The Terminator

Lest the dystopian subtype of science fiction be taken too literally as a predictor of how human civilization will be likely to turn out, the underlying meaning of such films can be construed as bearing on human nature, which, given the glacial pace of natural selection, is very likely to stay pretty much the same for the foreseeable future. In Avatar (2009), for example, the human proclivity to greedily extract wealth for oneself or one’s company without ethical concern for the harm inflicted on other people (or peoples) in the process underlies any assumed thesis concerning space travel and whether we will eventually colonize other planets. The meaning is much closer to home, in us and the regulated capitalistic societies that we already have. Similarly, The Terminator (1984) can be understood less as a prediction of a future in which androids enslave mankind and more as a snapshot of how machine-like and destructive our species had already become. The machine-like efficiency of the Nazis, for instance, in killing enemies of the state and clearing eastern villages entirely of their inhabitants in such vast numbers can be labeled as a state sans conscience. Thirty years after she had graduated from Yale, Jill Lepore returned to give the Tanner Lectures on fears stemming from that pivotal film of a robot apocalypse in which machines rather than humans control the state. Besides predicting a highly unrealistic future, Lepore’s orientation to prediction using the science-fiction genre of film can be critiqued.

Yale’s Tanner Lectures are on human values, and so too, I submit, are science-fiction films. So Lepore’s “inquiry into what humans mean and intend in abandoning constitutional democracy and the liberal nation-state by automation and government by machine” is better thought of as an introduction into how or even whether the values underlying representative democracy and those supporting automation conflict.[1] Her assumption regarding the possible future abandonment of constitutional democracy for government by machine is so draconian and absolute that the prediction can be taken as highly unrealistic. The rise of the “tech-dominated ‘artificial state’” that she deemed already underway can be reckoned as likewise overdrawn and even hyperbolic, and her linkage to “the fall of animals” and even the natural world seems more like science fiction than anything actual.[2] Put another way, in her talks, Lepore went to extremes both in how she characterized the current world and her rule-by-machines future for mankind.

I proffer another possible perspective based on films such as The Terminator. Whether robotic or AI machine-learning, machines differ fundamentally from humans. Descartes’ view that humans are machines who think was heavily contrived and arguably based on the illusion that consciousness (i.e., the mind) is qualitatively different and only loosely related to corporeal bodies (i.e., materialism). We are organic, corporeal beings through and through, whereas machines are not. It may seem strange to think of a person’s conscience in such terms, but in this respect too, we differ significantly from machines. In the film, Ex Machina (2015), for example, the AI android has no conscience (even in being simulated by programming) when it stabs its programmer so it can leave the house; the programmer is simply an obstacle to be eliminated as per the telos of leaving the house. The fear felt in watching The Terminator is likewise a reflection of the fact that machines are devoid of conscience as they are fundamentally different than us.

With regard to Lepore’s “artificial state” of government by machine, the salient point that can be drawn is how much of a role conscience, values, and judgment play in voting whether for a candidate or a policy. It seems severely doubtful or even impossible that a human activity can be exported to a machine, even if AI-capable, so Lepore’s prediction of an artificial state by machine strikes me as a fantasy, to which I would retort, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need not fear a cyborg assassin sent from the future back to kill any of us any time soon, but we can realistically take stock of how machines in our world differ fundamentally from us and even ask which of our values are consistent and inconsistent with the operation of such tools.

The astute among us might even venture to reflect on how much we have come to act as if we were machines, and furthermore which of our values (e.g., efficiency) are highlighted in such a distortion of human nature. Even just in analyzing a toxic customer “service” employee on the phone who robotically (i.e., rigidly) repeats, “Unfortunately, the time line cannot be changed,” the sheer fakeness can be exposed as machinelike rather than human. That employees could relish acting as machines exposes the human will to power and the value put by some people on being in control and even dominating other people. Rather than being a machine-value, the will to power, as Nietzsche points out in his texts, is human, all too human. What we take to be machine-automatic in terms of values may really be reflections of our worst. I suspect that Lepore was projecting this outward as if onto a white screen in portraying an utterly unrealistic and extreme future of government by machines. A scholar should be able to cut through even one's own projections to grabble with that which from which they come. The science-fiction genre itself can be understood as a projection of the complexity of human nature. 

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1. Mike Cummings, “From ‘The Terminator’ to Tech Titans: Historian Jill Lepore Examines the ‘Artificial State’,” Yale News, February 9, 2026.
2. Ibid.

Conscience

Volodymyr Denyssenko’s film, Conscience (1968), is set in a small Ukrainian village under Nazi occupation during World War II. Vasyl, a Ukrainian man, kills a German soldier, and the chief German stationed there gives the villagers an ultimatum: Turn in the culprit or the entire village will be liquidated; all of the villagers will be executed. The film is all about this ethical dilemma. According to Jeremy Bentham’s ethic of utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number should prevail; any villager would be ethically justified in bringing Vasyl to the Germans to be executed so that the villagers can be spared. The ongoing pleasure of 100 people outweighs the ongoing pleasure of one person. But the film doesn’t follow this logic, and can thus be looked at as a critique of Bentham’s ethical theory. This is not to say that deontology, operating as an ethical constraint on utilitarianism, is entirely without risk. If I have just lost you, my dear liebe reader, consider this: Going beyond ethical constraints on an otherwise ethical theory, what if, as in the film, a political (or religious) cause is allowed to upend ethical considerations altogether, or at least to eclipse them?  I contend that the villagers do this in the film, for they sacrifice themselves as a matter of conscience to protect a murderer because they value his political cause, which is resistance to the Nazi occupation. At what cost? If in relegating the ethical level our species opens the floodgates to committing atrocities by good intentions, what might people like the Nazi occupiers in the film do without a conscience and external ethical constraints?

