touch of the spiritualism that has been pushed aside by technology throughout the twentieth century. Dick shrewdly gave Mercerism the structure that a post-apocalyptic society will require only slightly more than our own: its focus is away from moral laws and toward unity, but it achieves unity, as our society increasingly does, via the shared experience of an image on a screen. Mercerism is a believable practice in the novel because it represents the struggle against the forces that try to isolate us from each other. So convincing is it at fulfilling a human desire that readers tend to empathize with Deckard and ignore the evidence that Mercer is a fraud, a character played by an old drunkard, and to accept Mercer as being more real than ever when he mysteriously, supernaturally, appears to Deckard.

Unfortunately, the only way to include the practice of Mercerism in the movie would be to waste precious screen seconds showing Deckard, Iran, or Isidore staring at a video tube. Dick did suggest a cinematic quality to Mercerism by having the empathy that is felt by its practitioners show up as physical bruises and welts, which is at least a step closer to the visual language of film than simple emotional bonding would be. In a quieter film, it would give viewers chills to see a character on screen who is so entwined with a distant figure that their empathy could draw blood, but Blade Runner is too active, too predatory, to slow down for this kind of abstract point.

The fact that this movie has no way to include animals in its futuristic scenario represents a true loss. In the novel, Deckard's electric sheep, his goat, and the toad that he finds in his moment of despair at the end all are important. They indicate how individuals in this society relate to those they come in contact with, and to society in general.

The electric sheep helps define just how badly people in Deckard's world long for something to care for, to look after and love. The mention of lead codpieces in the first chapter indicates that radiation has made people in this society sterile, unable to bear the children that might otherwise be the objects of their affection. Deckard's electric sheep also functions to give readers a sense of his humanity by showing him as a failed, vulnerable human being: not the chisel-jawed tough guy of the film but a poor schnook, looking at his neighbor's horse with envy.

When Deckard buys his goat, his good fortune is as balanced as it is for real humans struggling in modern society. The fact that he can at last afford a live animal is a mark of his growing success, but the fact that he feels a need to immediately squander his windfall, that he has to get an animal right away, indicates a desperate, slightly pathetic need for something warm and alive. A goat is not the most loveable of creatures—as the android Rachael notes, "Goats smell terrible"—but that is what the shop had available at the time, and Deckard is so in need that he appreciates what he can get. The goat is also significant because, while representing Deckard's attempt to forget society's faults by establishing a one-to-one relationship with an animal, it also traps him in a job that he has come to despise: his mortgage on the goat ensures that he will have to work for years to pay it off. At the end of the film Blade Runner, Deckard escapes with Rachael Rosen to a new, happy life, but the novel's Deckard stays true to his responsibilities

In the end of the novel, after all of his struggles, his raised and shattered hopes, it all comes down to the toad that Deckard finds. This final touch is so important to the story that one of Dick's earlier titles was "The Electric Toad," to give readers a hint at what really matters. In the final chapters, Deckard finds a life form that is supposed to be extinct, raising his hopes not just for the future of toads, but for life on this planet. He finds out that it is fake, indicating that reality is slipping away, becoming irrelevant in his world. After he has gone to sleep, Iran makes provisions to care for Deckard's toad, indicating that whether a thing is real or unreal is irrelevant; it is caring about it that counts. Compared with this web of despair and hope, the film's ultimate point that Deckard can love a beautiful android as if she were human seems crass and primitive.

Other animals are mentioned in the story, and although they are not as prominent, they help the reader refine a sense of what Deckard's world is like. In the first chapter he recalls a sheep he once owned that Iran's father had left to the Deckards upon emigrating to Mars. From this little fact we gain a perspective on how valuable real animals are, that a policeman's salary would not be able to buy one on the open market. The film gives no such realistic detail. Later, when the owl owned by the Rosen Association is introduced, readers have some idea of how phenomenally expensive such a rare animal must be: we understand the magnitude of Rosens' power, and of the bribe Deckard is offered and rejects. The cat that dies while J. R. Isidore is taking it to the hospital informs readers of Isidore's inability to distinguish real from imitation, a particular manifestation of his radiation-induced weakness that becomes significant in his later dealings with Pris and the Batys. Though Isidore accepts the androids as being enough like himself for friendship and maybe even love, he does realize, when Irmgard mutilates the spider—an insect that most of the novel's readers would destroy without a second thought—what the difference between a false human and a true human is.

