Well, would we offer a prisoner on death row a one-in-a-million lottery chance to be spared the electric chair?
I doubt it—when we as a society decide a person does not deserve to live, we mean we want him to die with probability 1. Cryonics offers an unknown but non-zero probability of survival. I’m not sure how I feel about the death penalty, but someone who believes in the death penalty should not allow cryonics after execution.
This seems reasonable since we don’t assign a different punishment to those who survive botched executions.
But on the other hand people there are some people who are ok with the death penalty because they can let “God sort it out”. Believing in a immortal soul or reincarnation and then killing someone seems to me more like a forced eviction and a extreme restraining order than a annihilation.
What if there are more people like that than there are people who are against executions on primarily religious grounds (this is far from clear btw since the Roman Catholic Church, arguably the largest religious denomination on the planet, formally lobbies and preaches against it)?
Why not argue that we should allow low probability far future acquittal in the form of death followed by cryogenic preservation on the grounds that there is a reasonable doubt that we as a society are wrong about this, and will be wrong for quite some time (longer than his natural life) but not forever. If we are killing them anyway, why not let our descendants to undo our mistakes?
Well, would we offer a prisoner on death row a one-in-a-million lottery chance to be spared the electric chair?
I doubt it—when we as a society decide a person does not deserve to live, we mean we want him to die with probability 1. Cryonics offers an unknown but non-zero probability of survival. I’m not sure how I feel about the death penalty, but someone who believes in the death penalty should not allow cryonics after execution.
This seems reasonable since we don’t assign a different punishment to those who survive botched executions.
But on the other hand people there are some people who are ok with the death penalty because they can let “God sort it out”. Believing in a immortal soul or reincarnation and then killing someone seems to me more like a forced eviction and a extreme restraining order than a annihilation.
What if there are more people like that than there are people who are against executions on primarily religious grounds (this is far from clear btw since the Roman Catholic Church, arguably the largest religious denomination on the planet, formally lobbies and preaches against it)?
Why not argue that we should allow low probability far future acquittal in the form of death followed by cryogenic preservation on the grounds that there is a reasonable doubt that we as a society are wrong about this, and will be wrong for quite some time (longer than his natural life) but not forever. If we are killing them anyway, why not let our descendants to undo our mistakes?