Let’s say hypothetically that this guy works for years in his basement laboratory and eventually develops the cure for cancer. Let’s also say he is only motivated by money. He determines that the best way to maximize his proceeds is auction off the cure, selling it to the 5,000 highest bidders, and then destroying it afterwards. People would call this guy the antichrist. Some one who easily could have saved millions of lives but let all these people die because he wanted money for himself would be more hated than Hitler.
The ironic thing is that if this guy had sat on his couch all day drinking 40s and robbing stores to pay for his heroin addiction he would be a sympathetic figure. Instead, because he studied and worked his ass off, saving five-thousand lives in the process, people feel that they are entitled to the fruits of his labor and condemn him when he doesn’t relinquish them.
By any objective standard, the researcher in question would be one of the greatest men who ever lived. If a fireman saves five lives in his entire career, he is lauded as an incredible hero; this guy would have saved five-thousand. No NGO ever saved five-thousand lives, and the twenty most prolific social workers combined could not come close to his total. Critics of our inventor will say it’s not what you do in life that counts, but what your motivation is, or some other moral relativist horseshit. These same people will try to condone the murdering fascist dictator Stalin, saying that he was only trying to create a utopian communist society and got lost along the way. This argument allows people to feel better about their lack of competence. They tell themselves that even though they would never have the capability or drive to save thousands of lives like our inventor, they would help more people if they could, as if this somehow counts. These same people claim that they would cure world hunger if they had one wish, and then live their lives resenting of other people’s popularity and material possessions.
The other argument people will use to criticize our inventor is that his actions promote inequality. People who further this argument will try to use to perverted logic to show that it’s somehow better to go to a remote Inuit village and give each of the fifty members one cherry than to single out one member and give him a year’s supply of caribou meat. Equality is an impossible notion. Everyone can and should have equal rights or equal protection under the law, but people stretch this concept to cover things like achievement, possessions, and even happiness. They will try to argue that curing the 5,000 richest cancer patients will somehow make life worse for the millions who were not cured. If anything, it would probably give them far more hope to know that a cure for their disease was possible and inspire a more energized research process. Equality pimps, however, will make some argument that those who do not get the cure will have their self esteem hurt or something dumb like that.
Guess what: the more humans evolve, the more material inequality will exist. When we’re all crawling on four limbs, we all travel in the same manner. When some one invents a Corvette or a hoverboard, not everyone will get one. The only people who could possibly argue that this is a bad thing are those whose worldview is dominated by bitter jealousy. To recap, our hypothetical researcher develops a cure that will give the five-thousand people who can afford it the gift of heath and may provoke jealousy in those who cannot. Whether you consider his existence good for the human race depends on whether you place greater value on human health or human bitterness.
