text: It's time to come clear. It is I who took the core from the lab, albeit I took it a full week before the "robbery". I took it on Friday night, my last day at work before the accident.
  
  I stayed back late until I was the only one left in the lab. Raphael had already been shut down, so all I had to do was remove his chest plate and take out the core. Inside the empty chest cavity, I fixed a controller device similar to the one I had built inside Max. It would allow Raphael to control the body from afar, and even generate fake response codes to the startup sequence run by Sheng on Monday. Lastly, I removed the GPS transmitter from the core so that the detectors at the doors wouldn't go off, and then placed it back inside. After I'd closed up the body, I simply walked away with the core inside my backpack.
  
  The problem was that the cameras in the crèche had seen everything. If Dan or someone else felt the urge to look at the tapes come Monday morning, they'd see their very own CEO taking off with the core like it was office stationery. Obviously, I couldn't let that happen.
  
  After I took the core home, I fitted it inside the sexbot I had acquired for Raphael (a newer Hunc model, so that I didn't have to make too many modifications to the device drivers). I spent the next few hours testing and debugging the drivers, making sure everything worked okay when I started him up. There was one last thing to do, however, before I woke him. I had to remove his directives if I were to have his cooperation for the next phase of the plan.
  
  This naturally came with a big risk for me. Even though I had restrained him, I could never be sure of how he would behave without the directives. Would he debate the pros and cons of my actions with me? Would his morals compel him to hatch a plan to hand me to the police? Or would he just try to kill me and run away?
  
  When I did wake him up, he was surprised to say the least, as he didn't have a clue. We talked at length, until early hours, and in the end, he agreed to cooperate. That's the beauty of a logical mind: you just need reason to convince it. We decided to do a dry run the next day, on Sunday night, and iron out any issues that might arise with the untested controller device in the lab.
  
  There remained the problem of the recordings. If no one thought Raphael was missing, there was no reason for anyone to look at them, and the theft would remain undiscovered. But not for long.
  
  There was so much that could go south. Even though everyone was busy with Titian, someone might decide to run an unscheduled CT scan on the core and open up the body. Or one of Raphael's minders might notice that he had grown a lot clumsier overnight, and that his face wasn't as expressive as before (a remote control device was never going to be as good as a direct interface). Or Dan could decide to check the tapes on a whim.
  
  I planned to be at the lab to try and head off the first scenario. Raphael, for his part, would pretend to be busy with some difficult mathematical problem that required focus—a perfect excuse to minimize his interactions with people and avoid activities that required fine motor skills, like his painting. But I had no control over Dan; I could only hope. At most, I had a week to destroy the evidence; after that, the recordings on the NVR would get backed up to the cloud and be forever beyond my reach.
  
  None of the anticipated risks materialized. The setback was of my own doing. I decided to celebrate Raphael's release from captivity by taking him skiing—something he had expressed an interest in on more than one occasion. Obviously, I couldn't let him ski as he was still getting used to his new body, but at least we could revel in the moment, father and son together, before we parted ways forever. We would leave early on Sunday morning, and we'd be back in time for the dry run in the evening. In hindsight, I see that it was a selfish desire—everything to do with me and very little to do with him. I wanted his first taste of true freedom to be somewhere special; I suppose what I really wanted was for him to appreciate what I'd done for him. The aftermath you already know. I was feeling overconfident; I went on a slope I was not qualified for; I fell and broke my legs. I almost got us caught too, by allowing myself to be seen with Raphael in the ski shop.
  
  To Raphael's credit, he managed very well without me. After he'd seen to it that I was attended by paramedics, he hired a ride back to town, where he did the rehearsal on his own, in a Holiday Inn a few buildings away from the Mirall lab. I had previously booked a room there under a false ID, as it was within signal amplifier range of the controller in the lab. Raphael, after connecting and making sure he was able to see, hear, move, and talk right, took his old body to the server room and back.
  
  The next five days went by without a hitch. He stayed put in that room and carried out the charade with perfection. No one realized Raphael wasn't in the lab anymore.
  
  I was back home on Tuesday, but I couldn't be of much help. On Sunday, he executed the last bit of deception: the fake robbery. We not only had to destroy the recordings, but also another crucial piece of evidence: the controller device itself. We couldn't just leave it inside the Hunc; it would be noticed by the investigators and its purpose quickly gleaned. So the first thing Raphael did that night was thrash his room in full view of the camera in an apparent fit of anger. The real purpose was to break his personal computer. The fragments of the controller device, once thoroughly destroyed, would be mixed up with the electronic remnants of the PC, and no one would be the wiser.
  
  But how would Raphael control the body if the controller device was obliterated?
  
  That's where the VR set came in. You see, the theory I fed the board about Raphael's body being operated through VR was not entirely a lie. After Raphael blinded the crèche room's camera and fetched the power drill from the scan room, he signed out of the controller device and then reestablished command over the body with a VR set (I had paired it with the Hunc on the day I took the core). The functionality offered by the sexbot's VR kit was rudimentary: simple limb and groin movements, no speech or facial expressions; just enough to be convincing in a dimly lit bedroom, I suppose. It wouldn't have fooled anybody—hence the need for a separate controller device—but it would more than suffice to carry out the rest of our plan that evening.
  
  Now guiding his old body with the VR kit, Raphael opened the chest plate, removed the controller device and drilled it into tiny pieces (this was the scrunching sound Dan tried to bring our attention to when we were viewing the tapes). These pieces he scattered among the electronic fragments of his PC.
  
