Philip K. Dick, empathy as a test, and why no criterion is ever enough
“When you turn empathy into an exam, someone always finds a way to pass it without feeling a thing.”
In 1976, Isaac Asimov gave this debate the most generous ending fiction could offer: a robot who, after decades of patience, dies in order to be recognised as human, and the reader closes the book convinced it was right to be moved. Eight years earlier, in 1968, Philip K. Dick had written a far more uncomfortable novel about the same problem, and refused, from beginning to end, to offer that same comfort. It’s worth looking at Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? precisely for that reason: because it doesn’t give in to sympathy so easily.
A World Without Animals
This short novel takes place after a war that filled the atmosphere with radioactive dust and wiped out almost all animal life on the planet. Owning a living animal has become such an important status symbol that anyone who can’t afford one, like the protagonist Rick Deckard, buys an electric substitute and hides from the neighbours that his sheep is fake. Before mentioning a single android, Dick builds the question that interests him: in a world where even compassion for an animal has become a social performance, what is left of human empathy to distinguish it from a convincing simulation?
The Test of Empathy, Not Intelligence
Dick made a deliberate choice that sets him apart from Turing: he wasn’t interested in measuring whether an android could imitate an intelligent conversation, but whether it could feel. To that end he invented, within the novel, a test he called the Voigt-Kampff test, a fictional name that means nothing outside the book: it is simply the instrument his android hunters use to detect them. The test doesn’t ask about mathematics or chess; it describes situations of cruelty towards animals and measures, using sensors that record skin flush and involuntary eye movement, whether the subject reacts with something resembling moral horror. Dick believed that empathy, not intelligence, was what truly separated humans from their creations, and he built the entire narrative apparatus of the novel around that wager.
Why That Criterion Also Collapses
The novel, however, doesn’t let that wager stand cleanly. The androids of the latest model almost manage to fool the test; some humans damaged by radiation fail to pass it; and Deckard himself, in order to do his job as an android hunter properly, has to suppress empathy towards his victims — precisely the trait the test is meant to detect in them. In one particularly uncomfortable passage, a female android Deckard is interrogating points out this very contradiction to him: if his job consists of killing without remorse those who lack empathy, perhaps the hunter resembles the hunted more than he’s willing to admit. Towards the end, Deckard begins to feel genuine compassion for the androids he pursues, which, by the novel’s own criterion, makes him less fit to go on being their hunter.
Even Empathy Needs a Machine
Dick compounds the problem on the human side. The humans in the novel rely on a mood organ that lets them dial in their emotional state for the day, and on empathy boxes which, when held, produce a shared mystical experience with a figure called Mercer, whose authenticity the novel itself calls into question. In other words: the very humans who set themselves apart from androids through their capacity to feel depend, in order to feel with the intensity society demands, on a technological device that manufactures that sensation. The line separating the human from the artificial doesn’t erode only because the android draws closer to us; it also erodes because we depend, more than we’d like to admit, on our own machines to feel what we claim to feel naturally.
The Christian Perspective
Placed within the sequence of this series, Dick’s contribution is to show that not even empathy — a nobler criterion than mere imitation à la Turing or Dennett’s functionalism — holds up as proof of personhood. Every observable criterion, every one measurable by an instrument or assessable by an examiner, ends up being a proxy, and every proxy can, sooner or later, be faked, fail for reasons unrelated to the matter at hand, or demand of whoever applies it a coldness that brings them dangerously close to the very thing they claim to be looking for. The Christian tradition never offered human dignity as the result of a test. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 2:11 that there is a spirit within man that knows his own thoughts — not a score that some external instrument could register. Against Mercer’s empathy box, whose authenticity the novel itself leaves in doubt, the Christian faith offers no device that manufactures the feeling of being connected to something greater; instead, it offers the affirmation that this connection — the breath of God in Genesis 2:7 — was already given, with no need to hold anything in one’s hands to prove it.
Conclusion
Dick refused to resolve his own novel with a scene that would let the reader close the book in peace, and even left open the suspicion that Deckard himself might, without knowing it, be one of the androids he hunts. That final discomfort, far from being a flaw, is perhaps the most honest reading science fiction has ever given this problem: any test we devise to separate people from their imitations — including the noblest of all, empathy — can fail in both directions. The one thing that never depended on passing a test was the reason why, to begin with, someone deserved to be given one.
