Bender’s able to understand morality, and when he acts contrary to that, we can call his actions immoral. Despite being programmed with a different sense of morality, Bender succumbs to the prevailing moral paradigm, and therefore we can consider his actions outside that paradigm to be immoral.
Of Course It Matters
Robots don’t exist in a cultural vacuum. The robots we create reflect clearly back on us. If we create a robot that slavishly follows utilitarian rules, then that suggests we as a society care more about the greater good than we do about the individual. If we create a robot that’s subjectivist and only concerned with self-interest, that suggests we ourselves are only concerned with self-interest. Robots are a simulacrum of humanity. As Gips points out, we could create a robot that is a moral saint, but we won’t, since we’re not saints; but does that mean we’re responsible for their immorality?
Robot 1-X is helpful, kind, creates clean energy, and is phenomenally more useful than the robots that have come before. Naturally those robots despise Robot 1-X, but Robot 1-X doesn’t seem to care. In fact, Robot 1-X appears to have been designed without personhood or autonomy.
In “Obsoletely Fabulous,” Bender frets about his place on the Planet Express team, given the introduction of an actually useful robot; and comes to the conclusion that it’s fine for him to interact with Robot 1-X, because, after all, Robot 1-X is just a tool. This is the fundamental difference between Robot 1-X and Bender, as no one could ever refer to Bender this way. Bender is a sentient, cognizant being, who isn’t merely a means to an end. By placing Robot 1-X in this moral position, and noting that Robot 1-X is better in all the robotic ways than Bender, Futurama appears to be making a statement both about human utility and also about Bender’s own place in the universe.
According to Grau, an individual can be considered to consist of a capacity for self-awareness, self-governance, and free and responsible choice. However, it doesn’t follow that the individual must utilize these capacities, only that they must possess them. Bender is, well, bad. He’s immoral even by his own standards, and that’s a large part of what makes his character so compelling.
Rather than giving us a simple robotic analog, Bender showcases some of humanity’s worst traits, and in so doing, gives us a lens with which to consider ourselves. Bender’s autonomy matters because it sheds light on the roots of human autonomy. If Bender can break free of his programming and choose his own actions, then we humans have no excuse to not exercise our own free will. We aren’t robots and we aren’t slaves to our genetic or cultural programming. We’re autonomous beings, and as such, we’re responsible for ourselves.
Good News Everyone, It’s Time
13
On Becoming Your Own Grandfather
DAN BURKETT
With each and every use [of time travel] you risk tearing the universe asunder!
—LORD NIBBLER
If there’s one thing we’ve learned from Futurama, it’s to always trust the words of a three-thousand-year-old, diaper-wearing alien. In this case, Nibbler’s absolutely right. Time travel’s a tricky business—and frightfully dangerous too.
In the Season Three episode “Roswell that Ends Well” the crew of the Planet Express ship find themselves thrown back in time to the year 1947. For Fry, it’s a golden opportunity to meet his grandfather Enos as a young man. Unfortunately, his hopes are soon dashed by Professor Farnsworth:
Stay away from him you dim-witted monkey! You mustn’t interfere with the past! Don’t do anything that affects anything. Unless it turns out you were supposed to do it—in which case, for the love of God, don’t not do it. . . . If, for example, you were to kill your grandfather, you would cease to exist!
Despite Farnsworth’s warnings, Fry does stumble across Enos, and subsequently embarks on a series of misadventures in which he does all he can to protect his grandfather’s life. Despite his best intentions, Fry’s actions lead to the very thing he tried to prevent: Enos’s death. Fry doesn’t cease to exist, however, leading him to the conclusion that Enos isn’t his grandfather and—more importantly—that the lovely Mildred (Enos’s would-be fiancée) is not his grandmother. Unfortunately, Fry’s reasoning is flawed, and after a sordid night of passion he’s seemingly done the impossible by becoming his own grandfather.
There’s something hard to stomach about this story—something over and above its disturbingly incestuous nature. There’s the idea that something’s wrong, that something just doesn’t make sense. How on earth can a man be both his own grandfather and grandson? Stories of backwards time travel often give rise to all sorts of bizarre scenarios like this. Some take these stories as proof that backwards time travel simply isn’t possible. Should we do the same?
The Other Grandfather Paradox
Farnworth’s dire warning is a reference to the ‘Grandfather Paradox’—a problem popularized by David Lewis in “The Paradoxes of Time Travel.” We should, perhaps, take a moment to consider this particular scenario.
Suppose we alter the story above so that Enos is Fry’s real grandfather, but that he has yet to father any children. Suppose, too, that instead of heeding Farnworth’s warning, Fry sets out to prove him wrong. He carefully plans the assassination of Enos, purchasing the best rifle money can buy and spending hours in practice with grandfather-shaped targets. He discovers the route his grandfather takes to work each morning and rents an apartment with an ideal vantage point. Then, one day, he lies in wait—rifle in hand. Fry’s grandfather appears as expected, blissfully unaware of the danger he’s in. Fry lines up his shot and pulls the trigger . . . What happens next? According to one commonly accepted theory of time, if the bullet finds its mark, and Enos is unable to inseminate Mildred, then Fry never exists. If Fry never exists, then there’s no Fry to travel back in time to kill Enos in the first place. Hang on, this is where it gets fun. If there’s no Fry to travel back in time to kill Enos, then Enos can inseminate Mildred—if he keeps his eyes off the boys long enough—and so, Fry exists. Now we’re back to the beginning: Fry exists, so he can now travel back in time to kill his grandfather. This, my friends, is what we call a paradox. What does this mean for the possibility of backwards time travel?
