Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy

by Richard Greene; K. Silem Mohammad

  Recognizing equal rights for vampires has an even more startling implication. If my sister were to announce her upcoming nuptials (or civil union) with a vampire, there may be little that can be said. This arrangement would be undoubtedly odd. But if the Undead are capable of rational action and capable of a full range of emotions, then they seem capable of forming meaningful bonds. This suggests that a vampire could be as good as any other suitor.

  There are many reasons she might choose not to marry a vampire. Vampires can’t procreate and she might want biological children. Vampires are immortal and she is not. These might be legitimate reasons not to marry someone, but they have nothing uniquely to do with the fact that her suitor happens to be a vampire. If biological children and a similar life expectancy are truly important to her, then my sister will reject any human suitor who does not fit the bill. And if she does not value these things, then there is no reason she shouldn’t marry a vampire (at least not on these grounds).

  Of course, there’s the obvious worry that my sister will fall victim to the vampire’s violent desires. But the fact that someone can be victimized by those they love is nothing new. As with humans, spousal abuse is reason to call the authorities. But the fact that someone happens to be a vampire is irrelevant. Violence and not Undeath is the problem. Similarly, if a vampire waited until his wedding night (or tenth wedding anniversary) to disclose his true identity, then this deception provides a reason to call things off. In this case, however, deception and not Undeath is the problem. I may not like the fact that my sister plans to marry a vampire, but I can only legitimately object if he gives me a reason (say, violence or deception). It seems reasonable to suppose that a well-behaved vampire may never provide such a reason. If so, then perhaps I should rather see her marry a non-violent vampire than a violent human being.

  Current debates over same-sex marriage suggest that many people will reject arrangements that seem unfamiliar, unconventional, or unnatural. Marrying a vampire would surely be all of those things. As with the case of same-sex marriage, however, we shouldn’t confuse discomfort with a principled objection. If vampires are capable of entering into meaningful relationships, then they ought to be considered as prospective life-partners. If they aren’t, then they should be rejected because they make terrible lovers and not because they happen to be Undead.

  Universal Rights: Vampires, Space Aliens, Robots, and Humans

  All of this may seem absurd, but the argument is simple. In the human case, it is wrong to discriminate on the basis of race, class, gender, or sexual orientation. All those capable of understanding their environment well enough to engage in self-conscious moral reflection ought to be considered moral agents. If they behave badly, they should be held responsible. Indeed, holding people accountable for their wrongdoing demonstrates that we respect their ability to behave better.

  Extending this well-established principle, I’m suggesting that all those capable of self-conscious moral reflection should be held accountable for their choices even if they are aliens from outer space, artificially created humanoids, or Undead creatures of the night.63 If they behave badly, then we should respect their ability to behave better by holding them responsible. It would be wrong to hold them to a lower standard simply because they are old, ugly, and eat strange foods. Since at least three vampires exhibit the capacity for self-conscious moral reflection, we can reasonably conclude that some Undead creatures can be held responsible for their bloodthirsty behavior. And if being a full moral creature demands being treated with dignity, then vampires deserve equal rights as well.

  11

  The Bloody Connection Between Vampires and Vegetarians

  WAYNE YUEN

  DR SEWARD: Your diet, Mr. Renfield, is disgusting.

  RENFIELD: Actually, they [flies] are perfectly nutritious. You see, each life that I ingest gives back life to me.

  —Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula

  Vampires should not drink human blood. This is not a terribly controversial statement, but asking ourselves why this is so leads to the underlying moral principles that govern how we make decisions about what is right and wrong. It’s our job as moral individuals to investigate these principles and try to live a life that is consistent with them. If we look at the situation of vampires and come to understand why it is that we evaluate their particular eating habits as immoral, we will discover the moral principles that can help us gauge whether or not our own eating habits are consistent with our belief that vampires should not eat people.

  We get plenty of examples of the eating habits of vampires from Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but we actually see a vampire learning to become a vampire in the film Interview with the Vampire. So this chapter will concentrate, for the most part, on that particular film.

  Reasoning with Vampires

  Before we look at the principles governing vampires’ eating habits, we should examine what it takes for something to have moral responsibility. Moral agency, the ability to have moral responsibilities, at minimum requires two conditions: sufficiently developed rationality and free will. For example, I wouldn’t say that my cat, Fizzgig, has a moral responsibility not to kill birds in the backyard, even if the birds are endangered species. I would like it if she would not kill the birds in our backyard, especially the endangered ones, but she does not have what it takes to be a moral agent. She lacks moral agency because she does not have the rationality necessary to think about the world in moral terms.

  Are vampires rational creatures? The answer is an unequivocal yes. Aristotle believed that if an agent can envision the best outcome of a situation, and can successfully bring that outcome about through acting in a way that best and most consistently promotes the desired outcome, then he or she holds practical wisdom, a high form of rationality. The ability to deliberate well is difficult to obtain, but vampires can clearly envision a goal, such as kidnapping or seducing a woman, and produce fairly intricate plans to achieve the goal. Although Aristotle would disapprove of most of the goals envisioned by vampires as the “best outcome,” vampires match all of the other criteria set forth by Aristotle to be a rational deliberator.