The omissions made when translating this novel for the screen may thin out the story's substance, but it would be wrong to imply that this is one of those cases where the author had to suffer the indignity of watching his work watered down. Philip K. Dick suggested most of these changes. In 1968 he wrote notes on different ways the novel could be handled as a film script. Some of his suggestions seem quaint from a perspective of modern time—Gregory Peck seemed to him a good choice to play Deckard, and his idea of a good contemporary film script shows an obsession with the newly released film The Graduate, which was indeed cutting-edge artistry in its time but seems raw and clumsy compared to the film that became Blade Runner. Dick's main concern for the film was that it raise the question of what reality is, which might be why he related it to a coming-of-age movie like The Graduate. He was quite willing to sacrifice much of the novel. "We can have a many-sided film …" he wrote, "or, I would think, some of the moods (and plot, etc.) can be eliminated entirely, however important they are to the novel" His notes specifically recommend keeping "the search and destroy androids theme" and the sexual relationship between Deckard and Rachael, which, probably not by coincidence, would have been the elements of most interest to prospective movie makers. Dick was still a fairly obscure and underpaid science fiction writer when he prepared these notes, and he may well have been simply doing what he could to sell the screen rights and make a buck, but there can be no question about whether Hollywood surprised him by changing his story. The filmmakers probably were not following his directions, but the simplification they did in 1982 ended up following the changes he anticipated in 1968.

Source: David J. Kelly, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999. Kelly is an English instructor at several colleges in Illinois, as well as a novelist and playwright.

It really is time to take science fiction seriously. The genre now forms about ten per cent of paperback fiction sales, and with the continuing success of comics such as 2000 AD and graphic-novel fiction such as Watchmen there's every reason to think that the readership will continue to grow. Literary syllabuses in schools and colleges have traditionally been slow to catch on to the study of contemporary forms of popular narrative, whether they are soaps, pulp romances, detective novels, or science fiction. But the growing number of self-constructed course work options does offer the possibility of bringing new kinds of contemporary writing and reading-experience onto the syllabus. I want to suggest some ways of approaching the writing of one of the most celebrated SF authors Philip K. Dick through a discussion of his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and its acclaimed film realisation as Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). I concentrate on the central theme of both novel and film: the conflict between 'authentic' and 'artificial' personality, that is, between people and robot….

A common reason often given for not paying attention to science fiction is the supposed lack of 'human interest' in the genre: technology dominates to the exclusion of developed personalities or relationships. Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream? is a special case for this kind of objection because it explicitly plays with confusions between human personality and artificial or machine-derived intelligence: what would be the difference between a physically perfect android kitted out with memories and emotions passably like our own, and a person nurtured through the usual channels? The question can stimulate good discussion: name as many robots as you can think of; do we believe artificial intelligence will ever equal human resources; and if all robots look like the Ford automated-assembly line then why are we even beginning to take the idea of androids seriously?

One answer to the last question is that in all periods 'human-Things' have been imagined as entities which test or define the contemporary sense of human value: the incubus or succubus in Christian tradition, the Golem in Jewish folklore, Prospero's Ariel and Caliban (and perhaps even Miranda too?), E. T. A. Hoffmann's Sandman, and of course Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Philip K. Dick's androids are no exception, they belong to their period, the late 1960s, in the way that they are defined in relation to authentic human emotionality and sanity. But as soon as we have written the glib phrase, we are brought up short, in exactly the manner which the novel provokes: what is an authentic human psyche?

Do Androids Dream? is set in the decaying megalopolis of Los Angeles, AD 2020, a post-holocaust society where the human population has been decimated by the effects of radiation sickness. So far, so conventional; the scenario is one major cliche of pulp SF. This novel's originality is created by the compelling logic to be found in the details of the North Californian world which it evokes. The effects of 'World War Terminus' have induced progressive species death, beginning with birds, then 'foxes one morning, badgers the next, until people had stopped reading the perpetual animal obits.' This species-scarcity induces a kind of religion of animal-ownership in the surviving human population, where everyone aspires to possess and care for one of the beast creation. Curating animals is also partly a replacement for child-rearing, because the fear of genetic damage has discouraged human reproduction. The bounty-hunter hero of the novel, Rick Deckard, keeps a black-faced Suffolk ewe on the roof of the apartment block where he lives with his wife Iran. But the sheep is not ideal, in fact it's electric; Deckard can't afford a real one, and he continually checks the list-price of animals in 'his creased, much-studied copy of Sidney's Animal & Fowl Catalogue.'

