A while back I asked about a pill that turned humans into something like the Elves from Lord of the Rings, the only way to die being a violent death (you also need food, water, air and shelter). It cures and immunises against all known and unknown diseases, including genetic disorders, and modifies cells to abolish the Hayflick limit; so telomeres don’t shorten. In other words, no ageing and no ‘dying of old age’.
Anyway, this pill is distributed among every human. After a few teething problems humanity eventually adapts to its new-found immortality. The status is passed along genetically and cannot be revoked.
However, problems remain. Anger, jealousy and psychopathic people still exist, and bullets and blades haven’t lost their effectiveness. Now a murderer robs their victim of a potential eternity rather than a few decades.
So what do we do with murderers of all stripes? An eternity of prison seems even crueller than execution, which itself still has its own problems. A fixed prison term somewhat loses its bite if the convicted lives forever.
This is the plot for the most recent season of Torchwood. It tried to be deep and meaningful about these moral quandaries, but in the end didn’t really address them in any satisfactory way.
The good thing about immortality is we don’t need to make any snap decisions. We can just lock them up for now while we think over what would be a just punishment. If, in a couple of hundred years, we’ve decided that’s long enough, we can let them go. Or if we decide that execution is the only just punishment, we can kill them then. No need to rush to a decision.
One issue I see with longer fixed sentances is that under the current mortality scheme, if someone does get out after serving a decade plus sentance, they’re generally going to be mellower simply by virtue of being older. What physical and emotional age is everyone stuck at?
Otherwise, removing years from your life is only one aspect of what prison is supposed to do. Depending on your philosophy of justice, it’s also supposed to be unpleasant so you don’t want to go there or it’s supposed to reform you so you can reenter society. The former works just as well sans mortality, the later perhaps even better. I think realistically, you’d have to make a sort of open-ended “life until deemed fit to reenter society” to replace life without parole since who knows what can happen in a few centuries. It may end up you have some sort of permanent population of unreformables, but so long as you treat them well and give them an honest chance of getting out if they try I see no problem.
Of course, what’s going to happen in the sci-fi short story version is that given enough millions of years everyone is eventually going to commit a crime punishable by life imprisionment and so the whole world ends up incarcerated. Near the end people have to roam far and wide to find someone to murder so they can join the rest of society inside.
As far as the murder thing goes, I think it would be most important to consider the likelihood of this person doing it again.
For example, if a woman catches her husband diddling the kids and she blows his head off, I’d imagine it’s pretty unlikely that she’s going to go down to the local mini-mall with a shotgun and go on a killing spree: she can go free. If we must, at most have her sit in prison for a few years, but personally I don’t feel like this woman, in this particular case, is really in need of any “rehabilitation” (i.e. punishment) and frankly she did the rest of society a favor.
OTOH, if someone does go down to the local mini-mall with a shotgun and goes on a killing spree, then society as a whole is more hurt than benefitted from this person’s continued existence and keeping them alive imprisoned for eternity is punishing everyone.
Our hypothetical immortality pill (thanks to Blaster Master and rachelellogram flagging up the problem of murder in that thread) results in telomeres no longer shortening; meaning no deterioration in cells due to division. You won’t show signs of ageing, in other words, rather than just being ‘frozen’ at a set age. What physical age you look I couldn’t say, the effects of ageing make themselves known at different ages in different people.
Valid, although this probably contradicts the core concept of the OP.
As I see it, humanity would instantly become very, very conservative. Lots of mildly dangerous things we all do – drive cars, fly in airplanes, go surfing, go swimming, walk across the street – would become taboo. Safety would become a religious value.
Just threatening to kill someone might easily rise to the level of a capital crime.
And, yes, the contradiction would be profound. A society that puts a nearly-infinite value on life shouldn’t be a society that kills. But such contradictions are easily rationalized, and, in this case, I think they would be.
I can see this society executing someone simply for failing to dry the bathroom floor after taking a shower…as this threatens the safety of the next person.
I’ve never bought that. It comes across as mortal humans trying desperately to convince themselves that what they can’t have isn’t really desirable in the first place. Like a poor person trying to convince themselves the rich are all miserable.
Simple. We worship them.
You never seen Torchwood: Miracle Day? The answers are all there.
Although… to be perfectly honest with you, I’d rather just blow them up and make sure the pieces are scattered and can never be put together again.