bounty hunters

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? bounty hunters are sent from Earth's various police forces to locate escaped androids and "retire" them, earning a thousand dollars for each body. Author Philip K. Dick’s main character, Rick Deckard, is assigned the job to retire eight androids that have recently arrived on Earth after killing their human masters on Mars.
The job of a bounty hunter is to distribute the ”Voigt-Kampff” empathy test, which distinguishes androids from humans. The test involves asking the suspected android several hypothetical questions that a human would respond with through empathy. Androids are unable to produce the necessary human response because of the lack of capacity for empathetic thinking. If determined to be an android, the bounty hunter’s job is to “retire” them, or kill them.
As the androids have become more humanlike, retiring them has become more difficult after he newest models of androids created by manufacturer, the Rosen Association is the Nexus-6 came out.
The role of a bounty hunter is essentially a contradiction to what they’re killing androids for through “dehumanizing effects” to make them not experience empathy toward their target. (Sims 1) Bounty hunters such as Deckard are paid to kill these androids that look and act as humans with jobs and friends. However, as readers discover through the novel, the requirements of being a bounty hunter involve the hunter not having empathetic feelings towards the androids who they are assigned to kill. This is essentially the same as acting as an android is permanently.
Deckard is caught between his personal feelings and the requirements of being a bounty hunter. His job to kill leads him to think about human feelings of empathy, love and loneliness. After meeting Resch, a fellow bounty hunter working at another police station, his moral dilemma deepens after learning that Resch is not an anti-empathic android, but instead a coldhearted and ruthless bounty hunter; everything Deckard no longer wants to be.
The picture that Dick creates of San Francisco as Deckard hunts for androids throughout it is dark and disturbing. This setting may help the reader to get a picture of the internal battle that Deckard faces as a bounty hunter as he questions the nature of his job due to the contradictions the requirements are based on.

Bibliography:
Sims, Christopher A. "The Dangers of Individualism and the Human Relationship to Technology in Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?." 67-86. 2009. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed December 6, 2010).