Atheist Ethics: Teleportation

Here’s a moral dilemma for the sci-fi fans. Consider a form of teleportation in which you can walk into a pod in Chicago where your body is deconstructed molecule by molecule providing the information that is used to make copies of those molecules to be built again at the chosen destination, let’s say Tokyo. While this a million times faster than any other mode of transportation, it’s legitimate to say that the you in Chicago painlessly and instantaneously died while a perfect clone of you was born in Tokyo. From the perspective of the new and now only you in Tokyo, it seems like you were “beamed-up” Star Trek style, with your last memory walking into the Chicago pod. From the perspective of the old you in Chicago, well, there is no longer a perspective to be had.

Is this a morally acceptable technology to you? For well-adjusted atheists, I think it should be.

For the most part, atheists don’t believe in souls. Post-deconstruction the teleporter is a non-entity, I needn’t worry that the essence of the Chicago teleporter is going anywhere. I can imagine that a person who believed every time teleportation was used someone would be condemned to hell, exalted to heaven, or prematurely partaking in another afterlife would oppose the technology.

For the most part, atheists don’t accept transcendent moral standards. The act of teleportation could be seen as a willful killing and therefore immoral according to the most popular verses of most holy books. If we consider teleportation in regards to the negative impact of involved parties, one could argue that it isn’t immoral at all. Even if we see the Chicagoan's action as suicide, it lacks all the negative consequences of a suicide. The person’s replacement is indistinguishable from the original, meaning there is no one to morn. The victim is painlessly turned off knowing that a redundancy will be turned on elsewhere.

Where do you stand on this? Is it moral? Would you do it? Why or why not?

I Don't Know

“I don’t know.” I grew up thinking this statement was a sign of weakness. My father set the early goal of making me a leader--with middling results--by establishing tenets drawn from self-help books and cliches such as “never let them see you sweat” and “shoot first, ask questions later.” His uncharacteristically geeky role-model, Captain Kirk, always had the answers even when the situation was completely unknown. While this worked out for the main character of a successful television show, but in the real world the “no-win-scenario” actually isn’t winable and some questions just don’t have accessible answers.

I eventually dropped Kirk as my inherited role-model for the more analytical Batman. This was partly because Bats was way cooler and partly because I didn’t want to end up as an away team red shirt. Bruce Wayne’s alter ego is considered “the world’s greatest detective” and is an accomplished scientist in many fields. (For the purposes of this argument, please familiarize yourself with the Batman of the comic books. I recommend Grant Morrison’s JLA or Batman: Hush. Christian Bale’s depiction was great and all, but he wasn’t the hero we deserved.) Among nerd conficts of superheroics, it is accepted that, given enough intel and perparation time, Batman could beat anyone. Seriously, Superman, Thor, Yahweh, anyone! I consider him a posterchild for the importance of knowledge.

via AmazingSuperpowers.com

Religion has proven itself a source for answers throughout history--and history has proven religion’s answers false at nearly every turn. Yet people still hang on to the few answers that religion holds over the growing wealth of verified human knowledge. Abiogenesis, pre-Big Bang and post-death happenings, and existential meaning are all supposedly answered by invoking a single word, “God.”  That kind of baseless research tells us nothing. We should instead sit at our Bat-computers, gather information, study, learn, and contribute to knowledge. If that all fails, we need to accept what theists and Kirk don’t understand--that “I don’t know” has value. The value is honesty.