I might pose I similar thought experiment: if a scientist today, discovered he could raise the dead, restore anyone who had ever lived, what would we do with that power? Do we have a moral responsibility to “save” all humans ever? Even if resurrection were free, the earth couldn’t (currently) support a population of every human (and perhaps some pets?) who’s ever been. We’d have to decide who gets to live and who doesn’t. Restoring past-people will almost certainly entail displacing some people who might otherwise have been born. Why do we privilege those that already got to live a “full” (typical human) life over the millions of potential humans that could populate the earth in our stead?
Furthermore, I don’t see much of a distinction between deciding who gets revived and who doesn’t, on the one hand, and killing the people we don’t want around, on the other. Faced with a delemia of “who gets to live”, unless we aim for a sort of “equality of time alive”, out of a sense of fairness (in which case, most modern humans are running a deficit), it seems we would kill the ass-holes to make room for the cool people from history. Is that inhumane?
Or consider, maybe we’d stop giving birth entirely, so that all the existent people can take turns being the one’s alive. Does a world where every person is old, where no one is falling in love for the first time, where children are absent, so that we can have more life, see like a good one?
I’m asking these questions sincerely. Maybe that is the world we want.
I’d expect the answer to be similar to an analogous situation involving birth. If everyone had more children than they could afford to raise, society would collapse. We like to think that since the children are not responsible for their situation, we as a society would choose to support them, but this only is possible because the number of people who have children and demand that society support them is limited. At some point the drain on resources would make it impossible to support them as a society, and we would have to let them starve, and/or not permit immigrants from countries with high birth rates.
The same would go for resurrection. If you resurrect someone, you are responsible for supporting them for a maximum of 18 years and a minimum that depends on how long they are dead (so you’re not on the hook for 18 years if you resurrect someone who died last week). If you resurrect more people than you can afford to support, this is treated like having more children than you can afford to support; the resurrected will have to live in poverty or starve. There will be a safety net to help some of them but it will be imperfect and it may not be possible to help them all. And of course you don’t allow immigration from countries who like resurrecting lots of people and sending them across the border to take advantage of our social services.
If it is significantly easier to resurrect than to have children, we may need to have penalties that we wouldn’t tolerate in the case of children, such as arresting people if they resurrect more than X others and do not support them, something we currently do only for child support cases.
I might pose I similar thought experiment: if a scientist today, discovered he could raise the dead, restore anyone who had ever lived, what would we do with that power? Do we have a moral responsibility to “save” all humans ever? Even if resurrection were free, the earth couldn’t (currently) support a population of every human (and perhaps some pets?) who’s ever been. We’d have to decide who gets to live and who doesn’t. Restoring past-people will almost certainly entail displacing some people who might otherwise have been born. Why do we privilege those that already got to live a “full” (typical human) life over the millions of potential humans that could populate the earth in our stead?
Furthermore, I don’t see much of a distinction between deciding who gets revived and who doesn’t, on the one hand, and killing the people we don’t want around, on the other. Faced with a delemia of “who gets to live”, unless we aim for a sort of “equality of time alive”, out of a sense of fairness (in which case, most modern humans are running a deficit), it seems we would kill the ass-holes to make room for the cool people from history. Is that inhumane?
Or consider, maybe we’d stop giving birth entirely, so that all the existent people can take turns being the one’s alive. Does a world where every person is old, where no one is falling in love for the first time, where children are absent, so that we can have more life, see like a good one?
I’m asking these questions sincerely. Maybe that is the world we want.
I’d expect the answer to be similar to an analogous situation involving birth. If everyone had more children than they could afford to raise, society would collapse. We like to think that since the children are not responsible for their situation, we as a society would choose to support them, but this only is possible because the number of people who have children and demand that society support them is limited. At some point the drain on resources would make it impossible to support them as a society, and we would have to let them starve, and/or not permit immigrants from countries with high birth rates.
The same would go for resurrection. If you resurrect someone, you are responsible for supporting them for a maximum of 18 years and a minimum that depends on how long they are dead (so you’re not on the hook for 18 years if you resurrect someone who died last week). If you resurrect more people than you can afford to support, this is treated like having more children than you can afford to support; the resurrected will have to live in poverty or starve. There will be a safety net to help some of them but it will be imperfect and it may not be possible to help them all. And of course you don’t allow immigration from countries who like resurrecting lots of people and sending them across the border to take advantage of our social services.
If it is significantly easier to resurrect than to have children, we may need to have penalties that we wouldn’t tolerate in the case of children, such as arresting people if they resurrect more than X others and do not support them, something we currently do only for child support cases.