Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy
Page 19
So, having shown that vampirism needn’t be intrinsically immoral, and that there are certainly reasons to desire it for oneself, we’re left with an uncomfortable but uncompromising fact: neither I, nor you, however much we might desire otherwise, is going to become a vampire. So what’s the point of musing about it at all?
Deserving to Be a Vampire
In the end, the thought-experiment of Unlife serves us as a means of understanding the mortal life we actually know and experience, and allows us to focus on just what it is that makes life valuable in the first place. A life that wouldn’t be much good over a span as long as eternity might not be terribly worthwhile for a mere eighty years either. On the other hand, a life overflowing with joy and stimulation, with healthy and thriving relationships, with the satisfaction that comes from dreams pursued and goals accomplished—who wouldn’t want that to last forever? And wouldn’t it be wonderful if it could?
Vampires can be immoral just like we can. It all depends on choices made. A vampire’s eternal life might be as unbearably unsatisfying as our own can be. It all depends on choices made. Since it’s unlikely any of us will find ourselves vampires some day, why not do the next best thing? Try to live a life that would be worthy of eternity.
PART IV
Digging Up the Body Politic
14
The Political Economy of Non-Coercive Vampire Lifestyles
DOUGLAS GLEN WHITMAN
In a Season 5 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy discovers the existence of a vampire brothel, where thrill-seeking humans pay vampires to suck their blood.99 The vampires benefit from the arrangement because, as Buffy’s friend Anya observes, “they get cash, hot-and-cold running blood, and they don’t leave any corpses behind, so they don’t get hunted.” An angry Buffy eventually burns down the brothel. But her Watcher, Rupert Giles, adopts a more accommodating attitude, noting that all the brothel’s customers are “willing victims” and suggesting that Buffy’s efforts might be better spent combating a “less ambiguous evil.”
In the movie Blade, occasional reference is made to blood banks that take deposits from humans and allow withdrawals by vampires.100 Although the movie does not state clearly whether the donations are mandatory or voluntary in nature, the strong implication is that the human government requires humans to contribute blood in order to placate the vampires, thereby forestalling a war between the two groups.101
The Buffy and Blade scenarios present radically different templates for interaction between humans and vampires. The former “brothel” model shows the potential for peaceful and non-coercive coexistence, sustained by the possibility of voluntary exchange. The latter “blood bank” model reveals a quasi-peaceful but coercive coexistence, enabled by forced transfers from humans to vampires.
In this chapter, I will use these two models of vampire-human interaction to explore the conflict between two popular perspectives in political philosophy, which I will refer to as “libertarian” and “welfarist.” In the libertarian perspective, represented by such thinkers as Robert Nozick,102 Loren Lomasky,103 and David Schmidtz,104 people have individual rights the violation or curtailment of which cannot be justified by the needs of other beings, except perhaps under very unusual circumstances. Ideally, interactions between rights-bearing persons should be voluntary in nature, and social cooperation is sustained by the possibility of many such voluntary interactions. In the welfarist perspective, represented by such thinkers as Peter Singer,105 Peter Unger,106 and G.A. Cohen,107 society should be structured to ensure that the basic needs of all people are met, even when it entails sacrifices by others. Social co-operation for this purpose may properly be mandated if it does not occur voluntarily.
Either perspective must specify what kind of beings should be included in the moral calculus. Do only fully developed humans have rights or interests worthy of consideration? Or does moral consideration extend to other types of beings, such as animals, fetuses, and the Undead? I will argue that, on almost any plausible definition of moral personhood, vampires ought to be included. Yet humanity does not seem inclined to adopt such an inclusive definition. On the contrary, most humans believe vampires’ interests ought to be actively opposed. I will suggest, however, that intolerant human attitudes toward vampires are neither fixed in stone nor fully malleable, but instead are influenced by political and economic institutions. People will be most willing to recognize vampire personhood under a more libertarian system (the brothel model), which emphasizes voluntarism and gains from cooperation. On the other hand, a more welfarist system (the mandatory blood bank model) will motivate humans to adopt more restrictive notions of personhood in order to avoid the burdens—in blood and money—of supporting the vampire population.
Libertarianism and Welfarism Defined
I Have Learned Not to Think Little of Any One’s Belief, No Matter How Strange It Be. 108
Libertarian philosophers are united by their support for limited government and individual rights of person and property. They envision a social world in which people interact, for the most part, on the basis of consent and contract. Individuals are regarded as self-owners: they have the moral and legal right to determine the use of their own bodies as they see fit. They may also own parts of the world outside their bodies, usually in the form of private property. In the libertarian vision, people strive to meet their needs and wants through voluntary cooperation and trade with others. Although most libertarians agree with these general conclusions, they arrive at them by various routes. Some, like Robert Nozick, rely on a Lockean notion of natural rights that people possess by their nature as human beings (or perhaps by the grace of God). Others, like Henry Hazlitt109 and (arguably) Friedrich Hayek, 110 justify libertarian conclusions on utilitarian grounds; they contend that individual rights provide the social structure most likely to maximize the happiness of the members of society. Neo-Aristotelians, like Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl,111 ground individual rights in classical notions of virtue and human fulfillment.
