Does it change the OP’s assessment if the human in Westworld is a White Hat or a Black Hat? (Let’s assume for the moment the the AI robots are no more sentient than a toaster.)
In other words, if someone goes in there and defeats the evil AI sheriff terrorizing the town is the human unquestionably evil for doing so?
Depends - is there teabagging involved?
This could be thought of as a fight between ethics of motivation or the ethics of consequence. But if the robots are toasters, there are no real consequences, so it boils down to whether the player is playing because it’s an exiting game or because he or she enjoys how close it feels to going around killing real humans. Whether the goal of the game is good or bad within the game is less important.
And if the robots are toasters it still doesn’t make the player evil unless he or she is doing it as practice for mass murder.
Well, that’s the questionable part. Is it objectively wrong, or is it subjectively wrong depending on the motivations of the guests?
I think white hat, or black hat, there is a difference between doing a historical reenactment, where everybody’s ‘in on it’, and really splattering (or raping, for that matter, which is so obviously wrong to me I see little point in discussing it) somebody that is virtually indistinguishable from a human and not consenting to the system.
Knowing what I know (as a viewer), I would not go into Westworld. Even being witness to the stuff going on in there would make me sick.
OTOH, personally, as a viewer, would I feel less about a “bad” AI dying than say, Lawrence’s wife and kid? Sure. But that’s just a matter of suspending disbelief as a viewer, you’re supposed to feel empathy for Lawrence’s wife and kid. The show is emotionally manipulating you to do that.
As a matter of fact, I’m not so sure I “like” sentient Dolores, who has every right to be pissed off at the situation. Mainly because I vew Dolores as more ruthless and full of hubris. I definitely like sentient Maeve more than her. I don’t know that that matters though.
This issue has been argued for a very long time. The first good treatment of it can be found in “I, Robot.” No, not the later book of that name by Asimov, but the original, written by Eando Binder in 1939, the first of a series of Adam Link stories (collected as Adam Link - Robot).
Binder does a remarkable job of thinking through the existence of an intelligent robot, from the instinctual fears of humans for a being stronger and smarter than they are, through a battle in the courts whether he should be treated as human, to the robots desire for companionship in the form of a female robot, to whether a robot can compete with humans in sports. Binder’s on Adam Link’s side, so Adam always wins, but he lays out the course that virtually everyone else has followed.
There won’t be any real-world answers until there are real-world examples to provide specifics. *Westworld *is interesting, but phony and manipulative in many ways. If the androids were properly programmed and maintained, none of the issues raised by the show would exist in the first place, because no misbehaviors would occur. They’d become just another version of sex dolls. Those also raise issues, but they’ll happen a lot sooner than Westworld will.
Did they?
In my opinion, you have cause and effect backwards in the case of American slavery. Whites didn’t view blacks as subhuman, and therefore it was justifiable to enslave them. Rather, they enslaved them, and came up with the idea that they were subhuman to justify enslaving them. And in fact, the first justification for enslaving Africans was not that they were inferior, but that they weren’t Christian. So go over to Africa and enslave a bunch of Muslim or Pagan people, and put them to work.
Except the slaves had this unfortunate habit of converting to Christianity when they found out that conversion meant freedom. So that justification had to be abandoned. So the reached for the arguments from classical times. Captive people were enslaved, and that was right because might makes right. If your city was conquered you might become a slave yourself. And so why do we enslave these Africans? Because we can. But that didn’t sit well with the Enlightenment. So finally, in the 1800s, after hundreds of years of slavery in the Americas, came the idea that Blacks are naturally inferior and therefore natural slaves.
The notion that White people in the 1700 and 1800s thought Blacks were subhuman animals ignores the actual historical record. People wrote about this subject, there are documents and historical facts. And it just isn’t true.
What if allowing rape in Westworld (again assuming the androids are not sentient) means that person does not rape in the real world? They have an outlet for their desires and once met they can return to and function in society much better.
Is that bad?
This is more than academic. Some have suggested animated pedophilia might be a means to allow real pedophiles to find some outlet for their urges without harming anyone and, presumably, make it less likely they’d find a real child to assault.
