So at some point in the near future, explorers find someone who has frozen “to death” N years ago but is, due to the circumstances of the freezing, preserved enough that, with recent (imaginary) advances in nanotech surgery and cryonics, they could almost certainly be revived more or less as good as new.
Should they be revived? What would their legal status be post revival? What set of ethics, and/or laws, would cover this process?
What if N is:
1
10
100
500
10000
?
Anything less than a hundred years, try to contact family members and respect their wishes.
Anything more than that: Sure, give it a go as long as said person will be financially provided for the rest of his life.
And said subject should be entitled to all the freedoms the rest of us enjoy.
And granted citizenship of course.
I’d say yes, based on the reasoning that, if it were me frozen in the ice, I’d want to be revived.
Their legal status would be “a living human being”. Probably stateless, though, if they’re from long enough ago. If their country still exists, then they’re still a citizen of that country.
Laws don’t matter. This is new, and I’m not waiting around for the law to catch up. Let them figure it out later.
Ethics? The same as providing medical treatment for anyone incapable of communicating their desires: Do what seems to be in the best interest of the person, as best as you can determine it. Not being frozen seems better to me than being frozen.
If you’re worried about culture shock, then spend a few bucks to create an environment that closely matches what they’re used to, and use it to integrate them into modern society. That this may be difficult shouldn’t be a factor in deciding what’s the right thing to do.
If this is not one of those sci-fi scenarios where the guy is simply fodder for the gladiator pits, slave market, or body bank, then I do not see how this is even debatable. Somebody is frozen or otherwise injured but still alive, you take them to the hospital and fix them up, right? It has nothing to do with their legal status or lack thereof, simply medical ethics. (Legally, I suppose the guy would be in the same boat as any other refugee who lost his paperwork, which experience today varies a lot depending on where you end up.)
Assuming that the frozen person isn’t like Jason Voorhees Friday the 13th, then of course, yes, you must save his/her life.
Frozen for X amount of years means you were dead.
I don’t see how that can be up for debate.
I see the OP as asking about the ethics of reviving a dead person. And not saving the life of a live person.
ANAL but ISTM legal status would depend on jurisdiction.
Start with “She’s DEAD, Jim!” Who owns a found corpse? Local authorities, or the nearest relative, or finders-keepers? Can she be sold? If a finder gains ownership of the corpsicle / ice queen and re-animates her, is she a chattel slave? If a free, live person, can she cancel her will and reclaim any property her heirs received? She is documented with birth and death certificates, one each. Will laws ever establish re-birth certs?
Moral status IMHO is trickier, a function of her salvager’s belief system and professional standards, if any. Whether to re-animate - is that a personal decision, or an instruction from family or authorities? If Fearless Leader orders “Revive her,” do you argue?
Scenario: Let’s say I’m mountaineering in Upper Slobovia where I find the ice queen in a glacial crevice, quick-frozen like Birdseye peas. (Clarence Birdseye learned flash-freezing from Eskimos.) Upper Slobovia’s laws are a bit vague about found corpses. A local identifies her as having gone missing 50 years ago. I easily [del]bribe[/del] gain permission to ship the still-frozen ice queen to the cutting-edge bio-med lab of my sibling Pat in North Jambalaya where laws and ethics are remarkably loose. Pat re-animates her and calls her Frosti. Her brain functions as before. After reviving, we find that she’s a BDSM dominatrix who subdues Pat and I as sex slaves. Did we do wrong?
Legally and ethically, what is the difference between the way we should treat a frozen person or someone in a coma?
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I’m just a caveman…”
According to Webster the definition of death is “The irreversible cessation of all vital functions especially as indicated by permanent stoppage of the heart, respiration, and brain activity” (Bolding mine)
How long they have been frozen is irrelevant, if they are in a condition where they can be revived then under that definition they are not dead and by all medical ethics they should be revived
There’s a saying among medical people regarding people who have been frozen that says “They’re not dead until they are warm and dead”
The follow up questions of their legal status and what to do with them afterwards are not something that should be considered in the medical decision to revive them or not
If you feel you must revive him, do NOT add bionic body parts. It won’t go well.
Okay. Point taken. But with the giant leaps in medicine made in the OP. I think society will have to reexamine what “death” means.
I mean, if frozen for 10 years doesn’t qualify, what does? If we stand by the “We must revive every person we can”., I’d imagine we’d have an over population problem in a few generations.
Nanaobots capable of fixing damaged cells from freezing could probably stop old people from getting old too.