Before we answer this question, we need to be clear about what we mean by ‘possibility’ and ‘impossibility’. Usually when we say that something is possible, we’re talking of physical possibility. I might say that it’s possible to drive from Houston to Dallas in less than a day, or that it’s impossible for me to jump over the St. Louis Arch. These sorts of claims are based on facts about how the world is. When it comes to time travel, physical possibility is what scientists are concerned with. Are the laws of nature such that time travel could actually occur? If so, what would be the best means by which to make it happen: A very fast spaceship? A wormhole? Or perhaps some less conventional option like a DeLorean or an early 1960s British police phonebox?
Philosophers, however, are often interested in a different sort of possibility—namely, logical possibility. Something will be logically possible so long as it doesn’t involve a contradiction. For example, logically it’s possible for me to jump over the St. Louis Arch, even if it’s not physically possible. On the other hand, drawing a three-sided square is logically impossible because it necessarily involves a contradiction.
The best thing about working with logical possibility is that anyone can do it. If we want to know if something is physically possible, we have to carry out all sorts of fancy experiments. Not so with logical possibility. All you need is a comfy armchair and some quiet time to figure things through. In fact, one of the best ways to work out if something is logically possible is to see whether or not you can conceive of it—that is, whether you can picture it in your mind’s eye. It seems clear that we can’t conceive of something contradictory (try picturing a three-sided square—difficult, isn’t it?). If we can conceive of something, it seems like good evidence for that thing being logically possible.
Killing Gr
andfather and Conceiving Father
To recap our assassination story, Fry can’t succeed. In order to pull it off, two things will have to be true. First, his grandfather has to die in 1947 before having fathered any children. Second, Fry has to be around to kill him. But there’s our problem. In order for Fry to exist, it must be the case that his grandfather did not die in 1947. A story in which Fry kills his grandfather is therefore a story in which his grandfather both did and did not die in 1947 and this is a contradiction. For this reason, it’s logically impossible for Fry to kill his grandfather.
Some time travel stories make use of a “branching universe” theory to sidestep the problem. According to this solution, Fry’s assassination of his grandfather would create a new timeline—a timeline in which his grandfather is killed as a young man and never has the chance to father children. This timeline would be entirely separate from the one from which the crew of Planet Express originated. The difficulty with this solution is that it doesn’t really solve our problem. Fry still fails to kill his grandfather. Fry’s real grandfather, the one who will go on to father Fry’s dad, is still alive and well in the original timeline. He has to be, otherwise where did Fry come from? Fry, then, has killed someone else entirely—someone who is no one’s grandfather (seeing as he is tragically assassinated before producing any offspring).
What does happen when Fry pulls the trigger? We’ve made a pretty solid case that Fry logically can’t kill his grandfather. Fry has all the skills and resources he needs, yet he’s still going to fail. It gets worse, too. When Fry doesn’t succeed, he can loop back in time and try all over again. There could be one thousand Frys attempting to kill his grandfather that morning, but logically, every one of them will fail. This seems to go against every reasonable instinct we have. How could that many well-armed and well-trained individuals fail to take down one oblivious target? It seems we need to rely on some sort of contrived intervention—in the form of a Nibblonian, or a Time Lord, or some other mystical entity.
Nothing of the sort is required, however. Fry will always fail to kill his grandfather, and he’ll fail for very ordinary reasons. Perhaps his gun jams, perhaps he gets distracted, perhaps he loses his nerve at the final moment. Whatever happens always happens, and the end result is that Fry’s grandfather lives long enough to father at least one child. We know this simply because Fry Exists.
You might find this solution unsatisfactory, but consider a similar case. Suppose you have a friend who’s an absolute math-whiz. Suppose further that she announces to you that she’s off to draw a three-sided square. “You can’t do that!” you declare, “that’s logically impossible!” She’s completely unfazed, however. “Nonsense!” she replies, “I have all the skills I need, countless sheets of paper and numerous pencils. Best of all, I have persistence, and I’ll just keep trying until I succeed!”
Do you need to worry about your friend? Is some intervention necessary in order to prevent her from breaking the laws of logic? Of course not; she’ll fail, and she’ll continue to fail, because what she’s attempting to do is contradictory and, therefore, logically impossible. The case of Fry attempting to kill his grandfather is no different.
Consider now our original story, the one in which Fry doesn’t kill his own grandfather but, rather, becomes his own grandfather. Are Fry’s genealogical gymnastics also logically impossible? No, they’re not. Fry’s story may be stomach-turning, but we can tell it in its entirety without discovering a single contradiction. Fry travels back in time, begets a man who eventually begets Fry, who then travels back in time and . . . Well, you get the picture. It might be weird, but what Fry does is nevertheless entirely conceivable (pun intended!). It’s an example of what is often referred to as a “causal loop.” Fry is the cause of his own father, who’s the cause of Fry, who’s the cause of his own father—and around and around we go. While causal loops are bizarre (not least because they seem to suggest that something can come from nowhere) they’re not logically impossible, and therefore not a problem for backwards time travel.
