Posted 30 July 2005 - 07:37 AM
I guess I just look at this differently from most people, perhaps I am less mature, as others have mentioned, I would of course choose to save both, but if that were an offered choice, it wouldn't be much of a moral dilemma, now would it. I chose the 100 not out of any great emotional attachment to them over the child, or visa versa, instead, simply because of the (perhaps misplaced) trust I place in technology. I didn't see that article that someone mentioned about people being buried because their funding ran out, but to the best of my knowledge, in the about 3 decades since the advent of cryonics, no one has been "lost" once preserved.
Since I believe with very little uncertainty that within another 2 maybe 3 or 4 at the very most times that length of time nanotechnology will have reached a level that all of those people will be able to be revived, I would say the probability is that at least 90 of them will make it, it's simply a numbers issue. I don't want someone to burn to death, but I'd rather save 90 people, or maybe even up to a 100, than 1.
The cryonics patients are also even more helpless than the child. I don't know exactly what you mean by a "fire door", but the child can at least move around and maybe get out a window or something. The cryonics have no means by which to protect themselves at all, they are going to sleep, maybe forever (dying) with the desperate and very sympathetic hope that maybe they will wake up again someday. It's terrible, but to me, the moral choice is clear. But this is a really complicated and thorny issue, like abortion, like all those, a final conclusion on what is truly "right" in these cases may never be widely agreed upon. I think the main issue here is how much faith one places in the tech. What if the 100 cryo patients were people in cardiac arrest, who, if, theoretically, there were enough doctors on-hand to defibrillate all of them, there was a good chance that most would live? Would you still choose the one over the many? Was someone who was technically "dead" for a thousand years and then revived perfectly ever really any more dead than someone who was technically "dead" for a minute? These are the kinds of complex philosophical issues I think the poster of this poll was meaning to raise, I'm surprised I haven't seem them discussed here more already.