Say someone commits a crime, then goes into a scanner, destroyed, and recreated somewhere else. is it agreed that they’re the same person? if so, it would make sense to still blame them for the crime.
Now let’s say we discovered that this person never actually destroyed themselves, they were scanned and cloned, but faked getting destroyed.
Should the “clone” now be declared innocent, and the “original” declared guilty instead? or should both of them be declared guilty?
Yeah, that makes sense. The way I came to think of it is that person A commits a crime, then faints and is unconscious after that. Afterwards, a separate nefarious cloner then clones person A in a black box, so one person A goes in, two persons A come out from the cloning black box. Person(s!) A awake, and having a strong conscience of their crime, turn themselves in. Since they have exactly the same memories and conscience, they are indistinguishable from the point of view of being the person who committed the crime, both internally and externally.
This is actually a good question. I feel that both persons should be declared guilty, since cloning oneself (whether intentionally or not) should not give one an automatic-out from moral judgement. I am not as sure about whether the punishment should be equal or shared.
Let’s see if i can help.
Say someone commits a crime, then goes into a scanner, destroyed, and recreated somewhere else. is it agreed that they’re the same person? if so, it would make sense to still blame them for the crime.
Now let’s say we discovered that this person never actually destroyed themselves, they were scanned and cloned, but faked getting destroyed.
Should the “clone” now be declared innocent, and the “original” declared guilty instead? or should both of them be declared guilty?
Yeah, that makes sense. The way I came to think of it is that person A commits a crime, then faints and is unconscious after that. Afterwards, a separate nefarious cloner then clones person A in a black box, so one person A goes in, two persons A come out from the cloning black box. Person(s!) A awake, and having a strong conscience of their crime, turn themselves in. Since they have exactly the same memories and conscience, they are indistinguishable from the point of view of being the person who committed the crime, both internally and externally.
This is actually a good question. I feel that both persons should be declared guilty, since cloning oneself (whether intentionally or not) should not give one an automatic-out from moral judgement. I am not as sure about whether the punishment should be equal or shared.
See my thoughts here on full/distributed punishment