This is like saying “Abortion is a good thing, because you could be killing the next Hitler”. Unless you think that the expected value of additional lifespan is negative, it would only affect the cost-benefit tradeoffs, and even then not very much(unless your guesses about the future are wildly different from my own). Cost-benefits are important—in fact, they’re my primary point of disagreement with the pro-cryonics consensus around here—but this is a very small lever to be trying to move a lot of weight with.
This is like saying “Abortion is a good thing, because you could be killing the next Hitler”.
Perhaps this is more like asking because we know human lives include suffering and end in death, is it moral to bring new humans into being? if possible future suffering is a reason to stay dead, then guaranteed present suffering is a reason not to have children. This isn’t an argument I’m advancing, but it is relevant. I’m not an anti-natalist but I admire some writers who are anti-natalists.
If someone is arguing that life is a net bad, and that this means that cryonics is a poor investment, then I will at least concede that their arguments are consistent(even if them being alive to make those arguments is not). But I don’t think that argument is being made. Arguing from a tiny possibility of a very bad outcome is playing very obviously to human emotional biases, and the result almost always needs to be discounted significantly to account for the low probability.
This is like saying “Abortion is a good thing, because you could be killing the next Hitler”. Unless you think that the expected value of additional lifespan is negative, it would only affect the cost-benefit tradeoffs, and even then not very much(unless your guesses about the future are wildly different from my own). Cost-benefits are important—in fact, they’re my primary point of disagreement with the pro-cryonics consensus around here—but this is a very small lever to be trying to move a lot of weight with.
Perhaps this is more like asking because we know human lives include suffering and end in death, is it moral to bring new humans into being? if possible future suffering is a reason to stay dead, then guaranteed present suffering is a reason not to have children. This isn’t an argument I’m advancing, but it is relevant. I’m not an anti-natalist but I admire some writers who are anti-natalists.
If someone is arguing that life is a net bad, and that this means that cryonics is a poor investment, then I will at least concede that their arguments are consistent(even if them being alive to make those arguments is not). But I don’t think that argument is being made. Arguing from a tiny possibility of a very bad outcome is playing very obviously to human emotional biases, and the result almost always needs to be discounted significantly to account for the low probability.