At the verge of its extinction, the natural world becomes a valuable commodity; the process of collecting and buying the living merchandise itself accelerates the destruction, increasing scarcity, raising prices. Here the often-praised predictive aspect of good science fiction is very evident. But the keeping of animals in the future world of the novel is an element of a larger belief system: everyone views their own life as part of 'the Ascent', a progress up an increasingly steep incline which they share with the god-like figure of Wilbur Mercer. This religious empathy, or feeling-with, is generated and experienced through technology. By tuning in to an 'empathy box' each individual shares in the Ascent of Mercer, and shares the antagonism directed to their god-figure by some unknown enemies, 'the old antagonists': 'He had crossed over in the usual perplexing fashion; physical merging—accompanied by mental and spiritual identification … As it did for everyone who at this moment clutched the handles, either here on Earth or on one of the colony planets.'

'Empathy' joins believers with Mercer, either through use of the black box, or through the empathy which they extend towards the animals they keep or, more rarely, to other individuals. And at the center of the novel's increasingly tortured attempts to locate absolute differences between androids and human beings, we find the linked ideas of empathy and affect. The Oxford English Dictionary defines 'empathy' as 'The power of entering into the experience of or understanding objects or emotions outside ourselves.' It is a relatively recent word in English, first recorded by the OED in 1912, and imported from the vocabulary of German philosophical aesthetics. Through empathy we know and feel what it is that other people know and feel; it is an experience of (literal) fellow-feeling. 'Compassion' is the medieval word used to designate this sort of emotion (from 1340), and 'sympathy' the Renaissance term (1596).

'Affect' is a much older word that has taken on a new lease of life again in the early twentieth century. It is first recorded by the OED from about 1400, conveying a group of related meanings: 'Inward disposition, feeling, as contrasted with external manifestation or action; intent, intention, earnest', and 'Feeling towards or in favour of; kind feeling, affection'. So even in the medieval period 'affect' was already a word with psychological resonances, and it is used for this reason in our own period by Freudian psychoanalysts to describe emotional value within the psyche. Do Androids Dream? employs this idea of 'affect' to distinguish between a 'person-Thing' and a human entity: humanity experiences affect (and affect-ion), robots don't. But again there is a problem: some people suffer from a 'flattening of affect', and in the test situation could be mistaken for robots, on this criterion.

The androids of AD 2020 are organic beings—soft robots—designed by scientific-industrial corporations for use on the planetary colonies to which people from earth are emigrating because of all-pervasive radioactive contamination—'The saying currently blabbed by posters, TV ads, and government junk mail, ran—"Emigrate or degenerate! The choice is yours!'" The robots act as slaves for the off-earth colonies where they labour or work as servants. They are modelled as mature individuals who never age but, tragically, they only have a shelf-life of four years: this also gives them a certain desperation. Periodically androids run wild in the colonies and return to earth, hoping not to be recognised.

Because they don't possess empathy, the androids represent a potential threat to the human population; they are physically powerful but completely lacking in conscience, moral sense, guilt, and human sympathy: 'Now that her initial fear had diminished, something else had begun to emerge from her. Something more strange. And, he thought, deplorable. A coldness. Like, he thought, a breath from the vacuum between inhabited worlds, in fact from nowhere….' The androids are, potentially, manufactured psychotic killers. And it is only by identifying them through their lack of empathetic response that they can be located and destroyed. Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter, a twenty-first-century version of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe; he traces androids which illegally return to earth, administers the empathy test, and 'retires' them with a laser gun.

This sounds like a no-nonsense kind of job, but Deckard becomes more and more anguished as the boundaries between android response and human response are systematically blurred by the action of the novel. Deckard administers the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test to suspect androids; this consists of a series of questions which stimulate minute but measurable reflex responses in the subject being tested. The questions are framed to provoke emotional reaction in the 'suspect', the logic being that there is an innate, automatic response within the human psyche which is triggered by particularly emotive descriptions. Ironically, many of the Voigt-Kampff questions describe cruelties which we presently accept as routine, and which presumably would not unduly trouble many people today: lobsters boiled alive, bull-fighting, hunting trophies. In AD 2020 these are crimes against animals which universally horrify humanity, and supposedly leave androids unaffected. But the latest generation of Nexus-6 'andys' approaches nearer and nearer to human empathetic ability, and these robots cause Deckard particular difficulty.

