Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy
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Perhaps most subtle of all is an attempt to justify their termination on the grounds that they have an altered personal identity given a radical change in life goals and aims. This absolves us of responsibilities we might have to the prior individual. It also opens up the possibility that we might be justified in terminating the zombie out of a respect for the prior identity that is no longer present after transformation. However, none of these justifications are entirely satisfactory, given open questions such as how much of a personality change is required for there to be the categorical claim that a zombie is no longer the “same person.” Perhaps we ought to respect the “new person,” despite the hostility issues. I am not really advocating the implementation of PETZ, a society for the Protection and Ethical Treatment of Zombies. But perhaps a more complex analysis of the relation between personal identity, mentality and value should at least give us pause for concern the next time we bash out the brains of a zombie with a cricket bat.28
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Dead Serious: Evil and the Ontology of the Undead
MANUEL VARGAS
I don’t know whether Undead beings exist. I also think it is an open question whether anyone is evil in, say, the way bad guys are depicted in supernatural horror films and serial killer movies. I do think it’s nevertheless puzzling that the Undead are frequently portrayed as evil in that way. I’m inclined to think that if we were to stumble across any Undead they would be less likely to be evil than any random live person we stumble across. Consider this a call for some Undead understanding.
Some Puzzles about Undeath
Common-sense conceptions of the Undead aren’t perfect, but they are a good place to start. Without a good supply of Undead to study, it simply isn’t possible to proceed by studying them as scientists might. I’ll therefore begin with our ideas or concepts of the Undead.
Some philosophers (the editors of this book, actually) have proposed this account of what we mean by Undead: it refers to “that class of beings who at some point were living creatures, have died, and have come back such that they are not presently ‘at rest.’” This definition seems like a good place to start. It is a perfectly reasonably construal of how we tend to think about the Undead, to the extent that we do, and it is consistent with how the Undead are portrayed in literature, movies, television, video games, and other aspects of popular culture.
On the account we’ve started with, it is a requirement that there be some death involved prior to Undeath. Something Undead can’t have stayed alive. An interesting thing about these elements of our working definition is that we don’t have to have experimented on the Undead to know these things. We just have to have an adequate grasp of the concept of “Undead” to recognize that anything that is going to count as Undead has to have died (and thus lived), in at least some recognizable sense of having died. Because they are grounded in our concepts, let’s call these truths about the Undead conceptual truths.
Conceptual Truths about the Undead
There can be conceptual truths about things that do not exist. There can be conceptual truths about unicorns, even though unicorns surely do not exist (unlike the Undead, perhaps). One such conceptual truth might be that under normal conditions an adult unicorn has a horn. This truth doesn’t require that unicorns exist in any substantial sense. The same goes for any truths about the Undead.
All I mean by the notion of a conceptual truth about the Undead is the idea that from where we currently stand, there are some things that would have to be true of an entity for us to treat it as even a candidate for being Undead, at least right here and right now. Our experiences might give us reason to change our concepts, and thus the conceptual truths about something, but nothing in what follows turns on these sorts of details.
This definition does rule out some things that we might be tempted to think of as Undead. There is a category of creatures called “philosophical zombies.” These are beings who, apart from lacking consciousness, are like normal human beings in their outward appearance. Although the name might distract, I believe that we should hold that philosophical zombies are no more Undead than is the rock musician and horror movie director Rob Zombie.29
Most interesting truths aren’t conceptual. Non-conceptual truths require that we learn something about the way the world is put together. Our common-sense concept of a twenty-first birthday party may require that there be someone (or something) for whom the party is intended (a conceptual truth), but this does not settle when and where a particular party is held, nor whether twenty-first birthday parties are generally good or bad. Concepts don’t settle these things by themselves. Similarly, that there are conceptual truths about the Undead does not mean that all truths about the Undead are purely conceptual. We may discover that the Undead are somewhat different from what we expected, just as we might learn that particular parties are better or worse than we expected.
Sometimes we find that a concept is just not decisive on some issue. Consider the idea that the Undead are not “at rest.” Presumably this means that the Undead are not straightforwardly dead. But are they alive? Are they some other thing? I suspect that we will not find agreement in common sense thinking on this issue.
When common sense is unsettled about something, we have to recognize that any attempt to “clean up” or unify our thinking about some concept will require changing how at least some (and maybe even all) of us think about this issue. In the case of the Undead, this might mean that any attempt to decide whether the Undead are alive, dead, or something else entirely will require departures from the way some or all of us tend to think about these things. These departures might be motivated by things we learn from studying Undead specimens, were we to find any. And, these departures might be motivated by reflecting on accounts we have of life. If, for example, some of the things we thought about the Undead relied on erroneous understandings of what life means, then we should expect that a suitably informed understanding of life might change how we think about the Undead.
