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?