Another reason proposed for the limited moral worth of zombies might be their largely absent mentality, their altered personal identity, or some combination of both. Zombies clearly appear to have something going on “upstairs,” but not much, and presumably what they have is very different from their prior state. Brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and disorders such as autism also raise questions about absent and altered personal identity. For example, at what point is the person no longer “at home”? Or at what point is a person no longer the same person I once knew? Zombies clearly bring to mind the ravages of brain damage and serious cognitive disorders. Good horror exploits our deepest fears and issues that we rarely like to bring to the surface. To understand these fears it is necessary to explore the metaphors for and analogies to our own general condition.
Another attempted justification for the moral devaluation of zombies, other than an absent mentality, is their altered personal identity. This altered identity perhaps releases us from prior obligations to the pre-transformed individual. If this identity is altered to such a degree after zombification, we might think that out of a certain respect for the prior identity of the individual we are obligated to terminate the zombie.
Three general justifications for zombie termination appear to be as follows: a) they are (or are very close to being) brain-dead; b) because of their radically altered life goals, what personality is left lacks the same personal identity as the original individual, releasing us from prior obligations; and c) after zombification they are usually homicidal cannibalistic killers.13
The Philosophical Challenge of Zombies
Each one of these justifications, however, poses a philosophical conundrum to our desire for absolute and sharp distinctions. If zombies are only partly brain-dead, how much is left and does this matter? Is what remains of the personality of zombies after zombification an altered personal identity? If we remove the homicidal tendencies by training the individuals, as in Day of the Dead,14 or chaining the individuals up, as in 28 Days Later 15 and Shaun of the Dead, 16 presumably the justification for termination on the grounds of self-defense is removed. However, we are still left with questions as to how we should treat these individuals.
Should we use them in service industry jobs or as entertainment on game shows, as depicted in Shaun of the Dead ? Do we have an obligation to terminate them out of a respect for their past identity? If your spouse is zombified, should you divorce him or her? Even if we grant the status of “dead” to the zombie, issues arise concerning our perceived obligations to the body alone.
Obligations to the body are instrumental to the Marine’s absolute commitment to “leave no man behind” (meaning by “man” a dead body), even at the potential expense of other living persons. This apparent obligation is apparent in the massive investment humans have in rituals of burial and cremation. If one takes literally a hoped-for resurrection of the body, the initial mutilation causing zombiehood might be troubling, but the future mutilation required in “finishing off” the body often leaves little of the original. Nobody usually stays behind to bury a decapitated zombie.17
The sharpest moral challenge often arises when a character is faced with the realization of the altered state of a loved one and the choice of either terminating the loved one, who is thus transformed, or being transformed oneself. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers,18 the girlfriend’s personal identity is substituted when her psyche is replaced by an alien psyche in a physically identical body.19 The father of the girl in 28 Days Later gets “the disease” as an infected droplet of blood falls into his eye. In Shaun of the Dead, Shaun is confronted with the required termination of his mother, whose zombie transformation is hardly great given her somewhat mindless previous state.
Dead or Alive?
Zombies, often described as the “living dead,” confront us directly with the question whether they are alive or dead. If we can classify them as dead, any moral question about termination is largely resolved. Zombies, however, challenge this dichotomy. Zombies present us with beings who appear to be alive, but who lack the rich mental life that we associate with “normal” persons. Their decay and disintegration is rather more indicative of death than life, but on the other hand, their dogged animation and lumbering groaning is more indicative of life than death.
The flicker of awareness that appears to be present in these beings may or may not be sufficient for some semblance of rationality as a criterion for personhood. This limited awareness may or may not be sufficient to argue for a continuity of personal identity in the individual. We get a clear acknowledgment of zombie memory, and even a hint of revenge (and perhaps affection), when the trained zombie in Day of the Dead uses a gun to shoot the killer of his trainer. In White Zombie, we get the striking image of the zombified heroine playing piano despite her complete failure to recognize her new husband. In Shaun of the Dead, Shaun’s best friend at the end is depicted as perhaps capable of playing video games.
Alternatively, we might describe zombies as more dead than alive. In years past, one proposed criterion for death was the absence of a soul. This sharp distinction between being ensouled or not, as separate from the distinction of being alive or dead, allows for the consistent imagined possibility of being alive but soulless.20 According to this criterion an oak tree satisfies the “in between” condition of being alive but soulless. But souls are a little hard to measure and not just a little metaphysically dubious.
Current debate regarding a brain-based criterion for death tends to focus on what might be termed “total brain death” or, alternately and more controversially, “partial brain death.” If we opt for a brain-based definition of death that considers death as only the loss of the higher cognitive functions while leaving the lower cognitive functions intact, then zombies might be legitimately classified as “dead.”