For now, it is enough that we acknowledge that (1) there are some conceptual truths about the Undead, (2) these conceptual truths provide partial characterizations of the nature of the Undead that require further supplementation, and (3) what supplementation is provided may change the way we think about the Undead.
Kinds of Undead
I now want to turn to one way of supplementing the way we think about the Undead. It’s helpful to think about two different kinds of things, nominal kinds and natural kinds. What makes something a nominal kind is that it is what it is in virtue of our having defined it that way. “The stuff on my desk” is a nominal kind, in that I can think of or treat it as a kind, but the sense in which it is a kind of thing is very loose and largely (perhaps entirely) dependent on my thinking or stipulating that it is a kind. On the other end of the spectrum are natural kinds, things like water and electrons, which are (let us suppose), roughly, real, non-artificial, non-socially constructed kinds of things. In between, there are presumably lots of kinds of kinds, such as social kinds (ethnicity, and maybe race and gender) and artifactual kinds (computers, toasters, and chairs), and so on.
I believe that the Undead do not make up a natural kind (or an unnatural kind, for that matter). Instead, the term Undead refers to something closer to a nominal kind, a motley crew of different things whose unity is more a function of how we happen to have constructed the category and less a function of any unity in the universe’s own organization. For example, apart from being both thought of as “Undead,” there seems to be little that connects zombies and vampires. One lacks higher mental capacities and the other has them. One requires a diet of brains and the other a diet of blood. One has a body that is rotting and the other has a body that is capable of repairing itself from a wide range of injuries. Indeed, whether an Undead creature is identical to the creature associated with the body prior to death seems to vary. Vampires seem to be their old selves (albeit with a case of vampirism). Zombies, while sporting the rotting bodies of fo
rmer people, do not themselves seem to be the persons who once were in those bodies. It’s not even clear whether a body has to remain even mostly intact in order to count as Undead. At least in principle, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to rule out the possibility of composite Undead, something constructed out of disparate parts, each of which was attached to a different body, each of which died. Perhaps the Frankenstein monster is an instance of an artificially created composite Undead.
If I am right, the Undead do not make up a single natural kind. To put the point somewhat technically (bear with me for two sentences), the Undead make up something like a nominal kind, where various members of that nominal kind (vampires, zombies, composite Undead, and so on) may themselves be further nominal kinds or in some cases natural kinds. What determines the limits of the overarching nominal kind (the borders demarcating Undead and not Undead) is largely fixed by what conceptual truths there are about the Undead, and any constraints imposed by the universe on the reality of the Undead. In other words, there are lots of ways to be Undead, and some of those ways may be more and less a product of our way of thinking about things.
I now want to shift from discussing what we might exaggeratedly call “purely conceptual” issues about the Undead to ways in which some otherwise perfectly boring facts about the world should shape our understanding of the Undead. In particular, I believe we can learn something about the Undead by canvassing some of the possibilities of how Undead creatures might come to be.
First, we must acknowledge Undead of supernatural origin. This would include any Undead brought about by the work of magic. A zombie created by the spell of a sorcerer would be an instance of something Undead of supernatural origin, as would be one created by the will of a demon. Prior to the last part of the twentieth century, this may have been the predominant way of thinking about the origins of the Undead. You might be tempted to think that all instances of the Undead must have supernatural origins (perhaps you think this is a conceptual truth). But this does not seem plausible. Indeed, the trajectory of popular culture has increasingly been to emphasize the origin of the Undead in viruses or biological weapons programs initiated by entirely non-magical agents (see, for example, Max Brooks’s excellent book The Zombie Survival Guide, and movies such as 28 Days Later, Resident Evil video games and movies, Blade comic books and movies, and so on.). Although we might discover that the Undead are entirely of supernatural origin, this is a contingent empirical fact, something we would have to learn from the field and not from the philosopher’s armchair.
A second important class of Undead origin is artificial. These would be Undead who were created by agents (whether human, divine, demonic, or other) by entirely non-magical means. The bioweapons program gone awry in Resident Evil or the accidentally released virus in 28 Days Later would be an instance of the creation of Undead by artificial origin.30
The third possibility would be Undead whose creation is by entirely natural forces, devoid of the intervention of agents. Some accounts of vampirism seem to have this structure, treating it as a virus that developed by mutation on its own, as opposed to, say, the intervention of a lab of genetic engineers or the infernal actions of the devil.
