Dexter and Philosophy

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

  Let’s apply this to our favorite meta-killer. Because emotions are missing in Dexter, something else (E) is missing in him as well. Whatever this something is, we have it, precisely because we have emotions. We want to know what this something else is and Dexter is just the guy to learn from. Whatever this something else is, Dexter doesn’t have it.

  The Spock Problem

  Imagine yourself almost as you are now. You have beliefs about how the world works, you have values and judgments about what matters, you have a body and can move around, but you have no emotions. Now ask yourself: What else would be missing from my life because my emotions are missing? Spock, Dexter, and the philosopher Robert Nozick will help us figure this out. Spock, while showing no emotion and being very, very rational, reliably advised the very emotional Captain Kirk on the important decisions facing the starship Enterprise.

  The philosopher Robert Nozick offered a thought experiment called “The Spock Problem.”6 Nozick uses Spock to ask whether we regular, emotional folks would actually be better off being like Spock; being rational, having beliefs and making value judgments, but having no emotional feelings that come from them. This is how you just imagined yourself at the beginning of this paragraph. You are all in the same boat now! Like Spock, you and Dexter can have non-emotional feelings like pain and pleasure, tickles, itches and toothaches. Dexter, like Spock, is also pretty darn good at what he does, presumably because he is not hindered by emotions. Unlike Spock, Dexter is a bit cooler, has better luck with the ladies, and loves killing killers, but these don’t seem to be relevant differences for the point at hand. The “problem” Nozick poses is to explain why we wouldn’t be better off without emotions.

  Notice the following interesting point about the Spock Problem: while it seems obvious that oodles and oodles of important things would be missing from life if your emotions were missing (for example having friends), you couldn’t be emotionally bummed out by the fact that you don’t have friends because we’re imagining that you don’t have emotions to begin with! As my friend used to say, “If I had feelings, that would really hurt.” Saying why an emotionless life would be a poorer life is surprisingly difficult. Your lack of emotion cannot cause you any emotional troubles!

  What, then, does Nozick say about why the Spock-like life is an impoverished life? Nozick concludes that emotions connect us to the world of value much as vision connects us to the world of shape and color. Emotions are value perceptions. When we see a red ball, we know redness and roundness directly by being acquainted with roundness and redness, rather than abstractly knowing them through descriptions of redness and roundness that we read in a book (one which is neither red nor round).

  Nozick says that external values actually create an internal replica of themselves inside of us when we respond to situations emotionally. The value of what we take pride in comes to dwell within us and we are directly, experientially knowing it when we are proud. We feel the value of what we are proud of (such as neatly slicing someone’s jugular) when we feel pride, and this is what makes the feeling of pride important. Simply put, emotions connect us more deeply and directly to value than mere reasoning can ever do. With emotions, we feel our values.

  If Nozick’s right, Spock doesn’t have this kind of access to value. He can judge that certain events of the Starship were good, but he can’t feel that goodness. Unlike Spock, you feel the goodness of good things, and the badness of bad things when you have emotional responses to them. Since values vary, people will have experiential confrontations with value on different occasions and in different ways. Perhaps this is a way in which emotions will also cause conflict. But, despite these differences and potential conflicts, we all experience value when we have emotions, and this is why they are important to us.

  The Dexter Problem

  How do these reflections apply to Dexter? This is The Dexter Problem. It appears that Dexter feels neither remorse nor love, nor does he experience deep bonds of friendship, regret, pride, shame, or disgust. He doesn’t feel these things in his relationships with Rita, Deb, or Trinity. Does Dexter feel emotions about his favorite pastime, killing killers? This is complicated. If we take Dexter at his word, he has no emotions and thus no emotions about killing killers. On the other hand, he only feels satisfaction when he kills killers and he sees a moral imperative to do so. Perhaps killing is the only time he gets to feel emotion. When Miguel Prado asks Dexter what it feels like to kill a killer, he says “justice.” So, he definitely feels something. But is it an emotion?

  To say that Dexter does not feel emotions is not to say that he feels nothing at all. This is an important point in understanding the nature of emotions. Dexter feels tired, he feels behind on duties, he enjoys the sun on his skin when he’s on his boat, and he sure seemed to enjoy some sexual lust with his “short-lived” girlfriend Lila. And he enjoys killing. This does not show that Dexter actually has emotions, it just shows that there is a basic difference between emotional and non-emotional feelings. Understanding what emotions are will require knowing just what marks the difference between the two, the subtle difference between an emotional feeling and a ‘mere feeling’, as we might call it. To understand that difference better, we need to understand Dexter a bit better.

