This characterization of evil requires some refinement. Sauron wouldn’t turn out to be evil in the malevolent sense if the reason he aimed to conquer Middle Earth was to secure equality and equal dignity for all races. Although it might be morally wrong to kill innocent humans, hobbits, dwarves, and elves, and generally misguided to try to secure political and social equality for orcs and trolls, it wouldn’t be profoundly, truly, or genuinely evil in the malevolent sense of the term.
In the jargon of philosophers, the motive has to be non-instrumentally held. Non-instrumental motives are motives that cannot be explained by appeal to other beliefs or desires that I have. I just have them. Contrast this with an instrumental motive: my desire to arm myself with holy water and my belief that there is holy water to be gotten at the local church can generate in me an instrumental motive to get out of the chair, to get to church, and to secure holy water from, say, the baptismal fount at the church. Non-instrumental motives don’t depend in that way on other desires and beliefs I have. My desire to be happy is a good candidate for a non-instrumental desire: I don’t want to be happy because I think it is going to satisfy some other set of beliefs or desires; I simply want to be happy.
Something that is evil in the malevolent sense has to have a non-instrumental desire to damage the welfare of others. There may be other things required as well. Perhaps a creature incapable of consciousness cannot be evil in the relevant sense. Still, I will leave aside other conditions that may be required but which seem less distinctive of evil in this sense.
Again, I do not intend to deny that there are other, less demanding senses of evil. We might also learn that there are surprisingly few instances of malevolent evil in the world. Even if we were to discover this, however, it would not mean that there are not other senses of evil. It would simply mean that what evil there is is rarely, if ever, malevolent.
Evil and the Undead
Despite its potentially small range of actual cases, malevolent evil is a sense and perhaps the dominant sense of evil that we associate with the demonic and the Undead. What makes the vampires, zombies, and ghosts of fiction malevolently evil is that they are apparently motivated by non-instrumental desires to do us ill. At least part of what makes the Undead of horror movies so horrific is not merely that they wish to kill us—it has to do with why they wish to kill us. They do not wish to kill us for some further, recognizable cause we can imagine ourselves sharing but do not happen to share. Rather, it is that they have some basic desire to harm us and that’s it.
We might find that the Undead are somewhat different from what we imagine them to be. In particular, we might learn that the Undead, despite what we tend to think, actually lack the motives required for evil in the malevolent sense. This might well be difficult to determine. There are, however, several reasons why we should, on reflection, be skeptical that the Undead will typically turn out to be evil.
First, if it turns out that there are naturally occurring Undead, it seems plausible that a good many of them will not be sophisticated enough to have desires at all, much less desires of the relevant sort. If zombies don’t really have motives (maybe their brains have decayed too much for them to really have motives, even if they preserve certain functions that we might have once called “instinctual”), then they cannot, strictly speaking, be malevolently evil. They would be more like a deadly virus—the kind of thing we have reason to avoid and to try to control, but nothing that is really evil. Moreover, if it turns out that there is a range of naturally occurring Undead from viroids up through insects (assuming these lack motives), then as a matter of numerical considerations it may well work out that most Undead simply lack the mental machinery to count as evil.
Second, even if many archetypal forms of the Undead have motives, it is not obvious that they have the special kind of motive required for evil. Suppose zombies are motivated to, say, eat fresh brains. Would these motives count as non-instrumental desires to see the welfare of others harmed? Nope. To the extent that zombies do have desires to eat fresh brains, those motivations likely depend on a more basic desire to get food, and the belief that fresh brains constitute food. That would make an instrumental and not an evil-constituting motive. Even if the desire to eat fresh brains is non-instrumental, it does not look as if it’s really a desire to harm the welfare of others. If there were a way to get fresh brains without harming the welfare of anyone, I suspect zombies would be perfectly satisfied. Contrast this to Hannibal Lecter—presumably he would reject harm-free brains as a mediocre substitute, at best. At any rate, there is no evidence to suggest that harm-free brains would be rejected by zombies. In the absence of such evidence, we should conclude that zombies lack the desire that marks out malevolent evil. In short, zombies are not evil—they are just misunderstood.
Even if we find that a majority of the Undead have the relevant mental machinery to be capable of non-instrumental desires to harm others, there does not seem to be any reason why they would have those motives in greater frequencies than you or I tend to have them. If they are Undead of a sort that suffers from advanced physical decay, this seems to diminish the chance that they could have the relevant sorts of motives (or motives at all). On the other hand, if they don’t suffer from advanced physical decay, it does not seem likely that they will have motivations significantly different from the ones we currently have. And, as far as I can tell, most people don’t seem to be malevolently evil.
Consider the case of vampires. A vampire simply seems to be the person who was in the body prior to becoming a vampire. There is no obvious reason why having become a vampire would suddenly add non-instrumental motives to harm others. To the extent that vampirism introduces new desires, they don’t (necessarily) seem to be of the problematic sort. That is, on becoming a vampire you might want to suck blood and so on, but it is difficult to see why this should make you want to do bad things to other people when you did not want to do them before. We should not simply assume that vampirism brings with it non-instrumental desires to harm others.
