Almost all injustice comes from the sense that some people are worth less than others. So we can behave as if women are worth less than men; foreigners less than we are; poor people less than rich ones, and slaves, paradigmatically, are worth less than free people. This is so obvious that it is difficult to think about, and difficult sometimes to see. One way to make it fresh and unavoidable would be to set it up as fact. Suppose there were a class of robot servants, things which were by definition not properly human, and which could not, because of the way they are made, suffer in the ways that we do, even if they appeared to be anguished. What would be the moral wrong in mistreating them?
This is the premise of Westworld, the latest big-money, made-to-be-a-box-set television show, in which rich tourists are set loose in a gigantic wild west theme park populated by entirely lifelike androids whom they can treat exactly as they like. The violence is almost as enjoyable as in real cowboy movies because we know the blood, however copious, isn’t real. But the androids must eventually acquire consciousness, and the story will reach a denouement as old as Frankenstein.
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