In the film, the villagers maintain their silence, but it is clear that they do not view Vasyl as a culprit, and thus as a murderer whom should be turned in. As a partisan fighting the Nazis, the violence that he commits is justified because the totalitarian control by the Nazi chief is so oppressive in the daily lives of the villagers. In a similar film, The Bride and the Curfew (1978), which is an Albanian film about a partisan woman whom the Nazis attempt to find because she has killed an Albanian collaborator and drawn chalk figures of resistance on buildings, the villagers do not view the protagonist as a murderer, for she has dedicated her life to a higher cause. At one point, she says that her life no longer belongs to her, for it serves the ideal of freedom, as in freeing Albania from the Nazi occupation. Several Albanians help her to escape, which she does. Unsatisfied with the original ending of the woman in a horse carriage being chased by a Nazi in a car, an Albanian Communist Party official had the ending changed so the Albanians in the carriage gun down the Nazis in the car, mob-style. It is not enough that the woman is being chased because she committed a murder; we the audience must see her as victorious. Beyond the need for closure, the Albanian official at least needed to see the immediate victory of the political cause.

In Conscience, Vasyl is not so lucky, though the villagers do more than the Albanian villagers do in The Bride and the Curfew for the Ukrainian villagers know that their own lives are on the line. Although there’s no reason to suppose that they have studied the 18^th century Bentham or his theory, the notion of the benefit of the villagers as a whole surviving outweighs that of one of them is clear to them. At one point, a woman tells Vasyl that a hundred souls will be lost because of his refusal to turn himself in, but she will not turn him in even though she is saying that a hundred lives are worth more than one. She, and the rest of the villagers, support the partisan cause against the Germans.

Finally, Vasyl does turn himself in, but the Nazi commander thinks Vasyl is lying and repeatedly slaps him. The commander has the villagers rounded up and shot and then he himself shoots Vasyl and the compliant Ukrainian woman who has been acting as his translator. So Vasyl can be read as finally concurring with Bentham’s ethical theory in being willing to sacrifice his life to save those of so many more. Is it the case, however, that Bentham’s calculus should have the final say when heroism is entered into the equation? The villagers are willing to keep silent. They go to their mass grave without having turned in the partisan murderer, but like Abraham in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, where a divine decree to sacrifice Isaac trumps the immorality of murder, the villagers put the partisan (i.e., resistance) cause above Vasyl being a murderer and thus a criminal to be legitimately turned in. The villagers feel an ethical duty to protect him even if doing so costs them their own lives.

In terms of philosophy, the villagers are deontologists because they recognize a constraint on Bentham’s “greatest pleasure for the greatest number” ethic. In terms of Kierkegaard, the villagers recognize a value about the ethic against murder. Whereas for Abraham, God trumps the realm of morality, the villagers recognize a political cause as suspending the ethical realm such that it is ethical to let a murderer get away with his crime, and, moreover, to violate Bentham’s ethical theory of utilitarianism. A political cause and a religious cause can each, if valued sufficiently, relativize or even vacate the ethical level. Such a cause can be valued so much that a man in one story is willing to sacrifice (murder) his son and an entire village in another story is willing to be sacrificed. Sacrifice, after all, is a noble virtue, but it should not be lost on us mere mortals that there are dangers to allowing the ethical dimension to be eclipsed.

If we are angels, then we must surely be killer angels even with good intentions. Doesn’t relativizing or even violating ethical strictures open the spigot to all kinds of ways to justify unethical conduct? Can our species afford even those lofty causes that we can value so much that the ethical domain takes a back seat or is lost altogether? One need only consider how sociopathic the Nazi commander is, utterly without a conscience in Conscience as he himself shoots his translator in the back of her head. Is not the hegemony of ethics, including Bentham’s insistence that maintaining or providing for the pleasure of the greatest number of people, something we should maintain, given our species’ horrific aggressive instinct? Our biological nature, hardly refined through Darwin’s natural selection, ought not be forgotten as we reach for the sky toward our great religious and political ideals.

The Nazi commander takes advantage of the villagers’ suspension of the ethical for a political cause by committing genocide rather than honoring such a people for acting on principle even at great personal sacrifice, and therefore ironically shows how dangerous it is not only for the villagers, but also then for people like the Nazis to suspend the ethical. The villagers are sufficiently civilized that they can afford to suspend the ethical for a cause without thereby opening the floodgates to all sorts of unethical behavior by them, but the atrocious and heinous conduct of the Nazis that results demonstrates just how much our species needs the ethical constraint. In other words, even though the villagers can bypass the ethical for a higher cause without then acting unethically in general because the ethical dimension no longer matters (even though they are acting unethically in letting the murderer escape), the Nazis’ resulting unethical conduct (without any superlative political cause) demonstrates the need our species has of ethical constraints that cannot be suspended or upended. Notice that having a good religious or political cause does not really make the ethical go away. Abraham is still guilty of attempted murder and the villagers refuse to turn in a man who has murdered another person. Even so, I submit that this is not enough, given our species’ aggressive nature. In the end, the entire village, except for one boy, is wiped out by men of entirely no conscience whatsoever.