What makes vampires a complicated case, however, is the often-held idea that they are damned or in some sense “fallen.” Perhaps damnation does the work of introducing the relevant non-instrumental desires, making vampires necessarily evil in a way that other forms of the Undead might not be. It is an interesting question whether damnation could/would/should have the effect of introducing desires that give rise to malevolent evil, and I am uncertain about the matter. The vampire as necessarily evil in light of damnation or something like it has received reinforcement in comparatively recent popular culture from at least the early seasons of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television show. Despite its influence, the view of vampirism as necessarily evil (which the show seems to abandon in later seasons, anyway) does swim against an enormous tide of recent popular culture that holds that vampires are not necessarily evil in the malevolent sense, and for that matter, not necessarily damned. See, for example, a good number of Anne Rice’s vampire novels, Tanya Huff’s Blood series, Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries, Laurel Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, and the recent vampire-mystery novels by Kim Harrison. Indeed, I am told that in at least one genre, the contemporary romance novel, a vampire is never evil. In many contemporary comic books vampires are just people with a condition where they live a long time and need to suck blood (the vampire Cassidy in Preacher fits this mold). Something similar can be said for vampires in popular culture outside of fiction, ranging from movies (think Underworld) to video games (for example, Morrowind: The Elder Scrolls 3). So, even if something about vampires brings with it malevolent impulses, it is important to recognize that this problem is apparently rooted primarily in supernatural vampires, and to acknowledge that these impulses might be overcome by other motives or values.
The preceding reflections suggest that vampires never really fail to leave behind a basic fact of the human predicament: We’ve all had bad motives, but with the right upbringing, friends, or environment, most
of us tend to do a good job keeping it under control. If so, then even if it turns out that vampires necessarily have malicious motives, it does not follow that they are evil to any great degree, or that they are even evil at all. After all, a vampire might never come to act on any of his or her non-instrumental motives to harm others.
I suspect that the reason why vampires have been associated with irredeemable, malevolent evil is a function of two things. First, there is the need for blood. Wanting to suck someone’s blood can seem pretty creepy, and we may be tempted to think that creepy equals evil. But creepy isn’t necessarily evil. And, if popular representations of vampires are any indication, when a vampire finds a way to circumvent the need for blood we don’t tend to think of the vampire as straightforwardly evil. So maybe the creepiness of needing blood makes it easier to interpret the average vampire as having non-instrumental desires to harm us. After all, if they wished us well, surely they wouldn’t want to suck our blood? (For what it’s worth, I think that in reasoning this way we are reasoning badly. But I also think bad reasoning is widespread. However, I also think that there are oftentimes good reasons for reasoning badly.)
There is also a second reason, connected to the first, which provides some culturally influential impetus to the thought that at least vampires are typically evil. The original vampire of fiction seemed to act out motives that are easiest to make sense of as non-instrumental desires to harm others. And, at least in some chronicles, the figure Dracula was modeled after—“Vlad the Impaler”—committed atrocities on a scale that we seem to find easiest to explain by appeal to motives of the malevolently evil sort. Ascribing non-instrumental desires to harm others to someone gives us a way of making sense of what otherwise tends to seem radically senseless. By appealing to non-instrumental motives we can “explain” certain horrific acts: he is someone who wishes us ill for no good reason—he simply wants us to hurt.
Resting in Peace
So what have we learned about the Undead?• First, if there are Undead, the largest number of Undead are likely to be of natural origin. Comparatively simple entities (biologically speaking) such as viruses, virons, or even more complex things like seeds and insects, likely make up the largest chunk of the Undead, much as they do among the not-yet-having-died living.
• Second, there is no reason to think that among the most-likely-to-exist forms of the Undead (the comparatively biologically simple), many will have the capacities required to be evil in any genuine or profound sense.
• Third, even among more sophisticated forms of the Undead, many of the Undead of classical lore seem to lack the capacities required to be evil.
• Fourth, even if there were Undead agents with the right capacities to be evil, there is no special reason to think that they have the motives that make one evil in any greater frequency than we find in regular, not-previously-dead humans. Even if they did have those motives, there is no reason to think that they would be fundamentally different from us in the capacity to act against those motives.
It’s time for us to abandon our prejudices about the Undead. It may not be evil to portray them as we tend to, but it is wrong.31
5
Zombies, Blade Runner, and the Mind-Body Problem
LARRY HAUSER
RACHEL [TO DECKARD]: Or we could live in sin, except that I’m not alive.
—PHILIP K. DICK, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Zombies and Replicants
J.R. SEBASTIAN [TO ROY BATTY]: You’re so perfect!
—Blade Runner
Zombies are Undead. Something animates them, but whatever it is—whether voodoo or science run amok—it’s not their departed souls or, as philosophers (not wanting to prejudge the theological question of souls) would have it, their conscious selves or minds. Zombies enter philosophy where horror fantasy and science fiction meet dawning scientific fact. Robots, many believe, are unconscious, soulless automata. Many further believe robots will remain unconscious and soulless no matter how convincingly human their appearances and behavior become, even robots able to fool the most careful unaided observer—like the androids in Blade Runner.32
That zombies enter philosophy in this vicinity partly explains the peculiar way in which philosophy zombies are Undead. Much like computers (according to the general supposition), typical philosophy zombies are unfeeling, but capable of sophisticated thought (or at least the appearance of it). This is quite unlike the stereotypical zombies of George Romero’s Living Dead series which are severely cognitively and emotionally diminished, if not completely unthinking or unfeeling. Maybe they have sensations—maybe brains taste like something to them. Who knows? On the other hand, they are certainly intellectually challenged. One can’t reason with a Living Dead zombie.
