In the hierarchy of goodness as perceived by the great and good, which would rank as the more beneficial for human kind, international drugs companies or Oxfam? The latter, of course. After all, are some 40 drugs companies not trying to prevent the South African government, which has Oxfam support, from enacting local laws which will render the patents for AIDS drugs virtually meaningless, thereby making the drugs far cheaper? Obviously, then, the case is cut and dried. On the one hand, you have a disease which is running out of control right across sub-Saharan Africa, and which, unopposed by AIDS drugs, will certainly claim the lives of millions. On the other hand, you have the might of the most powerful multinational companies in the world protecting their patents. How can there be any choice? And indeed, there is no choice, provided you are prepared to settle for a future world with no medical research and no pharmaceutical industry, a world in which illness, having been briefly defeated in Africa, would in the longer term conquer all, with virtuous charities like Oxfam battling Canutely against fresh and inventively diabolical plagues.
Patents law
For the real moral issue is not drugs but patents. Patents make drugs possible, and patents law is one of the cornerstones of modern civilisation. Not merely does it enrich those who invent; it also punishes those who copy without rewarding the original inventor. It was the recognition of the need to protect the intellectual copyright of the inventive against the plagiarist which caused the Florentines to devise the first patent laws nearly 700 years ago - uncoincidentally, at the height of the Renaissance.
Few people are content to strive unseen and unrewarded while others receive the acclaim and profits which are rightly theirs, and Filippi Brunelleschi was not one of the few. A goldmsith-turned-architect, and a brilliant artistic innovator, he took out letters patent on his design for a barge with hoisting gear to transport marble. That patent is one of the key moments in the history of the West: it is one of the reasons why growth and intellectual inquiry continued in Europe. Without such patenting, early progress in science in the Arabic world and China eventually came to nothing. The patenting of an intellectual property, like the creation of limited liability and the rule of primogeniture, is clearly an injustice of a sort. But in that injustice lies an inegalitarian and civilising instrument; and to undo that injustice in justice's name is to ensure that not merely do we not go forward, but we actually regress, as Imperial China and Islam did.
Abandon principle
This is not to say that the people of Africa should be allowed to pass to their terrible deaths while the world pharmaceutical companies hoard their drugs and cacklingly count their profits. Nor are the companies suggesting this should be the case. They have offered to give drugs to South Africa; but they will not abandon the principle of patent - and why should they, least of all to the kleptocrats now running the ANC, and just about every other sub-Saharan country? To abandon patent is to abandon profit, and to abandon profit is to abandon all medical advance against all disease.
"Governments have a clear obligation to put the health of their citizens before the profit margins of patent holders," said Oxfam's Kevin Watkins. A similar argument underwrote the forcible requisitioning of food from kulaks to feed the starving citizens of the young Soviet Union. In a few years, the communist agricultural system which depended on commandeering food produced not food, but famine.
People don't become pharmaceutical scientists out of simple virtue, nor simply because they are good at and enjoy scientific research. Another motive is needed to transform what would otherwise simply be an enjoyable hobby and occasional noble deeds into a lifelong career; and that is materialism. Pharmaceutical scientists are like kulaks, or journalists, teachers, doctors, stockbrokers and bricklayers: they try to make lots of money, commensurate with the effort involved.
A drugs manufacturer, unlike Oxfam, is not a charity. It is a publicly quoted company, an industry answerable to the twin authorities of its stockholders and of law. In their drive to generate profits, drugs companies have created a vast pharmacopoeia which has transformed the health of much of the world; in comparison, Oxfam's laudable achievements are dewdrops in the wide Amazon. Medical research is not driven by altruism: 70 years of virtuous, profit-free communist medicine yielded not a single prescribable drug.
Stockholder
If you as a stockholder voted to give away the legal patents of a company in which you had invested your life savings to needy governments throughout the world, thereby forfeiting those savings, management would be morally justified in obeying your wishes. Now. Do you know of a single stockholder who invests in a company with the instruction: make me penniless?
Drugs companies overcharge when they can. They give GPs free weekends in luxury castles in order to encourage them to prescribe their products. Is this proof that they are intrinsically villainous? No - merely that they behave as commercial organisations, and not as the Simon Community, which means as unscrupulously as they can get away with. Enforce laws against bribery and abuse of market dominance by all means, but leave patents alone. If South Africa wants to know the meaning of suffering, it will prevent commercial pharmaceutical companies from operating profitably; and then it may start really counting its dead.