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Does RoboCop get paid and pay taxes?

Turd Ferguson

Turd Ferguson

Rear Admiral
Rear Admiral
Just an off the wall thought I had today. As we know, RoboCop was created by Omni Consumer Products (henceforth referred to as OCP) to combat crime in Old Detroit. He did a good job, taking down Clarence Boddicker, Dick Jones, Cain, RoboCop 2, McDaggett and Otomo.

Now. Here's an interesting question.

Does RoboCop get paid? Does he pay taxes? I ask, because RoboCop became something more than a product. He identifies as Officer Alex Murphy. His fellow police officers call him Murphy. Hell, The Old Man and the CEO of OCP know of him as Murphy. So, if Murphy is indeed an active member of the Detroit Metropolitan Police Department (he would have to have a W-2 on file listing Ellen and Jimmy Murphy as dependents on file), wouldn't that entitle him to some sort of monetary compensation? And, if given monetary compensation for services rendered, would he not also have to turn in a Form 1040 at the end of the year?

Also, could he possibly have an apartment? That'd be sad spending a long hard day at work then crashing in your chair in the Metro West HQ. I imagine Murphy coming home, cracking open a jar of Strained Peas baby food and relaxing, watching TJ Lazer :lol:
 
I think he would have to go to trial first just to prove he is more than just a robot with human memories. Jason
 
Robo starts going by Murphy again, but I don't recall him ever asserting his legal right to be more than OCP property. (Unless that happens in the third movie? I have difficulty remembering a lot of that turd.) He even begrudgingly (and falsely) admits to a lawyer in Robocop 2 that he is a machine, and nothing more.
 
Just going by the first two movies (because why bother with anything else?) Alex Murphy is legally dead and Robocop is the property of OCP. As noted above, they even get him to (falsely) disavow his person-hood, presumably with all the rights, protections, privileges and obligations that go with it.

As for wages and tax, if there's any tax to pay for operating a cyborg enforcement unit it probably goes through OCP via the DPD. Wages are probably in the form of a service contract and is paid to OCP either by the City of Detroit or the Federal Government, depending on the arrangement (probably the former.)
In return OCP and the department just provide him with that paste he eats, a recharge socket as well as reloads and maintenance services. I mean it looked like they had two or three people "looking after" him at the station pretty much 24/7.

Part of the trouble with everything about this is that even by the end of the first movie it's not cleat cut as what degree he really has freewill. He's still restricted by his directives but we still see him make his own choices within those parameters. Plus of course in R2 when they damn near drive him crazy with massively extraneous directives he manages to purge *all* of them, even it seems Directives 1 through 4.
So logically by the end of R2, it seems as though he's no longer under OCP control. Whether they'd try and reassert control or if he gets legally recognised as a person is kind of irrelevant since R3 was a garbage fire that didn't really touch on it. On the other hand, OCP went under and it looked like the larger world was headed for a dystopian collapse of some sort, so it may be rendered moot.

Actually, there's a better idea for a 3rd movie right there: Robocop as the lone lawman in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Very much in line with the western gunslinger tropes the original drew from.
 
In the live-action TV series, RoboCop was OCP property and its various corrupt low-level execs frequently took advantage of that to hobble him or force new programming on him. But the show portrayed the OCP Chairman (called the Chairman instead of the Old Man because they didn't have the rights to most of the character names from the movie) more in line with the sympathetic but clueless CEO of the first film than the corrupt bastard of the second, so it was often the Chairman's benevolence that protected RoboCop from the abuses of his underlings -- although he was never willing to go all the way and grant him total independence, because the Chairman's benevolence only went so far to cancel out his greed and clueless privilege. (There was one episode where, after the Chairman had shut down the plans of the evil OCP junior executives of the week for the umpteenth time, he stormed off saying "I have got to have a talk with Personnel!")

