Saving lives: a pointless measurement

Lots of these in the news lately: stories where doing X would save so many lives. Here's one, and here's another.

But really what it means is not that those lives would be saved, because they wouldn't - those people would still die eventually, as indeed we all do. They'd just die from something different. What they mean is, those lives would be prolonged. And I dare say that quite a few of them would be prolonged in such a way that the person involved would be completely miserable, or be permanenetly disabled, or have no quality of life whatsoever.

So, is saving lives (really prolonging lives) a viable measure of whether something is worth doing? Or should we just let people get on with it?

Lots of these in the news lately: stories where doing X would save so many lives. Here's one, and here's another.

 

But really what it means is not that those lives would be saved, because they wouldn't - those people would still die eventually, as indeed we all do. They'd just die from something different. What they mean is, those lives would be prolonged. And I dare say that quite a few of them would be prolonged in such a way that the person involved would be completely miserable, or be permanenetly disabled, or have no quality of life whatsoever.

 

So, is saving lives (really prolonging lives) a viable measure of whether something is worth doing? Or should we just let people get on with it?

I've been wondering about this issue, from a bit of a different perspective.

Given that it's all going pear shaped, and we can no longer afford to look after old people, or pay decent pensions, what's the point in funding medical advances, such as cures for cancer, or having all these expensive medical interventions?

Now to be a bit controversial, wouldn't it be for the greater good if people just died when their time was up?