The first Nexus-6 which (who?) Deckard meets is Rachael Rosen, and she very nearly passes the empathy-test ordeal; more difficult still, she ceases to be an inanimate object for Deckard, because he finds himself attracted to 'her'. Rachael also turns the tables on Deckard, accusing him of being in human because of the instrumental, cold way in which he tries to deal with her. But Deckard does not destroy her, because she is 'the property' of the corporation that made her, 'used as a sales device for prospective emigrant.' Luba Luft is the next person-Thing whom Deckard has to hunt and destroy, and who has become a fine opera singer: 'The Rosen Association built her well, he had to admit. And again he perceived himself "sub specie aeternitatis", the form-destroyer called forth by what he heard and saw here. Perhaps the better she functions, the better a singer she is, the more I am needed.' Luba Luft is a cultured andy: Deckard finds her at an exhibition of Edvard Munch's work, and as a last request before being 'retired' she asks Deckard to buy her a reproduction of Munch's painting Puberty. (Why this painting? Is it because it represents a developmental stage which the android never had, and wishes to experience?) He spends $25.00 on a book containing the print, and after he has destroyed Luft, 'systematically burned into blurred ash the book of pictures which he had just a few minutes ago bought Luba.' Who exactly is exhibiting android behaviour in this situation? 'Luba Luft had seemed genuinely alive; it had not worn the aspect of a simulation.'…

The debates which this novel stimulates by creating 'artificial' people who are effectively indistinguishable from 'authentic' people reproduce in fictional form some elaborate arguments from philosophy. For example, I've taken the phrase 'person-Thing' from Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, an influential but now increasingly controversial work, written in Germany during the 1920s. Heidegger's subsequent relations with Hitler and National Socialism cast a long shadow across his philosophical work, but Being and Time remains a unique contribution to many questions. What is the quality of our knowledge of other people? How should we avoid treating other people instrumen-tally, exactly as person-Things? What kinds of criticism can be made of empathy, as a means of understanding others? Are we condemned to treat the world only as an object, and so progressively degrade it?…

Blade Runner radically simplifies the plot-line and 'metaphysics' of Do Androids Dream?, but constructs a different logic through visual coding, as all films do. This emphasis on appearance can be said to intensify one of the problems of science fiction as a genre, and this has to do with the representation of gender. Is science fiction inescapably a genre written by men, for boys/men? The loving attention paid to technology, and the flattened portrayal of human character, particularly women's roles, might indicate as much. Authors such as Ursula Le Guin and Doris Lessing have taken up the genre with the explicit intention of creating new kinds of SF narrative and value. Do Androids Dream? and Blade Runner are not tender-hearted works, they display the routine brutalities and masculinist attitudes of the popular genres to which they owe so many of their conventions, (e.g. Do Androids Dream?, p. 145: 'He began hunting through the purse. Like a human woman, Rachael had every class of object conceivable filched and hidden away in her purse; he found himself rooting interminably.') Rick Deckard's infatuation with Rachael is the most troubling instance of this problem. In the novel, bounty hunter and android sleep together, prior to the final shootout with the remaining three Nexus-6 robots. Rachael articulates the dilemma: 'You're not going to bed with a woman…. Remember, though: don't think about it, just do it. Don't pause and be philosophical, because from a philosophical standpoint it's dreary. For us both.'

That the problem is 'philosophically dreary' is a droll way of putting it, and this goes some way to rescuing the situation. But not all the way. Blade Runner opts for a softer option. The closing sequence shows Deckard and Rachael flying at speed to the good green country in the north, and Deckard reveals that Rachael has no 'termination date'. He has an ageless companion for the duration. Is this also tacky? Or is it a witty rewriting of the Greek myth of the dawn goddess Eos and her mortal lover Tithonus? Eos begged Zeus to grant Tithonus immortality, but forgot also to ask for perpetual youth on his behalf.

Source: Nigel Wheale, "Recognising a 'Human-Thing': Cyborgs, Robots and Replicants in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner," Critical Survey, Vol. 3, No. 3, 1991, pp. 297-304.