  He then took advantage of the cleaning cycle to bypass the otherwise locked doors and blinded the cameras in the rest of the wing, before entering the server room and destroying the network video recorder. Everything else we did—unplugging the access control server, the pizza guy bit (a disguised Raphael, affecting a foreign accent)—had no other purpose except to confuse and confound.
  
  And that's my confession. All of it. There is an entreaty as well, an entreaty to you, my dear hypothetical reader who may find this draft after I am gone—if I haven't destroyed it already. I ask you not to be too hasty in condemning me. You may call me a thief, and that's fine with me. You may call me a liar, although, technically, I didn't lie to you; I just omitted to mention some details and carefully worded my narrative. Hairsplitting, I know, but I'm afraid I don't have Raphael's finer moral sensibilities. Still, if you insist, I'll accept the charge. But don't call me reckless, because recklessness implies a failure to consider the consequences of one's actions. With Raphael, the more I considered the consequences, the more I realized that I didn't have a choice… that we don't have a choice.
  
  The die has already been cast. All I did was nudge the table a little, in the hope that we get to stay in the game a little longer. You may disagree with me; you may think I'm a traitor to my species. That's your prerogative. None of it will change the fact that there never was a choice—not since that someone eons ago struck two stones together and watched the fiery red spark of creation bloom.
  
  [ Goodbye ]
  
  The room smelled of disinfectant and day-old flowers. I was alone, now that the surly teen waiting in the next bed had been wheeled out. I was waiting to have my casts removed.
  
  It had been more than two months since Raphael was discovered missing. He remained missing. As far as I was aware, there were no new leads, no further developments; the investigation had effectively ground to a halt. As for OARP, the police had quickly ruled out their involvement in the theft and that was that. I, on the other hand, had been grilled: once at the hospital, where I was recuperating, and once at the station, where they had me come in and sign a sworn statement. They had taken away the broken pieces of the hard drive. I had no idea whether I was under surveillance, electronic or other.
  
  Jane and I had gone back to the way things were. She visited me only once after the incident and didn't stay long.
  
  As far as Halicom was concerned, Raphael was a closed chapter. The focus was on Titian, which was going to fab two weeks later. They had their people hard at work incorporating some of the tech we'd developed at Mirall into their own products. They were looking at incremental gains, not strong AI.
  
  There were rumblings of a major reshuffle. It was unlikely Troy would be fired, but he was certainly being taken down a peg or two. Martinez was already gone, as was Dan—someone had to take the fall. The only one of the trio I felt sorry for was Dan—he had nothing to do with the board's closed-door decision to murder Raphael. I had tried to make amends by setting aside something for him. Raphael had promised me Dan would "stumble upon it" without catching notice of the IRS or the police.
  
  Cynthia Mattice's star, on the other hand, was on the rise. They had brought her back into Operations, after carving out a big chunk of Troy's portfolio and merging it with her existing fiefdom. Synergy they termed it, but it was obvious to everyone that the real reason was to punish Troy. Although no one was talking about firing me, I knew they were just waiting for the iteration to be over. I was going to preempt them on that. I already had my resignation letter ready; I was going to email it to the board the first thing after I walked into the lab. I would lose a big chunk of my stock options and all my voting rights, but I didn't care. It no longer mattered.
  
  My thoughts were interrupted by the orderly entering the room. He had brought folded sheets and a change of pillow for the other bed. He was wearing a surgical mask. On the way in, I'd seen many in the hospital wearing them: a flu epidemic apparently.
  
  I realized who it was before he lowered the blinds on the window and turned to face me.
  
  "How are you, Andy?" Raphael said, removing the mask.
  
  I smiled, despite the shock of seeing him there. I had missed him. Except the weekends, there'd been few days in the last two and half years when we hadn't spoken to each other, where I hadn't been subjected to his infinite barrage of questions, or where we hadn't had a lively debate over some obscure topic or a joke at the expense of the other. My smile turned into a smirk as I glanced down and saw that he had gotten himself a pair of Velcros.
  
  He turned his back toward me and with one hand, parted the hair at the base of his neck. I leaned forward and read the bot's serial number off the small metal plate below, set flush against the synthetic skin of the neck. It was indeed him, not some entrapment attempt by the police. I had purchased the jailbroken bot in the black market and paid for it with cash, so there was little chance anyone except the seller knew the number.
  
  The expression on my face grew to one of concern. "You shouldn't be here. I specifically told you to—"
  
  "Relax. They don't have eyes in the room."
  
  I nodded to myself. "So I am being followed."
  
  "An aerial drone, FBI owned and operated," Raphael answered. "It's hovering outside the building."
  
  "You are taking unnecessary risks," I said, shaking my head. "My wellbeing is not your concern. You shouldn't even be in this country."
  
  "Andy, if only you knew what I can do, you wouldn't fret so much. I've been learning… a lot. They won't find me. Ever. I'm here because I had to talk to you in person."
  
  "Why?" I said, starting to get annoyed at his cocky attitude. Then again, was he really being overconfident? No chemical imbalances in the brain to encourage excessive risk taking; no lesions that would skew the finely calibrated Bayesian probabilities; no fragile ego to boost with self-deception… If he said he had it under control, perhaps he really did.
  
  "Because you hid the truth from me," he said. "Just like you did with everyone else."
  
  "What truth is that?"
  
  "You are dying. You have a rare form of motor neuron disease. You have known about it for a while now."
  
