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| title | date | tags | techne | episteme | slug | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Consent of the Dead | 2011-12-30 |
|
:done | :fiction | 2011/12/30/consent-of-the-dead/ |
[Sister Y observes][Sister Kaldor]:
A market or social system may provide for individual choice in any given transaction, but a participant cannot decide whether to be part of a market economy. It's not [consent all the way down][Turtles], you might say.
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.
<%= image("twoface.jpg", "Two-Face") %>
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.
Did he do so with Two-Face's consent?