  When Dexter is killing, he sometimes thinks about the fact that he’s taking the life of a human being, and the impact on the lives of other human beings his killing will have. When at home with Rita, he thinks about how much she really loves him, or when he’s at work, about how Deb really needs and trusts him. He also realizes that he does not have anything close to kindred or appropriate feelings towards others in these situations. Most of us would naturally feel some sort of regret, shame, or fear if we acted in ways that undermined the things we value, or didn’t show an appropriate response to the things we value, and some sort of pride or self-respect when we do. This is the part that Dexter doesn’t have. He often has the thoughts that an emotionally equipped member of the species would have, including relatively accurate beliefs about what he is doing, and values much like decent folk have, but no emotional reaction or feeling follows from them. This is essential to being Dexter. Most of us wouldn’t be able to do what Dexter does precisely because we would have the emotional feelings normally aroused by the beliefs and values Dexter has.

  Emotional feelings are thus ones that ‘run through’ our beliefs and values, feelings imbued with and saturated by an often complex web of cognitive states, including beliefs, values, judgments, perspectives, construals, and ways of seeing the world. Mere feelings, or non-emotional feelings, do not depend on or run through our beliefs and values. Dexter’s non-emotional feelings of pleasure while having a beer on his boat are due to the way his body reacts to the warm sun and cold beer. On the other hand, were we to feel guilty for killing Miguel, that emotional feeling of guilt would be explained by our beliefs and values. Likewise, we feel pride in things only if we believe that we did them and that they are valuable things to do. This is a very different kind of feeling than a tickle or an itch, or the pain of being bludgeoned by a baseball bat. That would be painful no matter what our beliefs and values may be, but pride is a feeling we have only when certain beliefs and values are in place. And so, one interesting thing about Dexter is that he often believes the things we would believe when we have emotions, but he doesn’t have the emotional part. He has the beliefs that connect us to emotional feelings, but he doesn’t connect to the feelings.

  This small difference not only helps us identify what is unique to emotional feelings, it also shows us something essential to Dexter’s success. Dexter wouldn’t be nearly as good of a killer if he had the affective, emotional connections to his victims, his wife, and sister that most people would have. Maybe that’s what prevents most people from being meta-killers. This is somewhat surprising because we often think that violence comes from an excess of emotion and lack of reason, as with crimes of passion, hate and vengeance. In Dexter, it seems to be the opposite; he kills b
ecause he is too rational and not emotional.

  Dexter is thus better off because he has no emotions, and presents a particularly compelling version of The Spock Problem. At least, given his current life plan to kill as many killers as he can, he is plainly better off than he would be if he had emotions. It might be that he would have a different life plan if he had emotions, but this may just emphasize that he is better off without them. Harry, his dad and mentor, would certainly agree.

  As Goes Dexter, So Go We?

  If this is true of Dexter, how can we be sure this is not also true of us? Perhaps we too would be better off without emotions. We really could be more like Dexter if we wanted to. Since emotional feelings are tied to beliefs and values, we can affect our emotional life by affecting our beliefs and values. We are not simply passive receivers of emotions, but have an indirect control over which emotions we have by controlling what we believe and value. If you simply stopped thinking about your ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend, or stopped caring about them, you wouldn’t have emotions about them. You are then becoming more Dexter-like by having fewer emotions.

  Perhaps we would become less emotional by becoming more Buddha-like and cultivating a detached perspective on our own mental life. There is much about human psychology we would have to examine to know how far we could take either emotion-eradication strategy, but it seems possible that we could become more Dexter-like if we made a goal of it. Dexter did not need to go through the training and discipline we would have to go through. He presumably had this done for him when those drug dealers killed his mom with a chainsaw in front of his little eyes and left him sitting in a pool of her blood. We would take different paths to the summit, but it looks like there is a path we could travel to get there too.

  The question now is whether this would be desirable. We could be like Dexter, but should we? Dexter is pretty cool, in a science-geek kinda way. His wife is hot (so long as she lived), kids are cute, job is exciting, he’s in good shape, and most importantly, his dreams have largely come true—he kills lots of killers. While this might not appear to be a laudable life project to most us, perhaps that is because we’re hindered and small minded due to our emotions.

  Anyway, who are we to say? Whatever floats your boat. The important question is whether we, like Dexter, would be better positioned to achieve our important life aims if we didn’t have emotions, or if there would be something essential and valuable missing from our life. That is, what value, if any, do emotional feelings bring to our life?

  The Good Life and The Dexter-like Life

  Remembering Nozick’s answer to the Spock Problem and Mill’s Method of Difference, perhaps we can now say clearly what is missing from Dexter’s life. Dexter intellectually recognizes the value of Rita, Deb, and his kids, but he doesn’t feel their value. Nozick says that feeling value is itself something valuable, and Mill would add that this is the ‘something else’ that would be missing when emotions are missing. Fair enough, but does Dexter feel the value of meta-killing? When he tells Miguel that killing killers feels like justice, it sure sounds like a value perception. On the other hand, he might just be reporting that he believes he is doing the just thing, and he enjoys certain non-emotional pleasures in the process, since, as he often tells us, he has no emotions. It’s a subtle difference, but an important one. For Dexter, since meta-killing is an act of justice, knowing the justness of meta-killing directly and experientially, perhaps through the emotion pride, would be even better than the meta-killing alone. Taking Dexter at his word and assuming that he has no emotions, poor Dexter’s life is deprived of this kind of value. His life is deficient compared to the same life lived with emotion.

