From: Billy Brown (bbrown@conemsco.com)
Date: Tue Nov 24 1998 - 12:08:03 MST
Max M wrote:
>You can argue that a violent criminal is not that, and I would have to
>agree. But wouldn't it be better to lock up the criminal until he can be
>rewired with nanotech drugs or something else? This way everyone would
gain,
>and there could be some sort of compensation to the victims family when the
>reformed criminal returned to society..
>
>Of course if somebody is uncureable it is another story, but uncurability
is
>a very unextropian concept ... right?
Is this re-wiring a criminal's brain against his will really better than
executing him?
First, it raises very slippery, and currently unanswerable, questions about
the nature of identity - if we rewrite a major portion of your personality
to make sure you don't kill anyone else, are you really still you? If the
answer is no, then we've just picked a high-tech method of execution.
Second, do you really think its a good idea for government to have the
authority to "fix" criminals? Since there is no way to create an objective,
measurable definition of sanity that an arbitrary group of bureaucrat can
agree on, what we would end up with is sanity by committee. After all, as
long as we're convincing you not to be a murderer, we may as well make sure
you aren't a rapist or a traitor either. There is a natural tendency for
this kind of "treatment" to mutate into organized mind control over time,
and the only way I can see of avoiding the problem is to prohibit
involuntary personality alteration completely.
Billy Brown
bbrown@conemsco.com
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