[extropy-chat] How to be copied into the future?

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 4/24/07, A B <austriaaugust at yahoo.com> wrote:

But the question arises: Is *he*, evil Adolf, actually
> entirely responsible for this situation. Because in
> this case it was the future human who chose to give
> him life, as evil as he is. Similarly, none among us
> humans, even the evil ones, had the choice to come
> into existence. No-one first asked me whether or not
> I'd like to awaken within this particular Universe.
> And no-one asked any of us. Just as we might put the
> blame on the above-mentioned future human for the
> existence of evil Adolf; we might be just as justified
> in placing the blame on this (currently) unintelligent
> Universe for having created any evil person to begin
> with. What I'm trying to get at is that perhaps we
> should place blame precisely where it is justified...
> nowhere. In my opinion, we shouldn't punish solely for
> the sake of punishing.
>
> As others have said, that doesn't mean we shouldn't
> take practical measures to promote and protect our
> human and transhuman values...


Neither people nor inanimate objects have any real freedom, in the final
analysis, since every object in the universe including Adolf Hitler is bound
to follow the laws of physics. However, punishing inanimate objects for
doing things we don't like is unlikely to make any difference, whereas
punishing people, or the threat of punishment, might.

Stathis Papaioannou
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070424/e18dc66a/attachment.html>