The moral of the story? Be careful! While it’s impossible for you to kill your own grandfather, it’s incredibly easy (or so it would seem) to become him.
Why Time Spheres Aren’t All They’re Cracked Up To Be
In Bender’s Big Score, our heroes make use of “time spheres” as a far more reliable method of backwards time travel. These spheres are summoned into existence by a recitation of the Universal Machine Language Time Code—a code found, in all places, on one of Fry’s buttock cheeks. What makes this code especially interesting, however, is that it’s—according to Nibbler—paradox correcting. If this is true, then everything discussed above becomes moot. Time travelers can do whatever they want without fear of contradiction.
It’s not clear that time spheres live up to their reputation, however. In fact, it seems that the spheres create just as many paradoxes as they purport to correct. Consider Hermes’s self-serving use of the sphere. Hermes’s head and body are separated after an unfortunate encounter with a saber. His head is preserved (thanks to the miracle of H2OGFat), but his mangled body is in desperate need of replacement. Bender is sent back in time to kill Hermes’s younger self and steal that body before the saber incident. A familiar problem emerges, however. If Bender succeeds in going back in time and stealing Hermes before decapitation, then Hermes was never decapitated; and if Hermes was never decapitated, then Bender was never sent back in time; but if Bender was never sent back in time, then Hermes was decapitated. . . .
The time-spheres’ patented “paradox-correction” feature supposedly takes care of this—Hermes’s stolen body being doomed to destruction by a falling chandelier. Does this actually correct the paradox? Sadly, no. It doesn’t matter if the “duplicate” body is later destroyed, by the time Hermes’s head is attached to his stolen body, the contradictory event has already occurred. In order for this unusual medical procedure to even take place it must be the case that Hermes both was stolen by Bender in the past (so that Bender might steal the body now in use) and wasn’t stolen by Bender in the past (so that Hermes might survive that encounter and eventually be decapitated). What Hermes and Bender do is still logically impossible—“paradox-correcting” time spheres or not.
A Real Time-Bender
The problem of time-travel duplicates can occur even in cases that don’t involve a contradiction. All we need to do is change our story slightly. Suppose that after Lars’s funeral, Bender keeps the Universal Machine Language Time Code stored in his memory banks. At the end of that year, he decides that he’s had a darn good twelve months. So good, in fact, that he elects to travel back in time to the beginning of the year and relive it all over again. For Bender, however, this still isn’t quite enough. He decides that this is the only year he ever wants to live through, and decides that every time he reaches December 31st 3008, he’ll travel back in time to January 1st 3008, and live it all over again. Sick of reciting the Time Code, Bender instead carries out some internal programming so that every time his high-precision digital chronograph reads 11:59 P.M. on December 31st 3008, he’ll automatically be transported back in time to 12:01 A.M. on January 1st 3008.
A cunning plan, no? Let’s consider what’ll actually happen. Bender happily lives through 3008, drinking beer, smoking cigars, and imploring people to bite his shiny metal posterior. On New Year’s Eve, one minute before the calendar clicks over to 3009, his automatic programming kicks in, and he’s flung back to the beginning of 3008. So far, so good, but let’s consider how things look on the morning of January 1st, 3008. How many Benders would we find there? A reasonable guess might be two—the “first” Bender who’s yet to live through 3008, and the “second” Bender who’s just travelled back in time, having already lived through 3008. But is this all? What happens to that second Bender when he lives through the year and reaches December 31st 3008, for a second time? His programming will kick in and he’ll be sent back to January 1st yet again. So, is the correc
t answer three Benders? Well, no, because we haven’t considered what will happen to that third Bender at the end of the year. . . .
It should be clear that this little story will take us a very long time to tell. The number of Benders in 3008 seems to continually grow every time he “loops back,” and this is worrying. Despite this, there doesn’t seem to be any contradiction that would prevent such a series of events unfolding. What, then, are we to make of this story?
The Harlem Globetrotters Have It Right—The Doom Field Is Real
We have three options. The first is to continue to tell the story and come to the conclusion that Bender’s time travel journey will result in there being infinitely many Benders in the universe. But can we do this? Can we have an infinite number of something? It’s hard to tell, especially if our universe turns out to be of a finite size. Just where are we going to fit all of those sass-talking robots? The second option is to simply concede that having an infinite number of Benders is so ridiculous that backwards time travel must be impossible in order to prevent such a ridiculous experiment from occurring.
We have a third option, however, and for this, we have our friends the Harlem Globetrotters to thank. Bender’s situation only becomes a problem if all of the Benders from January 1st make it to December 31st—that is, if Bender continues looping back ad infinitum. All we need is for one Bender to meet an unfortunate end at some point during that year. If this happens, then everything is right with the world. Sound familiar?
Futurama and Philosophy Page 14