Thou Shall not Kill

Incentivizing someone to kill another is a bundle of sin in the Christian framework, because it puts responsibility for evil on the person who funds the market, it might also corrupt the morals of the otherwise innocent person who is tempted by the incentive - even if the murder doesn’t happen, and of course might make them commit murder.

On the other hand, preventing several million deaths because one psychopath gets poisoned would seem like a good thing. I don’t know what Christians and pacifists say about the murder plots against Hitler, but it’s probably a difficult thing to argue against. Of course, it’s impossible to know in advance that the next Hitler would kill many people, but in the Damocles set-up, that tyrant will have already killed people by the time the bounty is large enough to become a bounty.

There is also the case to be made for the deterrence aspect of the system. Once it has been used, it would certainly give pause to future psychopaths having bad intentions.
This most likely implies that the number of psychopaths that would get killed would be modest. It is also legitimate to ask what would happen of them: what evil thing would they do next if they were no longer confined to starting wars (which are bad enough) where we can all see them. Would they just move on to new deviant forms of entertainment ? This is a concern.

So far, we can imagine that the Damocles set-up might protect people from state repression, gang activity, corporate exploitation of foreign resources, nuclear disasters, worldwide medical experiments and perhaps more.
It’s hard to see how it could protect from child predator rings, extortion cartels and other situations in which abuse rather than death is the goal . Except in the case that deaths toll rises. In other words, the abuse must be fought and people must die defending their freedom for the freedoms of others to be secured.

Sound familiar ?

That’s right, it’s the platitude we are given to placate us from revolting in the face of 40% taxation when our founders refused to accept a 3% tax on Tea.
So when you hear the other platitude, “freedom isn’t free”, used to excuse every manner of Orwellian surveillance on the population, you might now think it’s not false after all.

The moral aspects will be disturbing to many people. I struggled with the idea of making the Damocles setup public, as a mere idea. It’s very likely that long before it’s implemented the psychopaths in charge will attempt to suppress it.

There are other moral implications as well.

Since the Dead Man Switch and Prediction Market Transaction is only one example of post-mortem action, there is always the possibility that someone might use a different type of transaction to perform an action in the real world. We live in a world in which people hold grudges well into their grave and there is no shortage of crazies who hate the world enough to burn it down if they cannot get what they want.
In other words, the psychopaths holding the nuclear launch codes could engineer ways that annihilate all of us if we collectively decide their abuse is sufficiently getting out of hands and decide to set up a Damocles for themselves.
It just doesn’t eliminate the need for responsible governance, checks and balances that prevent such concentrations of power that can be turned into a suicide pact.

I’m also fairly certain that these new post-mortem action and incentive-boosting prediction markets will give rise to a whole new taxonomy of Trolley Problems, used by philosophers to tease out people’s values and illustrate the sensitivity of our values to small changes. Hopefully some of them will notice and examine the ramifications.

Conclusion

This concludes my 15 article series on this new, yet to be implemented technology.
I expect mainstream media, corporate media and government apologists will surely distort this idea to make it the product of a deranged mind, intent on destroying everything they (the psychopaths) hold dear. For that reason, I have also published these articles on an un-censorable blockchain and I want you to remember the following: If, rather than criticizing the idea, the technology, the ethics, they criticize someone trying to achieve world peace, you should be suspicious. You are not simply confined to wishing for world peace at rallies, beauty pageants, religious gatherings and concerts: it is your world.

And finally, because we’ve been told the same

“You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.”

countless times by the tyrants who would spy on you, control your money and interfere with your medical choices, it’s only fair that we might soon be able to tell the tyrants:

If you don’t plan on killing anyone, you have nothing to fear.