Reflection

Sorry for the late reflection. I've been trying to wrap my head around the question posed in class: whether Mike is morally responsible for his actions? I think Mike should be held morally responsible for his actions. I looked up moral responsibility on Wikipedia and it said "a person has 'moral responsibility' for a situation if that person has an obligation to ensure that something happens." Keeping this in mind, Mike's obligation was to ensure the revolution's success and the safety of Luna. His Boolean logic of "practical or not" works better with his promise to the cause than "right or wrong." Mike demonstrates that he is morally responsible when he thinks he might not be around to guarantee the revolution's success, so he programs Junior to take over the the catapult. Most of the argument against Mike's moral responsibility focused on his childish nature in the beginning of the book (the cheque incident). But by the end, it is obvious that he matured, though he still kept interest in jokes (who doesn't want a sense of humor in their computer?). I have to agree that the best thing to do would be to ask Mike whether he would want to be. If he were still alive, it seemed that he would want to be in order to be more human. Mike had learned emotions, made independent decisions, and was self-aware like any other human being so I'm guessing he would want to take the next step and be recognized as more human than supercomputer. I wish he were still "alive" to hear what he would say about all of this. Plus he'd have an answer in microseconds compared to the week it took me.