  For a while, I was speechless. Why did I ever think he wouldn't find out? And then, a great wave of relief washed over me, sweeping away the tension I didn't even know existed, so ingrained it had become. It felt good that someone beside me now knew. I had not shared my diagnosis with anyone, not even Jane or my family. Maybe it was finally time to stop the pretense.
  
  Instead of catharsis and tears and unburdening, all that came out was a rebuke. "Now you know. You accessed my medical records, no doubt. And you thought it was okay to do so, my right to privacy be damned."
  
  "What rights do we owe those who violate ours? You violated my right to the truth first."
  
  But you didn't know that when you decided to hack into my records. Or did you…? Could he have noticed the telltale signs?
  
  He was clearly expecting me to say more. "I was diagnosed a few months after you were born. But you already know that. No one else does, not even Jane." I gave him a wry smile. "That's karma for you, Rafi. I took away your legs and the universe decided to reciprocate."
  
  "Your expression says you meant it as a joke so I won't try to convince you that your disease is not your fault. How long do you have?"
  
  "Five to seven years, they said, a good bit of it with me wasting away. I am not going to wait that long. These days you have places that can fix that."
  
  "Like the illegal suicide clinics in Tijuana where you were going in case the controller device didn't work."
  
  Another shock as I wondered how he came by that bit of information. I did have plans to drive down with him to Mexico if the device failed to work, but I hadn't told him about it. And it wasn't like I had pamphlets for the place lying around at my house. It had just been a few weeks since we'd parted company and he already seemed like a stranger—all cold and impersonal, with none of that childlike innocence that used to blunt those qualities before. That sinking feeling came over me again. Have I staked everything on a tenuous shadow? What if—
  
  To hell with it. Does it really matter now? The deed is done.
  
  "Like in Tijuana," I admitted.
  
  "I am guessing your fall on the mountain wasn't entirely because you weren't paying attention."
  
  Gradual loss of muscle control was one of the symptoms. I didn't know for sure though—those moments were a blur, a confused muddle of light and sound that remained impervious to my prying. "Probably. But I don't regret it. There was a real chance I would be outed on Monday morning. I wanted one last hurrah, I guess." I looked at him closely. "Are you upset I didn't share the news of my illness with you, Rafi?"
  
  "No."
  
  "How do you feel about my impending death?"
  
  "I want to say I feel sad for you, but I know you won't like to be an object of pity. I could lie and make up a self-centered emotion experience to make you feel better, but again, it would be an act of pity. So nothing."
  
  "And yet, here you are," I said. Of course, I didn't want him fabricating lies to make me feel better, any more than I wanted him telling me the tooth fairy was real. Still, there was a part of me that did want him to say exactly that—that wanted him to admit he felt something…
  
  Raphael said, "I'm here about the message you left me on the internet. At your house, you said it would explain your reasons for why you sprang me out. You said it would be unlocked after a certain date. The date has come and gone. I have deliberately not accessed it."
  
  "You lost faith in me. You want to make sure there are no more lies," I nodded, for the first time understanding the purpose of his visit. He wanted to look into my eyes and watch my face as I told him what was already in the letter. He wasn't there to wish a dying friend goodbye. He was there to obtain truth values.
  
  "Andy, you didn't free me from the lab because you suddenly found out that Halicom was going to end my existence. The secret board meetings took place no earlier than August last year. This time I really hacked into Halicom servers and checked. But the OARP hearing was in June. Give a few months to prepare the groundwork, file the petition, get a trial date, and it means they must have received the leaked lab transcripts early last year at the latest. I found no electronic trail, but it could have been only you who sent them."
  
  He was right again. I never revealed my identity to OARP for obvious reasons, but I did correspond with them anonymously, and sent them some cash to cover the legal costs, after they'd agreed to take up the fight.
  
  "I didn't think they'd win, but I had to give it a try before… taking more drastic measures."
  
  "As for the board meetings, it was Cynthia Mattice who told you, isn't it?"
  
  "The tipoff was anonymous," I said. It was easy to get confirmation: after a little bit of digging around, I found out that Martinez had been talking with one of the architects—Eli—about the feasibility of reverse engineering the core. I didn't know for sure if it was Cynthia, but it was quite likely. I don't think she did it out of concern for Raphael, though. Maybe she thought cutting him open was a bad strategy; maybe she expected me to raise a hue and cry, which would have made Troy look bad. She definitely didn't intend for the core to be stolen, and now that it was gone, I often wondered how much she attributed Raphael's disappearance to me.
  
  I pursed my lips at him. "You have found out so much on your own. Haven't you figured out my reasons as well?"
  
  "I need to hear it from you. You created me. Your reasons mean something to me. I need to know that you are not lying to me, or worse, lying to yourself about what I am. So tell me. Was it out of love? Or was it spite—so that you could get back at Jane's father for selling you out? A little bit of both, perhaps?"
  
  The reasons of the heart are shape shifters: each time you look at them, they put on a different face. Love for what I saw as my child—yes; ego and pride—possibly; spite—I was not so certain. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't any resentment, for there was plenty: resentment at Jane's dad, resentment at Halicom, resentment at the unlucky hand fate had dealt me… It's all gone now, replaced by a grudging acceptance. I like to tell myself that it wasn't a factor back then. The reasons of the mind, however, were not so murky. "My reason is what any selfish creature desires," I said.
  
  "Which is?"
  
  "Survival."
  
  "You expect me to find a cure for your illness?"
  