In Romero’s Land of the Dead zombies develop rudimentary communication and tool-use skills. Philosophy zombies’ intellectual abilities are imagined to be even further developed—typically, as well developed as yours and mine. “As human as human” is the rule with zombies in philosophy: zombies in philosophy are more akin to the wives in The Stepford Wives or the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers than to the brain-munching ghouls of Night of the Living Dead. Still, with Stepford wives and pod people there’s something discernibly, albeit subtly, amiss. Philosophy zombies resemble normal humans more perfectly still. In philosophy, zombies are typically, outwardly, indistinguishable from normal humans, at least to the naked eye, like the Replicants in Blade Runner. A Replicant can only be detected by a special test measuring “capillary dilation of the so called blush response, fluctuation of the pupil, involuntary dilation of the iris” and other involuntary emotional responses. They call it “Voigt-Kampff,” for short. Some philosophers have even imagined zombies literally identical to humans; some philosophy zombies are humans. We’ll return to that.
Zombies that haunt philosophers’ imaginings these days are fully humanoid agents, information processors, and even organisms. Outwardly, or objectively, philosophy zombies appear to be typical individuals. Inwardly, or subjectively, however, there’s no conscious “light” behind their eyes, however much they seem to shine. Objectively, philosophy zombies are perfect human replicas, as human as human; subjectively, however, there’s “nobody home.”
Despite their seeming intelligence—or rather precisely because of it—philosophy zombies do eat brains . . . in a sense. And herein lies their horror for materialistic philosophies of mind and, consequently, for scientific psychology. In the philosophy of mind, materialist theories maintain that mental functions can all be accounted for in physical terms, or identified with material processes, without recourse to immaterial entities like souls. In philosophical thought experiments, however, zombies seem to “devour” everything about brains that various materialist theories might suppose thoughts and sensations to be. Philosophy zombies “eat brains” by seeming to be counterexamples to every attempt to identify thoughts and sensations with the things about brains materialists propose to identify them with. Behaviorists propose to identify mental states with adaptive behavioral output. Functionalists propose to identify mental processes with computations that produce such output. Mind-brain identity theorists propose to identify minds with the underlying neurophysiology that, perhaps, implements such computations. All these alternatives seem to be ruled out by zombies. In philosophy, zombies eat behavior, programs, and brains.
And Bears! Oh No: Zombies Invade Philosophy
DECKARD [TO ZHORA]: Is that a real snake?
The first reported sighting of what philosophers have since come to call “zombies,” however, was not of humanoid zombies, but of zombie animals.33 In the wake of William Harvey’s discovery that the heart is a pump, René Descartes proposed in 1637 that every life function could be explained materialistically on mechanical principles. Even adaptive intelligent-seeming behavior, such as birds’ nest-building and navigational abilities, Descartes argued, could be explained as the activities of unreasoning, unconscious mecha
nisms. Proposing to regard animal bodies as machines, Descartes concluded that all animals are “automata,” furry (or scaly or feathery) robots, totally lacking reason and consciousness. Shades of Pet Sematary . . . except in Pet Sematary, the resurrected pet corpses—like Romero’s zombies and unlike philosophers’ zombies—are manifestly not themselves. They’ve changed, turned vicious. Zombie animals, as conceived by Descartes, on the other hand, are indistinguishable from our pets, wildlife, and cattle, because they are our pets, wildlife, and cattle!
Descartes, notably, did seem to glimpse humanoid zombies once. Having introspectively assured himself of his own consciousness, looking out his window to see other “men crossing the square,” he still wondered whether what he saw were “any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons.”34 What do I really know about anyone else’s inner life—or lack thereof—except what their words and acts seem to reveal? Zombies are us! Oh no! Or, rather, since I know from my own first-person experience that I am conscious (or so Descartes taught) zombies might be you. Philosophers call this the “other minds problem.” Descartes, however, dismissed the possibility of humanoid zombies. The variety and flexibility of human actions “guided by the will,” he reasoned, could not be mechanically replicated. Since the infinite variety of conscious reason outstrips the necessarily finite resources of material devices, Descartes concluded that no machine could ever use words or other signs to “produce different arrangements of words so as to give a meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence”; neither could a machine “act in all the contingencies of life in the way in which our reason makes us act.” Whereas “reason is a universal instrument which can be used in all kinds of situations,” Descartes reckoned such scope of application and flexibility of operation would be “impossible for a machine.” 35 Only the presence of an immaterial principle or soul in us (a theory called “dualism”) could explain the virtually infinite variety of human behavior. Whereas life-processes could be mechanized, thought-processes could not.
Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy Page 7