  By this standard of rationality, vampires are rational creatures. In Interview Lestat is intelligent enough to make financial investments for the future so that he can live a comfortably luxurious lifestyle. Vampires can reflect intellectually (if not in mirrors) about the world and, more importantly, upon their own actions. They are aware of the consequences of their actions. They even make moral judgments. Lestat believes that “evildoers are easier and they taste better,” referring to Widow St. Clair, who blamed a slave for the murder of her husband. Lestat’s claim is an aesthetic judgment about the tastiness of evil people, but to make this judgment at all, one must be able to morally judge people to be good or evil.

  The second quality, free will, is much more problematic. Some philosophers believe that free will does not exist, and that all actions are fully determined. However, since we are concerned about ethical behavior here, we may rightfully assume that free will is possible. If there is no free will, then it makes little sense to talk about ethical behavior at all. It’s beyond the scope of this chapter to offer a defense of free will;64 the question at hand is whether vampires have free will. Just because free will exists, it does not follow that vampires have it.

  Free will is the capacity to act in a way of our own choosing, without being forced by something external to ourselves. Imagine if someone were to hold my family hostage and ordered me to rob a bank or they would kill my family. In this case an external force would be compelling me to commit an act that I know was wrong. My free will has been compromised. If I am in a straitjacket, I do not have the freedom to pet my cat.

  To say that somebody ought to do something, in the moral sense, implies that they could do it. Imagine this scenario: a woman dies during childbirth. It would make little sense to say that the baby is morally responsible for killing
his or her mother. The baby is the cause of the mother’s death, but is not responsible for her death because the baby could not do otherwise. Similarly it wouldn’t make sense to say that vampires should not drink human blood if they did not have an alternative. If the blood of humans was the only thing that could sustain them, then we couldn’t say that vampires should not drink human blood. I believe that vampires in popular culture have an alternative to drinking human blood.

  In Interview we get an intimate look at the life of a particular vampire, Louis de Pointe du Lac. After Louis is turned into a vampire by Lestat, he confronts the nature of the vampire, feeding on human beings, and is disturbed by it. He struggles with the morality of his previous life as a human being and his existence now, dependent upon blood. But when Lestat reveals to Louis that he could live off animal blood, he tries living off rats, but eventually drinks human blood. Other examples of vampires living off of non-human blood can be found in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel television series: Angel, and later Spike, survive by drinking the blood of animals.

  Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t

  The freedom of vampires is closely connected to the nature of what vampires are. Vampires at the most basic level are human beings who have been condemned to an eternal life. Most people would see eternal life as a gift, or a blessing. But the vampire is damned because of this “gift.” Vampires are left to live their lives with an eternal hunger. Dracula hungers not only for human blood, but for love. He is only released from his curse when Mina finally is able to satisfy that craving. With such a craving driving the vampire’s action, can a vampire exhibit free will? Again this is a difficult question to answer, but let’s imagine that it does annihilate the vampire’s free will. If this is so then any case of extreme craving would remove a person’s free will. A heroin addict, who because of her compulsion for the drug robs a store in order to get money to get more drugs, would not be considered morally responsible for her action. If we cannot accept this conclusion, we must reject the initial assumption that leads to this conclusion, that the craving for blood annihilates a vampire’s free will. This leads one to believe that vampires have free will over themselves when choosing to drink human blood.

  To make matters worse, there seem to be important differences between the heroin addict and the vampire. Firstly, vampires seem to be in full control of their faculties even while they crave human blood, whereas drug addicts typically cannot control themselves. They are compelled, depending upon the degree of addiction, to seek the drug. Consider another example of compulsion: people who are lost at sea have been known to drink ocean water, even when they rationally know that they should not drink the water. Their thirst is so great that it overwhelms any kind of rational ability. Dracula, Louis, and Lestat all exhibit restraint even when they are in densely populated cities. This suggests a difference between a craving and a compulsion: a compulsion cannot be resisted. A drug addict is under a compulsion to seek drugs. A craving is a strong preference. When I crave vanilla ice cream, I have a strong preference, but I would not rob the grocery store to satisfy it.

  A second problem that is unique to the vampire is a question of character. If a vampire is damned, then perhaps nothing that the vampire can do is good, because the character of the being prohibits any good from being done. Being damned then does not compel a being towards evil acts, but rather it taints all their acts with evil. This idea is rooted in a model of virtue ethics associated with Aristotle. Developing a good character is primary. From a virtuous character, virtuous acts follow, and from a vicious character, vicious acts follow. Hitler is the typical example of a person who has a stained character. No good that Hitler has done can change the fact that he is a morally vicious character. Vampires are stained with evil, someone might claim, and so consequently nothing that they do can ever make them good moral agents. When it comes to new vampires like Louis, however, there are few if any character traits that we can point to when trying to evaluate his moral character. Louis is a different person after he becomes a vampire. Perhaps more importantly, we can evaluate an agent’s character separately from his or her actions. For example, if Hitler decided to give a large donation to famine relief in the world, the act of donating can be evaluated as good, even though the person’s character (Hitler) is vicious. In this chapter, we’re mostly concerned about a particular action of vampires: their feeding habits.

