In line with his repeated calls for South Africa to get tougher on crime, African National Congress president Jacob Zuma has confirmed that he will be putting forward proposals for the introduction of cryonics at the next party conference. Msholozi believes that this will achieve a balance between those seeking the death penalty and the life-imprisonment lobby.
Cryonics is the system of preserving humans and animals at low temperatures until they are resuscitated at an unknown future date. This would afford society the opportunity of removing criminals without killing them permanently.
“Cryonics is based on a view of dying as a process that can be stopped in the minutes, and perhaps hours, following clinical death. If death is not an event that happens suddenly when the heart stops, this raises philosophical questions about what exactly death is.
“In 2005, an ethics debate in the medical journal Critical Care noted that ‘few, if any, patients pronounced dead by today’s physicians are in fact truly dead by any scientifically rigorous criteria’.
“Cryonics proponent Thomas Donaldson has argued that “death” based on cardiac arrest or resuscitation failure is a purely social construction used to justify terminating care of dying patients. In this view, legal death and its aftermath are a form of euthanasia in which sick people are abandoned.
“Philosopher Max More suggested a distinction between death associated with circumstances and intention versus death that is absolutely irreversible. Absolutely irreversible death has also been called information-theoretic death, which is destruction of the brain to such an extent that the original information content can no longer be inferred.
“Bioethicist James Hughes has written that increasing rights will accrue to cryonics patients as prospects for revival become clearer, noting that recovery of legally dead persons has precedent in the discovery of missing persons.
“Ethical and theological opinions of cryonics tend to pivot on the issue of whether cryonics is regarded as interment or medicine. If cryonics is interment, then religious beliefs about death and afterlife may come into consideration. Resuscitation may be deemed impossible by those with religious beliefs because the soul is gone, and according to most religions only God can resurrect the dead. Expensive interment is seen as a waste of resources.
“If cryonics is regarded as medicine, with legal death as a mere enabling mechanism, then cryonics is a long-term coma with uncertain prognosis. It is continuing to care for sick people when others have given up, and a legitimate use of resources to sustain human life.
“Cryonics advocates complain that theological dismissal of cryonics because it is interment is a circular argument because calling cryonics “interment” presumes that cryonics cannot work. They believe future technical advances will validate their view that cryonics patients are recoverable, and therefore never really dead.” — Wikipedia
An ANC justice spokesman confirmed that the matter had been debated at party level for a while now. “We are of the view that a substantial part of the anger surrounding convicted criminals relates to the ongoing appeals which constitute a drain on the economy and the trauma they occasion to the families of the victims.”
The DA’s Helen Zille lambasted Zuma, saying that the party president should focus more on issues such as the Scorpions and less on fanciful remedies when dealing with crime. She called it “a proposal requiring internment ludicrous for overcoming our laws”.
Whether or not we are ready to accept it, cryonics — like embryology — may well play a part in our future and particularly in the criminal justice system.
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