Lecture Ten: Bladerunner and the Idea of the Person

I.          Administration

A.                 MP #2 due on Thursday.  Questions?

B.                 Movies in the weeks to come.

C.                 Questions?

II.        Finish Comparison Lecture:  Movie v. Book

III.       Why Read Bladerunner?

A.                 It’s got monsters.

1.         Rick Deckard, perhaps…

2.         Evil androids (e.g., Polokov, Roy Baty)

                        3.         The company that makes the androids, viz., the Rosen Association.

B.                 Bladerunner represents a transition for us, from the more obvious monsters into those who are monstrous for subtle reasons.  They are no less monstrous for this, but it is more difficult to tell that they qualify.

C.                 It supports examination of human normalcy.  Remember that monster is a relational concept that is understood relative to a given normal context.

D.                 The book is futuristic, supplying us with a new and contemporary context within which to examine monsters.

E.                  It also allows us to explore the idea that artifacts are monsters.  To this point, we have been loathe to move much beyond the idea that living beings are monsters, but this book challenges our presumptions here.

IV.       Studies in Humanity

A.        What is it to be a person?

1.         As we have seen, one popular and traditional way of answering this question is in terms of intellect.  Persons are rational animals.

a.         Frankenstein can be seen as an indictment of this point of view—to be the fully rational person is to be out of touch with what is required for the good life.

b.         Bladerunner takes a similarly dim view of the privileging of reason over all other features.  After all, the androids are intelligent—they are smarter than chickenheads, and at least at a level with folks like Deckard, yet that doesn’t make them persons.

c.         Thus, both of these qualify as fictional rejections of this analysis of what it is to be a person.

2.         What, then, distinguishes personhood, if not reason?  The answer: emotion. 

a.         In Bladerunner, the answer is more specific, viz., humans are creatures capable of empathy.

b.         Empathy is the ability to understand, be aware of, and vicariously experience the feelings of another creature. 

c.         Humans differ from androids in Bladerunner in that the former have this ability while the latter lack it. 

i.          Note that this is not just a useful but accidental difference—it represents a substantial and essential gap between humans and non-humans.

 ii.         To reinforce this point, we need only look to Mercerism, a religion built around empathy.  In addition, there are the remarks made by the final three androids in JR’s apartment that drive home the importance of this difference.

d.        Thus, we are presented with the idea that we are at bottom emotional and not rational creatures. 

B.         Can machines be persons?

1.         What if androids could be empathetic—would they qualify as persons then? 

a.         They would then be as smart as we are and as emotional as we are.  What would the relevant difference be?

b.         While they would not be biological in the traditional sense, they could be biological life forms, as the Nexus 6 androids demonstrate in the book.

2.         If they do qualify, then we are obviously morally obligated to them, but could we have moral obligations to them even if they don’t count as persons?  Would it be possible to have moral obligations to them if they weren’t empathetic?

C.        Must something be capable of both intelligent and emotive behavior to qualify as a monster.