[collyw]

I sometimes wonder if curing cancer and other diseases is such a noble cause. More people consuming more of the finite resources that we have. Its a difficult question, and I am thinking of lots of outliers as I type this. Extending a 70 year olds life by a few years is different from curing a child leukemia sufferer.

[solipsism]

The only difficulty is deciding how to define "noble". Such questions appear hard because we vacillate between many different optimization functions, and in conversation we lack precision.