Phil Resch passes the empathy test, although Rick Deckard finds his readiness to kill disturbing. Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? makes that result more troublesome than a simple failure of detection would be. A test that identifies someone as human has not demonstrated that his conduct is humane. Deckard’s work asks him to use one conclusion as permission for another: classification should settle what may be done to the classified being. His encounters repeatedly expose the gap. Empathy becomes unstable as an official boundary because responding to another creature can produce obligations that the boundary was designed to exclude.
The review of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’s uncertain identities places the investigation beside Deckard’s domestic life and desire for a real animal. Those attachments complicate the moral authority of the test he administers.
01
Resch passes without becoming reassuring
Resch’s willingness to kill androids prompts Deckard to doubt him. When Resch demands testing, the result identifies him as human. The scene does not merely ask whether appearances deceive. It puts two grounds of judgement beside each other: an official result and Deckard’s response to how the man behaves.
The result resolves one question while sharpening another. If Resch is human, Deckard cannot explain away the disturbing conduct as the expression of a nonhuman nature. The category now contains behaviour that had seemed to threaten its moral definition. Humanity becomes less useful as a shorthand for the treatment somebody can expect.
This is a limit on the familiar claim that Dick simply makes the test unreliable. In the Resch episode, the ethical problem does not depend on a faulty result. Even an accurate identification would leave Deckard with an unanswered objection to the person identified. The objection concerns conduct, and another score cannot discharge it.
02
The investigator becomes an inconvenient respondent
Deckard’s increasing concern for androids makes the distinction harder to administer. Jill Galvan’s Science Fiction Studies essay argues that his encounters undermine an exclusively human community of empathy. The present reading follows a narrower institutional consequence: the investigator begins to experience the response that his assignment requires him to withhold from its targets.
Testing is supposed to stabilise the encounter. Once the other being has been classified, professional procedure can resume. Deckard’s response interrupts that sequence because an identified android can remain someone towards whom he feels concern. Knowledge of origin and the experience of attachment no longer deliver the same practical instruction.
The androids’ cruelty to a spider prevents an easy reversal in which artificial beings become the innocent moral superiors of humans. John Isidore’s distress at that cruelty matters. Dick supplies conduct that calls for judgement on both sides of the boundary, denying either category an automatic exemption from the question of what it does.
03
Animal ownership turns care into evidence of standing
The scarcity of living animals gives owning one conspicuous value. Deckard’s electric sheep places him inside that economy with an imitation. The desire for a real animal therefore has more than one possible object: a creature to care for, and a socially legible sign that the owner can afford to care in the approved way.
The two desires need not cancel each other. A person can feel attachment and still want the status attached to it. But the combination makes visible evidence of compassion difficult to interpret. The purchased animal says something about access to money before it can establish anything about the owner’s treatment of living beings.
Mercerism similarly gives shared feeling a recognisable form through the empathy box. Its technological mediation complicates the idea that authentic human feeling must be untouched by manufacture. The human community relies on a device to express the quality by which it distinguishes itself from its manufactured neighbours. That dependence does not make every experience through the box insincere.
04
Iran has a task after the revelation
Deckard brings home a toad that he believes is living. Iran discovers that it is mechanical. The revelation seems ready to repeat the book’s familiar disappointment: apparent life has been assigned to the wrong category, and a correction should cancel the value of the encounter. Yet the final domestic action goes elsewhere.
Iran arranges supplies for the artificial toad. She does so after identifying it, so the care cannot be explained as a continuing mistake about its construction. The discovery changes her knowledge without eliminating the task she undertakes. It is a small action, with none of the authority of Deckard’s professional examinations.
The toad need not be declared conscious for this ending to matter, since Iran’s practical concern can answer to her husband’s attachment as well as the object itself; Dick leaves her deciding what to provide after the distinction between living and manufactured has already been settled, where Deckard’s official procedure would prefer decision to stop.
Sources
- primaryDo Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?Philip K. Dick, 1968; Del Rey edition, Penguin Random House.
- criticismEntering the Posthuman Collective in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?Jill Galvan, Science Fiction Studies 24.3, November 1997, pp. 413 to 429.
- referenceDo Androids Dream of Electric SheepNovels for Students, Gale, hosted by Encyclopedia.com.
- referenceDo Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?Wikipedia, plot and publication history.
Questions about Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Does Deckard hunt machines called replicants in the novel?
The novel calls its artificial people androids, including the Nexus-6 type. Replicant is the familiar terminology of Blade Runner and should not silently replace the book’s wording.
Is the empathy test a medical instrument readers can apply?
No. The Voigt-Kampff procedure belongs to the fiction. It cannot establish consciousness, humanity or moral worth in actual people.
Does exposing Mercerism’s staging end its effects?
Buster Friendly exposes its manufactured presentation, but the narrative continues to include experiences of Mercer. Debunking the production does not neatly end the characters’ relationship to it.
When was the novel first published?
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? appeared in 1968. Later editions and the film adaptation should be distinguished from that first publication when discussing its setting or terminology.