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 t...
If someone is sentenced to life in prison or the death penalty, should they also be prohibited from signing up for cryonics? Specifically, I'm referring to people like these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_death_row_inmates
I am not talking about providing it for them, just allowing them to sign up for it provided they can somehow get enough money together and allowing a response team into the prison to retrieve the body after the prisoner has died or been executed by lethal injection. I think they should be allowed access to cryonics, because we don't know enough yet about the brain to determine how much of their criminal behavior is due to mental illness/disorder and how much is due to free will. It may be possible to diagnose and cure people like Jeffrey Dahmer in the future before they commit any crimes, or to cure those already in prison such that they won't commit any more crimes.
As cryonics gets more and more popular, this will become an issue, especially when the first death row inmate wants to sign up for it.