But what higher cognitive functions are sufficient for claiming that an individual is alive? One possible requirement might be a functioning cerebellum. This allows for consciousness, personality, memory, reason, enjoyment, and worry, as well as a variety of other higher-level cognitive capacities. 21 Lower brain functions such as those that allow for breathing and a heartbeat do not allow for such capacities. The absence of higher cognitive functions and the presence of only the lower would therefore result in a state classifiable as “death.” Zombies appear to lack individual personalities and rich conscious lives. They do appear, on the whole, to possess “behavioral” memories, high levels of aggression, and a rather insatiable hunger. If this distinction between higher and lower cognitive capacities is sound, and zombies are categorically determined to lack the higher, we might legitimately classify zombies as “dead.”
This loss of higher cognitive capacities in zombies is very loosely analogous to real cases of brain damage, in which involuntary motor actions such as spasms and blinking may create the terrible illusion of conscious awareness. A person in such a medical condition is sometimes described as being in a “permanent vegetative state,” or more specifically, when automatic behaviors such as blinking occur, as “awake but unaware.” In these cases there are no specific responses to varied stimuli, despite what individuals might desire to see in otherwise random spasms of behavior. Zombies, however, have fairly sophisticated responses to environmental stimuli. They can recognize non-zombified humans clearly as potential food. They also respond to lights, or a jukebox playing Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now,” as in Shaun of the Dead.
Since we see motion and goal-directed behavior as indicative of “life,” the behavior and rather zealous focus of zombies makes it hard just to automatically classify them as “dead.” When Shaun and his friend witness a zombie in the backyard, they mistake her for being simply drunk. This over-simplistic classification of zombies as dead is also complicated by the rather miraculous recovery of the heroine in White Zombie, which suggests the possibility of reversal of the zombification process. The scientist in Day of the Dead hopes to find a way to effect such a reversal
. However, just as zombie films pose a problem with arriving at a clear criterion for death, they do not give us a clear criterion for personal identity.
Self as Fiction
In assuming zombies’ possession of somewhat limited mentality, popular representations pose a problem for us in attributing to them anything like a coherent identity. One solution might be to reject the notion of a personal identity that a being either possesses absolutely or absolutely does not. Perhaps we could opt for a more fluid concept of self that admits of degrees. This strategy mirrors a tradition in philosophy of rejecting absolutist notions of self.22 The Scottish enlightenment philosopher David Hume challenged such absolutist conceptions when he identified the self as essentially a “fiction” rather than an essence. What we describe as the self is in his account really a continuous series of perceptions and experiences that we bundle into a unity and describe as “me.”
According to Hume, when our psychology ceases, we cease. To think otherwise is to go beyond “serious and unprejudiced reflection.” Thus Hume concludes that mankind is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. . . . The man is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.” He goes on to conclude that there is no simple essence which constitutes our basic identity, however tempted we are to mistakenly imagine such a basic essence, or as he describes it, “simplicity.”23 Once an absolutist notion of self (and hence, a personal identity that is either possessed or not) is abandoned, this raises the intriguing possibility of degrees of psychological continuity.
Contemporary philosopher Derek Parfit takes up where Hume left off. Once all talk of souls and essences is abandoned in terms of the richer notion of degrees of psychological continuity, then we are in a position to evaluate zombies more carefully. As Parfit remarks, “if there will be one future person who will have enough of my brain to be psychologically continuous with me, that person would be me.”24 If zombies have some form of psychological continuity, then we have an idea of personal identity that will presumably give zombies a basic potential for psychological continuity which unites their present identity to a previous one. According to Parfit, bodily continuity alone is not sufficient for personal identity—psychology matters. Furthermore, valuing a human in a permanent unconscious state, yet alive, ignores the importance of psychological presence and degrees of continuity.25
Curiously, in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, all the memories of the original persons remain intact in the physically duplicated body. This demonstrates some considerable psychological continuity. In the duplicate body, however, the original person’s life goals are replaced with a new mission and a personality apparently devoid of emotion. The prior values and intentions of the original person are entirely replaced in the duplicate with a new objective—to replace all the remaining original humans with “pod people.” This raises the analogous possibility that in addition to acquiring an insatiable hunger for human flesh, zombies’ life goals change. Perhaps this alteration in life goals is sufficient to warrant the claim that the individual after zombification is no longer the same person, despite their limited mental continuity.
“Not Your Mother!”
Of what does remain of the zombies’ mental life, does their personal identity remain constant? We might place a higher demand on psychological continuity and memory for personal identity that goes beyond simple non-autonomous abilities such as how to play the piano, play a video game, or shoot a gun. But even if we grant a limited psychological continuity between the pre-zombified person and the zombie, we might also require a certain continuity of life goals in order to be able to claim strict continuity of personal identity.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers demonstrates an example of a clear substitution of personality in individuals. As humans sleep, they are duplicated in pods, but in such a way that despite considerable psychological continuity between the original person and the duplicate person, there is a radical alteration of personality. This altered personality and adoption of new life goals makes it easier for us to judge that the replaced individual is indeed a new individual.
