Yes, but the point is that people who characterize somebody as "bad" or "good" and people who decide which bodies to jettison are different people who don't necessarily share a vocabulary, never mind a common value system.
I disagree. If you are the decision-maker and your decision algorithm includes "badness", its your responsibility to define (and calculate) "badness", based on the data available to you. This is key.
It seems to me that this whole scenario is roughly analogous to the Trolley Problem, with the twist that the decision-maker is given unknown access to unknown amounts of data about the people who will live or die. In a situation of minimal information (imagine caskets identified by a randomly-assigned ID, archived by a database which had long-since been lost), the decision-maker must choose the survivor based only on the information stored within the body (e.g. DNA, presence of extant uncured diseases, etc.). Given more information (such as Jiro's caskets), the decision-maker must choose based on the combination of the information within the body and the information attached to it.
So, you must kill m people in order to preserve at least m+1 people, and you have n people from which to choose. How would you do it?
So, what data would you use and how?
calculate a Societal Expected Value
That's interesting. So the value of the person is entirely in his/her usefulness to the society?
calculating the "badness index" based on current criminal justice practices
Well, the problem we are discussing assumes that you do NOT have access to much data (certainly not their rap sheet or the lack thereof) about the frozen people -- their name and whether their contemporaries thought them "good" or "bad" is all you have.
In fact, the core of the issue is whether you are willing to accep...
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.)