  A third and final problem that is unique to the vampire is rooted in a different conceptual model of the vampire. If the vampire is not merely an Undead human cursed with a craving, but rather a demonically possessed body whose human soul has left,65 then do vampires simply have different moral values? This might be true in a cultural sense of the word. In America most people believe that it is wrong to eat dogs, but acceptable to eat cows; in other parts of the world, it is acceptable to eat dogs; and in still others, wrong to eat cows. However, all things being equal, there are principles that appear to be universal. For example, a world with more unnecessary suffering is worse than a world with less unnecessary suffering. Even our model vampire Lestat tells Louis that vampirism is a gift that helps him escape a painful world. It is precisely this principle that motivates Louis to live off rats instead of human beings. Ironically, Lestat appeals to the same principle, in a short-sighted way, to justify drinking human blood, to spare himself from the unnecessary discomfort of not drinking human blood. It’s short-sighted in that Lestat does not consider the unnecessary suffering that is brought about for the victims.

  It’s a Matter of Taste

  The obvious “justification” for vampires eating people is that, for vampires, humans are really tasty. If humans taste better than rats, then that may be enough reason to choose to eat them. Louis describes Lestat’s killings as if describing a gourmet dinner: “A fresh young girl, that was his favorite for the first of the evening. For seconds, he preferred a gilded beautiful youth. But the snob in him loved to hunt in society, and the blood of the aristocrat thrilled him best of all.” Compared to rats, humans are a marvelous delicacy. But the pleasures of the palate do not excuse the immorality of drinking human blood either. Given the choice between killing a person and killing a rat, killing the rat is the lesser of the two evils. Saying that killing the human is the better choice, because they taste better, does not make the act any less evil.

  All of this, of course, presupposes that human beings do have some kind of value that is of greater worth than that of a rat. All kinds of justifications have been offered for the greater worth of humans, but many of them fall flat: that human beings have souls, and animals do not, for example. It’s hard to prove either way that humans have souls and animals do not, without appealing to the authority of a religious text, which draws its authority from faith, not reason. However, since we are discussing vampires as possibly humans who have lost their souls, we should entertain the notion. The intrinsic value of a soul might provide a reason to choose animals over humans. Something is intrinsically valuable if we value it for no other reason other than for what it is. Money has instrumental value because it can get us stuff. Happiness has intrinsic value, because we value it for what it is. The Judeo-Christian tradition is pretty clear on the non-soul status of animals, but this does not mean that animals should receive no consideration when we make decisions that concern their well-being.

  Another quality that should be considered is human rationality. Although it’s safe to say that humans reason, since we are aware of our own internal mental states and operations, we cannot say with any kind of authority that animals cannot reason in any manner. On the contrary there are many animals that seem to have an intellect that is at least equivalent to a human child’s.66 Finally, consider that both humans and animals can feel pain and suffering.

  What separates humans from animals may not be any particular quality, but more precisely, the degree to which humans possess the quality. Humans clearly have a greater capacity for reason than animals do, and this extends our cap
acity for suffering in unique ways. We as humans can worry about our futures. We can be actively aware of the things we have not acquired yet and be aware of our lost capacity for acquiring those things. When I see my lemon tree slowly withering from disease, I realize that I have lost all the future fruit that the tree will bear, which makes the loss of the tree that much more unfortunate. When my life is put into danger, I realize not only that I may lose my life, but also that my wife may lose her husband. Choosing to kill a human over a rat is choosing to bring more unnecessary pain and suffering into the world, which is universally undesirable, something that even some vampires try to avoid.

  Perhaps vampires don’t need human blood to survive, but to thrive. To reach their full potentials, they need to eat humans. Vampire popular culture is a mixed bag on this point. Vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, notably Angel and Spike, can thrive on butcher’s blood fighting off a litany of demons and gods.67 However, when Lestat survives and grows stronger “on the diet of the blood of snakes, toads, and all the putrid life of the Mississippi” he still looks likes a corpse. Without human blood Lestat is weak and putrid; with human blood, Lestat can read people’s minds and is handsome and vital.

  There are two problems with this position. First is the problem of what is meant by full potential. Peak physical condition is not always necessary for a person to reach his or her fullest potential. Steven Hawking is an excellent example of a person who has been hampered in reaching his fullest potential, yet still greatly excels in life. Or perhaps Hawking has reached his own individual physical potential. In either case, the condition of his physical body is irrelevant to whether or not Hawking is excelling in life. Few would argue that Lou Gehrig’s disease has made Hawking less of a physicist. The second problem with this position is to assume that there is only a singular maximum that people can reach. Imagine Louis swearing off humans, and surviving solely on rats. He could have a lucrative career as an exterminator. What makes this choice better or worse than his eating human beings and developing mystical empowerments? Any answer that could be given to this would rely on either an arbitrary social standard (being an actual mind reader is better than being an excellent exterminator), or on some moral standard. It’s almost not worth stating that being an excellent rat exterminator is better, morally speaking, than being a serial killer.