Rage against the dimming light
 

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Assume that sometime in the future, we will have the capacity to create robots that are able to feel emotions like love and sorrow, and think abstractly about topics like religion and politics.

Assuming that they look & feel exactly like humans, and can think exactly like humans... would it be immoral to turn one off permanently?

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Excellent question. Beats Sklansky's whiplash by a mile and a half.

Yes, IMO, it would be immoral and also inconsistent with prevalent human logic & morality, as we see them now. (I am assuming that when we construct conscious robots, we will have gone beyond our qualms for cloning, creating life, etc. Therefore, a conscious robot would not be something that would be seen as anathema or a plague, by most people.)

Currently, all our efforts in medicine are (theoretically, at least) geared towards preserving human health and prolonging life. But, also, towards preserving consciousness! We are ready morally, but not technically) to transplant hearts, livers, kidneys, even babies to our body. And we always consider the donor, say a living person donating a kidney, to be parting with his body part and we consider the recipient to be the same person, with only a minor technical adjustment to its physical configuration, ie a new kidney.

But when we come to the question of brain transplant, then things change totally! The donor is considered to be the human being that will continue to "be", while the "recipient" will be "turned off". Which is understandable, because we accept that consciousness, as expressed through the brain function (and through no other organ -- sorry, not even the heart, young lovers!), is paramount.

Ergo:

If sometime in the future
- we accept the moral legitimacy of cloning humans and constructing life, and
- we construct human-like robots

then it would be inconsistent (and, hence, "immoral") to "turn off" a human consciousness, whether it resides in a robot or in a carbon-only, uterus-made human.

To see this more clearly we could engage in the thought experiment of having a bona fide human's brain transplanted into a human-like robot's head. Would we be supposed to treat that robot, carrying the human's brain, any differently than a proper human ?