First of all, we could easily have something akin to child protective services, which protects the rights of marginalized individuals within citizen units. If individuals are being abused, they can be removed, and put with foster citizen units.
We may decide that actually, individuals don’t have the right to leave the citizen unit they were “born into”, but I do agree that I share some aversion to that idea. It is worth noting that in a society where the norm is existing in a close knit citizen unit of copies of varying similarity to you, individuals may have far less aversion to being unable to leave their C.U. (or leave it easily). It may be far less of a problem than it seems to us. Consider traditional societies where one’s family is of large cultural importance.
However, if we ignore the sociological pressures...
We need a system by which sufficiently deviated copies can appeal to get “divorced” or “emancipated”, but one that limits this occurrence so that the rate of citizen unit population growth doesn’t outpace that of the economy. This certainly puts a damper on the clean, simple, and automatic non-Malthusian-ness of my proposed system, but it doesn’t seem insurmountable. The problem is not so different than that of immigration regulation in our time.
The basic principle is that there should be a quota of new copies (or copy collectives, more likely) that can receive emancipation in a year. The number of this quota should be determined by the growth of the economy in that year.
We could disincentivize “divorces” or disincentivize making copies or even disincentivize only making copies that are sufficiently different from the original that the copy can be held to be morally independent of the actions of the citizen unit. Alternatively, we could incentivize “mergers”, in which separate citizen units (Is there a better name for these than citizen units?) combine to form a single, new citizen unit. Consider why many people decide not to have children today: cost, loss of freedom, ect.
some ideas:
We only allow the quota’ed number of new citizen units to be split off in a given year. When the number of applicants exceeds the spots available, they can chose to either continue as part of the citizen unit they were “born into” until a spot opens up, or they can enter a sort of suspended animation where they are run extremely slowly (or are even deactivated and digitally compressed) until a slot opens up.
Every citizen unit has a state mandated right to split up into two citizen units once in so many years. Individuals right to decide which of the new citizen units to join is protected. (This has some complications involving game theory and picking teams).
Individuals can break off from the citizen unit they were born into and join another (willing) citizen unit, whenever they mutually agree to do so.
New C.U.s can break off from old ones as long as they combine with another new C.U. that wants to break off.
If individuals are being abused, they can be removed, and put with foster citizen units.
How does that work? People are permitted to kill members of their own citizen units without penalty. If they can be killed without penalty, surely they can be abused without penalty too, right?
Of course you could say “they can be killed but they can’t be abused”, but that leads to problems. Can someone threaten a member of the same citizen unit with death or does that count as abuse? How do you determine abuse anyway (if I am about to duplicate myself, and I arrange a precommitment which results in one copy being abused and one copy benefitting, can the abused copy appeal to the anti-abuse law, thus essentially making such precommitments impossible?)
Consider traditional societies where one’s family is of large cultural importance.
Families are limited in what they can do to their members much more than members of CUs are limited. Furthermore, we consider some of the things those families were permitted do to be immoral nowadays (such as letting husbands abuse wives.)
First of all, we could easily have something akin to child protective services, which protects the rights of marginalized individuals within citizen units. If individuals are being abused, they can be removed, and put with foster citizen units.
We may decide that actually, individuals don’t have the right to leave the citizen unit they were “born into”, but I do agree that I share some aversion to that idea. It is worth noting that in a society where the norm is existing in a close knit citizen unit of copies of varying similarity to you, individuals may have far less aversion to being unable to leave their C.U. (or leave it easily). It may be far less of a problem than it seems to us. Consider traditional societies where one’s family is of large cultural importance.
However, if we ignore the sociological pressures...
We need a system by which sufficiently deviated copies can appeal to get “divorced” or “emancipated”, but one that limits this occurrence so that the rate of citizen unit population growth doesn’t outpace that of the economy. This certainly puts a damper on the clean, simple, and automatic non-Malthusian-ness of my proposed system, but it doesn’t seem insurmountable. The problem is not so different than that of immigration regulation in our time.
The basic principle is that there should be a quota of new copies (or copy collectives, more likely) that can receive emancipation in a year. The number of this quota should be determined by the growth of the economy in that year.
We could disincentivize “divorces” or disincentivize making copies or even disincentivize only making copies that are sufficiently different from the original that the copy can be held to be morally independent of the actions of the citizen unit. Alternatively, we could incentivize “mergers”, in which separate citizen units (Is there a better name for these than citizen units?) combine to form a single, new citizen unit. Consider why many people decide not to have children today: cost, loss of freedom, ect.
some ideas:
We only allow the quota’ed number of new citizen units to be split off in a given year. When the number of applicants exceeds the spots available, they can chose to either continue as part of the citizen unit they were “born into” until a spot opens up, or they can enter a sort of suspended animation where they are run extremely slowly (or are even deactivated and digitally compressed) until a slot opens up.
Every citizen unit has a state mandated right to split up into two citizen units once in so many years. Individuals right to decide which of the new citizen units to join is protected. (This has some complications involving game theory and picking teams).
Individuals can break off from the citizen unit they were born into and join another (willing) citizen unit, whenever they mutually agree to do so.
New C.U.s can break off from old ones as long as they combine with another new C.U. that wants to break off.
How does that work? People are permitted to kill members of their own citizen units without penalty. If they can be killed without penalty, surely they can be abused without penalty too, right?
Of course you could say “they can be killed but they can’t be abused”, but that leads to problems. Can someone threaten a member of the same citizen unit with death or does that count as abuse? How do you determine abuse anyway (if I am about to duplicate myself, and I arrange a precommitment which results in one copy being abused and one copy benefitting, can the abused copy appeal to the anti-abuse law, thus essentially making such precommitments impossible?)
Families are limited in what they can do to their members much more than members of CUs are limited. Furthermore, we consider some of the things those families were permitted do to be immoral nowadays (such as letting husbands abuse wives.)