In the last essay I suggested that although a re-animation is not a person, it could be seen as a virtual person. This sort of virtual personhood can provide a foundation for a moral argument against re-animating celebrities. To make my case, I will use Kant’s arguments about the moral status of animals.

Kant claims that animals are means rather than ends because they are objects. Rational beings, in contrast, are ends. For Kant, this distinction is based on his belief that rational beings can chose to follow the moral law. Because they lack reason, animals cannot do this.  Since animals are means and not ends, Kant claims we have no direct duties to animals. They belong with the other “objects of our inclinations” that derive value from the value we give them. Rational beings have intrinsic value while objects (including animals) have only extrinsic value. While this would seem to show that animals do not matter to Kant, he argues we should be kind to them.

While Kant denies we have any direct duties to animals, he “smuggles” in duties to them in a clever way: our duties towards animals are indirect duties towards humans. To make his case for this, he employs an argument from analogy: if a human doing something would create an obligation, then an animal doing something similar would create a similar moral obligation. For example, if Alfred has faithfully served Bruce, Alfred should not be abandoned when he has grown old. Likewise, a dog who has served faithfully should not be abandoned or shot in their old age. While this would seem to create an obligation to the dog, Kant uses a little philosophical sleight of hand here. The dog cannot judge (that is, the dog is not rational) so, as Kant sees it, the dog cannot be wronged. So, then, why would it be wrong to abandon or shoot the old dog?

Kant’s answer appears consequentialist in character: he argues that if a person acts in inhumane ways towards animals (abandoning the dog, for example) then this is likely to damage their humanity. Since, as Kant sees it, humans do have a duty to show humanity to other humans, shooting the dog would be wrong. This would not be because the dog was wronged but because humanity would be wronged by the shooter damaging his humanity through such a cruel act. To support his view, Kant discusses how people develop cruelty: they often begin with animals and then work up to harming human beings.

Kant goes beyond merely saying we should not be cruel to animals; he encourages us to be kind. Of course, he does this because those who are kind to animals will develop more humane feelings towards humans. Animals seem to be moral practice for us: how we treat them is training for how we will treat human beings.

In the case of re-animated celebrities, the re-animations currently lack any meaningful moral status. They do not think or feel. As such, they seem to lack the qualities that might give them a moral status of their own. While this might seem odd, these re-animations are, in Kant’s theory, morally equivalent to animals. As noted above, Kant sees animals are mere objects. The same is clearly true of the re-animations.

Of course, sticks and stones are also objects. Yet Kant would not argue that we should be kind to sticks and stones. Perhaps this would also apply to virtual beings such as a holographic Amy Winehouse. Perhaps it makes no sense to talk about good or bad relative to such virtual beings. Thus, the issue is whether virtual beings are more like animals or more like rocks.

I think a case can be made for treating virtual beings well. If Kant’s argument has merit, then the key concern about how non-rational beings are treated is how this behavior affects the person engaged in it. For example, if being cruel to a real dog could damage a person’s humanity, then a person should not be cruel to the dog.  This should also extend to virtual beings. For example, if creating and exploiting a re-animation of a dead celebrity to make money would damage a person’s humanity, then they should not do this.

If Kant is right, then re-animations of dead celebrities can have a virtual moral status that would make creating and exploiting them wrong. But this view can be countered by two lines of reasoning. The first is to argue that ownership rights override whatever indirect duties we might have to re-animations of the dead. In this case, while it might be wrong to create and exploit re-animations, the owner would have the moral right to do so. This is like how ownership rights can allow a person to have the right to do wrong to others, as paradoxical as this might seem. For example, slave owners believed they had the right to own and exploit their slaves. As another example, business owners often believe they have the right to exploit their employees by overworking and underpaying them. The counter to this is to argue against their being a moral right to do wrong to others for profit.

The second line of reasoning is to argue that re-animations are technological property and provide no foundation on which to build even an indirect obligation. On this view, there is no moral harm in exploiting such re-animations because doing so cannot cause a person to behave worse towards other people. This view does have some appeal, although the fact that many people have been critical of such re-animations as creepy and disrespectful does provide a strong counter to this view.