"Revelation Space" moral dilemma: The victim IS the murderer

[Mark6]

I was going to post this on "Could our minds handle effective immortality?" thread, then decided to make it separate.

The thread above is not so much about immortality as about mind uploading (or about immortality through mind uploading). It reminded me of a rather minor plot point in Alastair Reynolds' "Revelation Space".

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

John Brannigan is debilitated captain of the ship "Nostalgia for Infinity". Yuji Sajaki is his second, commands the ship due to Brannigan's illness, and goes to utterly insane lengths to find the cure for captain's condition -- at least everyone else in the story finds Sajaki's obssession with curing Brannigan both hopeless and insane (and they are mostly right). Here is what they (and the reader) do not find out until near the end of the book:

Sajaki is John Brannigan. Decades earlier, by methods I need not go into here, captain Brannigan erased Sajaki's mind and inserted his own memories instead. Yuji Sajaki is dead, his body contains copy of John Brannigan. That does not necessarily explain "Sajaki"'s unfailing loyalty -- some people, especially as callous as John Brannigan, would in such situation say "Thanks for the great new body; good bye old man!" But others would not, and would in fact care for the ailing... brother?... to heroic degree.

Here is a problem Reynolds did not explore. When Ilia Volyova figures out what (original) Brannigan had done, she quite correctly accuses him of murder -- and devises a way to both punish Brannigan and give him a chance to atone for the crime. But isn't "Sajaki" equally guilty? He has memories of being John Brannigan up until the crime. He remembers planning to erase Yuji Sajaki's memory, if not necessarily executing the act. Volyova does not think about it because by the time of her discovery Sajaki/Brannigan is already dead, and she has much more pressing concerns. But I found the question fascinating.

 

[Twiler]

People are generally defined by their minds in our society, so I'd say that yes, they're both guilty, because they're both Branningan.

 

[FireGarden]

How perfect was the copy? We already have Sajaki acting with more compassion than we might have expected.

We can't know for sure that they were the exact same person. Even the exact same memories working on different 'hardware' might add up to a different person.

 

[Doghouse Reilly]

It is not true that people are generally defined by their minds in our society, especially not in a legal sense. A person may believe they have committed murder, but if there is no evidence to support this belief, they will not be punished. So why would the imitation Brannigan be punished for something that he never actually did, even if he has a memory of it?

It is possible for someone to develop a false memory of robbing a house or killing a person. Obviously this doesn't mean they should be punished for the crime of robbery or murder.

 

[Mark6]

How perfect was the copy? We already have Sajaki acting with more compassion than we might have expected.

We can't know for sure that they were the exact same person. Even the exact same memories working on different 'hardware' might add up to a different person.

It was not perfect. The process involved was never perfect to begin with, and obviously the two diverged in subsequent decades.

 

[Aepervius]

It is the crime-clone thought exercise.

If you have a person A, which commit a crime, say murder. Then that person is cloned and both clone B and original A exists at the same time. Is clone B responsible for the act of original A ?

If you think that any copy of the persons mind *is* the person, no matter how often copied, even with immediate diverging of life/personality/thought after the cloning, then you will say they are both guilty.

If you think (and i tend to that theory) that the clone is a different person with an identical memory at the moment of cloning but diverging automatically afterward, then the clone is fully "innocent" as a baby born.