Welfarism112 is not a label self-consciously adopted by many thinkers, but a label I have chosen to designate various related perspectives that stand in opposition to libertarianism. Welfarists generally believe that people’s basic needs, including survival and health, outweigh or invalidate individual claims to wealth or personal assets. Such wealth or assets may therefore be forcibly transferred from some people to others for the purpose of meeting the recipients’ needs.113 The welfarist perspective usually either rejects individual rights outright or else regards them as interests that can be overcome by the sufficiently weighty needs of others. In some accounts, the needs of others actually create positive rights to certain services or outcomes (such as healthcare or a minimum standard of living) that other people have a responsibility to provide.
As with libertarianism, these are conclusions, not justifications. Probably the most common justification for welfarist conclusions is utilitarian: if some act or policy of coercion generates greater gains for its beneficiaries (say, the recipients of government welfare) than losses for others (those made to pay taxes), then the act or policy is justified because it creates net benefits to society. Peter Singer and Peter Unger—whose views will be examined more carefully later—both represent the utilitarian brand of welfarism. Others, like G.A. Cohen, assert equality of outcome as a valuable goal in and of itself. Yet others, like John Rawls,114 justify welfarist conclusions on the basis of a contractarian model in which people deliberate over the rules of a just society.
This chapter will not resolve the debate between libertarianism and welfarism. Instead, it will draw attention to a conflict within welfarism that libertarianism avoids. The conflict begins to emerge when we ask the question: are vampires persons?
Vampire Personhood
I Am Neither Good, Nor Bad, Neither Angel Nor Devil; I Am a Man, I Am a Vampire.115
To put the question another way, do vampires possess whatever characteristics would entitle them to moral co
nsideration? In a libertarian framework, moral consideration would imply the possession of equal rights for vampires; in a welfarist framework, the consideration of vampires’ needs and wants would be on equal terms with those of humans. Either way, we need to know whether vampires count as persons from a moral perspective (where “person” means any being that merits moral consideration). Not to put too fine a point on it: if vampires are persons, then hunting and staking vampires constitutes an egregious violation of their rights, a gross indifference to their interests, or both. More provocatively, in the welfarist approach, morality would require providing vampires with regular opportunities to drink human blood.
Robert Nozick summarizes the candidates for characteristics that might signify the possession of rights or morally relevant interests:The traditional proposals for the important individuating characteristics connected with moral constraints are the following: sentient [i.e., capable of feeling or perception] and self-conscious; rational (capable of using abstract concepts, not tied to responses to immediate stimuli); possessing free will; being a moral agent capable of guiding its behavior by moral principles and capable of engaging in mutual limitation of conduct; having a soul.116
Let’s apply each of these criteria in turn. Are vampires sentient? Clearly they perceive the world around them, and they possess the capacity for pleasure and pain. They can suffer from lack of blood, exposure to sunlight, even emotional disappointment. Peter Singer argues that any being that can suffer deserves as much moral consideration as humans: “No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be counted equally with the like suffering—in so far as rough comparisons can be made—of any other being. . . .”117 Under this permissive standard, vampires obviously qualify for moral consideration. Since vampires are also, in most depictions, aware of themselves and the nature of their existence, they still qualify if we require self-consciousness.
Are vampires rational? Like humans, vampires use abstract concepts to impose order on the world around them, allowing them to observe relationships and patterns, to think about the future, and to create plans and execute them.118 There may exist vampires who, like animals, respond instinctively to stimuli—biting at the first scent of blood—but if so, they appear to be the exception. Unlike killer sharks or deadly viruses, vampires are generally depicted as having minds capable of weighing the benefits of alternative courses of action. According to most accounts, certainly those in Buffy and Blade, vampires can resist immediate pleasures to obtain longer-term rewards.119 If they sometimes succumb to their base instincts, the same is true of humans, who sometimes overindulge in food and drink. The difference in rationality between humans and vampires is at most one of degree. Some individual humans have much greater difficulty resisting their passions than the typical vampire. The difference in rationality between the two groups, if any, hardly seems great enough to justify disparate moral consideration.120
Free will is more difficult to assess—for both humans and vampires. As humans, we certainly feel as though we make free choices, but that feeling could be an illusion. There does not exist direct evidence of free will. What would constitute indirect evidence? The answers turn out to be characteristics already discussed: sentience, self-awareness, rationality. If vampires possess these characteristics, then there is just as much evidence for free will in vampires as in humans. As for the intuitive feeling that one possesses free will, any self-aware, thinking organism will most likely experience the same feeling. We can therefore conclude that there is as much warrant for attributing free will to vampires as to humans (while admitting the warrant may be weak in both cases).
