Surrogates: Was the ending morally correct? (spoiler)

[wamdue]

ok so spoiles from this point in you have been warned.

At the end of the movie Tom Geer (Bruce Willis) disconnects everyone from their surrogate, and disables the surrogates.

The question is: Was he right to do this?

I say no.

Canters plan was cleary wrong, but for all the reasons his plan is wrong is the reason why the discount is wrong. The people he would have killed wre largely innocent, and many will have made the choice to use the surrogate themeselves (however fair enough plenty will have fallen to societal pressure), Canter decides that feel are already dead.

Geer on the other hand decides to take that choice away from them, from everyone inculding the disabled who the surrogates were meant for.

Also despite some people using the term "meat bag" in a negative way (despite the fact racism had apparntly been all but wiped out) humans could live their life without a surrogate, after all Bobby had a job that allowed him to take surrogates off line, a job some surrogate people (as in people who prefer to use a surrogate) might feel a human shouldnt have.

I dont see what gives him the right to make this choice, to say nothing of the fact his choice may well have been infulenced by the problems with his wife.

On a more general point, I am surprised at how human all the surrogates were, as humans we can be very creative with our looks, be it for fun or work, we have built machines capable of things no human can do (see the average building site) yet it does not seem in the movie that things have not been combinded.

That said whilst the surrogates are all robots they all have human operaters and that kinda of change does not come over night, maybe if left to run society would evolve to create such surrogates, and the lives lived would have been differnt.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Not to mention that he probably killed tens of thousands of living breathing people out for a stroll or in their pods when cars and tanker trucks crashed into their homes, trains derailed, helicopters and planes crashed (depending on the extent they allow Surrogates to be used for those tasks), industrial accidents happened, surgeries and other medical procedures were interrupted, police Surrogates left their weapons lying around, caretakers looking after elderly people and children stopped working... He's probably the world's most wanted mass murderer at this point.

Just the damage alone is going to completely destroy the world economy. The infrastructure is ruined, the roads are clogged with cars and androids, there's little working transportation available, ships and aircraft carrying needed cargo are stranded at sea of crashed.

I'm assuming the military has their own servers controlling their Surrogates, but if not they've all collapsed in hostile territory and left their weapons and technology for those hostile nations and groups to reverse engineer and use.

His heart may have been in the right place in wanting to effect change to a trend he (rightly, IMO) saw as harmful, but he went about it in completely the wrong way.

 

[wamdue]

I suppose the question is how often did people go out without use of a surrogate, most people seemed to work and play in them, saving there flesh selves for the home, so certainly in the city there may not have been many on the street. We saw how Geer struggled to walk the city without his surrogate.

If you think that his wife is typical of a growing movement of people who couldnt face life without a surrogate, then in theory there wont be many flesh people outside. Still that is a bid of a fudge, I dont think society was at that point yet. Still yes planes falling out the sky, cleary would kill alot of people.

The intro said that use of surrogates was legal, it didnt mention if people would have to be flesh in some jobs like airline pilot, there certainly seemed to let surrogates fly helicopters.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

This inspires me to start a thread about Source Code.

 

[wamdue]

I have yet to see "source code"

 

[stj]

The surrogate system had to have elaborate safeguards against sudden disconnections from any cause, not just Willis' command, or the system would have caused accidents.

And they can always build a new system if they feel so inclined.

Willis didn't actually force a permanent change. It was supposed to be a forced enlightenment to their real situation, hidden by the surrogates.

The morality of his action is comparable to forcibly stopping someone in their business and making them listen to a lecture.

For me, the real problem in the movie is accepting the surrogate premise. I couldn't feel it very strongly because I couldn't suspend disbelief very well.