- guys i'm totally going with this doctor deontology thing
- thougt experiment
techne: :done
episteme: :speculation
slug: 2011/12/30/consent-of-the-dead/
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<ahref="http://theviewfromhell.blogspot.com/2011/01/pareto-kaldor-hicks-and-deserving.html">Sister Y observes</a>:
<blockquote>A market or social system may provide for individual choice in any given transaction, but a participant cannot decide <em>whether to be part of a market economy</em>. It's not <ahref="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down">consent all the way down</a>, you might say.</blockquote>
The lack of consent is the strongest case for the immorality of bringing someone into existence, I think. Morality must be grounded in contracts (among other things, perhaps) and without consent, you have no Rule of Law, but tyranny. It might be a super-happy tyranny of fun, though. Evil has its upsides.
Assuming the necessity of consent, can there ever be a moral way to bring someone into existence? Maybe. Consider this simple thought experiment.
The evil Doctor Deontology is trying to assemble his crew of supervillains. He has recently gotten his hands on a cryogenically frozen Two-Face and now considers reviving him. He knows that Two-Face always makes his important decisions by flipping a coin. Fortunately for him, Doctor Deontology also obtained this coin, and deontologist that he is, he wants Two-Face's consent first before he goes through with the procedure.
So he thinks, if Two-Face were already alive, he would simply flip this coin to answer my question. There is nothing special about *him* doing the flipping, so *I* can just flip the coin in his stead. So he does, the coin comes up heads and Doctor Deontology revives Two-Face after all.
