Is This Crossing The Moral Event Horizon?

So I have a protagonist who's kinda leaning on the edge of the Moral Event Horizon. He's recently discovered that not only is he a cyborg, but his main function was to serve as a "brain vault" of sorts, storing the uploaded consciousness of thousands of people.

He is not happy about this.

So he wipes it. Deletes all of their minds. He tries to justify it by saying he only wanted to free them from their torture (which is true, the experiment was done without their consent), but what he won't admit is that he didn't want to live his life burdened by that responsibility, so he flushed them.

Is this crossing the Moral Event Horizon, 'cause it really looks like it from where I'm standing.

That doesn't seem like Moral Event Horizon to me. It doesn't sound irredeemably evil enough. Not bothering with responsibility is lazy or escapist, not EVIL evil. Maybe I'm missing something about what positive aspects a brain vault is, but your description reads more like pulling the plug on an unethical experiment than evil.

Yeah, but by doing this he's killing thousands of people just because he was too cowardly and selfish to keep carrying such a responsibility.

I'm not understanding something here. Was he their only consciousness storage? Was he backup? are these people he's storing still alive, and that's all of them that's left?

I think it's crossing the moral event horizon if he's deleted thousand of still-living people's consciousnesses and they're left as vegetables/amnesiacs because of his actions. If he was serving as a backup/storage for dead people, not so much.

I'm wondering if one of my characters has passed the Moral Event Horizon because he has killed a few million people. Directly. Then again, he might just be in A Million Is a Statistic territory.

Obviously as we all do or at least should know, MEH is subjective and whilst some people might believe that the character you described has crossed it, others would disagree.

Their bodies are dead, but their minds still function. They've been uploaded and separated from the protagonist's mind.

Uh, why couldn't he just reupload them to another server? ctrl-c

edited 30th Apr '11 10:36:42 AM by melloncollie

I guess I'm also having trouble understanding how all this extra data in his head is affecting him at all. Is he like, running consciousness boot-camp, so other consciousnesses can be accessed? If it's merely storage and all the other consciousnesses are separate and don't make his mind lag, what's the problem? Does he have to keep himself clean and uninjured and etc. to keep himself a suitable host? I mean, if they're just kind of there and not really affecting his everyday functioning, just deleting all of them is pretty evil.

I would say no. It's like that old philosophical debate:

You wake up in a room hooked up to a machine. The machine is hooked up to another person on a bed next to you. You learn that you have to stay hooked up to the machine for 6 months or the other person will die. If you unplug yourself, you'll be perfectly fine and are free to leave.

What is the moral choice here? Will you stay captive for 6 months to save a life, or gain freedom at another person's expense?

If you want it to not be a MEH, then your character should at least try to find an alternative solution. Even if he ends up killing them anyway, at least he shows he cares.

(Not saying that it definitely counts as a MEH otherwise, that's a very grey area.)

^^ But from the information given it doesn't seem like these extra consciousnesses are impeding the character's life in any way, other than him not being okay with it.

I think a couple thousand voices in your head wouldn't be comfortable.

Unless they're dormant and just in storage....then the deletion would be what I'd call a "dick move"

edited 30th Apr '11 12:06:26 PM by Carbonpillow

The whole dick move interpretation seems right. Considering the fact that he hasn't noticed the thousands of consciousnesses until he's told they're there, and that they're separate from him... yeah. What a dick.

There are, uh...better ways to store information than in the mind of another human being, it would seem...

Unless computer technology isn't advanced enough in the story, and since the human brain is very complex, whoever upload the minds into him found using a person a more pracical solution.

Yes, the human brain is very complex, and that's exactly it, because using a device you do not actually understand as a storage device is perfectly safe.

But, eh, this is a tangent. Okay, so they're still conscious? Well, um...

It seems like the protagonist doesn't want to be responsible for a group of people...and his solution is to murder them. It's self-defeating. Congrats, man, you're not responsible for them, you're just responsible for mass-fuckin'-murder. MEH-crossing is dependent on how you present.

Well, I should clarify. He's not actually human, he's a Ridiculously Human Robot codenamed Project ADAM. The reason for his creation was twofold. Firstly, to create a machine that can perfectly mimic a human. Creating life from scratch, hence "ADAM". The second purpose of the project was to develop a means to ensure humanity's place in the hazardous and unknown future. By uploading human minds into storage, a trace of humanity can be kept forever. The protagonist is both a scientific marvel and an ark of sorts.

He's uncomfortable with this because neither he nor the test subjects had any say in what was done to them. But yeah, no matter how you word it, this seems like a bit too much of a dick move.

Did all of the people sign on knowing that they'd be horribly imposing upon another person?

The scientists? Yeah, they all agreed to it, although some were pressured and others cooperated, but didn't necessarily agree with the other's For Science! mentality.

If you want to pull in a What the Hell, Hero? / Heroic BSoD, then no. If he feels no remorse, then yes. That said, if you haven't planned out what will happen after he deletes them, then why not try writing something different and seeing where it goes?

That's the idea. Okay, new plan. The company sponsoring the research is hunting him not to secure its cargo, but because he escaped before the upload. That... actually works pretty well.