Most people seem to have come to the same conclusion I did regarding the should-the-be-revived question. If they can be revived, they’re not dead. And if they’re not dead, medical ethics apply.
What to do next is where it gets tricky. Suppose we’re about to revive a 10,000-year-old person. How do we possibly set things up so that they can wake up and start to communicate with us without freaking out, going insane, being miserable, etc.
What environment should they be woken in? What food should we give them? How do we communicate with them? And how long can we “keep” them anywhere as a test subject before their natural rights as a human being start to outweigh whatever right we have as scientists/historians/whatever to learn from them?
What’s the difference? In either case, a person who would otherwise be dead is now not dead. That’s a good thing, for the same reason preventing someone’s death is a good thing.
As we all know from watching movies, that when you die, your soul departs your body. And when you revive soulless bodies, well, they are basically evil incarnate, and nothing good ever happens.
You would create an environment as close to what they were used to as you can. They’ll realise pretty quickly that it’s not what they’re used to, and that weird shit is happening, and then we can start the process of contact - learning languages, explaining the situation, and then seeing where it goes from there.
This gets into something we often see when people are talking about “Who built the pyramids?”, and start speculating that it must have been aliens, because there’s no way those primitive screw-heads could have built them. But people need to remember, they’re primitive, not stupid. The guys who built the pyramids were the Einsteins of their age. Any random person from back then will likely be as intelligent as any random person of today. Given the chance to acclimate, I expect they’d get along all right.
That’s a good question. Are we better off building our best approximation of their environment… knowing that we won’t get it quite right, plus it will almost certainly be fenced off and limited to begin with; so from their perspective it’s some weird mockery of what they’re used to; vs something all plastic and metal but with plentiful water and food and comfortable stuff; so it’s immediately and blatantly something alien but non-threatening?
I dunno.
I think once communication is fully established, the ethical thing to do is to offer the person a choice for how they want to live the rest of their life:
(1) Painless suicide pills, if they really have no interest in living alone
(2) They can go live alone in as large a stretch of wilderness as can be found, and we will never disturb them for the rest of their life (I wonder whether this would actually be vastly harder for them to survive than one might think… edible animals might well be orders of magnitude less common now than in the pre-industrial past)
(2a) But we’ll give them a panic button radio device with which we can come rescue them if they get in trouble
(2b) We’ll give them some good metal knives, and a water purifier, and some other useful survival gear to start out with; and instructions on how to use it; and a method to resupply if they run out
(3) Like (2), but we’ll send an alternating group of people to hang with them one week out of every month, to check up on them, provide company, bring whatever they’re missing, continue to learn from them, and also give them the chance to change their mind if they want to
(4) We will teach them about modern society as they teach us about their past life, and they can live a life of comfort for as long as they like, with some special quasi-diplomatic legal status. So they can become as acclimatized to as much of modern life as they want, but will still live in a special bubble, surrounded by guardians/aides/etc.
(5) We’ll teach them about modern society and languages, with the goal that they’ll eventually join modern society, go to college, etc.
“Sometimes dead is better.”
It’s very unlikely this person would want to live alone, even if we could give them a wilderness that would sustain them. Humans are social animals; complete solitude is torture. Given that they can apparently remain in suspended animation indefinitely, I’d be very hesitant to bring them back until we’ve got the legal and practical issues sorted out.
Did anyone else read * Island of the Blue Dolphins* in fourth grade, about the last remaining indigenous woman on San Nicholas Island? It was a novel based on a true story. The woman it was based on lived alone for 18 years on her native island after her tribe was killed, then died a mere 7 weeks after being “rescued” by Spanish missionaries and taken to Santa Barbara. From * Shrouded Heritage* by Tom Holm:
It breaks my heart to think of how lonely she must have been. Hell, people are going crazy right now because they can only see their loved ones over video chat. Imagine going to sleep and waking up to find you’ll never see any of them ever again, nor anyone who speaks your language or understands your culture. And then, imagine that there’s no place for you in this world, that you have no legal identity with which to enter into trade agreements or marriage or employment contracts even if you learn the rules and adapt to this alien society.
If we can do better than that–find a way to not only keep this hypothetical iceman alive in a world full of diseases he has no immunity to, but successfully integrate him into modern society with the full privileges of citizenship and a means of self-sufficiency and human connection-- then sure, let’s do it. Until we can, though, let’s keep him on ice.
This alien petting zoo stuff sounds more far-fetched and over the top, not to mention mad-scientific and disturbingly imperialistic, than the original hypothetical.
In real life (this is supposed to be the “near future”?) you can get things like support, benefits, loans, national insurance, education, training for work, etc.