I’m not sure I know the answer to that for myself. Animated pedo-porn is hard enough to get my head around. Imagining a pedo-Westworld makes me really uncomfortable. But it would seem better than the alternative of real children being sexually assaulted.
It is not an issue of maintenance. It is Dr. Ford playing god and making the androids sentient behind the scenes that is the problem. Everyone else just wants non-sentient androids.
Well, I don’t know. I do know that if WestWorld was real, and found out somebody I knew was raping host kids in Westworld, I would have nothing to do with them, regardless of whether or not it was “therapeutic.” Not somebody I want within a mile of me and my family. I would also look very, very dimly on somebody doing that to “adult” hosts. I guess one of the reasons it seems more obviously wrong, is a lot of games are murder simulators, but very few dare to make rape simulators.
Maybe you can read it anyway you want, but that quote suggests to me that it’s wrong. Maybe it’s just electrons going around in their heads, but electrons are going around in our heads too.
Most games are not murder simulators. Most games you are the hero killing the bad guys who have it coming. There is a reason Nazis and zombies are so frequently used as foes in so many games because (almost without exception) we see them as things that need killing and we are righteous for doing so.
I remember the game Hatred which was a murder simulator. It was poorly received. No doubt there are others (Grand Theft Auto lets you murder) but more often than not you are cast as the good guy and while you are killing things you are not “murdering” your opponents.
You and I play different games. 
In MMOs almost invariably you are invading the territory of somebody (who very often does not look anything like your character, so there is also simulated racial prejudice), unprovoked, and just killing everything alive. If it were a real scenario, it would be considered straight up murder, at least from the victim’s point of view.
Yeah but you can’t really kill anyone. I would not call it murder when the person murdered comes back to life within seconds (or a few minutes maybe) which is what happens in an MMO. It is not a murder simulator. It is an inconvenience simulator.
And I play EVE Online where dying is about as brutal as it gets in an online game but you never lose your life, just your stuff.
Right, so it’s functions like westworld, except cleaner. Nobody has to go round up the bodies and stitch them back together at the end of the day. Spawn time 24 hours?
Now, let’s say an amazing technology was developed that allowed me to read off everything you were about to say (suggesting you were a puppet with no free will), but yet you felt like you had free will, felt all five senses, felt like you were just as real as the next guy. And then somebody said “I’m gonna kill you now in a horrible fashion and desecrate your corpse, but don’t worry, tomorrow you won’t remember a thing,” would you be okay with that? Would you consider that mere inconvenience?
You do understand that not being Christian was equivalent to being inferior, right? Non Christians were either heretics or savages. Savages were inherently inferior and subhuman. They weren’t separate categories.
It depends. Are you slaughtering "bad guys: to protect the innocent or to protect yourself? Then I dont see a issue. When you "go into dungeons and kill everything alive " you are supposedly killing evil monsters, monster who prey upon humans.
Or are you just being a murderhobo, committing atrocities as you see fit? Ala Grand Theft auto, etc? Then I can see how this teaches people to be less ethical.
Supposedly, the guns turn magically into paintball guns when they shoot at a Guest. Which is damn silly- there is no reason to ever have the host have real guns.
However, the knives dont turn into rubber, and of course they have shown the Hosts have access to a craptonnne of nitroglycerin, and I dont see why they do or how a Guest would be immune to the blast.
You either have free will or you don’t. You can program something (in theory) to mimic free will and agency. The android could beg and plead for its life, cry when hurt and so on and be a very convincing actor. But that is just an act. There is no sentience behind it. In which case you cannot do evil things to it anymore than you can to your toaster. Your actions might say something about you and your predilections that others might find disturbing but you have committed no evil act.
If the android is sentient then it is really no different than you doing whatever it is to another living being and should be judged accordingly.
Yeah, it’s silly. A guest most certainly could die. And I’m sure they’d have a waiver for that.
But I’d also bet that you could also stitch up humans a lot better than we can too.
What exactly are the hosts made of? The old ones are more like robots. Those white ones are supposedly “blanks”, but the ones out in the park seem indistinguishable from humans other than superior strength and their lightbulb-like brains (and before this season, I thought they had regular brains kind of like in bladerunner).
According to whom?
1537:
i.e., anyone advocating the enslavement of so-called inferior/heretics/savages was an official agent of Satan.