  This seems to answer one of our main questions. What’s the unique benefit that emotions bring to life? Feeling our values, rather than just knowing them abstractly. In the process, we seem to have an answer to the other main question: why not be like Dexter? Because we would not be feeling our values, we would just know them as abstractions. This also explains why we think of emotions as deep. Not only do emotions contain a sometimes large range of our beliefs and values in them, thus containing much of who we are, but we become more deeply immersed in our own values when we respond to the world emotionally. We actually experience our values. This shows us something valuable that we have (assuming you have emotions) but that Dexter does not.

  I think Dexter can strike back here. Simply to show that there is a kind of value that the emotional life has which Dexter does not have is not to show that the former is a better life than Dexter’s. He gets to be a top notch meta-killer, which those fettered by emotion either would not be able to pull off or would be mediocre at were they able to muster it at all. Because of the supreme importance of killing killers for Dexter, he would hate himself if he gained emotions and became unable to kill killers because of these emotions. Even if he got the extra value of feeling the value of his relationship with Rita and his kids, that his job is cool and he has a great sister, the inability to kill killers would presumably outweigh these. So, even if emotions bring some form of value to our lives, the value of what we get by not having them may be greater. Still, Dexter would have to admit that if he were able to continue to kill killers and have emotions about his success in doing so, then his life would be better than it currently is.

  That may be the main question for Dexter, and points to the main question for the rest of us. Whether emotions are worth it will come down to whether we could do what matters most to us, and to do it well, if we were fully emotional. If we could, then the emotional life would be the better life because we will feel its value. If we could not, well, odd as it may sound, we might be better off being more like Dexter.

  3

  Dearly Damaged Dexter

  DANIEL HAAS

  Dexter Morgan is an uncomfortable character to root for. We’re first introduced to him as he drives down the Miami strip, eagerly anticipating the coming night (“Dexter.” Season 1). After weeks, perhaps months, of stalking a potential target, his hard work is about to culminate. He is going to kill Mike Donovan, husband, father of two, and leader of a successful boy’s choir.

  Many of the murders in Showtime’s Dexter are played for laughs, but the Donovan murder is different. It’s a cold horrific affair, one of the few times where the audience is really reminded that Dexter is a sadistic psychopathic killer who enjoys the suffering of his victims.

  First, Dexter car-jacks Donovan by wrapping fishing wire around his neck and forcing him to drive to an abandoned warehouse. Once they’re inside, Dexter throws Donovan against a wall and starts screaming, “Open your eyes and look at what you did.” Donovan, clearly terrified, keeps his eyes closed. Dexter continues in a flat, emotionless voice, “Look or I’ll cut your eyelids right off your face.”

  Donovan opens his eyes to see the rotting corpses of three little boys. You see, Donovan is a pedophile and a murderer and Dexter has recovered the bodies so that Donovan can be shown exactly why he is about to die. Crying, Donovan begs, “I couldn’t help myself. Please, you have to understand.”

  Dexter smirks and says “Trust me. I definitely understand. See, I can’t help myself either.” He pauses. “Children, I could never do that. Not like you. Never, ever kids. I have standards.” Dexter gives Donovan a sedative and prepares his body for the kill, which involves strapping him to a table and wrapping him in plastic-wrap. Dexter takes a blood sample from Donovan’s cheek, a trophy of his latest kill. “Soon, you’ll be packed into a few neatly wrapped Hefties, and my own small corner of the world will be a neater, happier place. A better place.” He then proceeds to cut Donovan’s body into pieces which will later be dumped in the ocean off Miami’s shore.

  I reproduce the scene to illustrate that Dexter is unquestionably a sadistic killer. He stalks, tortures, terrorizes, and brutally murders a person roughly every other episode. And he enjoys it. Yet there’s something sympathetic about him. I hope I’m not alone in this, but I find myself rooting for Dexte
r to catch his victims and hoping that the Miami police never discover his real identity. After all, most of the people he kills are serial killers or rapists who deserve to be punished for their crimes. And Dexter really can’t help himself. He’s got a Dark Passenger compelling him to kill. So, it’s not really his fault, is it?

  But hold on. If I say that Dexter isn’t really morally responsible because he can’t help himself, well then what about all the killers that he stalks and kills? Current brain science seems to show that biology and childhood experiences play a causal role in determining whether or not someone becomes a psychopath. If that’s true, then aren’t the Trinity Killer and the Ice Truck Killer just as compelled to kill as Dexter is? And surely we want to say that the Ice Truck Killer is morally responsible for his psychotic behavior. What is moral responsibility anyhow? And is there a sense in which Dexter is morally praiseworthy for his decision to kill only other killers?

  You’re a Killer, I Catch Killers