There’s another, typically internalist theory that doesn’t quite fit into the category of either strong or weak internalism as I have described them here. The coherence theory of justification is a view that also requires a sort of internal, reflective evaluation, but this evaluation concerns whether the belief one is thinking about adopting coheres with the other things one already believes. A given belief is justified to the extent that it coheres.
Is Dexter operating in accordance with the coherence theory of justification? Perhaps. Consider his investigation into Jonathan Farrow in Season 4. The department finds blood and a fingernail in Farrow’s apartment. The fingernail turns out to belong to a woman whose arm was found inside the body of an alligator. Dexter forms the belief that Farrow is a killer. This belief coheres with all of his other beliefs at this point. So, he decides to kill Farrow.
This case, as loyal Dexter viewers might now recognize, points to a serious problem with coherence theory. The beliefs we have might be internally consistent, but this doesn’t mean that such beliefs will be true. As it turns out, Farrow is innocent. If we have no reason to believe that our beliefs will be true if they are internally consistent, why do we care about coherence?
Hey Dex, Is Your Spidey-Sense Tingling Yet?
We might want to move in a different direction entirely. By contrast to internalist theories of justification, externalist theories hold that not all justifiers need to be cognitively accessible to the believer. One of the most prominent externalist theories is reliablism. According to this view, a belief is justified if it is the product of a reliable belief producing mechanism or process. Imagine that your son is out playing with his friends and you hear them all talking. Your son tells a big whopper of a lie. You know that it was your son and not one of the other children that lied because you can reliably pick out the sound of his voice. It seems plausible that many, perhaps even the majority of our beliefs are formed in this way.
This view is initially promising as a candidate for the way Dexter might be justified. As John Kenneth Muir points out in another chapter of this book, Dexter’s ability to recognize other serial killers is so amazing it’s like a superpower. Recall the flashback to Dexter’s first human victim, the nurse who tried to kill his father. All it took was a look passed between the two of them for Dexter to report to Harry, “She’s . . . like me.”
The problem is, Dexter’s overall methods are not all that reliable. Dexter himself claims that using his spidey-sense alone is not sufficient for determining the guilt or innocence of his potential victims. He says, “My instincts are impeccable, but I have to be sure of my prey” (“Popping Cherry,” Season 1).
Just as very few lawyers would win case after case employing the courtroom techniques that Perry Mason employs (in fact, many would probably be disbarred), few vigilantes would be successful if they employed the standards that Dexter employs. As Daniel Malloy points out elsewhere in this book, a significant amount of moral luck is involved in the show. Dexter happens to kill guilty people most of the time, but, given his investigative techniques, he could just as easily have killed innocent people. Sure, he does the occasional DNA test or background check, but he’s much more likely to carry carving tools than fingerprint powder and luminal along with him on his little outings.
More than a Feeling?
I don’t think it’s unusual that, in one episode Dexter seems to have one notion of justification and in another episode he acts according to a different notion altogether. He slashes all across the conceptual space. Perhaps this is because Dexter’s Code did not initially come from him, it came from Harry. The poor boy just wanted to kill things; he didn’t understand the deeper philosophical foundations for his father’s lessons. Perhaps Harry didn’t either. He was just trying to make the best of a bad situation.
The fact that Dexter’s theory of justification is all over the map points to the conclusion that, when he claims he has to be certain, he is employing the first sense of certainty we discussed in this paper. Certainty for Dexter is just a particular kind of feeling. He looks like a coherentist in some moments, a strong internalist in others, and a reliablist in still others because employing one method makes him feel certain at some moments and other methods at others.
But, as we said at the beginning, this view of justification is not sufficient for knowledge, Feeling certain often has nothing to do with actually being right. If this is so, Dexter doesn’t have justification sufficient for knowledge of the guilt of many of the people he chooses to kill. Would he want to know this so he could change, or would he rather satiate the cravings of his Dark Passenger in blissful ignorance so long as he feels justified? He could potentially hurt a lot of innocent people. He could have one strapped to his table right now. “Tonight’s the night. And it’s going to happen again, and again . . .”
6
Dexter the Self-Interpreting Animal
BRIAN GREGOR
What does it mean to be human? This is the central question of philosophical anthropology. It’s also a question that Dexter poses in a fascinating way. The Dexter TV series suggests that being human is not simply a matter of being a member of the species Homo sapiens; Dexter is clearly a human in a biological sense, but is he human in the deeper sense of the word? And what might that deeper meaning be? This question arises throughout the series as Dexter wrestles with his own humanity (or lack thereof). As to what this humanity might be, the series leaves us with more questions than answers: just the sort of territory where philosophy feels at home.
Riffing on Aristotle’s famous definition of the human being as a “rational animal,” the philosopher Charles Taylor defines the human being as a “self-interpreting animal.” To be human is to interpret oneself, to work out one’s sense of identity as a self. Who am I? What am I doing here? Where am I going? How should I live? It’s human nature to ask these questions, to examine our lives and represent ourselves in art, stories, and other cultural expressions. But Taylor’s point is not merely that we examine and represent ourselves. More profoundly, our identity as selves—our very being as humans—comes into being through self-interpretation.
