Much medical research, by taking the postponement of death as the sole measure of success, carries the unspoken assumption that any pain or postponement of pleasure today is worth the extra time in the future
Anti-smoking campaigners, for example, have been known to call young people ill-informed because they tend to identify road accidents, rather than smoking, as the thing which is most likely to kill them. But, in a world & a time where the most likely cause of death for a girl of 14 is a ride in a young mans car, this seems an eminently rational answer to the question
Of course for a teenager the years of life beyond the decrepitude of 40 seem completely devoid of value
There is research which attempts to measure the quality of life after medical intervention, the courts are regularly called upon to put a value on a lost or damaged life, & many transport cost/benefit or safety studies attempt to measure the value of lives saved
I am trying to move towards asking how do we measure life qua life for ourselves, not necessarily for the economic or other value which we bring to society or to others
I found it quite useful to think about this in the wake of the ongoing fuss about HRT & breast cancer. For example headlines about the Million Women Study in 2003 all emphasised the estimated 20,000 additional cancers in a decade
But Richard Sullivan, head of clinical programmes at Cancer Research UK, said: "Each decision to start HRT should be made on an individual basis between each woman and her doctor." He pointed out that HRT speeds up—rather than causes—the onset of breast cancer, acting as "a promoter not an initiator."
So a woman considering whether to use HRT is not making a stark choice between hot flushes & cancer, but between hot flushes now & cancer at, say, 65 rather than 70
For a 50 year old woman at the peak of her career even a hard headed economic analysis might suggest HRT. But every woman has a right to make her own decision on this.
