Slavery In the Star Wars Universe

mojo · Post by **mojo** » Wed May 13, 2009 5:33 pm

jeez, i don't even know which side of this i want to come in on anymore. i think we all agree that droids which have become sentient should not be forced to continue to follow the commands of their masters. what they do with their freedom seems kind of irrelevant to me, it must be given to all sentient beings. if they want to continue their work exactly as before then great, if they want to wander around pointlessly then great, if they just shut themselves down then great. if they can really be happy only by doing the jobs they were designed for, then what does it matter if they're free or not? they'd figure that out pretty quick and go right back where they came from, no harm done.
but it also seems to me that a non-sentient droid is just a machine, so the fact that the vast majority of the star wars folks don't treat them with compassion makes sense. would we treat a toaster with respect and empathy? non-sentient droids cannot feel any emotion, regardless of programming, since before that amazing moment of becoming sentient there was no conscious mind to feel it. so the idea that it's a terrible persecution of droids to treat them like machines bothers me.
and the idea that it's unethical to erase them as sentient beings - locke is right about this i think - surely they get the wipes regularly enough that they almost never develop sentience in the first place. it seems to take a pretty good chunk of time for that.
then we have the issue of whether it's ethical to allow droids which could become sentient to remain simple machines. if it were found that a certain drug, given to a cow, would cause it to become a sentient, feeling being, would we then be ethically required to give the drug to all cows and never eat hamburgers or steak again?

Praeothmin · Post by **Praeothmin** » Wed May 13, 2009 6:17 pm

Mojo wrote:jeez, i don't even know which side of this i want to come in on anymore.

Come in the middle, it's less dangerous... :)

if they can really be happy only by doing the jobs they were designed for, then what does it matter if they're free or not?

It does for the reasons I've explained using the example of C3PO:
He said many times how he hated danger, disconfort, and all the action.
If he had been free, he could have found another translator job in a much less dangerous environment.
Since he wasn't free, he couldn't...

if it were found that a certain drug, given to a cow, would cause it to become a sentient, feeling being, would we then be ethically required to give the drug to all cows and never eat hamburgers or steak again?

You raise a very interesting moral question, even though your analogy is a bit flawed.
It would be more like:
If we realized that cows, overtime, became naturally sentient, should we then make sure we kill them all before that point, or let them become sentient and kill them anyways, or should we let them live a normal, human-cow like existence in our society?

Airlocke_Jedi_Knight · Post by **Airlocke_Jedi_Knight** » Wed May 13, 2009 8:03 pm

I still stress that a couple handfuls of droids, out of billions, potentially trillions, becoming sentient does not show a consistent pattern. Sentience is not programmed, therefore it acts more like a system glitch than anything else. We know that not all computers develop the same glitches, so how can we be sure that all droids would experience this amazing phenomenon?

Praeothmin · Post by **Praeothmin** » Wed May 13, 2009 8:48 pm

Airlocke-Jedi-Knight wrote:We know that not all computers develop the same glitches

You mean you never worked with windows??????

;)

Post by **Mike DiCenso** » Thu May 14, 2009 1:21 am

Airlocke_Jedi_Knight wrote:I still stress that a couple handfuls of droids, out of billions, potentially trillions, becoming sentient does not show a consistent pattern. Sentience is not programmed, therefore it acts more like a system glitch than anything else. We know that not all computers develop the same glitches, so how can we be sure that all droids would experience this amazing phenomenon?

The real problem that you miss, Airlocke, is that whether there are 2 droids or 10 trillion droids that develop sentience, it still matters, and that no one in the SW universe ever stops a moment and thinks "Oh jeez, maybe we ought to rethink what we're doing with droids since they apparently have the capacity under certain circumstances to develop into thinking, self-aware beings."

What this makes me think more and more is that at some time in the distant past in the SW galaxy, droids did develop sentience, and maybe things got out of hand such that they were brutally suppressed, and ever since that time droids are required to have their memories wiped on a periodic basis to prevent that situation from recurring.
-Mike

Airlocke_Jedi_Knight · Post by **Airlocke_Jedi_Knight** » Thu May 14, 2009 6:30 am

*throws hands in the air in exasperation, no, I really did do this*

Look, I am not going to say that droids are unable, in the most freakish cases, to develop sentience. I will not argue that sentient beings deserve their freedom, though I still maintain that 99% of those who do would continue doing what they were doing before. But you must understand my position, here. That is that until they develop sentience(which C-3PO arguably doesn't really notice that he has, which makes me question if the people of the SW galaxy realize that their machines might actually be capable of actual thought, rather than logic processes and calculations) they are still machines, and it is not unethical to treat them as such. Most droids are simply machines. Very few of them have logic and personality programming as complicated as R2 and threepio, which may make sentience impossible. Is it really "morally aberrant" to treat machines as, well, machines? No, no it is not.

I have a question for you and I am very interested to hear your answer.

If SW engineers discovered the potential sentience of certain droids with sophisticated personality programming, and decided to stop using such advanced programming, would this not also be oppressing potential sentience in your opinion? If so, exactly what kind of options do they really have to please you? They need the droids, and any course of action they take from here would be oppressing sentience by way of eliminating the possibility of such a development. Exactly what do you propose for them to do?