In Blade Runner I had very strong feelings about some of the moral decisions of characters in the world and how the setting came to be.
Even with the unicorn scenes in the movie. I would never have considered the fact that Rick Deckard was a replicant, had all the clues not been pointed out, but after hearing all of the evidence it seems so obvious. He has photographs like all the rest of the replicants we know, someone knows that he’s been thinking about unicorns and even made him an origami one, and he is capable of both finding and taking down the replicants who at the beginning of the movie were stated to be just as smart as the people working on them as well as being smarter and faster.
The revelation that Deckard was a replicant really made me question whether or not humans actually are at all different from replicants. If we, humans, were able to watch a two hour long movie and have almost none of Deckard's actions make us even the least bit suspicious towards him being a replicant, then he is definitely human enough. Also, if the most consistent way of telling the difference between a replicant and a real human-being is an empathy test, then it seems like, while you may have created a race of sociopaths, you still created a race of human beings.
Deckard being a replicant brings me to a moral dilemma. Is it moral to purposefully create a creature whose only job is to destroy its own kind? Especially when every being involved is sentient. Imagine a lab rat created specifically to murder the other rats in a cage with it, but instead it’s a human and he is made to murder other humans. Obviously my answer to this question would be no it’s very much not moral and that if you are going to create replicants that are effectively human beings they should be given the same rights and opportunities as actual human beings.
"while you may have created a race of sociopaths, you still created a race of human beings:" Nice! So you're saying that we don't have to be good, or even feeling, to be worthy of life? It's interesting, how we measure the right to live in different contexts.
ReplyDeleteI also wonder if we miss the fact that Deckard is (/might be) a replicant because we're conditioned to see characters that don't fully display empathy, or emotion. But...then on second thought, that doesn't seem quite right to me. Deckard's treatment of Rachel, at least, is the most empathetic thing we see in the movie (with, you know, a few moments where he's less than awesome to her).