Making Love to a Robot Clone of Your Dead Lover, Then Locking Him in the Attic.

          The short film we watch for this post, Be Right Back, is part of the series Black Mirror, a series devoted to raising questions about how our morals change as our technology changes. This particular episode raised multiple issue, such as the ethics of using a program that created robotic duplicates of loved ones that have passed away. If faced with the decision to use this program or not, I personally would most likely choose the latter. If, in this hypothetical future, my wife was to pass away, I would be unable to bring myself to join the program. The opening stage, in which you are sent text messages that sound like they were written by your deceased loved one, would not be too terribly unpleasant, but the next stage in which the program calls you using their voice would to me be akin to rubbing salt in to a fresh wound. The idea of then creating a bastardized pseudo-replacement of her would seem to me in my grief as being utterly disrespectful to her: that I would somehow be saying she was replaceable. The robot clone may be a perfect preservation of the person that was, but it is not a reincarnation your deceased loved one. From the moment it is created, the robot clone has a fundamentally different experience and outlook than a “normal”” human. For example, from the first moments of his activation, Ash2 knew he was a robot, knowledge that colored his experience and his perceptions. This knowledge caused him to say things that Ash1 would not have, such as admitting that he does not eat or the joke about feeling “ornamental.” They are all things that Ash1 would say if he was a robot, and said in presumably the same manner in which he would say them, but they are not words that Ash1 would have ever said. So, from the moment of his activation forward, Ash2 was not merely a copy of Ash1 but a wholly new individual who had the partial memories and personality traits as another person. With regard to the question of the morality of keeping Ash2 in the attic to be visited by his doppelganger’s daughter on weekends, I do not believe it to be morally impermissible for her to visit him. As stated in our class, the existence of these robot clones is something with which she is probably very familiar, and I see her visiting with this particular model as being no more harmful than viewing picture or watching videos that her mom had of Ash1, considering those are what Ash2’s personality and appearance are formed from. Whether or not keeping Ash2 locked in an attic for the entirety of his existence is morally permissible, however, I will leave as a question for the comments.