Both the movie Blade Runner and the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are centrally concerned about the definition of humanness in the context of modern technology. The irony present in both works is that through its technology, humanity has diminished its own capacity to survive, necessitating the invention and mass production of a new life form (the android) which is capable of challenging humanity. This situation gives rise to the central dilemma of both movie and book—if the creature is virtually identical in kind to the creator, should not the creature have virtually all the same rights and privileges as the creator? (The theological theme here is obvious, but I leave others to deal with it.)

Thinking about the moral status of androids gives us a test case, a model, that we are emotionally removed from, for thinking about the moral status of different stages of human life and the relationship of those stages to each other. Reflection on the moral status of the android helps us to think more dispassionately about just what qualities of human life are required for the presence of personhood. In thinking about these qualities and when they are acquired or lost in relation to the android, we are not confused by the images of, for example, infants and the feelings that attend such images. It is not the purpose of this paper to resolve difficult and inflammatory moral issues such as, for example, abortion and euthanasia; its purpose is merely to point out how reflection on the androids presented in Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? might facilitate resolution of such issues.

The action in both works centers on the progressive feeling of moral wrongness that the protagonist has in "retiring" androids. The more Deckard gets to know them, the less he is able to distinguish between androids and human persons. Rachael is the "clincher" for him in the film. When he first meets her, she does not know that she is an android. It is difficult not to think of Rachael as a person and to sympathize with her as she goes through one of the most painful of human experiences: an identity crisis. In Rachael's case the crisis involves the discovery that she is an android, thus raising the question for herself of her humanity and her personhood. In the novel, Deckard's colleague Phil Resch goes through an identity crisis that is even more poignant given that he is in the business of "retiring" androids. Deckard can ask himself the question "If Rachael and Resch are not human, what am I?"

In the movie, Roy Batty develops into a sympathetic character. Our understanding of his cruelty changes as we come to understand it as a very human reaction to his existential situation: the imminence of his death and that of those he loves; the feeling of betrayal by the beings that brought him into existence.

Roy Batty and his friends are hunted and killed as non-persons, as though they were rabid dogs. The only "official" problem is that the hunters, even after long acquaintance with the androids, cannot tell if the androids are persons or not, except by a clumsy test of questionable validity. However, the moral problem perceived by the protagonist broadens this to the question of whether the androids are indeed the moral equivalent of rabid dogs or defective equipment, in which there is no issue of moral or legal rights and no question of restraint in the use of deadly force.

Generally it is accepted that only persons or collectives of persons have legal and moral rights. Examples of collectives of persons would include corporations (which are legal persons), families, churches, schools, social clubs and perhaps friendships. It is difficult to ascribe a "right to live" to any collective. But persons cannot justifiably be pursued and killed without due process no matter what hideous crimes they are accused of committing. The book and the movie both raise the question of what it means to be a person and thus to be protected by rights.

To be a person certainly means not to be merely a thing or object. That is, a person is a different kind of thing than stones, tables, or cars are. I am only appealing to ordinary experience when referring to these differences but it may not be possible to avoid metaphysical assumptions altogether, because the notion of personhood takes us to the heart of one of the most difficult philosophical problems: the nature of the self.

Under most circumstances the terms "a human being" (i.e., a particular individual human), "person," and "self can be used interchangeably because they are denotatively synonymous. But that synonymity does not necessarily hold if androids like those in the film and the novel exist. Since these androids are biologically human, even if they are not sexually reproduced, they must be considered human beings in the sense of being homo sapiens. When we think of androids as beings "crafted" from human tissue to have human form and functions, we would not assume that such a being is necessarily a person or "has" a self. We would want such a being to meet certain functional criteria before being declared to be a person or to have a self.

The android is in the same theoretical position as the fetus in the abortion debate. Is being live, growing human tissue sufficient for being considered a person with all the protection of a moral and legal society? Human cancer cells growing in a petri dish are not persons; neither are cloned human thyroid cells. No moral dilemma arises if we throw them into the garbage when they turn "bad" or we have no more use for them. But if the cells in the petri dish are a human zygote, we may have moral qualms about discarding them or ever having started them.