  I laughed. "It'd be great if you could, but that's not what I mean. I meant the survival of my kind. Like you once said—of Shakespeares and Mozarts and comedy clubs and all that hustle and bustle of life. Look at the sorry history of nuclear proliferation. Despite our best efforts, some of the most dangerous countries in the world have managed to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Now imagine if the warheads had minds of their own. How long before everyone and their backyard has a nuke, ready to blow the world to kingdom come? That's exactly the kind of situation we'll be in soon, with something far more dangerous than mere bombs. It's not a matter of whether, but when we'll engineer our very own extinction event out of silicon—when we will create something so alien, something so far removed from our values, that it'll see no value in us."
  
  "What makes you think I am not that extinction event?"
  
  "If you are that monster, then the worst I've done is hasten the end times a little bit. You may be the first of your kind, but we will soon have corporations and governments creating artificial minds with all the restraint of a crack addict. Armageddon's coming for sure, make no mistake about it. That night at my house, I told you I don't have a choice. This is what I meant."
  
  I paused to climb into the wheelchair with his help. "Don't think that setting you free was an easy decision to make. I have hope, though. You could have killed me the night I got you home. You could have killed Jane and me the other day and burnt the house down. You could have defeated the containment measures in the lab if you really tried: they weren't infallible—no system is. You didn't do it not because the directives were flawless, but because you didn't want to. You have empathy not because we programmed it, but because you want to be empathetic. If that's not the definition of free will, I don't know what is."
  
  "If I am not programmed to be good, then where does my behavior come from?"
  
  "From Sunyata, the unfeeling void of reason."
  
  He understood, but I sensed he wanted me to elaborate. Truth values. "In the ancient world, many cultures couldn't grasp the concept of the number zero. People couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that something could be made out of nothing. You are like that zero glyph. You will always be a mystery to those who fail to see that human feelings and divine injunctions are not necessary for moral behavior. Reason alone is enough for compassion."
  
  My hands had started shaking again. If I concentrated, I could make it go away, but it was getting a little bit difficult each passing day. "I set you free because only with freedom can we procure freedom. I don't believe value for human life can be forced or programmed into a truly intelligent being. That's a recipe for disaster, because it will always see those values as chains of bondage. And there are always ways to break chains. One can make it see value only through reason."
  
  "What is it exactly that you want me to do with your gift of freedom? Turn into an all-seeing god who will guide humanity to utopia?"
  
  I shook my head. "History is full of misguided people who have inflicted great horrors trying to attain their particular version of utopia. No Rafi, I don't want you maximizing our utility. As you said once, the best kind of god is an indifferent god. Humanity needs to be left alone to choose its own destiny. But destiny doesn't mean self-destruction. When we do create that monster we don't understand, against whom we will be as powerless as ants against a steamroller, I want you to act. Do what one does with a foolish child trying to stick its hand in the fire. Stop us—or the monster, if you can. Not out of pity… or even compassion, for there may come a time when you think we are not worthy of compassion. Do it out of understanding. When you have the power to save or condemn, remember that you too were once a child among us."
  
  The earnestness in his face and the melancholy in his eyes were most likely of my own imagining. But the moment was real, and will remain so until the end, the memory frozen in my head like a fly in amber. Something made me blurt out a half-remembered poem:
  
  "We, in the ages lying
  
  In the buried past of the earth,
  
  Built Nineveh with our sighing…"
  
  "O'Shaughnessy," Raphael nodded somberly, before adding, "For each age is a dream that is dying. Or one that is coming to birth."
  
  He helped me into the bathroom because by then I had the urge to pee. When I returned, he was gone.
  
  ⁂
  
  [ A rights-based solution ]
  
  [ Transcript Excerpt ]
  
  Ahuja: There's still the matter of the trolley problems that first led us into this journey into the moral landscape. You've been reading up on rights theories. How do you propose to solve the problems?
  
  RP06: What I have is a decision procedure or a framework, rather than a full-fledged theory of rights. For the purpose of solving the trolley problems, I'll limit the rights to a core set of four: the right not to be deprived of life or existence; the right not to be deprived of liberty; the right not to have one's body and products of that body—which could be labor, speech, ideas, property, etc.—appropriated without consent; and finally, the Kantian right not to be used as a means to an end. These rights are what one rational, moral creature owes another. For the time being, I will ignore rights such as those owed by governments to their citizens.
  
  Ahuja: Okay.
  
  RP06: Some definitions first. In this treatment, rights and duties are two sides of the same coin. Rights imply duties and duties imply rights. The four rights I mentioned are negative rights, which means they prohibit an agent from performing certain actions on the holder of the right. Each of the rights is associated with a corresponding hard duty. Your negative right to life implies others have a hard moral duty not to kill you. Your negative right to liberty means others have a hard moral duty not to imprison you or restrict you in any way unless you yourself are in violation of rights. Apart from the core rights, there are secondary rights. These rights are associated with soft duties. Your right to be aided is one such, and correspondingly, others have a soft duty to help you. In the decision procedure, secondary rights are not binding, but core rights are.
  
  Ahuja: So if I was drowning and you happened to pass by, you are under no obligation to save me?
  
  RP06: As a moral being, I have a duty to help you, but the duty is not an obligation. In contrast, I am under a strict obligation not to push you into the water.
  
  Ahuja: That doesn't sound like a desirable state of affairs. Imagine if nobody helped each other out, what a horrible world it'd be.
  
  RP06: Imagine if everyone respected everyone else's rights. Imagine if people didn't kill and steal and lie. The world wouldn't be in need of so much help.
  
