> it's more immoral to develop a cure and make lots of money from it, than to spend billions on activities that don't even cure anything
OK, when you put it this way, yeah, it's hard to argue against.
What I was going for was more about the after-the-fact of having developed a cure: there's something about the fact that they /have/ the cure and at that point choose not to make it more available that seems reprehensible. This to me seems analogous to the sad fact that people are dying of hunger all the time in the world but a lot of us are isolated from that fact by sheer distance and go about our lives ignoring that with no moral weight on our shoulders (analogy to twitter, not having developed a cure - and not to say that this is a good thing), but if we directly encounter a person dying of hunger one day and we have food (analogy to insert-pharma-here), I'd like to think most of us would feel obligated to help. The immediacy and ability to help seems a factor.
> it's more immoral to develop a cure and make lots of money from it, than to spend billions on activities that don't even cure anything
OK, when you put it this way, yeah, it's hard to argue against.
What I was going for was more about the after-the-fact of having developed a cure: there's something about the fact that they /have/ the cure and at that point choose not to make it more available that seems reprehensible. This to me seems analogous to the sad fact that people are dying of hunger all the time in the world but a lot of us are isolated from that fact by sheer distance and go about our lives ignoring that with no moral weight on our shoulders (analogy to twitter, not having developed a cure - and not to say that this is a good thing), but if we directly encounter a person dying of hunger one day and we have food (analogy to insert-pharma-here), I'd like to think most of us would feel obligated to help. The immediacy and ability to help seems a factor.