Yes, it’s an absurd hypothetical. If you don’t wanna play, then don’t.
Recently the personal representative of a billionaire white supremacist approached Rhymer Enterprises about our building a kill-all-jews-blacks-and-arabs-in-Manhattan-ray. Now, RhE is evil, but we’re not, you know, evil, so I gave the guy a listen to, told him what he wanted certainly sounded feasible, explained our fee schedule, and as soon as the wire transfer cleared shot him in the kneecaps. That was as far as I was willing to take the matter; nobody was paying us to take down this racist pig, and RhE is not in the hero business. But I wasn’t done being treacherous, so I called up a group of do-gooder technomages and suggested they might want to go save some lives.
That was a mistake. Oh, the heroes did their bit–raiding the billionaire’s island lair, destroying his kill-sats, freeing a couple thousand slaves, the usual stuff–but there was a complication. Two, actually. One, a good number of the billionaires’ worshipful, racist goons escaped; and two, the do-gooder technomages discovered that the billionaire had a clone of Adolf Hitler on hand. An actual freaking Hitler clone, chronologically two weeks old but force-grown to be physiologically in his mid-fifties. Moreover, the HC has been technomagically impressed with all of the originals memories, personality, and abilities, and made to think that it IS Hitler kept in suspended animation since the war and only recently revived, eager to resume the original Adolf’s ambitions.
Now had RhE undertaken this op , we’d have immediately fed the HitlerClone into the nearest wood chopper. But the do-gooders have doubts. One of them points out that the HC, despite its odious origin and nature, is still technically innocent of Hitler’s sins. Another goes further than that, spouting the ridiculous opinion that the clone is a he, not an it–and that “he” is as much a victim of the racist billionaire as the slaves they rescued. That particular do-gooder wants to try to readjust the clone so it doesn’t believe itself to be the original and won’t try to raise an army or start another holocaust, but says its wrong to murder or even indefinitely imprison it unless it actually starts some shit.
Fooey on that, I say. The technomagic memory implantation used on the HC, I happen to know, is state of the art; there’s no known way at present to undo it (unless you count bashing its head in with a sledgehammer) and no guarantee that a reversal process can be developed. If the HC weren’t at the do-gooder’s headquarters I’d sent out a team to mulch it–but it IS at their headquarters, and RhE has a strict policy of not starting fair fights.
Anywho–let’s say you’re an member of the the do-gooders’ guild. Do you argue for the elimination of the HitlerClone? Confining until it can be reprogrammed? Releasing it into the wild? No matter what, why do you argue as you do?
Still I loves me some Kristen Chenowith slapbot! When should I expect her to come over?