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What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Difference between revisions
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Intelligence and emotions, and whether the character in question is actually alive in the conventional sense, are usually what dictate the morality of the situation. But more often than not, it's based upon how human-like the character is (an issue further explored in [http://www.fanboy.com/2010/01/are-humans-biased-to-thinking-that-only-humanoids-are-intelligent.html this blog post]). The sliding scale usually goes something like this:
* Obviously nonliving things like inanimate objects do not figure into this at all... Unless you're in an [[Everything Talks]] situation where the objects are given names, faces, personalities, and so on. And especially if, in the case of the broken-down cars in ''[[The Brave Little Toaster]]'' and Jessie from ''[[Toy Story (franchise)|Toy Story]] 2'', they sing sad, sad songs about the day their owners threw them away. Mileage on a [[Companion Cube]] may vary, though usually if it gets destroyed/damaged, other ''characters'' will react as if you'd just killed something that was alive.
** Special exceptions may apply in the case of great historical and cultural treasures, usually because someone who values them may opt for a [[Heroic Sacrifice]] rather than allow them to be destroyed.
* Robots and Artificial Intelligence stories examine this quite a lot in their plots, possibly because of the writings of [[Isaac Asimov]]. Good robots and other [[Mechanical Lifeforms]] are considered people most of the time. Killing one is generally the karmic equivalent of killing a human the same way—except that it is easier to show them getting hurt (think of poor Bishop in ''[[Alien (franchise)|Aliens]]''), which gets awkward. [[Mecha-Mooks]] and bad robots almost always have a very low value in this regard, even if they demonstrate [[Ridiculously-Human Robots|obvious personalities, emotions]], and [[Creative Sterility|humanlike intelligence]]. Regardless, robots are the most frequent victims of the "[[How Did You Know? I Didn't.|How Did You Know That Mook]] [[Not Even Human|Wasn't Human]]?" "[[How Did You Know? I Didn't.|I Didn't!]]" trope. It's [[Just a Machine]], after all. It probably helps that when a robot dies [[We Can Rebuild Him]] more easily than [[Came Back Wrong|bring back a human]] (which is a souce of superiority as well: human life is more complicated, probably because robots are ''always'' written as not having [[Our Souls Are Different|souls]] even if they are sentient), making them more expendable.
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