>>24576786 (OP)You're going off the movie, not the book. The movie reversed the book's message.
>Reading the book again forty years later I was struck by how poorly I’d understood it the first time around. Not only that, but on the key issue (concerning the moral status of the replicants) Dick reverses the judgement of the film. In order to understand why this is so, the first thing to realise is that Dick approached the matter of empathy from a different direction to Ridley Scott. He emphasised that the Voight-Kampff test is above all a psycho-political test, rather than physical or biological. He had the idea for centring on empathy for the test while researching an earlier novel The Man in the High Castle, when he read the diary of an SS officer serving in Poland, who complains at one point, “We were kept awake at night by the cries of starving children.” Monsters lack empathy.