Nozick’s next candidate, “being a moral agent capable of guiding its behavior by moral principles and capable of engaging in mutual limitation of conduct,” bears a strong resemblance to John Rawls’s notion of “moral personality.” 121 A being with moral personality is one to whom one can make moral arguments and stand some chance of affecting her choices. This criterion seemingly has greater potential for excluding vampires, at least given popular prejudices about them. Vampires are regarded as indifferent or even hostile to moral constraints on their behavior.
One difficulty with the moral personality standard, as Peter Singer notes, is that it errs by under-inclusion, since infants and young children obviously don’t meet it. More importantly, even grown human beings differ in their degree of moral personality. Some humans are more susceptible to moral argument, others less; yet we generally assume the moral agency of humans as a class.122 Since apparently we do afford consideration to humans with smaller degrees of moral personality, why should we deny such consideration to vampires?
Moral personality is an appealing criterion because it relates to the changeability of behavior: someone with a moral personality can possibly be persuaded to act differently. But there is every reason to believe that vampires can be induced under certain circumstances to behave in a moral manner, even if they do so for purely selfish reasons. In the Buffy episode discussed earlier, Anya observes that vampires seek willing victims at blood-brothels to avoid being hunted. Thus, they can be motivated by strong enough incentives to engage in less harmful behavior. 123 If vampires had greater opportunities to meet their needs without using violence against humans, as would be true if blood brothels and blood banks could operate without fear of attack, the incentive for vampires to eschew violence would be even greater. Without social or legal sanctions, it is likely than many more humans—though certainly not all—would engage in self-seeking behavior at the expense of their fellow humans. If humans and vampires differ in their responsiveness to incentives, it’s only a matter of degree.
Nozick’s final candidate is possession of a soul. This is, of course, where the vampire literature typically draws the line. But soul-possession is vulnerable to the same critique as free will. Lacking direct evidence of the existence of a soul, we must rely on some other signifier. The most plausible signifiers are characteristics already discussed—sentience, self-awareness, rationality, or moral personality. If it cannot be shown that vampires in fact possess souls, it is because we cannot verify the existence of souls at all, even in humans. We simply assert that humans have them and vampires do not.
We need not try to decide among the many possible criteria for moral personhood. There are reasonable arguments for and against each one. Instead, we should simply note the great difficulty of finding any standard for moral personhood that simultaneously includes humans and excludes vampires.
Ethical and Political Implications of Vampire Personhood
I Was in a Totally Black and White Space, People Versus Monsters, and It Ain’t Like That.124
If vampires are recognized as persons, how should a just society deal with them? The dilemma is that vampires can’t live without human blood.125 This need seemingly creates an unavoidable trade-off between the needs of vampires and humans. The survival and prosperity of vampires requires regular sacrifices—of blood, perhaps lives—by humans. Humans naturally resist such sacrifices. At least on first consideration, vampire-human interaction looks like a zero-sum game: the gains to one species are losses to the other. If vampires are just monsters, the conclusion is obvious: humans and vampires will always be at war, and the best interest of humans lies in eradicating the vampires. But if vampires are persons, what then? Could humans justifiably be forced to donate blood for the sustenance of vampires?
The welfarist answer is yes. So long as the gains to vampires exceed the losses to humans, in terms of life, health, longevity, and personal fulfillment for all persons involved, forced transfers of blood are in principle justified. If a pint of blood could save the life of a human child, while causing the donor only temporary weakness, the moral correctness of the sacrifice would hardly be in doubt. With vampires on equal moral footing with humans, a similar sacrifice would be justified to save a vampire child.
But isn’t there an important difference between the obligation to help a
particular individual in danger, such as by rescuing a child drowning in a shallow pool, and the obligation to help many anonymous people on a regular basis, such as by making frequent donations to UNICEF? Welfarist authors Peter Singer and Peter Unger both argue otherwise, contending that the two scenarios are morally comparable. Both affirm a simple principle: “If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it” (Singer 1979, p. 169; Unger 1996, p. 8). That principle, when applied to the vampire dilemma, would mandate regular contributions of blood to vampires in need.
The claim is not just ethical, but also political, for while voluntarism might be nice, it is not necessary in the welfarist mindset. Singer and Unger affirm that full implementation of their principle would mandate massive increases in government aid to foreign nations to abate starvation and disease. Doing so would assuredly involve sacrifice by the domestic population—higher taxes and lower spending on domestic programs. But the same principle that justifies massive aid to needy humans in foreign countries also justifies massive aid to needy vampires at home. Both blood and money donations meet the requirements of Singer and Unger’s principle, so long as the amounts donated per capita aren’t too large. We could easily imagine Blade-style mandatory blood banks as the logical implication of welfarist policy.