I've always liked the complexity of the TV series' portrayal of RoboCop as a character. He wasn't just Alex Murphy in a robot body like in other portrayals; he was a composite personality formed by the mix of RoboCop's artificial intelligence and the surviving fragments of the deceased Alex Murphy's memories and values. And so he was his own distinct entity, robotic in many ways but with an underlying depth and sadness, since he could never be the man that Murphy's family needed him to be, so he let them believe Murphy was dead. (The show ignored the sequels, so the scene in RoboCop 2 with Murphy's wife never happened in the show's continuity.) I also loved his intelligence, how he solved problems with his wits and detective skills rather than just brute force. The show was run by a former police officer, Stephen Downing, so it had a better understanding of the rules for police use of force than the indulgently violent movie sequels did. (I don't count the first movie, since in that film, RoboCop generally avoided lethal force unless the situation required it, so it was a more nuanced portrayal than the second film where every shot he took was a kill shot.)
 
Vger23 said:
Yet another question perhaps best left to scholars and philosophers.
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The question of RoboCop's actual personhood may be, but the question of his legal personhood, whether he would be treated as property or a paid employee, would be a matter for lawyers, jurists, and legislators to hash out. That's not an abstract philosophical question, but a concrete one of whether the law would recognize him as a person and protect his rights. The people involved in arguing over that question might invoke the philosophical debate, but ultimately there would have to be a concrete legal ruling, yes or no.
 
"He doesn't have a name-he has a program. He's product." You can't tax the product only the producer.
 
Nerys Myk said:
Does OCP pay taxes?
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I'd say it's likely they have a profit margin in the billions which means, no, they do not pay taxes.

Robocop isn't a "person" he's property, He's a manufactured machine with the brain of a dead human in him and a face pasted to a metal skull. There's nothing "alive" about Robocop without going into a Data-like sense which is beyond the morals and rationale of the corporate-ran America that exists today, er, in Robocop.

Murphy was officially declared dead which gave those who "owned" the Detroit police department, OCP, the right to do whatever they wanted with Murphy's remains per a contract he signed when joining the DPD. Part of what they did to him contained suppressing his memory and the ability to control his actions and thoughts.

Robocop isn't "alive" or a "person" he doesn't pay taxes because he does not "work." He's property.
 
Christopher said:
As far as how he's defined and perceived by OCP and the state, I'd agree. But isn't the whole point of the movie that they're wrong?
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Ehhhhhh... Maybe?

We need an episode of the Robocop TV series along the lines of "Measure of a Man" in order to clear that one up.

But, in the end, Robocop's mind is controlled and manipulated by OCP so it's hard to fully consider him sentient/sapient and his own "person" when they can just dump a bunch of lines of code in him to make him behave how they want so that he turns off fire hydrants and lectures kids on water conservation. (Though, RC2 sort of undoes the "development" of Murphy from RC1 and takes him back to the machine state from the "man in a suit" state. Which is either the "point" of the movie, he's a machine not a "person" or shitty writing. Probably some of both.)
 
Trekker4747 said:
Ehhhhhh... Maybe?

We need an episode of the Robocop TV series along the lines of "Measure of a Man" in order to clear that one up.
Click to expand...

You don't need the permission of the legal establishment within a work of fiction to have your own opinion about the sentience of its characters. The show consistently, clearly portrayed RoboCop as a sentient person with a highly intelligent and sensitive mind of his own -- not exactly the same person Alex Murphy had been, but far more than a mindless machine. After all, he was the main character of the show. It's illogical in the extreme to think that the makers of a TV show would not intend their main character to be personified and to have emotions that the audience could identify with.


But, in the end, Robocop's mind is controlled and manipulated by OCP so it's hard to fully consider him sentient/sapient and his own "person" when they can just dump a bunch of lines of code in him to make him behave how they want so that he turns off fire hydrants and lectures kids on water conservation.
Click to expand...

