue their productive lives for decades or centuries longer.
The costs: we would give up having children. The replacement rate for an immortal race must be very low. The weight of old, bad ideas might be harder to shake off.
This sort of thinking seems to me a consequence of assuming that brains are somehow separate from the rest of the body, almost bordering on dualism.
They might be easier to shake off, and I suspect this to be the case, if all human brains are rejuvenated brains with 25 year-old physiology. It is not clear that "old people set in their ways" is a result of minds that have simply been around a long time, regardless of their physical condition (i.e. immortal or not), as opposed to a consequence of a physically aging, deteriorating human brain.
So we might find ourselves with the equivalent of a population composed entirely of twenty or thirty-somethings, except some of them happen to have many decades (eventually centuries and millenniums) of experience. We may well be much better off than now.