CHAPTER SEVEN
Conclusion: The Virtue of Moral Character
in which I describe how to live out the virtual lesson of Blade Runner 2049 through living out the virtual reality inspired within the self
This discussion of the virtue of hope allows us to re-examine Green’s comment about K, which raises the question “can you change who you are by the virtue of what you do.” Understanding the “who you are” of character as an interpretation of competing virtual narratives that are embedded within the course of the life allows the sense of are to be flexible, rather than wholly determined. Put otherwise, our past is not a controlling determinant, because “the past” does not exist in an objective way. As Joi indicated, the vocabulary of programming (alphabets, numbers, or memories) have a strong role in opening up certain choices and capabilities, but allow us to dream beyond this point.
Our “are” is an understanding based on a series of interpretations of the virtual. Our characters are informed by overlapping narrative potentialities that circumscribe and limit our character and our point of view, but which do not wholly constrain it. The characters of both Joi and Joe K possess options for their behaviors and responses throughout the movie: each of them is shown, consistently, to choose loving the other in a series of actions that show each as intending more options for the other. These actions, that look to enhancing potential futures for the other that make room for the unknowable, indicate a position open to hope rather than one that attempts to make wishes. Being open to hope is a virtue (effective moral goodness) that is a virtual reality embedded within us.
Our “do” does, as Green indicates, play a vital role in constructing our are. The choices that change us, based on circumstances that challenge us, demand more from us than forms of justified true belief. Opting at the level of intellectual consent, which calling on justified true belief at most compels one to do, leads to an imposition of logic that leads to operating within—or possibly creating—closed systems. This is necessary to protect the justified true belief, and promotes the principles of paranoid thinking that Sedgwick discusses. The detached form of moral worth that becomes available in the absence of actions that change our interoceptive awareness as well as the world around us generally does more harm than good—leading only to the self-righteousness evinced by both Wallace and Luv.
The other form of doing—open to either confirming the status quo or providing an outlet for thorough change—arises from spending time using our bodies to create. This is part of the process that Richard Sennett describes in The Craftsman. In it, Sennett shows how the logic of craft contributes to a form of tacit experience that cannot necessarily be explicitly rendered in terms of justified true belief, but offers a form of embedded, embodied knowledge that develops into—relative to the above argument—a virtual portion of the self.[1] K’s fondness for found objects—the horse, in particular—is a way that the movie shorthands a compatibility with craft and a logic at odds with Luv.
The space of the virtual in Blade Runner 2049 thus invites viewers to consider the contrast between coding and choice. Our coding involves not only our alphabetical dispensations—the genetics that offer a certain set of limited potentials that remain a virtual part of us whether or not we access them (consider someone who has an innate genius relative to playing cello but never sees nor hears the instrument)—but also involves the habits that our behaviors train us to unthinkingly recreate. This coding, however, inevitably runs up against contingencies in the present that cannot be anticipated. We frequently face situations that surpass our preset scripts and thus require spontaneous acts. The result of these situations—a choice—is something that supplements our programming. This virtual element within us is our character. Character is revealed through our choices as the unchosen virtual reality within us. Joi and Joe K. do not overcome their programming so much as show that this programming is less limiting than one might think.
Movement toward aspirational futures involves our character—the moral virtue within us that opts toward the good. It is summoned when the convergence of coding and contingency, which create the conditions for character, allow us to choose a restorative rather than a paranoid perspective. Even if our cultural coding causes a default setting that inclines toward the reduced virtual, rather than its pregnant potentiality, we can find the possibility within us to allow unforeseen surprises that are delightful and lead to a reality better than what we would have summoned for ourselves. It is through the virtual resource of our moral character that we can focus on the potentiality of living well in this world—the pov of natality—rather than an embrace of death.
The choices of character comprise an embodiment of our moral essence. The choice is not simply an intellectual decision, but emerges as we work to displace the deterministic futures that arise from a paranoid conception of the world and to delay its forward momentum until an alternative can emerge. Our actions and our words are ways that we interweave latent narrative threads—the virtue of a hope of a desired not-yet-present—and then choosing actions and behaviors to bring this not-yet world into being.
The movie shows this. Rather than a mere projection of a conscious or unconscious possibility that would hover over reality in an imagined way (the way Joi’s essence floats), behaviors and actions—the virtue of what you do, as Green puts it—provide a way of recreating the self and the world (according to the lived experience of humans that parallels a symbol) according to a desired virtual reality (the way Joi’s character does). Even though her mode of embodiment is holographic, Joi’s character still leaves an imprint on the narrative that causes K. to choose otherwise than he might have. Green’s choice of the term virtue is particularly apt as it is the traditional site where ethicists discuss questions of character and action.
