Dexter and Philosophy

by Greene, Richard; Reisch, George A. ; Robison, Rachel

  The obvious parallel to this scenario would be when and if Debra discovers Dexter’s unusual hobby. As that hasn’t happened yet, let’s turn to a couple of situations Dexter finds himself in where he has to make a choice, but he didn’t choose the situation itself. To make things simpler, we’ll focus on two situations where Dexter has to choose between two people: one innocent, the other a killer.

  In the first situation, at the end of the first season, Dexter has to choose between the lives of his long lost brother and his adoptive sister. Dexter did not choose to be in the situation—given his druthers Dexter would have preferred to have both of them in his life in some capacity. He wants to keep Brian so that he can have someone with whom to share his Dark Passenger, but he needs Deb to maintain whatever link he has to the rest of humanity. In the end, of course, Dexter makes the “right” choice—he saves Debra and kills Brian. But the choice was difficult, as any interesting moral choice is going to be. The choice also helps the show. We see Dexter at the end of the first season as a monster, but he’s our monster. That’s why the discovery of his dumping ground causes us discomfort. We know he’s a monster, we know he should be stopped, but we also know that even in the face of tremendous temptation, Dexter will follow the Code of Harry, which means he’s only dangerous to killers.

  At least, that’s the theory. The closing episodes of the second season show that Dexter’s threat isn’t quite so clear cut. Once again Dexter has to choose between an innocent person and a killer. But this time the case is complicated because the killer is Dexter himself. As Agent Lundy and the Bay Harbor Butcher Task Force close in, Dexter finds himself forced to kidnap Detective Sergeant Doakes. The interesting decision occurs later, when the task force begins to focus on Doakes as a suspect, and Dexter begins contemplating turning himself in. He can’t kill Doakes—that’s against the Code. At the same time, turning himself in goes against the Code—the whole point of the Code is to prevent his getting caught. But, with the task force focused on Doakes, Dexter sees a way out: frame Doakes. This, of course, is what Dexter chooses to do. It means walking a fine line. On the one hand, it most likely means Doakes’s death—the number of bodies attributed to the Bay Harbor Butcher would probably merit a death sentence, regardless of Doakes’s record of service. On the other hand, Dexter isn’t killing Doakes himself.

  We might say Dexter makes the best of a bad situation. But while he’s certainly doing the best thing for himself, given his dedication to the Code, we can hardly say that he’s doing the right thing. Framing an innocent person for the murder of thirty or more people hardly seems like the right thing to do, under any circumstances. But regardless (for the moment) of the morality of his actions, the fact is that this situation was not of Dexter’s choosing. His whole life is geared around not getting caught, not having his murders discovered at all, much less finding himself confronted with super agent Frank Lundy.

  Clearly there are differences between these two situations. In one Dexter has to choose between himself and someone else; in the other between two people who are important to him. The first situation is something designed for him by Brian—all of the Ice Truck Killer’s moves in season one were dedicated toward bringing Dexter to this point, this choice. The second situation, on the other hand, is something that results partially from Dexter’s willful actions. Dexter didn’t accidentally kidnap Doakes. Still, both situations are beyond Dexter’s control, and they both confront him with difficult choices.

  So, is Dexter responsible for these situations? No, it would hardly be fair to say that he is. However, that does not relieve him of responsibility for what he does in them. Dexter is still capable of opting to do the right thing or the wrong thing in any given situation. While he’s not responsible for being in these situations, just as he’s not responsible for having his Dark Passenger, Dexter is nevertheless responsible for what he does in these situations—or, more specifically, for what he intends to do.

  Teaching the Code of Harry

  When Dexter locked up Doakes, he had no way of predicting that Lila would burn down the shack. So, is Dexter responsible for Doakes’s death? Doakes wouldn’t have died if Dex hadn’t kidnapped him. This is the problem of resultant luck, and it is the aspect of the problem of moral luck that got the ball rolling, as it were. In Bernard Williams’s original essay “Moral Luck,” this is the only aspect of the problem that interests him. And it has largely dominated the argument since then. We can easily see why: few people would argue that a person can be held responsible for their upbringing or the kinds of situations they find themselves in, but the consequences of our choices seem to be the best way we have of deciding the morality or immorality of those choices. But this presumes that we have a level of control over the consequences of our actions—which is not always the case. Dexter had no control over Lila. Or, to take another example from the show, when he chooses not to kill the Trinity Killer when he has the chance, he has no way of predicting the chain of events that will lead to Rita’s death.

  But let’s follow our pattern and look at a couple of parallel cases specifically when someone teaches the Code of Harry to someone else. First, of course, Harry teaches the Code to young Dexter. Then, in the third season, Dexter teaches the Code to Miguel. In each case, the teacher has no idea how this will end up—the consequences are unknown.

