The Misadventures of Quinxy von Besiex truths, lies, and everything in between

Criminals Invoking the Evil Parallel Universe Defense

A thought occurred to me today, at the intersection of my thoughts about the justice system and the parallel universe theory.

We accept certain "excuses" for crimes.  The situations are relatively rare, but they exist.  If you are in an area devastated by a hurricane, with normal food sources cut off, you are effectively allowed to steal food from an abandoned store.  If someone has carjacked your car with you in it and is demanding that you drive at 100 mph you are not criminally responsible for your speeding.  If your life is in danger you may kill in defense of your life.  If you are clinically insane or seriously mentally retarded you will not be held criminally responsible for your actions, whatever they may be.  The point is not so much the specific excuses that are acceptable as the concept that the legal system does not hold people criminally responsible for crimes they did not have the capacity to avoid committing, whatever they may be.

And now we come to the theory of parallel universes.  For those that don't know, a beautiful conceptual way out of quite a few sticky quantum mechanical problems is to imagine that for every situation where multiple events could happen, we avoid the question of why did this or that happen by saying that there exists a parallel universe in which every possible outcome exists.  To bring it to a macroscopic level, imagine you flip a coin.  It lands tails side up.  There exists an inaccessible parallel universe exactly like the one in which you got tails, with the slight change that in that one an identical you got heads.  And in fact there are an infinite number of variations on the theme, tracing out every possible combination of ways your brain could tell your thumb to move, the weather systems could cause the air to gust, etc.  If we imagine that scientists might be correct in this theory then on a macroscopic level there must exist parallel universes in which otherwise "good" people do "evil".  You may be a kind person in this universe but in another you are a homicidal murderer.  This must be, if parallel universes exist.  And so, too, the evil people in this universe manifest themselves in saintly ways in parallel universes unknown to us.  So the quantum philosophical question then becomes, how responsible can any individual be for any actions, when there exists a version of themselves in another universe doing something completely different?

Why couldn't the homicidal murderer invoke the Evil Parallel Universe Defense at his trial, saying in essence, "I am not responsible.  The laws of physics dictate that there must exist some universes in which I am evil, and this happens to be one of them.  In others universes, you, Mr. Prosecutor, you, your Honor, and you, the Jury, are all murderers, just like me.  We are all guilty, somewhere.  I'm no guiltier than all of your collective parallel selves."

Of course, this argument is rendered moot by the fact that every outcome of the trial will exist in parallel universes; and so this excuse must work in some universes, but not in others.   The criminal would just have to hope that his was a universe which not only made him evil but also made his excuse acceptable.  I suspect there's a smaller infinity of those particular universes.

^ Quinxy

(One final note, I was reminded of a more practical moral dilemma nations face, a situation in which people are "excused" for something because they are in a "fated" situation.  The government, for the good of the people, attempts to control the economy by taking actions to control inflation and unemployment: varying lending rates, controlling the money supply, etc.  Contrary to what you might expect, the "optimal" rate of unemployment is not 0% but something in the nature of 5%.  The government will modify policy to target that number, creating more unemployment if the number is too low, and trying to create jobs if the number is too high.  It's my belief that this artificial manipulation of the unemployment rate, this requirement that citizens be unemployed, morally obligates the government to support those who have been "artificially" made unemployed.  Of course identifying those who are "artificially" unemployed and those who are "naturally" unemployed is tricky, and in a sense meaningless.  It is, therefore, better to support all who are unemployed for a period long enough to mean their continued unemployment is squarely the fault of the individual and not the economy.  And that's pretty much what we do, as a nation, with the unemployment benefits we provide, though I would guess few (if any) would explain its necessity as the fulfillment of a moral obligation created by forced unemployment; but I like this argument because far from it suggesting some sort of creeping socialism, it is merely doing what is morally obligated by the government's own actions.)

Copyright protected by Digiprove © 2011-2012 Quinxy von Besiex