alternate personalities unite?

Great Debates
1

This is an idle thought and may not be worth it, but whatever.
Let’s say person is suffering from a severe form of dissociative disorder, his/her body housing two equally conscious, calculating personalities. For the sake of simplicity, think of said person as two people in one. No one personality has more of a claim to the body in question than another. (This is a hypothetical, not a question really based in reality.) Two possible situations, independent of one another:

  1. That person one day hears “the Lord’s call” (don’t get mad; religious tendencies not really meant to be affirmed or called into question here) and, simultaneously, one personality chooses to follow the Lord while the other chooses to regard religion as a fairy tale/opiate of the masses/whatever. This person dies and is brought before the Lord. (Hypothetical, people. <Ducks for cover.>) Now, if you are the Lord, do you “try” them jointly or separately? If jointly, where do they go?
  2. That person one day commits a heinous crime for which the death penalty is found to be warranted. (Imagine we’re in Texas.) To reiterate, for all effective purposes, these are two personalities trapped in one body, not conscious of each other’s thoughts. The physical evidence is irrefutable: this body committed the crime. One personality has admitted to it, but the other is completely unaware of what has happened and is, for all intents and purposes, blameless. (For now, do not consider the possibility of hospitalization. Consider only “kill” or “set free.”) Now, do you convict and execute that person, eliminating both personalities, one deserving and one blameless? Or do you acquit and set the “host body” free, keeping an innocent man free and letting a murderer go unpunished? Bear in mind, in the American legal system, it is canon that it is better for a hundred guilty men to go free than one innocent man be punished. Then again, you also have to factor in the good of society as a whole.
    These two questions are very similar, and really, I was just trying to get at a single point: Can an alternate personalities, given enough time to develop and become as unique and deep as any person you’ve ever met, ever be considered “their own persons” despite sharing a body with one another? If so, what are the implications? If you kill your alternate personality (a la “Fight Club”) without “just cause,” can you be tried for murder?
    Just a random thought. I could be off base.
2

For situation 1, try them seperately. Two souls.

I’ll leave alone the whole God as judge deal of mine and just let it sit at that.

3

Oh, I’m sorry, from the header I thought this was an activist group.

Dammit you are so naive.

Shut up! It’s an easy mistake to make.

Why I oughta…

Be quiet both of you. Let’s just go

4

In the first, as Medea said, no prob. for God, the believer gets into Heaven, and the one who rejects God goes to Hell. We won’t need our bodies in the afterlife.

In the second, since the setup says we’re in Texas - fry 'em! (or inject, or whatever).

However, the scenario removes the options available between “kill” and “set free,” specifically rejecting the obvious one (to me) - hospitalization. If thru a combination of therapy, video tape, and drugs, one of the personalities becomes dominant, whichever one emerges “gets what they deserve” - if the killer, whatever the punishment is in that jurisdiction; if the other one, freedom. If the two remain split 50/50, and unaware of the other, they should remain in the hospital. The Sick One could receive treatment, and the Well One could work there.

Now, this does not touch the ethics of extinguishing one of two ‘person’-alities. Requires deeper thought than available at present.