Gotcha! The issue isn't what happens to the individual robot, but the impact of the action on the actor and witnesses. To take it to the extreme: We have a per

Gotcha! The issue isn't what happens to the individual robot, but the impact of the action on the actor and witnesses. To take it to the extreme: We have a perfect simulacrum of a dog that we know does not suffer, but will appear to suffer. Kicking that fake dog won't cause any danger to the fake dog, but will feel the same as kicking a real, suffering dog to the kicker and witnesses. Done enough, the kicker and witnesses will grow insensitive to the suffering of the fake dog, which is identical to the suffering of the real dog. To avoid this, we must avoid causing even the appearance of suffering. I believe this imperative scales with the similarity of the appearance of simulated and real suffering. (Punching a rock painted with a crude smiley face is less immoral than beating up a human-like training dummy, which is less immoral than beating up a random NPC in Grand Theft Auto.)