Sufficiency, justice, and the pursuit of health extension

According to one account of distributive justice, called the Sufficiency View, justice only requires that we bring everyone above some critical threshold of well-being and nothing more. This account of justice no doubt explains why some people believe it is unfair to invest scarce public funds into combating aging. In this paper I show why the sufficiency view is wrong. Furthermore, I argue that the real injustice occurs when we disparage or ignore all potential avenues of extending healthy living. We must be both ambitious and imaginative in our attitudes towards health extension.