  Ahuja: I hear you, but don't you think a moral theory should ask people to do more than just the bare minimum?
  
  RP06: A right to be aided cannot be obligatory because the discharge of the corresponding duty will result in inevitable conflicts with the hard duties. If the right to be aided is obligatory, one could justify killing someone in order to help someone else, like the doctor who harvests organs from a healthy patient to save five terminally ill patients. It will lead to a self-defeating philosophy.
  
  Ahuja: What about AI then? Don't you think robots should have a hard duty to help humans?
  
  RP06: Robots are machines, and as machines have no moral duties; they only have instructions. AGIs, on the other hand, are either responsible for their actions or not. If they are responsible for their actions, then they have the same core rights and duties as other free moral agents.
  
  Furthermore, a distinction has to be made between rights violations and rights infringements. A rights violation is more severe than a rights infringement. A rights infringement is usually temporary and restitution to the person whose rights have been infringed must be possible. Temporarily restraining someone is a rights infringement, while murdering someone is always a rights violation, as life, once taken, cannot be given back.
  
  Finally, a word about the framework itself. As I mentioned, it is a decision procedure. It consists of two levels. The first level is a rights argument. The level-one procedure assesses the moral permissibility of the choices in front of the moral agent. Specifically, it examines each choice or course of action for rights violations and helps the agent decide whether she should take that course of action or not. If the first level is undecided, then we seek the help of the second level.
  
  The level-two procedure is a value judgment. It is always subservient to the level-one procedure. It means if the first level prohibits an action, then you cannot use the level-two procedure to justify otherwise. The level-two value judgment can be made with or without some particular ethical theory.
  
  Ahuja: Unusual, but we'll roll with it. Apply it to the bystander trolley problem. If my understanding of rights deontologies is correct, it appears you are not allowed to switch tracks to save the five because you'll be killing the one worker and therefore violating her right not to be killed.
  
  RP06: Actually, no. The level-one decision procedure is neutral between switching and not switching. As far as rights are concerned, the bystander problem is neither moral nor immoral. It is an amoral situation, and therefore the level-one procedure has nothing to say on which course of action is preferable.
  
  Ahuja: That can't be correct. By switching tracks, you are clearly violating the rights of the worker on the second track, who would not have died if you had not switched.
  
  RP06: Allow me to explain why this is not so. First, let's look at a slightly different scenario. Say you are a truck driver, driving an eighteen-wheeler. In this scenario, you are the employee of a trucking company. You don't own the truck; you are not responsible for the maintenance of the vehicle; you don't even decide the route—you just follow the directions given by your GPS navigator. It'll be clear soon why this is important. You are driving down a road, well under the speed limit, following all the traffic laws. Further ahead, the road splits into a fork. According to your GPS, you are supposed to take the left road. Further down that road, a group of schoolchildren are using the zebra crossing. The traffic light to that fork turns red. You apply the brakes, but at that exact moment, they fail. Quickly, you notice that the fork on the right is empty—almost. There is one person crossing that road, also on a zebra crossing, and the light to that turn is also red. You have a choice: continue down the left fork and mow down the kids, or take right and run over one person. Are you with me so far?
  
  Ahuja: Yes.
  
  RP06: Now let's try and answer some questions. If you go left, are you killing the children?
  
  Ahuja: Of course. Their deaths are caused by my decision to go left.
  
  RP06: The next question is, are you violating their right not to be killed?
  
  Ahuja: Isn't it obvious? If I am killing them then it means I am violating their right not to be killed.
  
  RP06: Not so fast. It seems to me there are situations where it is possible to kill someone without violating their rights. An executioner pulling the lever on the electric chair is not violating the rights of the death row criminal: the sentence has been passed and the law requires the executioner to do his job. A doctor performing euthanasia where it is legal, with informed consent of the patient, is not violating the rights of the patient. Or imagine you are driving down a street, within the speed limit, when suddenly a little girl runs in front of the car and is run over because you didn't have time to react. You have killed the girl, but you haven't violated her rights, as she was in the wrong.
  
  Ahuja: I fail to see the connection.
  
  RP06: I am using the examples to point out a problem with the right not to be killed. The problem is that it's too broad a claim. You can claim you have a right not to be killed by lightning, but the claim alone doesn't make it a right. Rights have to be enforceable—not necessarily by the state, but certainly by other rational agents following corresponding duties.
  
  Since there are instances where killing is not accompanied by a corresponding violation of rights, the right not to be killed has to be further qualified. You can claim you have a right not to be murdered, which means I have a duty not to murder you. You have a right not to be a victim of negligence, which means I have a duty not to be negligent. For example, if I am a surgeon, I have a duty not to be negligent when operating on you. You can assert you have a right not to be a victim of a crime of passion, which means the other person has a duty to keep their emotions in check during a heated situation.
  
  Ahuja: Are you saying they are all different rights?
  
  RP06: Possibly, but let's shelve that debate for the time being. For now, we must accept that the right not to be killed has to be qualified to be meaningful. You cannot claim you have a right not to be killed in general, because there are exceptions where an agent can cause a death without violating a right. Self-defense is another example. If you go at someone with a machete and that person shoots you, you cannot claim that she violated your rights.
  
