Quantum Immorality

[pokerfan]

Ooops, misread that. Quantum Immortality... That's different. Never mind.

Oh well, still a cool, if somewhat disturbing, short story. Here's a tricky, brilliant, inventive story that brings you the glad news that you will never die.
Well, then, in that case, you've got nothing to worry about, do you? Do you?

http://books.google.com/books?id=P15cRWeK_gwC&pg=PA161&dq=%22divided+by+infinity%22+%22robert+charles+wilson%22&hl=en&ei=Zm-tS5KWPIKcswOdqfSTDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22divided%20by%20infinity%22%20%22robert%20charles%20wilson%22&f=false">Divided by Infinity by Robert Charles Wilson via Google Books!

[hunter]

1. Quantum Immorality, I know how you'd test that...

You'd put a pedophile thirty year old school teacher in a box containing two rooms separated by a locked door. On the other side of this door would be her favorite student, a fourteen year old jock on the school football team.

The door would be set to unlock and open if a certain radioactive atom decayed. This atom would have a fifty-fifty chance of decaying while the experimental subjects were in the box.

Outside the box there would be another box. In that box would be the immoral experimenter. He too would be watching a radioactive atom. If the atom decayed, with a fifty-fifty chance in the same fixed time period, he would allow the experiment to proceed.

Outside that box, in yet another box, is some DU poster who is about to say he would have happily had sex with a hot teacher when he was fourteen, most especially his French teacher who would sometimes lean forward in such a way that he could see down her blouse...

Question: What's the moral status of the entire system? What's the moral status of any unborn baby that may or may not exist? Does this status change if the baby grows up, joins the Navy, and happens to be gay but nobody ever asks and he doesn't tell?

Question: Could James Randi influence the decay of these atoms by bending a spoon while nobody was looking?

Question: Is it immoral for me to imagine such experiment?

:P