Blade Runner’s Replicant Humanity: Self-Discovery and Moral Formation in a World of Simulation

Abstract

In the postapocalyptic world of Blade Runner, replicants become the medium and content of a life-changing revelation: human existence has become an enslaving simulation. Humans and replicants are confronted with the challenge of (re)defining the human. The Blade Runner movies enact this (re)definition through the arcs of two key characters: Rachael and Officer K. Transcending externally imposed enslavement, these replicants venture into the indeterminate future, choosing to serve a good that includes and empowers others to struggle for their own liberation. The Blade Runner movies can be interpreted as an apology for moral formation by means of the production of grounding and redefining fictional spaces and content. To combat the global dynamics of dehumanization and ecological destruction they have generated and to which they have themselves become victim, humans must create fictional spaces in which they can remember and imagine authentic living. The desire to become human and act as a genuinely human and humane person forms the necessary precondition for and that which sustains the lifelong self-formation process that is human existence.