We’re used to thinking about our identity, our humanity, our “self,” as something we have, pretty much like we have a head, limbs, and organs—as an interpretation-free fact, an object, a thing among other things. But Taylor maintains that self-interpretation does not interpret some “thing” that is already there, just waiting to be interpreted. Rather, self-interpretation brings our selves into being. Humans are different from other kinds of life. At a certain point of maturity, plants and non-human animals have fulfilled their potential. They are what they are. They are all they will ever be. But the human being is more than biological; although we reach a point of biological maturity, we never arrive at a final point where we simply are what we are. Who knows what new twist might lead us to re-evaluate the meaning of our lives? We’re like stories whose endings are not yet written.12
In a particularly philosophical moment, Harry explains this to the young Dexter: “When you take a man’s life, you’re not just killing him. You’re snuffing out all the things that he might become” (“Popping Cherry,” Season 1). As human beings, we’re always becoming, until the day we die. Our identities are always in process. Who we are—our very being as humans—is always growing, developing through our self-interpretations.
Those of us who know and love Dexter will recognize the truth of this. Dexter is indeed a self-interpreting animal. He is constantly interpreting himself, trying to understand who he is, what he’s doing, and where he’s going. We witness Dexter’s changing self-interpretation, and through this interpretation his becoming human. In the earliest episodes, Dexter interprets himself as more of a monster than a human being. At one point he describes himself, only half in jest, as “the wooden boy” (“Popping Cherry,” Season 1). But unlike Pinocchio, who dreamed of someday becoming a real boy, Dexter doesn’t suggest any such hopes for himself. Yet as the se
ries unfolds, his self-understanding is challenged by what Michael C. Hall calls Dexter’s “percolating sense of his own humanity.”13 As his relations with others develop, Dexter encounters his humanity surging up—much to his surprise, and at times, perplexity. Dexter’s humanity is highly problematic, but it’s growing, and we see a vital sign of it in his desire to understand himself. Dexter’s condition as a self-interpreting animal—which is to say, as a human being—is evident in three ways: in his self-evaluation, in the need for recognition, and in the narrative order of his life.
Dexter’s Inescapable Framework
One way we interpret ourselves is by evaluating ourselves. We distinguish which actions, feelings, and ways of life are good or bad, higher or lower, noble or shameful, deep or superficial, more or less fulfilling. These distinctions reveal a sense of responsibility: I’m responsible for myself. To paraphrase Martin Heidegger, my being is an issue of concern for me.14 It’s somehow up to me what sort of being I am going to be. But who do I want to be? And who should I be? What is the meaning of my life? What sort of life, what activities, what relationships are worth pursuing? To be human is to be in the process of asking—and living out a response to—these questions. To be human is to interpret oneself and one’s aspirations in this way.
Taylor says we can never ask these questions without bringing along our fundamental assumptions about what is good, worthwhile, and meaningful. We ask these questions within a “framework” of meaning and value. This framework gives me a conception of “the good”—that is, what is good for me individually and what is good for human beings in general.15 These frameworks give us “a picture of what human beings are like,” what is good for them.16 They give us a picture of what the world is like, about the way things really are.
We inherit these frameworks from a variety of sources, like family, social practices, cultural traditions, art, religion, and philosophy. In Dexter’s case, they come mostly from Harry, who gave Dexter the Code, but even more significantly embraced him as his son and showed him love. Of course, like Dexter we all have to take up these frameworks and make them our own: we critique them, reinterpret them, and sometimes reject aspects of them. But we can never build them from scratch, choosing whatever we happen to prefer. One’s sense of the good, meaningful, and worthwhile runs much too deep for it to have arisen from arbitrary choice. In a certain sense, these frameworks are given to us, and we cannot simply revise them on a whim. They reach too deeply into our identities for that.
Because we have these frameworks, we never encounter the world as a bunch of cold hard facts. Instead, we encounter the world as already interpreted according to our sense of what matters, what is meaningful, what is worthwhile, and what is good. Even when we’re unable to articulate this framework theoretically, it’s still there. It’s also true that different people often have different frameworks; but it’s impossible for a human being to exist without one. As Taylor puts it, these frameworks are “inescapable.”
Has Dexter Overcome Humanity?
Is Taylor right? Are these frameworks really inescapable? It might seem that Dexter is an exception—that he doesn’t have real convictions and intuitions about the moral order of things. It might seem that Dexter has no real basis on which to evaluate himself or his actions; he is a sociopath with murderous impulses and an impaired sense of right and wrong. That’s why Harry’s Code is so important: it gives Dexter guidelines to avoid being caught and executed for his killings. The Code is a useful convention to protect Dexter, but it doesn’t provide any deeper orientation regarding the moral order of things, such as why human life matters or why murder is actually wrong.