This is closer to the thought experiment posed by John Locke, another enlightenment philosopher. In this experiment he proposes the possibility that the soul of a prince that carries with it the conscious memories of its past life enters and informs the body of a cobbler. The soul of the cobbler departs as soon as the soul of the prince enters. Locke argues that it is obvious the cobbler would now be the same person as the prince, despite having the cobbler’s body, and that he would now be accountable only for the actions of the prince.26 This alteration would presumably absolve us of all prior obligations to the cobbler. So can we argue that the zombies’ personality has changed to such a degree that we could treat them as if their personality has been substituted for another personality?
Aspects of zombies’ personalities clearly do change. The hungry animalistic snarl of Shaun’s mother in Shaun of the Dead at the point of transformation appears to indicate an altered personality complete with different life goals. One reason for the moral devaluation of zombies partly arises from the lack of mentality in the new identity after zombie transformation. However, if the zombie is a loved one or friend, then the change in personal identity is crucial, entailing the release of the old obligations created by the prior interpersonal relationship.
Because of the altered personal identity of individuals who undergo radical transformation, the argument runs, obligations to the original individual become moot. Apparent changes in identity allow for Shaun’s killing of his flatmate and mother in Shaun of the Dead, to be at least justifiable, if not easy, given the release from prior obligations. But still, our sympathy with Shaun’s trauma at the killing of his zombified mother is caused by a doubt we might legitimately have about these distinctions. For example, a friend of mine in college professed to be “born again.” His behavior certainly changed in combination with distinct attitudes and life goals.27 If I made a promise or borrowed money from him before he was “born again,” perhaps afterwards I no longer have an obligation to keep my promise or repay my debts to him despite his bodily continuity. This would make as much sense, I might argue, as repaying a debt to Robert after borrowing the money from Jane: I obviously have no obligation to repay the debt to Robert, and therefore, I have no obligation to repay my debts to my “born again” friend.
Parfit’s account of personal identity in terms of psychological continuity explicitly admits of degree, and this raises serious questions as to the continuity of self as well as the constancy of personality in the zombified individual. This is particularly hard for Shaun, when confronted by his zombified mother, because of her somewhat zombie-like character prior to zombification.
Zombies and Us
Finally, there is the question of “normal” persons’ similarity to zombies. Once sharp distinctions between “dead” and “alive,” “self” and “non-self,” are rejected, and if these concepts are admitted in terms of degree, what then are we? For the “research and development” in writing this chapter, I decided to undergo some video-gaming experiences. After getting hooked, to my horror, it was six in the morning, and I had lectures to prepare the next day. I was in a state of partial zombiehood, with continuous responsive behavior to a visual stimulus, but a state of self-awareness that could hardly be described as present. The portrayal in Shaun of the Dead of the line of checkout assistants who mindlessly (if rhythmically) “beep” the purchases of customers, or of Shaun’s best friend as he whiles away the hours paying video games followed by a rapidly induced drunken stupor at the local pub, raises the terrifying possibility of our own general normal condition of zombiehood.
What distinguishes us from zombies, however, is our potential for brief intermittent actualizations of imaginative goal-di
rected action. Zombies appear to lack this capacity. One such actualization of self is presented in Shaun of the Dead when Shaun and his best friend are finally popped out of their humdrum existence by the full realization of the violent circumstances of their environment. For the first time in the film they make a conscious decision and plan for their future. This is depicted in the film by a break in the continuous narrative and the portrayal of three possible futures imagined by Shaun and his friend: first, go to Shaun’s mother’s house to get his mother, kill his zombified stepfather, pick up his ex-girlfriend, go over to her place, and have a cup of tea; second, go to Shaun’s mother’s house to get his mother, kill his zombified stepfather, pick up his ex-girlfriend, return to Shaun’s house, and have a cup of tea; third, go to Shaun’s mother’s house to get his mother, kill his zombified stepfather, pick up his ex-girlfriend, go to the pub and have a pint, and wait for the whole thing to blow over. As Shaun’s girlfriend says at the end of the film: it is not so much what Shaun eventually chooses, but the fact that he makes a decision—and presumably actualizes his autonomous self—that matters.
Zombie films challenge the dichotomies that we often take for granted. Just as these films challenge the distinction between being dead or alive, they challenge overly simplistic conceptions of the “soul.” A more reflective analysis of zombies should perhaps lead us to reject the notion that zombies are simply soulless or dead. Presumably our consciences are partially salved as we decapitate or kill them due to the threat they pose to our own survival. A more subtle justification for zombie termination might be offered when we consider their absent or limited “animalistic” mentality in an attempt to classify them as more dead than alive. But they clearly fall above the criterion of death when we consider them in contrast to severely brain-damaged individuals. Zombies can clearly respond to basic environmental stimulation albeit in a somewhat anti-social and ponderous manner.
Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy Page 5
