clockwork orange

Definition

A person or organism with a mechanistic morality or lack of free will.

Etymology

From the novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess, in which the main character is programmed to be incapable of antisocial behavior.

Example Sentences

• "Contrarily, he may be saying, “Look what your computerized, commodified society has made of me—a clockwork orange, for all appearances organic but mechanical.""
• "The telos of the pathologization of crime is the perfected robot or “clockwork orange” of present-day behaviorism and sociobiology, descendants of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century associationists like Jeremy Bentham."
• "This one took reality to be a large machine, a ‘clockwork orange', an automaton."