A thought experiment

[brin_bellway]

Inspired by a choice game I saw once and perhaps somewhat by torture vs dust specks.

[fairly strong cw: death, aging; FWIW, I would probably advise a version of me who had not already thought of this not to read it]







Say you were granted the power to, once per day, steal one day of lifeforce from a human with which you are in skin-to-skin contact. On each day that you use the power, you do not age, and the target you stole from ages two days.

(You *cannot* store up charges: if you *don't* use your power on a given day, that opportunity is lost.)

Would you use it? To the extent that you consider this a distinct question, *should* you use it?

Follow-up questions in a comment, to give you a chance to think it over first.

Comments

[sigmaleph]

look I will do a lot of things for immortality but a regular commute to Pilar to spend time among religious people is not one of them

(this is a joke. the existence of such a thing as hospice volunteers is relevant to the hypothetical though if they are likely to be that visibly Catholic it might actually be a problem to me, because trans.)

I think I kind of cheated in my answer above, though. Consent is the standard protocol I'd want in a society where life-leeches are some fraction of the population. If I was in the hypothetical guaranteed to be the only one (and the only person with similar supernatural abilities), it's easy to make the calculations come out in favour of nonconsensual leeching in various cases. But I don't trust people to be good utilitarians who check their math carefully when they have incentives to make it come out in their favour, an I am certainly not an exception; I genuinely worry about edge-case creep and don't know how to prevent it without harder rules like 'consent'. So my answer is that consent is me possibly leaving utility on the table and more flexibility risks eventually harming people even in expectation and I don't know what I'd actually choose because ethics is hard.

***

I tried to do a quick estimate of how long I can expect to live if I manage to stop ageing right now; if you treat it as a negative binomial p= 1- (probability of death at my age as given by actuarial tables) the expectation is about one and a half millennia but the variance is huge (standard deviation is very similar to the mean, can't usefully approximate as a normal distribution to get an intuition). I should do this more carefully but not right now (among other things, I don't know if it matters that I'm treating probability of dying as a discrete per-year event and doing something finer-grained would change much)

[brin_bellway]

>>Consent is the standard protocol I'd want in a society where life-leeches are some fraction of the population.<<

Yeah, true. Especially since it'd be easier to pull off a consent protocol in a world where life-leeches are a Known Thing. I mean, I expect they'd still be *distrusted*, and one might still want to be closeted about it†, but also if there's a lifeforce-donation distribution system set up (and if there are enough donors to go around) people are somewhat more likely to believe you if you claim not to steal from them (after all, why bother with the ethical issues of theft when you can just take donations instead?).

(convenience. the answer is convenience. (also sadism.) (also not having to out yourself to anyone, even the donation system.) hence a lot of the distrust.)

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†I just caught a glimpse of a possible world where this was the premise of a YA series, and there is *definitely* discourse about the problematic connotations of making your oppressed minority be people who literally steal the lifeforce of others.