My visceral reaction was that "bad people" shouldn't be preserved. A second take relaxed that position quite a bit: the potential gain from cryonic preservation is massive (imagine living for hundreds of thousands of years). This makes death extremely costly (in comparison to a more conventional view of the human lifespan as more-or-less capped at 120 years). As such, denying cryonic preservation to anyone is an extremely unfriendly action.
That said, cryonic preservation is a costly venture. In the unlikely event that humanity were in dire straights and needed to devise a list of preserved humans to be sacrificed (for energy costs, space constraints, or whatever) in order to maintain the safety of others in the population, I'm entirely comfortable with considering a person's "badness" as a factor in the decision of whether or not to jettison them.
I'm entirely comfortable with considering a person's "badness" as a factor in the decision of whether or not to jettison them.
So, as a thought experiment, imagine that through elven magic you get to resurrect some (but not all) people from, say, XVI-century Europe. What you have is a bunch of coffins and some of them are marked "Bad person" and some are marked "Good person" -- by people who buried them 500 years ago. Are you going to take these markings into account?
Would you answer differently if the coffins came from Pharaonic Egypt? An unnamed Neolithic village?
This month's media thread includes a short article on some people's idea to have Ayn Rand frozen, which ultimately didn't happen. My first reaction was a shudder. I thought, I definitely wouldn't want Ayn Rand preserved forever. My second thought was, What right do I have to say who can and who can't get frozen?
Whatever your thoughts on Ayn Rand, I think this can spark an interesting conversation: What, if anything, should humankind do about people who are widely seen as harmful for the whole? For example, if the Castro dynasty in Cuba or the Kim dynasty in North Korea decide to freeze themselves to ensure they will continue oppressing their countries forever, should that be prevented? (And yes, my opinion of Ayn Rand is such that these examples came to mind.)