In the supplementary reading The Seventh Sally or How Trurl’s Own Perfection Led to No Good, by Stanisław Lem, Lem creates a world apparently much like our own, but with a uniquely skilled individual named Trurl. Trurl possesses a powerful ability to create, and he uses this ability to create a perfect model of a civilization. The inhabitants of this model are described in detail as being exactly like the inhabitants of real civilizations: they love, they hate, they are traitors and heroes and conspirators and ordinary folk, and are purportedly fully human to Trurl, except that they are very small, and understood by him. The apparent moral dilemma, which comprises the main thrust of the story, comes when Trurl tells his friend Klapaucious what he has done, and Klapaucious explains that there is no difference between a perfect simulation of people and the real thing.

What surprised me is that Trurl then rushes to their aid. This behavior seems completely inappropriate given his new understanding of the nature of consciousness. I contend that if he has truly created a whole civilization of beings capable of the same feelings of which he is capable, he has no moral obligation to them at all. In fact, I would go so far as to contend that in such a case, neither moral obligation nor morals themselves exist.

In support of this, consider the fact that purely deterministic matter and energy cannot (by the definition of determinism), be arranged into a being with free, non-deterministic feelings. If Trurl, in his extravagant act, truly created beings sufficiently like himself emotionally for him to be convinced that they feel suffering just like he does, he would have shown that his own suffering was just as illusory as theirs, not the other way around.

Further, consider the fact that for Trurl to create his artificial civilization, he must understand how it works (and in fact, his dialog with Klapaucious suggests this). This implies at least some level of understanding about the way his own mind works (remember, Trurl was able to say that his creations truly felt), or in other words, he effectively knew the general algorithm for his own consciousness. Trurl thus knew he was a machine without freedom, bound in slavery to the algorithm of his consciousness.

The fatal assumption seems to be that humans are moral agents, which at least in the story is contradicted by the evidence. The story says that since humans are moral agents, anything that thinks and feels as we do must also be a moral agent, and may induce in other moral agents moral obligations. If the facts of the story are taken at face-value, however, without this ungrounded assumption, we must reach a different conclusion: If we can demonstrate that there are beings following merely deterministic principles (and are thus amoral agents), and that those beings nonetheless think and feel just as we humans do, then in all probability, humans are not moral agents either.