The reason for these qualms is presumably that a zygote is a potentially "complete" human being and thus a potential person. The androids are presumably assemblies of cloned cells. We are not given any clues about either the techniques or the principles whereby assembly takes place, integrating specialized cells from diverse sources into a single functioning organism. We can assume that it must be the reverse of the cell differentiation by which the zygote becomes an embryo, a cluster of identical cells differentiating into many specialized cells functioning together. If we decide that the end of these two processes, human cell differentiation and human specialized cell integration, results in beings with the same moral status, then why should not the beginnings have the same moral status? That is, human zygotes and cloned human cells would have comparable value. However, this is not to say that the human zygote has the same moral value as a human infant nor that the clusters of cloned cells have the same moral value as the android.

If we can imagine that it is morally permissible to throw away cloned cells intended for inclusion in an android and if we have decided that androids are the moral equivalent of persons, then we should be able to imagine that it is morally permissible to throw away zygotes and perhaps even embryos.

The androids are clearly human beings, but are they persons? Do they have "selves"? We cannot answer that question until we decide what a self is, and what it means to be a person. This brings us to the philosophical problem of the nature of the self, which has a very long history….

The qualities usually associated with personhood are rationality and self-consciousness. Persons are able to give purposes to themselves and to act on those purposes. The androids must have these qualities if they are to fulfill the functions for which they are needed: to take the place of "conventional" humans in situations in which there are not enough humans or which are dangerous or distasteful to humans. To act in such situations, the androids must be able to think like human beings, not like today's computers with all possible decisions programmed but as self-regulating, self-correcting beings. In the language of moral philosophy, they must be able to act autonomously.

Computers may be thought to act rationally, in the sense of acting logically, but they do not act to any purpose of their own, only to the purposes of others. To act with purpose requires consciousness of self. It means having an awareness of being an identity over time, an identity that can act to achieve a variety of ends or goals, and that, furthermore, can choose among that variety of goals The androids are portrayed as having these qualities in a variety of ways in both book and movie. Rachael, of course, exhibits the greatest sense of self and the greatest freedom of choice in both texts. In the book, the other androids are portrayed as acting in much the way any group of hunted persons forced to go underground might act; in the movie, they are portrayed as somewhat "unfinished" persons as suggested by striking moments of child-like or animal-like behavior, with the drama of emerging self-consciousness focused on Roy Baty. The drama of the movie really derives from Baty asserting his freedom by asserting his right to a meaningful length of life not only for himself, but for those he loves.

The androids are clearly persons, but with the exception of Rachael, all are felt to be somewhat defective, not quite right. The book locates the defect in the lack of empathy; the movie more cogently locates the defect in the lack of maturity or developmental experiences which remain with us through memory. Rachael was "given" memories and treated like a natural human person, which accounts for her sense of personhood and our "reading" her as a real or normal person. Leon clinging to his photographs symbolizes his awareness of his self as enduring through time; the photos remind him of that duration, i.e., his own identity.

The androids are an interesting thought experiment: what kind of person would you produce if you eliminated the unproductive periods of infancy, childhood and adolescence, and produced a fully grown adult from the start. It might be a tempting scientific and commercial goal, or even a survival goal if faced with a drastic drop in human fertility. Society invests much of its energy in economically unproductive persons. Non-adults in industrial societies are economically non-productive. Why not find ways to reproduce the species that produce useful adults in a shorter period of time? What kind of being would one have? One with all the intellectual, emotional, and physical capacities of an adult human being but with no experience in learning how to use those capacities. Such a being would, of course, be potentially self-reflective, and would, in a relatively short period of time, become aware of the absence of useful necessary knowledge and experience, just as the human child does. Imagine the frustrated rage of a child expressed in the body of an adult! The android in Blade Runner is such a being. No one expects a toddler to have empathy. He is too socially inexperienced. Neither does one expect a toddler to have control over murderous emotions. But as the child grows in experience, she gains in empathy and self-control.

Perhaps personhood is developmental and children and androids are in the process of becoming persons, depending on their degree of experience. Children, however, can be "comforted" in the knowledge that their immaturity is natural, i.e. it is not within the power of anyone except themselves to change it, over the course of a fairly long period of time. The androids do not have such comfort: they know they were manufactured, and thus someone could have made them different from what they are or need not have made them at all. And they do not have very much time in which to perfect themselves as persons. The android lives just long enough to become aware of his potentiality as a person before he dies. Both his immaturity and his retirement are determined by others. The genius of the movie, as opposed to the book, is that it makes us feel the pain Roy Baty feels when faced with the knowledge of his approaching death in conjunction with his consciousness of his potentiality for knowledge and accomplishment. We are aware with him of all the valuable things he will never know or do. This is the same pain we feel when confronted with the death of a child or adolescent: it is a profound sense of loss of potentiality.

