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lsparrish comments on Should criminals be denied cryonics? - Less Wrong
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This is a good question... If you see it as punishment of an evil person, it follows that they should be denied cryonics for the same reason they are being killed.
But if you believe in rehabilitation, thinking of the criminal behavior as the result of a mental illness, cryonics is a good thing because they are being sent forward to a time when their mental disease can be cured.
It would be interesting to see what would happen from a political standpoint if a death row inmate were to express a wish for cryonics. Has anyone tried sending literature on cryonics to condemned criminals?
That would indeed be interesting, particularly because it would be a good test of how seriously people take cryonics when they're not motivated to deny the possibility of its success (to explain why they don't want to sign up, or why it wouldn't have been any use in saving the life of a loved one, etc.) — we'd see how many of them seemed to be seriously worried about the death row convicts coming back someday.
Note that from the point of view of deterrent it doesn't mater whether cryonics works or not as long as the criminal believes it will.
True... so anyone who really wants to increase the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent should be promoting atheism. :)
Of course, it's even more effective to promote the belief that sinners will spend eternity burning in hell.
Especially if one also promotes that those executed are instantly sinners.
Suppose you believe that final death is an appropriate punishment for someone's crime. You also believe cryonics has probability p of working, where p is too small for you to sign up for cryonics. Should you allow the prisoner to be frozen?
If cryonics doesn't work, it doesn't make a difference; and if cryonics does, you shouldn't. Thus there is no reason to allow the prisoner to sign up for cryonics.
Notice that this conclusion doesn't depend on the probability of cryonics working, or on how certain you are the prisoner is guilty, for any certainty sufficient to justify him being executed.
I think you have just suggested an excellent persuasion tactic. I can't think of a better way to convince people they want something than by having them see it as a privilege that a deplored group don't deserve.
And the important thing is the presupposition that this is a matter worth discussion in the public arena.
I would not necessarily say it follows. Sentencing someone to information death is a whole different level of punishment than sentencing them to execution. In most cases even historically the soon to be executed criminals are allowed to see a priest. This suggest that the intended punishment is not usually eternal in nature.
Sure, but cryonics isn't religious, it's medical. Like doing CPR on the patient. And information death is what happens with the current death penalty. Taking away information death would be changing the punishment's essential nature.
It is action taken based off premises. It indicates intent. Those instigating the punishment quite clearly do not intend for it to go beyond the cessation of all function in the body.
The current death penalty doesn't talk about cryonic preservation at all much less incorporate it as part of the essential nature. It is current death - and the cremation or burial of bodies rather than preservation - that results in information death.
Prohibiting cryonics is not the default state, the status quo. It would be an additional punishment.
This is not clear to me. It could just as easily be that the intent is for the person's memories to be completely erased from the body in order that the person would not be able to return to life and commit the same crimes again. Otherwise it would not be as much of a punishment.
From a legal rights standpoint perhaps this is correct. But from an actual action-taken standpoint, it isn't. The status quo for a condemned criminal is to die and rot. If condemned criminals started doing cryonics, it would be a disruption in this pattern. Those in favor of the status quo of condemned criminals dying and rotting would be against this and in favor of regulating cryonics to prevent it.
The main point of punishment is to deter crime, rehabilitation is secondary. One to think of this using TDT is that the point of punishment is to acausally prevent crime. I discussed this in a slightly different context here.
As to whether a criminal should be allowed to sign up for cryonics, that depends on what the appropriate level of punishment for his crime is. After all, we assign some criminals 10 years in jail, others life, and execute still others.
As the question of mental illness, as Yvain points out in Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease.