
If you had the ability to die, but live on at the beach in any time period you desired, would you do it? Would a simulation of this nature even be ethical? What happens to religion and ethics in a world with this? The TV series Black Mirror covers the topic of what the future of technology could hold for the world, and in season 3, episode 4, the topic of the afterlife was the biggest topic discussed.  The episode San Junipero makes three big questions: What happens to the status of an individual in the simulation; What happens to religion when the afterlife becomes moot; and what becomes of personal ethics when you can’t harm anyone.

A big question that can be raised from the text is what the status of an individual in this simulation is. Are they dead or are they alive? Depending on how a person looks at it, it could be either. From a legal standpoint, they are dead, because the legal definition of death is "An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem” (Duhaime). However, this definition relates solely to the physical body, meaning that if there is any kind of non-corporeal manifestation of a person’s being (ie. The individual’s personal consciousness), then the legal definition is not enough to classify them as dead. That being said, if a person were to look at this from a metaphysical standpoint, only their body is dead, while there conscious can live on. This does however, raise the question of where that conscious goes.

The afterlife is a very questioned belief amongst the religious due to it being one of the grounding factors for their belief. However, if a person can no longer “technically” die, what does this due to the ideals of the religious. In a world equivalent to the reality in the text, any religious person must now question the ethicality of the simulation, because per their beliefs, when their body dies their conscious should die with it and go to the afterlife they believe in. But if they do choose to go to San Junipero as a guaranteed heaven of sorts, they would also have to bring into question how much they truly believed in their faith. Typically, this wouldn’t be a huge issue, but many religions would see going to San Junipero as a denouncement of faith, because it is literally stating you aren’t sure enough of what you believe in. These questions of faith pop-up almost every time a new technology is introduced, and even Stephen hawking has stated that “[he] think[s] the brain is like a program in the mind, which is like a computer. So it's theoretically possible to copy the brain on to a computer and so provide a form of life after death” (Stephen Hawking). Therefore, a world like the one seen in the text may be closer than it appears, and questions of faith may be coming quicker than anticipated. That being said, personal faith is not the only thing affected by San Junipero, personal ethics can also very quickly come into question.

In a simulation where you can’t die, and nobody is affected by your actions, how can anything be considered unethical? As seen in the scene where Kelly attempts to kill herself, you can do literally anything with no punishment due to the simulations ability to turn down pain, and “spawn in” whatever item or possession you want to have. Typically, something is seen as unethical if it can directly harm somebody else, but when possessions can just be reset, and you can’t feel pain or even die, you have nothing to ground ethics in. At worst, the most unethical thing you could do is hurt somebody’s feelings, and even that won’t stick for too long. Along with this, the ethicality of the program as a whole can come into question. This is due to the fact that the whole business model for it is encouraging the old or ill to pay for euthanasia in order to enter a fake world for a fresh start. On top of this, it is stated by Kelly that eventually people will end up in the quagmire (an old factory dedicated to satisfying fetishes) because they just want to feel anything at all. This is the most direct example of how the simulation can be considered unethical, because the people paying to enter it are suffering for an eternity, or at least until they delete themselves. This action has its own ethical questions as well, because if your conscious is all that remains of you, and you willingly delete it, many would consider you to have committed suicide. The last question of ethics involving the simulation is who gets to join. Realistically, the ability to upload your conscious to the cloud probably isn’t cheap, and along with this, how sick must somebody be to kill themselves in order to be uploaded? This combination essentially cuts out the poor, and could create an influx of unnecessary euthanasia, which is more than just a little unethical.

San Junipero creates many questions involving technology, faith, and ethics, as well as many other societal questions, all of which ae complex with many angles to look at them from. Along with this, it raises many questions on whether or not it should even be legal due to how it makes its money and what it does to its participants, as well as whether or not an individual should even choose to participate due to their own personal beliefs.
