Yeah I don't know either. Thanks to modern medicine, we already have enormous and growing problems with the accumulation of power and wealth in individuals. Currently, death is the only (legal/ethical) check we have on the people who have accumulated so much power that they are above the law. If we remove natural death, how can we ever get out from under the thumb of the uber-powerful? I'd really like to see more thought put into solving these problems before I could be convinced that longevity research is ethical.
It's only ethical because we have no power to prevent their death. If research could be done that looked likely to extend lives, but we chose not to because we'd rather people die earlier, that's equivalent to stealthily killing them. We might as well be upfront about it, and have them slain for being too old, except then they'd tend to resist.
Right, so we have two competing ethical problems: extending life is good, but also, it removes the one (ethical) tool we have to handle the problem of accumulation of power in individuals. This is the conflict I'm grappling with. I don't have a good answer to the problem.