Once you realize that the Undead might be of natural origin, you might also wonder whether we have already encountered some Undead and just not recognized them as such. Consider that there are a range of mysterious, “quasi-living” entities that we do not yet understand well. These include viruses and the even less well known viroids. It’s unclear whether these entities count as living. At least for some of them, it is possible to introduce conditions that stop all quasi-living functioning but then to change those conditions so that their functioning is restored. If we come to count viruses and viroids as living, then those capable of ceasing and recovering their quasi-living functioning might be candidates for the Undead. And, given what we know, these might well make up the largest chunk of the Undead population. Moving up several levels of biological complexity, there are a range of plant and animal entities whose biological functions can be brought to a complete halt and then restored or “restarted.” It is natural to think of many of these things as living throughout the process—seeds are commonly taken to be alive, even when frozen or put in some context where all metabolic activity ceases—but this raises interesting questions about the extent to which being alive is not merely a feature of an entity (the seed) but instead an entity and a context together. Maybe whether you are alive or dead depends on facts about more than you, but also facts about the environment you find yourself in.
Working out all the possibilities of a context-sensitive account of life is too big a project for this essay, but it does suggest a few possibilities for our reflections on the Undead. If we acknowledge that contextual features play a role in determining what counts as living, we would have to say a great deal more about what those features are if we are not to count the Undead as living. In turn, this would open up the possibility that some of the living are Undead. Consider that some people (including baseball player Ted Williams) have been cryogenically frozen soon after their death, in hopes that at some later date they might be revived and restored to life. Should we think of this as a case of someone becoming Undead? What about someone who “dies” in the emergency room but is then revived? Puzzling cases abound for supernatural forms of the Undead as well. Was Lazarus of biblical fame Undead? How about the resurrected Jesus? How about everyone whose body is resurrected on Judgment Day? Resurrection somehow seems different from becoming Undead, but maybe this judgment is a result of our piecemeal understanding of both of these categories.
A useful way to sort out some of these complexities is to suppose that there is a multi-axis continuum of phenomena with poles that include alive, dead, and not-ever-having-been-alive-at-all (NEHBAA). Different kinds of beings, Undead or otherwise, will occupy different places along this multi-axis continuum. That is, lots of everyday stuff will cluster in a range of spaces near one end or another of the alive, dead, and NEHBAA poles (see the diagram below). Your current pet is hopefully alive, but depending on its health it might be more or less close to the dead pole. Your great-great-great grandfather is probably at or very close to the dead pole and remote from the alive pole. Viruses and other unusual creatures rest somewhere between alive and the NEHBAA pole.
If we think about things in this way, it becomes natural to think of Undeath as including a wide range of states that fall in between all of these poles. Vampires may be alive enough to be counted as alive. Zombies might fall on the other side of a vague line demarcating life and death. Composite forms of the Undead (think Frankenstein’s monster) might turn out never to have been alive as a unit (although many and maybe even all parts will have been parts of different entities that were themselves alive), and thus they would be somewhere approaching the NEHBAA pole. Depending on their construction, composite Undead might also come in various degrees of livingness. In sum, the class of Undead creatures is likely to occupy a large and diverse state space, with different kinds of Undead clustering in different areas in that state space. There’s more diversity among the Undead than the usual catalog of vampires, zombies, and so on might lead you to believe.
A Touch of Evil
People use the word evil in a lot of different ways. The sense of evil I’m interested in is perhaps most familiar to us from fictional representations, reserved for a kind of person who has a disregard for morality and a special desire to see others injured. Hannibal Lecter may be the clearest example. Sauron and Iago might also be cases, depending on your interpretations of them. Serial killers, or at least our representations of them (think of John Gacy or Jeffrey Dahmer), tend to fit the bill. This sort of evil (although maybe there are varieties of evil here, too) seems to be recognizably different from other things we sometimes describe as evil.
I want to acknowledge up front that there are other senses of the term evil, senses I am not interested in for present purposes. For example, philosophe
rs and theologians sometimes use evil as a trumped up way of meaning “anything bad from a moral standpoint,” as in when they discuss “The Problem of Evil” (roughly, how could an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God allow bad things to exist?). However, this usage is a very large departure from how we ordinarily talk about evil, to the extent that we do. If you sneak a cookie from a cookie jar, you might have done something morally bad, but it is a stretch to call what you did evil in the sense in which we think of movie serial killers as evil. The sense of evil I am interested in is something closer to how a wide range of people—religious believers and atheists alike—might describe an extraordinarily malicious or cruel individual.
Let us call the more restricted sense of evil with which I am concerned the malevolent sense of evil. What makes something evil in this sense is having motives to harm others, to damage the welfare or well-being of others, and acting on these motives. Agents are evil to greater and lesser degrees depending on the extent to which they have and act on these motives. An agent who only acted on evil motives would be pure evil. An agent who almost never acted on these motives might be said to be hardly evil at all.