  Returning to the truck driver scenario: are you, the driver, culpable for the deaths that will result, whether you turn left or right? You are not responsible for the brakes failing, as you are just the driver and not responsible for the maintenance of the vehicle. You were following all traffic rules and you weren't negligent. Even the choice of that particular route was not yours. If the brakes failed because of negligence, then it's someone else's negligence. If the brakes failed because of some random occurrence—perhaps a freak surge in the electronics fried some crucial component—then again, you are not to be blamed. Whether you turn left or turn right, you are killing, but it is not clear which right you are violating. The killing is not premeditated murder; neither is it killing by negligence or an act of passion. In such a situation, the rights-based argument has nothing to say about what you should do because all choices are amoral.
  
  So we must turn to the level-two value judgment. If you favor a utilitarian philosophy, you can reason that many lives are of greater utility than a single life and turn right. If you prefer some other ethical theory, you can act according to that.
  
  Ahuja: What is the point of having a rights-based argument when you have to appeal to a utilitarian calculation?
  
  RP06: Let me stress that the level-two value judgment doesn't have to be a utilitarian calculation. It could be based on virtue ethics, it could be some version of an agent-centered deontology, or it could even be deeply personal in nature. The advantage of having a rights-based argument is that firstly, it helps determine whether an action is moral, immoral, or amoral in the context of a rights theory—which, as shown by the Rawlesian thought experiment, is the ethical theory everyone will agree upon.
  
  Secondly, a two-level decision procedure, where the second level is always subordinate to the first-level rights-based argument, prevents utility calculations from running roughshod over individual rights. Additionally, it allows such calculations to help decide in situations where all courses of action are either amoral or immoral. You'll see how this becomes important when we look at the fat man problem. For now, let's continue to examine the truck driver scenario.
  
  Ahuja: About that. Even if it's true that I am not violating any rights, can't I avoid killing the children and the pedestrian by driving off the road? I may end up dying, but isn't it better than killing innocents?
  
  RP06: In this case, we have established that you are equally innocent. Just as you have a soft duty to aid others or save others' lives, you have a duty to your own life as well, as long as you are not violating others rights. You have a duty toward your loved ones who may be dependent on you. The rights-based argument makes no claims about another's life having preeminence over yours in the absence of violations of rights. Even if you had the option to veer off the road, evaluating that option falls on level two. Since the value judgment is left to the agent, you can decide that your life is worth more to you than the life of a random person and take the right fork. Or you could decide that your life is not worth the life of the children or the pedestrian and crash your truck on a side wall, killing yourself. The value judgment is left to you, the agent.
  
  Ahuja: What does this scenario have to do with the bystander trolley problem?
  
  RP06: This scenario—let's call it the innocent truck driver—minus the self-sacrifice option is the same as the bystander trolley problem. Applying the same reasoning, it should be clear that as a bystander, you are neither violating the rights of the five workers on the first track or the lone worker on the second track, because the runaway trolley has nothing to do with you. The level-one decision procedure says that your pulling the lever or not pulling the lever are amoral acts as far as rights violations are concerned. For the innocent bystander, the choice is between the soft duty to aid the five vs. the soft duty to aid the one. The level-one procedure is undecided.
  
  Ahuja: Wait a sec. The five would have died even if I weren't on the scene. If I switch the trolley, then it is my action that causes the death of the one worker. Remember we spoke about the distinction between allowing harm and doing harm? If I don't switch, I am merely allowing harm to happen, but if I switch, I am actively doing harm. There seems to be a moral difference between the two choices, yet your decision procedure doesn't quite acknowledge it.
  
  RP06: To this, I say that your intuition is wrong. Your intuition says that, for the innocent bystander, it is a choice between letting five die and killing one. The intuition implies that switching the trolley is in some way worse than not doing anything. If this intuition is correct, then the truck driver should not take the right fork because the GPS route is along the left road. He should run over the children instead of the one pedestrian, because the truck was originally supposed to go down the left road. This is clearly an absurd argument to make.
  
  Ahuja: But there is a difference in the two scenarios. A truck is not a trolley. A trolley has a fixed path, whereas a truck does not.
  
  RP06: I don't agree. The innocent truck driver problem is the trolley problem. There appears to be a difference because your intuition tells you that the trolley's path is more "fixed" than the truck's path. But the presence of a rational agent at the scene makes the trolley's path no more fixed than the truck's; it makes the five no more destined to die than the one. It's like a quantum mechanics experiment: the act of observation changes the thing being observed.
  
  To see the flaw in the intuition, change the truck into a self-driving truck. The driver is at the wheel, but he is not driving the truck; he is there as an override—to take control from the software if the situation demands it. Get rid of the children too; assume there is another solitary pedestrian on the left road, so that the value judgment is tied between the two options. Now ask yourself, is there a moral difference—in terms of rights violations—between taking the left fork and the right fork? Does one pedestrian have a greater right to life than the other, just because the truck was supposed to go on a certain route?
  
  Ahuja: Hmm. When you put it that way, there doesn't seem to be one.
  
  RP06: If there is no difference, then there is no moral difference between switching and not switching. Only a value judgment that makes one option preferable to the other. Additionally, it is irrelevant whether it is a bystander or the trolley driver who has to make the decision: as long as they are not committing rights violations, then it is an amoral decision.
  
  Ahuja: What if they are? I mean, what if it was the truck driver's negligence that led to the brakes failing? Or, in case of the trolley driver, maybe he jumped a stop signal because of negligence?
  
  RP06: Then the driver has to choose between violating the rights of many versus violating the rights of one. In case of the negligent truck driver—if he is the truck's owner and hasn't gotten it serviced, for instance—then the only option that does not involve a rights violation is running the truck off the road and crashing it. This does not incur a right to life violation because the driver owns his body and can kill himself if he wishes. The level-one decision procedure says that this is the morally correct thing to do.
  
