There’s a bit in an sf novel I’m reading where a woman has a terminal disease that can be cured/removed by sending her through some sort of duplication device that will make a copy of her, but healed. The problem is that the terminally-diseased original will still be around.

The solution to me seems obvious: go into the duplicator unconscious, emerge, and then use something to revive the cured version. The cured one then kills the terminal original.

Can you be charged with murdering yourself? Good luck bringing that to a court and proving it. After all, you’re obviously still very much alive.

This seems to preserve or at least short-circuit the necessary continuance of consciousness that most people use as the standard of selfhood.

Could a person kill their original self? Seems an obvious solution to me but not sure how most people would reason about it.