But that’s a superficial understanding of the Code. However problematic the Code might be, it’s nevertheless set within a framework of fundamental convictions and intuitions about good and evil. When Harry explains his plan for Dexter to kill people who deserve to be killed, he’s clearly presupposing certain convictions about the moral order of things: there is good, and there is evil, and some people deserve to be killed. This background proves vital to Dexter’s formation; without it, he would very likely have ended up like his estranged brother Brian, the Ice Truck Killer. Dexter clearly operates according to fundamental convictions about the higher and lower, better and worse. The Code is too abstract, too formal to have any real claim on Dexter unless it was rooted in some deeper, more fundamental intuitions about the nature of things: for example, life is worth living, innocence should be protected, and evil deserves to be punished. Dexter owes these intuitions to Harry’s influence in his life, but they are too fundamental, too deeply rooted, to have arisen from the Code alone.
This is not to say that Harry, Dexter, or anyone else in the show gives an argument defending these fundamental convictions. But there is an implicit framework of meaning and value that forms the background of Dexter’s actions, and this indicates something of his humanity—however damaged that humanity may be.
This humanity is not apparent to Dexter. At times he sees himself as having moved beyond humanity: “I’m neither man nor beast. I’m something new entirely, with my own set of rules. I’m Dexter” (“Let’s Give the Boy a Hand,” Season 1). And by the end of Season 2 it might seem that Dexter gives up evaluation altogether when he overcomes the binding authority of Harry’s Code: “Am I good? Am I evil? I’m done asking those questions. I don’t have the answers. Does anyone?” On this account, Dexter might seem to have escaped any framework of meaning and value; perhaps he has even moved beyond humanity, like Nietzsche’s Overman (Übermensch ), creating his own moral reality, beyond good and evil. But even if we take Dexter’s self-interpretation as authoritative—and it’s not always clear that we should—does this mean he has left all moral frameworks behind?
No, it doesn’t. Dexter may feel justified in revising Harry’s Code, making it his alone, but even his revision of the Code assumes certain fundamental convictions about reality, and it’s impossible to create new convictions that have no reference to the way things are.17 Although Dexter continues to show a startlingly clear conscience over his killings, this is because he believes that he’s justified in killing these people, since they deserved to die. So in Season 4 his response is quite different when it turns out that Farrow, the thoroughly loathsome photographer whom Dexter killed, was not in fact a murderer. Following this mistake, Dexter finds himself burdened by his responsibility. He tries to shake this burden by reinforcing his sense of who he is (“I don’t do ‘should’ves.’ That’s not me. It’s not me”). But he is “uncomfortable” nonetheless—not merely because he violated an abstract Code, but because Farrow, unlike Dexter’s previous sixty-seven victims, didn’t deserve to die (“Road Kill,” Season 4).
None of this suggests that we should view Dexter as living a good life. Dexter’s understanding of himself and his actions is highly problematic, and he has a very murky understanding of what is good and why. But it’s clear that he interprets himself and his actions against a background of more fundamental convictions about the nature of reality, and this is a vital sign of his humanity. He’s not merely an inhuman monster acting on animal impulses and following a formal code to avoid being caught. Dexter is severely damaged, but his humanity is still evident in the fact that he interprets and evaluates himself and his actions.
The Need for Recognition
You haven’t got the first idea who you are, have you? Dexter, meet Dexter. I’m going to help the two of you get to know each other.
—LILA ( “See-Through,” Season 2)
Human beings are also relational animals, and our sense of who we are is inseparable from our relations with others. As Taylor argues, we do not interpret ourselves in isolation; instead, we work out our identities in dialogue—some overt, some internal—with others.18 Most contemporary discussion of this idea derives from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who argued that identity is always mediated by others.19 My sense of who I am is mediated and confirmed by those significant others whose o
pinion matters to me. There are endless ways that I can interpret myself, but unless others recognize me as I see myself, my sense of identity cannot be fully realized.
In order to understand ourselves, then, we need to be understood. This is a recurring theme for Dexter, who describes this need for recognition as a desire to be “seen” for who he really is. Yet genuine recognition seems almost impossible for Dexter, since it would reveal his identity as a serial killer. The young Dexter did, however, experience this recognition from Harry. Early in the first season he tells us that “Harry was the only one who saw me—really saw me.” Harry recognized Dexter’s dark impulses, showed him genuine love, and tried to help him. This recognition is crucial to Dexter’s sense of identity.
Yet Dexter also admits that “Sometimes I’m not sure where Harry’s vision of me ends and the real me begins” (“Let’s Give the Boy a Hand,” Season 1). Dexter’s sense of himself is caught in a conflict of interpretations—between Harry’s vision of who Dexter is, Dexter’s sense of who his “real” self is, and the humanity that Dexter finds surging up within himself as his relationships develop. This tension is heightened by the fact that Harry wants Dexter to be human, yet has given him a Code that works against that possibility by limiting Dexter’s human relationships. The Code focuses on Dexter fitting in, but these relations with others are meant to keep up appearances; he warns Dexter not to let other people get close. He tells Dexter that Deb will keep him “connected” (“Popping Cherry,” Season 1), but even she can’t see the “real” Dexter. The real Dexter can never come into the open, which is why Harry is always warning him not to become too involved with others. But the problem is that Harry’s Code doesn’t take seriously enough the possibility of Dexter becoming human, that he will desire to be “seen” by others. And so Dexter continues to think of himself as a master of disguise, wearing masks to protect his “true” identity.
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