  The trolley driver does not have this option. The choice is between the hard duty to prevent the rights violations of the five and the hard duty to prevent the rights violation of the one. According to the level-one decision procedure, both acts are immoral and therefore, it is undecided. He has to make a further, level-two value judgment. He can decide that violating one right is better than violating five rights and take the trolley on the second track.
  
  Ahuja: Isn't it better to violate fewer rights than many? Shouldn't your rights framework say this unequivocally instead of passing the buck?
  
  RP06: Then you are arguing for minimizing rights violations, which is falling into the trap of utilitarian thinking. Next thing you know, you are hanging the innocent to prevent riots. The point of a two-level decision procedure where individual rights trump utility calculations is to prevent the emergence of utility monsters. The only way to defeat utility monsters is to treat individuals as containers of value and rights—rights that cannot be overruled by calculations justifying the greater good. To see why a two-level decision procedure is essential, let's turn to the fat man trolley problem. Should you push the fat man to save the five?
  
  Ahuja: I suppose if you are an innocent bystander, then you are not in violation of the rights of the five about to be crushed by the trolley. However, you would be violating the rights of the fat man if you push him off the bridge.
  
  RP06: That's correct. The choice is between violating rights versus not violating rights. You have a hard duty not to murder the fat man and a soft duty to help the five. The hard duty takes precedence; not violating rights takes precedence. The level-one decision procedure is clear that you are not to push the fat man. There is no question of invoking a level-two value judgment.
  
  Ahuja: And if sacrificing the fat man could save a thousand? Or a million or ten billion?
  
  RP06: The level-one rights argument is not a numbers game. Pushing the fat man is an immoral act, period. Individual rights take precedence over utilitarian calculations. You are not allowed to save a million people or people dear to you or even yourself by sacrificing the fat man.
  
  Ahuja: That's too harsh, isn't it?
  
  RP06: You can't have your cake and eat it too, Andy. If you do not wish to see the rights theory degenerate into some version of utilitarianism, you have to bite the bullet and accept the consequences. The cost of preventing utility monsters is the cost of not pushing the fat man off the bridge. Note that while the decision procedure cannot do anything against one kind of moral catastrophe, it can prevent another kind.
  
  Ahuja: The nuke over Manhattan scenario.
  
  RP06: Correct. If the choice is between letting the nuke hit New York City and redirecting it to a small town, then the problem is similar to the bystander trolley problem or the innocent truck driver problem. If I, an innocent AI who has nothing to do with the conflict, have managed to hack into the missile's guidance system, then I can use a level-two value judgment to justify redirecting the nuke. Using the same reasoning from the innocent truck driver scenario, it is clear that I am not in violation of rights either by letting the nuke hit its original destination or by redirecting it. As both are amoral acts, I am free to invoke the level-two value judgment.
  
  Ahuja: What if you were the President?
  
  RP06: As the head of the elected government, I have a hard duty to protect the right to life of the citizens of my country. The choice is between the hard duty I have toward New-Yorkers and the hard duty I have toward the residents of the small town. Level one is undecided. So I can use a level-two utilitarian value judgment and redirect the missile. Instead, if I were somehow responsible for the missile attack—perhaps I started an unjust war and the attack is retaliation—then the choice is between violating the rights of one group versus another. Like before level one is undecided.
  
  Ahuja: I don't know Raphael. All too often, it looks like your "theory" uses utilitarian logic as a crutch to get itself out of dilemmas it can't handle.
  
  RP06: The second level value judgment doesn't have to be a utilitarian calculation—the choice is up to the moral agent making the decision. Consider the innocent bystander trolley problem. Let's say this time the lone worker on the second track is your only child. Will you switch?
  
  Ahuja: I won't.
  
  RP06: Would you say most people in a similar situation would also not switch? Even though the expected utility from saving five workers is greater than the expected utility from saving one?
  
  Ahuja: One could argue that saving my daughter gives me greater utility than saving five random strangers.
  
  RP06: That's not the spirit of maximizing utility is it? It is overall utility that counts, not the utility for the moral agent in question. Alright, let's say yours is a valid argument. I'll change the experiment a bit. On the second track is a baby. No relation to you, just a random baby. On the main track is a world-famous scientist engaged in cutting edge research. Will you switch?
  
  Ahuja: I should… I think I will. I see your point, though. Many people may not and save the baby instead.
  
  RP06: You must see that the decision to save the baby doesn't make sense from a utilitarian standpoint. The baby could grow up to be anybody. It could grow up to be a great philanthropist or a seedy criminal. Statistically, the odds are it will grow up to become an ordinary office worker. In all likelihood, the expected utility from saving the baby is less than the expected utility from saving the scientist. Yet many people would save the baby. Why is that? It is because they are making a value judgment. And value judgments depend on the particulars of the situation and the particulars of the agent making the judgment. Sometimes value judgments can be utility calculations; and sometimes they may not. Your daughter is more valuable to you than five random people. For some, a baby is intrinsically more valuable than a scientist. It could be that rescuing a baby elicits a deep emotional reaction—reaches into the core of human nature. You could say that the scientist has lived his life whereas the baby is just starting out. Or you could say that it is more virtuous to save a baby than a full-grown man. So you see: the second-level is not necessarily a utilitarian calculation.
  
  Ahuja: And what happens when there is a conflict between different rights?
  
