From: Harvey Newstrom (hnewstro@us.ibm.com)
Date: Tue May 09 2000 - 12:22:13 MDT
A fake "Dan Fabulich" <daniel.fabulich@yale.edu> wrote:
> Would you feel any more or less upset if I instead told you that someone
> had made a copy of you and then killed him?
No difference. Making a copy before killing me is no different then letting
my genetics live on through my children before killing me, or letting my
memory live on in the mind of others before killing me. It might be a nice
touch, but I'm still dead. The new guy is alive, but I'm still dead. We
are identical, except I'm dead and he's not. I would argue that this is the
biggest divergence that two copies can have to diverge into two separate
individuals.
What if I you tortured or raped or wounded instead of killed? Does having a
copy lessen your damages? Should you be unable to pursue a criminal
conviction of the attacker if you had a backup copy? Does that make the
attack not occur? The only reason that killing seems to work is the bogus
argument that the dead guy can't object. If I were reanimated after being
killed, I would start objecting again. I object as the murder is being
carried out, and if I could, I would object afterwards.
Most arguments state that the copies cannot be allowed to diverge. I submit
that death for one copy and life for another is about the biggest divergence
that can occur. What about the possibility of reanimation of the dead body
in the future? Does this retroactively make the killing a killing whereas
it wasn't before the original was reanimated? Do you have to destroy the
original body beyond reanimation for it to be considered not to be murder?
-- Harvey Newstrom <http://HarveyNewstrom.com> IBM Certified Senior Security Consultant, Legal Hacker, Engineer, Research Scientist, Author.
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