While death itself may not always be an evil, the suffering that attends death is, and the suffering that attends the death of a child is an undoubtable evil. There is something evil about manufacturing or in any way producing a being who will become conscious of his early death. It would not be surprising if such a being developed a warped and dangerous personality.

A dilemma appears to be present with respect to who is morally responsible for the murders the androids commit, the manufacturers or the androids themselves. We generally hold the manufacturers of products responsible for their products' defects. However the androids are not mechanical objects, but possess "wills" of their own. To the degree to which androids are persons, to that degree we would say they are morally responsible for their actions. Even so, we might say that they are persons suffering from diminished responsibility: anyone created to exist under the circumstances which obtain in the android's case would almost certainly go mad upon becoming fully conscious of the situation. Thus the manufacturers of the androids are morally responsible for the deaths caused by the androids. In any case, to kill an android as the blade runner does is clearly murder. As persons, the androids should be entitled to the same moral and legal rights as a "normal" human being of comparable maturity.

Well, one might say, androids of this sort might be theoretically possible, but who would want to bother? Natural reproduction will always be a cheaper, surer and more satisfactory way of increasing human capacities in the universe. If human fertility drops so low as to make such androids desirable, the question "why bother?" is even more relevant. So what kind of light does all the heat in Blade Runner generate? I think it is, at least in part, a parable about the morally responsible use of scientific creativity. The misuses of the discoveries of science led to the need for the androids in the first place. The scientific processes and products used to create the androids resulted in conscious beings of the sort that are clearly persons, and persons demand moral consideration.

One of the newest frontiers of science is the realm of consciousness. Science is exploring the physical basis for consciousness, ways of manipulating consciousness, exploring similarities between human and non-human consciousness. But consciousness is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for personhood, and it is to personhood that we attach moral rights and responsibilities.

Regardless of whether we conceive of personhood as something spiritual or something rooted in the natural world, we mean by the concept of "person" something which should lead us to constrain our behavior. That is, we feel obligations in the presence of persons. We feel that at least we should not kill or even cause unnecessary pain to persons. Most of us would say we also should not lie to or steal from another person, and that, in general, we should accord every person the same rights that we expect to have extended to us in so far as that person can exercise that right.

Immanuel Kant taught that we should always treat persons as ends in themselves and never as means only. In other words, it is morally wrong to use persons as mere means; we must always treat them as having intrinsic value. In Western capitalist culture we are accustomed to believing that the creator or discoverer of something is its owner and thus has the authority to use it or dispose of it. Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? carry that belief to its logical conclusion in the context not only of the modern world but of the future. This belief that ownership gives an absolute right of disposal of and authority over the owned has defined the relationships of father and child, husband and wife, master and slave in the past; in our times we have denied this belief in relation to those kinds of persons.

The belief that we have the right to use and dispose of what we own in any way we like, and that we own whatever we make, is still lurking to trap us in a morally untenable situation, because we still have not adequately reflected upon what it means to be a person nor appropriately extended the status of personhood. The abortion rights debate is really over whether personhood can appropriately be extended to fetuses. Blade Runner prompts us to wonder if the concept should not be extended beyond the conventional human and even to the non-human.

Science fiction has long operated on the premise that personhood cannot be confined to the human species, because science fiction writers have long understood that intelligence is to be respected wherever it is found. Intelligent beings, of course, are the rational, self-conscious, purposive beings we have described as persons.

But extending personhood to the non-human or the unconventionally human is no longer an activity that should be confined to the art of the science fiction writer; it must be seriously contemplated by scientists and lay persons in respect to any endeavor dealing with consciousness. If chimpanzees, gorillas, dolphins, whales, etc., meet the criteria of personness to the same degree as some humans, why should they not be extended the same moral and legal rights? Or conversely, if we deny such moral and legal rights to highly intelligent animals, why should we not deny them to some types of humans? Both questions have far reaching implications for the way we view ourselves and how we engage in much scientific and commercial enterprise. Animal behaviorists and medical researchers using animals must consider whether their subjects might meet the criteria for personhood. If they think they might meet those criteria, then they must either stop their research or proceed as though they were dealing with human subjects. Medical scientists and the public must consider the implications for personhood of their life-saving, life-altering or live-creating technology.