  In the first case, Harry teaches his Code to Dexter. There are a couple of questions we have to ask here. First, why did Harry do it? Second, what were the consequences, and how much chance did Harry have of predicting them? As to the first, we run into a bit of a problem trying to answer it. Unlike with Dexter, we don’t have direct access to Harry’s thoughts. We only know what he says. According to his testimony, he teaches Dexter the Code for two reasons. First, it will keep Dexter alive. The Code instructs him how to cover his crimes and to blend in, so that the people around him do not become suspicious (except for Doakes, of course). Second, it will channel Dexter’s urges in a useful direction. In a sense, Harry understands that Dexter is a monster—part of the purpose of the Code is to prevent him from becoming a complete monster, in the style of Brian Moser or Arthur Mitchell.

  What were the consequences of Harry’s actions? Well, Dexter became a very good little monster. Sure, he’s killed lots and lots of people. But, with two notable exceptions, those people were all guilty of fairly heinous crimes. So, it seems in this case Harry is justified by the consequences of his actions. But the fact is that he had no control over how Dexter applied the Code. For all he knew, in training Dexter as well as he did, Harry may have just been creating a more perfect monster. Had Dexter not taken the moral portion of Harry’s Code to heart, it would have made him simply the most prolific monster in history. Harry got lucky, and is only justified because he got lucky.

  By contrast, think about Dexter’s attempt to pass on the Code to Miguel. First, we have to admit that Dexter’s motives weren’t quite as noble as Harry’s. Harry was trying to save his adoptive son—Dexter was just lonely. He taught the Code to Miguel because he wanted, as he always seems to want, someone with whom he could share those parts of himself that aren’t fit for public viewing. Even Harry, who trained him, couldn’t handle that side of Dexter (“There’s Something about Harry,” Season 3). But, it seemed, Miguel could. So, Dexter taught him to kill because he wanted a friend. Not a terrible motive, admittedly, but also not an especially noble one. There is a difference between the understandable and the justifiable.

  Also unlike Harry’s choice, Dexter’s didn’t have great consequences. Miguel decided he could kill whomever he wanted, including defense attorney Ellen Wolf. We could certainly argue that Dexter isn’t responsible for this—we can’t be held completely responsible for the actions of other people. But Dexter did give Miguel the tools, not knowing how he would use them. If I give a child a loaded gun, then I am at least partly responsible for whatever he does with it. In the same way, Dexter is at least partly responsible for Ellen Wolf’s death. He ac
knowledges this, in a way, when he kills Miguel. If there’s anything Dexter’s good at, it’s cleaning up his messes.

  In each of these cases we have the same action—teaching someone how to kill another person and get away with it. In each case the rightness or wrongness of the action depends largely on the consequences that follow from it. And, in each case, those consequences are out of the control of the person who took the initial action. So, how do we determine responsibility in cases like this? Is it fair to say that Harry was right and Dexter was wrong because Dexter follows the whole Code and Miguel chose to ignore the moral aspect of it?

  I don’t think so. At the same time, I do think it’s fair to say that Harry was right and Dexter was wrong, but to see why, we don’t need to rely on the consequences of their actions. Rather, we have to look at how their actions differed. There’s a variety of ways that we can distinguish Harry’s choice from Dexter’s, but the most important difference is found in their intentions. Harry was acting from good, selfless intentions. He wanted to help his son and turn his darkness into something good. Dexter, on the other hand, was acting from selfish intentions. He wanted a friend.

  . . . And No More Fucking Remorse

  Still, there’s a problem with our discussions of resultant luck so far. In each case, we were asking about the responsibility that one person has for another person’s actions. While we do influence those around us, and may encourage or discourage certain courses of action, rarely can one person be held responsible for what another person does. Supposing, for instance, that Miguel had gotten caught; Dexter might have faced some punishment, but the murder of Ellen Wolf would have landed squarely on Miguel’s shoulders. So, in order to fully flesh out the problem of resultant moral luck, we really have to look at something Dexter did himself.

  The best example from the show of one of Dexter’s actions having moral consequences different from those he intends occurs in the Season 4 episode “Slack Tide.” In this unusual, though not entirely unexpected, turn of events, Dex gets sloppy and kills an innocent man, photographer Jonathan Farrow. It’s only revealed at the close of the episode that Farrow was in fact innocent, and so the next episode, “Road Kill” is left to show us how Dexter deals with this error. It is intriguing because Dexter, for the first time ever, experiences remorse. However, being a psychopath, it’s a little different from what you or I might call remorse. Dexter is quite insistent in his internal monologue that Farrow’s murder was a mistake—the kind of blunder anyone might make.

  Remorse, or more accurately agent-regret, is an important concept in thinking about resultant luck. The distinction between remorse and agent-regret is fairly simple. Remorse is the bad feeling that we have done something wrong. Agent-regret is the wish that we could undo some action we have taken. The two are often connected, as in Dexter’s case, but need not be. I can feel regret about some action I’ve taken without being remorseful about it—I regret having dinner one night when I got food poisoning, but I don’t feel remorseful about it. There’s nothing morally wrong with having dinner. But the consequences of that particular dinner were unpleasant, and I’d rather have avoided them. Dexter, in looking on Farrow’s murder afterward, feels both remorse and agent-regret. Oddly, we might claim that he feels the one because of the other. Because he’s remorseful, an unpleasant feeling, he has the desire to erase his earlier action—agent-regret.