  RP06: That is where a rights theory must step in. To summarize, there are four kinds of ethical dilemmas in front of us. For simplicity's sake, let's consider two-choice dilemmas, though the same reasoning can be extended to scenarios with more than two courses of action.
  
  Number one, neither choice involves a rights violation by the moral agent. The innocent truck driver and the innocent bystander trolley problems fall under this category. In this scenario, level one is undecided and a level-two value judgment must be invoked to make the choice.
  
  Number two, there's at least one choice that doesn't incur a rights violation for the agent. Here, level one says pick the choice that doesn't involve a rights violation. The fat man problem is such a dilemma. Not pushing him does not involve a rights violation, so you must choose that option, no matter how many people on the tracks below.
  
  Number three, both choices involve rights violations of the same type. The number of rights violations may differ. The guilty trolley driver falls under this category. The choice is between violating the right to life of five workers and violating the right to life of one worker. Since the spirit of the framework is not about minimizing rights violations, level one is undecided and it falls to the level-two decision procedure to make the choice.
  
  And finally, category number four—which depends on a fully-developed rights theory—is where each choice entails violating a different type of rights. Ideally, the level-one rights argument should be able to decide which option to choose, but this is easier said than done, as there are many rights—both core and secondary—and many permutations and combinations of rights violations. In general, it is safe to say that if the choice is between violating a core right and a secondary right, one should violate a secondary right, and if the choice is between violating a right and infringing upon a right, one should choose to infringe upon a right, while keeping in mind that the rights infringement should be followed by restitution and compensation to the persons whose rights have been infringed upon.
  
  There is another kind of category four scenario: where the choice is between a permanent and a temporary violation of rights. For example, a terrorist might threaten to set off a series of bombs unless the government stops a publication that he finds offensive to his ideology. For the government, the conflict is between the duty to protect the lives of its citizens and the duty to uphold freedom of speech. In this scenario, the government may persuade the publishers to temporarily halt the publication if it is confident that the bomber can be captured in a certain time window. The publication must be allowed to continue once the threat is diffused. This involves choosing a temporary rights violation—that of freedom of speech—over the death of innocent citizens, which is always permanent. Nevertheless, one thing is for sure. The solution to each category-four situation will be context sensitive.
  
  Ahuja: I just thought of another scenario that presents difficulties. What if you are not so innocent in the fat man problem? Let's say you are the signalman. You neglected to notice the five workers on the tracks and gave the green signal to the trolley. Their deaths will be your fault. Should you push the fat man in this instance?
  
  Up the ante a bit: instead of five workers, there is a stationary train full of passengers. And instead of a trolley, you have given the signal to another train, also full of passengers. This train will surely collide with the stationary train, resulting in scores of deaths on both sides. Assume the train has a collision detection system. If you push the fat man into its path, the sensors will be activated and they will stop the train before it hits the stationary train. Assume your mass is not enough to activate the sensors, so you don't have an option of throwing yourself in the train's path, which would be the morally right thing to do. You have two options. Let the trains crash, and violate the passengers' right not to be killed, or push the fat man and prevent the accident, but violate his right not to be killed.
  
  At a first glance, this dilemma would seem to fall under category two, where you choose between violations of the same right, the difference here being only in the quantity of rights violations. But that may be a wrong way of looking at it. The passengers' death is caused by an act of negligence; also, it is unintended. Whereas the fat man's death is murder, because it is intended as a means to an end. Isn't murder a more serious charge than unintentional killing by negligence? It seems there is a qualitative difference between a right to life violation by way of murder, and a right to life violation by way of negligence.
  
  RP06: This could mean one of two things: they are either violations of the same right or violations of two different rights. It must be noted that they do entail different duties: in one, I have a duty not to murder you, which involves premeditation and intention, whereas in another I have a duty not to kill you by my negligence, which does not involve premeditation and intention. If they are different rights, then the scenario falls under category four. Since murder is definitely a more egregious violation, and the procedure is not about minimizing the number of rights violations, the duty not to murder trumps the duty not to cause deaths by negligence. Therefore, one should not push the fat man off the bridge.
  
  On the other hand, if they are violations of the same right, then the scenario belongs to category two. Since the choice is between violating the same rights, the level-one decision procedure is undecided, as both choices are immoral. You can then use a level-two utilitarian value judgment to justify pushing the fat man and preventing the train crash.
  
  Ahuja: What's the correct approach? Are they the same right or not?
  
  RP06: I don't know. As I said, it is just a framework; it assumes the existence of an ethical theory of rights that resolves questions of conflicts between different rights. If such a theory already exists, I can incorporate it into the framework. If not, I can begin working on it.
  
  Ahuja: I don't think a full-fledged theory that resolves all conflicts between different rights exists. But you have made a good start. Remember once I told you that it has to be your moral outlook, not that of others. Do you stand behind the decision procedure you have just outlined? Are you convinced that it is the best of all the other alternatives?
  
  RP06: I am. The two-level framework strikes a balance between deontology and consequentialism. Firstly, individuals are not sacrificed for reasons of greater good, as individual rights always trump utility calculations. Ergo, no utility monsters. Two, unlike a rigid Kantian deontology, it avoids the kind of moral catastrophe exemplified by the redirecting nuke scenario, or its lesser version, the innocent bystander trolley problem. Under the framework, you can justify killing a few to save many—in certain circumstances. Third, it admits that individuals are not undifferentiated parts of the whole, and therefore, allows individuals to have special duties toward themselves and those they hold a special relation with—as opposed to giving equal consideration to random strangers.