Deontology Beats Consequentialism
If some men harbour sadistic or paedophilic fantasies, why not let them act those obsessions out on humanoid machines: silicone skin, responsive AI with the full repertoire of: vain resistance, pleading, and then the cries? After all, no one is actually harmed: no bruises, no trauma, no need for police reports.
The philosophy of down-the-line consequentialism: count the casualties; if the body count is zero where's the problem?
We recoil from this stance. It assumes that only the object matters - whether a creature gratuitously suffers. It ignores the subject - the agent who chooses cruelty. To simulate an atrocity, even against a doll, is to will a certain concept of personhood: domination as pleasure.
This is not merely the manipulation of plastic.
My take: some acts are intrinsically degrading because of what they express. We do not permit certain behaviours merely because the immediate victim is silicone and circuitry. The wrong lies in the stance adopted toward what is represented as a person.
The moral question is not only what happens, but what one chooses to will.
From an evolutionary perspective, we are hyper-social primates whose fragile, culturally-constructed norms of restraint ground cooperation. Systematically rehearsing cruelty - even in simulation - selects for dispositions that erode the very trust on which civilisation itself depends.
And so deontology.
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