  But, as Dexter mentions several times, it was a mistake. He didn’t mean to kill an innocent man. He meant to kill a murderer, as usual. In this one case, Dexter was negligent. Usually, as he proudly proclaimed to Doakes, his code “requires a higher standard of proof than your city’s laws” (“There’s Something about Harry,” Season 2). Indeed, just a few episodes before “Slack Tide,” we get a reminder of just how painstaking Dexter can be when he finds the evidence against Officer Kruger—searching her house, finding the remains of a glove in her trash compactor, testing it for DNA, and so on. But, in the case of Farrow, he slipped. He was just so sure. But that certainty makes no difference. Dexter was wrong, and he has to live with that.

  This example from Dexter is similar to one of the more famous examples used in discussing moral luck: the example of the reckless drivers. Take two reckless drivers. Both start from the same point and are heading to the same place. One makes it there safely; the other strikes and kills a pedestrian. The second driver had no control over the movements of the pedestrian, and so he is now a killer because of something he had no control over. Similarly, Dexter has now killed an innocent man because of something he had no control over: in this one case, the most obvious suspect happened to be the wrong one. He’s no more responsible for that fact than the second reckless driver is for the pedestrian’s movements.

  But, both—indeed all three (because we can include the first reckless driver in this as well)—are responsible for their parts in what happened. The reckless driver who killed the pedestrian isn’t responsible for the pedestrian’s movements, but he is responsible for driving recklessly. Once he’s made that choice, he must accept responsibility for whatever outcomes follow. In just the same way, Dexter chose to kill Farrow—he has to accept that he has killed an innocent man.

  Where the Bodies Lie

  So while the problem of moral luck presents a quandary, it is not unsolvable. Regardless of our background, circumstances, or even the outcomes of our actions, there’s still one key element of moral assessment that we can always be held accountable for: our intentions. Dexter’s a killer not because of his childhood or the wealth of opportunities to kill surrounding him, but because he chose to be one. In the end, he can still be held accountable for that.

  An interesting illustration of moral luck, applicable to Dexter, comes from philosopher David Lewis. In his article “The Punishment that Leaves Something to Chance,” Lewis argues that we should treat attempted murderers the same way that we treat successful murderers.50 To assign an attempted murderer a lesser sentence is to ignore his intentions. This person intended to take the life of another. He’s being rewarded with a lesser sentence for being incompetent, or for his intended victim’s stroke of good fortune. The attempted murderer has performed precisely the same action as the successful murderer. The only difference between the two crimes is likewise the point in the two crimes that relies on luck. Remove that from consideration, and they are identical actions, and therefore should be treated in identical ways.

  What does this mean for Dexter? First and foremost, it means that he’s guilty. He is responsible for all of his crimes, regardless of any mitigating factors. To return to Farrow, we shouldn’t be surprised that Dex killed an innocent man—we should be surprised that it didn’t happen earlier. Every action is, more or less, a roll of the dice. But we still choose where and when and how we throw those dice.

  What does it mean for us? Mainly that we have to rethink how we approach responsibility. Our focus must be on intention. That raises difficulties of its own—we cannot know what other people are thinking, as a general rule. We can, however, get a fairly good idea based on other actions. One of the reasons Dexter makes such a good example is because we have direct access to his thought processes. We are not so fortunate in real life. But we can generally predict a person’s intentions from his or her behavior patterns or character. It’s that, rather than the outcomes of our actions, that we can be held accountable for, and that Dexter will one day have to answer for.

  15

  Why Kill or Not Kill? That Is the Question

  SULTAN AHMED

  I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

  —JOHNNY CASH, “Folsom Prison Blues”

  Personally, I don’t know of any person who has shot a man in Reno, or any other place for that matter, just to watch him die. Johnny Cash does, however, make me wonder why somebody would kill another person. This song was playing once when I flipped the TV on to watch an episode of Dexter, and it got the gears in my head turning. Why does Dexter kill the particular people he choose
s to kill?

  Dexter’s victims belong to one of two groups: killers who manage to escape the justice delivered by the Miami legal system or people who threaten Dexter or those close to him. Save for one accident and one crime of passion following the death of his wife, Dexter has never killed a person who falls outside of one of these categories. This choice of victims is no coincidence. There must be some reason behind it.

  There are those who would have you believe that Dexter is a vigilante fighting for justice. He kills other killers because he feels it is his civic duty to ensure that the killers get what they deserve. These people are arguing that Dexter is a deontologist. This means that he kills the people he kills because he genuinely feels he has a moral duty to do so. For deontologists, the consequences of actions are not the central factor in determining whether an action is right or wrong. Other factors such as intent and a sense of moral duty are more important.

  I don’t believe that Dexter is a deontologist, because it’s not entirely accurate to classify him as one. Moral considerations are not what not primarily guide his blade. He doesn’t frame his killings as moral duties. Rather, Dexter’s select killings of other killers serve his emotional needs as well as those of his father. His deontology has an emotional foundation.