That feels extremely poignant to me, for some reason.
Cryonics doesn’t cut it from an Darwinist perspective. But you don’t let people die even though saving them will cost more than making a new human, or do you?
But you don’t let people die even though saving them will cost more than making a new human, or do you?
Are you speaking normatively or descriptively? We do routinely let people die even though saving them would not cost very much. People with the wealth to pay for treatment, or health insurance coverage, or who are born in a relatively wealthy country with government provided healthcare, are often saved at quite high cost. The majority of the world’s population has much less access to expensive health care however and in many cases we let those people die even though it would be relatively cheap to save them.
Economically it makes sense to spend more saving an existing person than creating a new one, either because they themselves (or their family or friends) place a high value on their particular life or more generally because a person with already developed skills and experience potentially offers a higher return on investment than a new person who will require years of expensive education to be economically productive. That could potentially be framed as an argument for cryonics but it seems less likely that a preserved human would offer economically valuable skills to a future society with revival technology.
That feels extremely poignant to me, for some reason. Cryonics doesn’t cut it from an Darwinist perspective. But you don’t let people die even though saving them will cost more than making a new human, or do you?
Click.
Are you speaking normatively or descriptively? We do routinely let people die even though saving them would not cost very much. People with the wealth to pay for treatment, or health insurance coverage, or who are born in a relatively wealthy country with government provided healthcare, are often saved at quite high cost. The majority of the world’s population has much less access to expensive health care however and in many cases we let those people die even though it would be relatively cheap to save them.
Economically it makes sense to spend more saving an existing person than creating a new one, either because they themselves (or their family or friends) place a high value on their particular life or more generally because a person with already developed skills and experience potentially offers a higher return on investment than a new person who will require years of expensive education to be economically productive. That could potentially be framed as an argument for cryonics but it seems less likely that a preserved human would offer economically valuable skills to a future society with revival technology.