All humans have "programming" we can't control. We get hungry. We need to sleep. We feel emotions whether we want to or not. Many of us, myself included, are prone to bouts of depression or anxiety that we have no power to turn off at will, that affect our behavior in ways we can only resist or override with great difficulty. Others have epileptic seizures or hallucinations or other changes of mental state they can't control. Does that make them non-sentient?

And we can be "programmed" by outside factors as well. We can be brainwashed, or conditioned by politicians and demagogues to blindly parrot their doctrines. We can be traumatized by abuse or violence and have uncontrollable post-traumatic reactions to certain triggers. But losing control over ourselves doesn't make us non-sentient. It just means that sentience is nothing so simplistic as an on-off switch. Human consciousness is not a single thing, it's hundreds of different processes interacting and feeding back on each other. And there are a lot of those processes that we don't have conscious control over.

Yes, Robo had directives that the machine part of him compelled him to obey. But we saw in the movies and the show that there was a thinking person underneath struggling against those directives, searching for ways to finesse them or get around them, feeling frustration when he failed to break the programming. In RC2, he eventually had enough and electrocuted himself to wipe the programming. In the show, he often found creative ways of interpreting the directives or convinced others to change the situation in a way that let him take action within the directives. His actions were constrained by the directives, but his thoughts were clearly more free. The directives could force him to do things he didn't want to do, but he could sometimes find ways to work around them, to assert his will against the programmed compulsion.


Armus said:
Then they pay 21%, the current corporate tax rate in The United States.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/corporate-tax-rate
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You're naive if you think corporations just obligingly pay that instead of finding every possible loophole they can to avoid it. Look at the link -- as many as 60 major corporations paid zero federal taxes for 2018. And RoboCop, of course, is in a dystopian alternate world where corporate corruption and power are even more extreme, and OCP is the worst corporation of them all. So of course they'd cheat on their taxes, or buy off enough Congressmen to get the tax laws changed in their favor.
 
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Turd Ferguson said:
Just an off the wall thought I had today. As we know, RoboCop was created by Omni Consumer Products (henceforth referred to as OCP) to combat crime in Old Detroit. He did a good job, taking down Clarence Boddicker, Dick Jones, Cain, RoboCop 2, McDaggett and Otomo.

Now. Here's an interesting question.

Does RoboCop get paid? Does he pay taxes? I ask, because RoboCop became something more than a product. He identifies as Officer Alex Murphy. His fellow police officers call him Murphy. Hell, The Old Man and the CEO of OCP know of him as Murphy. So, if Murphy is indeed an active member of the Detroit Metropolitan Police Department (he would have to have a W-2 on file listing Ellen and Jimmy Murphy as dependents on file), wouldn't that entitle him to some sort of monetary compensation? And, if given monetary compensation for services rendered, would he not also have to turn in a Form 1040 at the end of the year?

Also, could he possibly have an apartment? That'd be sad spending a long hard day at work then crashing in your chair in the Metro West HQ. I imagine Murphy coming home, cracking open a jar of Strained Peas baby food and relaxing, watching TJ Lazer :lol:
Click to expand...

Poor Murph is dead. You don't go to a recipient of an organ/tissue donation and act like it's the donor. Last I checked dead people only vote in elections, they don't pay taxes.

Jayson1 said:
Hey I am one of those things! The answer is 42! Jason
Click to expand...
But, what is the question?
 
And we can be "programmed" by outside factors as well. We can be brainwashed, or conditioned by politicians and demagogues to blindly parrot their doctrines. We can be traumatized by abuse or violence and have uncontrollable post-traumatic reactions to certain triggers. But losing control over ourselves doesn't make us non-sentient. It just means that sentience is nothing so simplistic as an on-off switch. Human consciousness is not a single thing, it's hundreds of different processes interacting and feeding back on each other. And there are a lot of those processes that we don't have conscious control over.
Click to expand...

Eh, I'd argue there's a difference between "programming" a person my indoctrination, propaganda, and psychological manipulation over a long period of time and being able to actually go into someone's thoughts and mind and instantly change the way it works.
 
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