In depicting a choice toward flourishing that exceeds K’s programming (or even a predictable plot), Blade Runner 2049 invests in helping viewers connect a sense of character with the older sense of virtual that relates to moral virtue. Virtue emphasizes the quality of moral goodness or righteousness as the essence of human strength. Aristotle identified moral virtue as the disposition that allows humans to navigate between excess and deficiency as opposed vices. We acquire our virtuous dispositions through habituated practice, not through reason alone. Thus, an embodied discernment is a primary ingredient of virtue because it is capable of adapting to current circumstances, rather than detached intellectual processing which teaches and learns from an abstract point of view. Further, Aristotle held that the point of cultivating this kind of disposition was flourishing. The virtue of happiness—living between extremes in ways indicated by your present circumstance—remains available to everyone, in every moment, as a potential strength. In 2049, K appears to occupy a virtuous middle between obedience (Luv) and rebellion (Freysa).
Aquinas took this notion of moral virtue (which became the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude) and added a classification—theological virtues. These virtues (faith, hope, love), differed from moral virtues because their origin and goal was God. While one could sense the value of the cardinal virtues as part of human experience, theological virtues constitute an expansion of human capabilities to allow for the unknowable and the unseen—God. In a secular framework, these theological virtues can be appropriated as human possibilities that emerge from a sense of openness to a contingent, observable non-present element.
Blade Runner 2049 does not have a “god” that is worshipped. In part this is because its universe, like that of Scott’s Alien franchise, focus on the possibility of having humans—not deities—play the role of the Creator.N However, the absence of a “god” does not eliminate access to the curious, courageous hope in the unknown as it informs both the world (as a virtual, observable non-reality) and the protagonist. The factuality of K’s origin story is less important than K. orienting toward his moral goodness, allowing his virtue (which Joi recognized as a virtual potential within him to exceed his programming, making him more than how he appeared).
The replicant’s tagline—more human than human, the tagline of the replicant—is provocatively ambiguous. When watching the movie, I focus less on the capacity for violence or rebellion and choose to view what it means to excel within one’s limitations. Roy Batty, Deckard, and K. do this in their own ways—Wallace and Tyrell do not. Even if death is the eventual end for each of these characters, the contrast of hero and inventor indicate the virtue of living within one’s means. Precisely because our perspectives and potency are limited, our actions inevitably disclose characters that are irregular, distinctive, incomplete. Something inhuman settles on characters who act with too much regularity or who attempt to surpass finitude. The movie commends the virtue or embracing our glorious “imperfections” (including our ability to die) as one of the high points of our virtual potentiality.
Blade Runner 2049 never attempts to be “true” as history or myth. As is true of most holy scriptures, the narrative provides a model of possible ways human relate to symbols of hope. By engaging in reparative practices, trusting in a strong virtual world, we become empowered to exercise our virtue toward a shared end of flourishing. Sometimes this means delaying our action until a non-paranoid course of action emerges. This choice of slow action embodies the virtue of hope, as it trusts in a better world to emerge subjunctively than the one that has presented itself. Virtue allows us to hope, rather than merely wish, and this permission provides a path toward making ourselves and the world better for all.
[1] Sennett’s book is wide-ranging in its examples, but consistently points to the advantages of remaining informed by virtual knowledge (such as trained bodily skills or earned intuitive discernment) rather than attempting to contrive virtual knowledge about an external object. Consider his example of a blueprint: “The blueprint signaled, moreover, one decisive disconnection between head and hand in design: the idea of a thing made complete in conception before it is constructed” (42). The blueprint—like much of what Sennett discusses—echoes Hayles’ discussion of pattern/randomness vs. presence/absence. Blueprints are able to quickly eliminate the “randomness” or “noise” that is presented in life—but it quite often leads to inadequate “solutions” that fall short of expectations—especially to the extent that those actually involved in building adhere to the pattern and ignore the randomness. The tacit knowledge acquired through the poesis of craft allows individuals to develop a virtual power that sublates each of the binaries Hayles describes to produce a potentiality that, as above, accords with the virtue of hope.
N Note that here, too, 2049 remains obedient to the virtual Electric Sheep narrative at its core, which featured a subplot in which morality and virtue arose through interactions with a game of dubious provenance that nonetheless could lead to miraculous outcomes. It also hews closely to the original Blade Runner, in which the Replicants were connected to both the Prodigal Son and to Milton’s Satan. The orientation to both of these stories, however, were welded to an immanent theological worldview, not one that brokered in transcendence.