What is it about?
Cryonics is the practice of freezing recently dead people in the hope that they can be revived with future technology. Currently this has to happen after death is legally pronounced, but it could be done before the patient is completely dead - "cryothanasia". We demonstrate that standard arguments against euthanasia somewhat surprisingly support cryothanasia. In particular, arguments that life is precious and should not be thrown away seem to strongly support trying cryonics and that cryothanasia is acceptable since it is done with the intention to preserve life.
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Why is it important?
Life and death are important things, and both throwing away one's life too readily and suffering from extreme end-of-life medical treatment are bad. Cryothanasia may be a way of balancing these things, yet is controversial and not yet legal.
Perspectives
This paper is a kind of sequel to the paper on cryonics and abortion, but I think this is a far more important issue - being able to control one's death is essential for cryonics. I hope it will become more and more normal over time. The term great "cryothanasia" is due to Ole Lars Moen, and we cannot claim credit for it.
Dr Anders Sandberg
University of Oxford
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Euthanasia and cryothanasia, Bioethics, August 2017, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/bioe.12368.
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