Dexter and Philosophy

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

You might think that it’s just obvious that psychopaths, such as Dexter and the menagerie of serial killers he murders, are morally responsible for their actions. After all, they’re running around Miami killing people. They’re doing something wrong and that’s all there is to it. They should be locked up and made to pay for their crimes.

  Well, okay, I can sympathize with you on that. But there are many different kinds of responsibility. If a three-year-old child steals a chocolate bar while shopping with her parents we wouldn’t really say that she’s deserves to be held morally responsible for stealing. She’s too young to understand that taking the chocolate without paying is wrong. Yes, she is causally responsible for causing something bad to happen, but is that the same as being morally responsible? This is a good teaching opportunity for her parents, but a child is not necessarily an appropriate target for moral blame. So, what makes moral responsibility difference from other kinds of responsibility?

  First, there’s a difference between legal and moral responsibility. Something can be illegal without being morally wrong. For example, in an early episode of Dexter (“Let’s Give the Boy a Hand,” Season 1), we find out that Dexter’s girlfriend, Rita, has a neighbor with a yippy dog. The dog barks through most nights and keeps Rita and her children from sleeping. Rita eventually gets fed up and confronts her neighbor. She asks her to do something about the dog but her neighbor refuses. She says that the dog is her ex-boyfriend’s, she doesn’t really like it, and that she’s just going to let it stay in her backyard and bark all it wants. Rita also learns that the dog is never taken for walks and is rarely fed. She also has really good reason to think that if the Humane Society or the police were called nothing would be done about the dog, as there are no obvious signs of animal abuse. Rita responds by breaking into her neighbor’s yard, stealing the dog and giving it to a family with two young children that she knows will take care of and love it.

  Now, what Rita did is unquestionably illegal. She broke into her neighbor’s home and stole her pet. But it is not clear that she did something morally wrong. After all, she rescued an animal from abuse, gave it a good home, and she protected her children. It actually sounds as if she’s done something morally right and that she deserves to be praised for her action.

  Likewise, something can be morally wrong without being illegal. For example, cheating on your significant other is morally wrong but it’s not illegal. When Dexter cheats on Rita with Lila, he does something morally wrong but he’s not breaking any laws (“Dex, Lies, and Videotape,” Season 2). And if we, as a society, decided that every moral transgression ought to be illegal, well, we’d all be in prison.

  Serial killers are clearly breaking the law. And Dexter is just as legally responsible for murder as any other murderer would be. Even if many viewers admire his vigilante justice he’s still legally on the hook for his ever-growing body count if he’s ever caught. And I’m not trying to suggest that he should get off the hook for his crimes. While serial killers might fail to be morally responsible for their actions there are clear legal and pragmatic reasons for locking them up.

  People can be responsible for their actions in both an attributive sense and an accountability sense.7 It is easy to conflate these two notions of responsibility so we need to be careful. To attribute responsibility to someone is to make a factual judgment about what they have done or perhaps what kind of character they have. When we make this kind of judgment, we’re saying that someone is causally responsible for an undesirable state of affairs or performed poorly at an assigned task. The little girl who steals a candy bar from a store is responsible for theft in an attributive sense. We can surely hold serial killers responsible for their actions in this way. Their actions clearly cause the death of their victims.

  But we haven’t said anything about whether or not the little girl deserves to be held accountable for her actions. While we attribute responsibility for stealing a chocolate bar to her, it’s a further move to say that she is accountable for this theft and that she ought to be blamed and punished for stealing the chocolate bar because that is what she deserves. This second notion of responsibility is responsibility as accountability. To say that someone is accountable for their actions is to judge that the person ought to account for their behavior. It is to treat the person as deserving of sanction or retribution if they did something wrong or, if they did something right, it is to acknowledge that the person is deserving of praise. And there’s at least some reason to think that for Dexter, the Ice Truck Killer, and other psychopaths, it would be unfair to hold them accountable for their actions in this sense.

  I’ve Always Sensed There Was Something Off about Him

  While it’s possible that not all serial killers are psychopaths, many serial killers satisfy the criteria to be diagnosed as psychopaths. And there are several things that psychopaths are incapable of that might make it unfair to hold a serial killer who is also a psychopath morally accountable. First, serial killers might not be capable of being motivated by moral concerns. Psychopaths do not experience moral emotions such as guilt, regret, or empathy.8 The exact cause of their impoverished emotional understanding is still unknown but the cognitive sciences have identified brain abnormalities and genetic sources as likely causes.9 Note that these all are causal factors that the psychopath is in no way responsible for.

  We’re told over and over that Dexter and his brother do not feel anything. In one of Dexter’s first inner monologues he tells us “I don’t know what made me the way I am but whatever it was left a hollow place inside. People fake a lot of human interactions but I feel like I fake them all and I fake them very well. . . .” When describing his sister, Dexter tells us “She’s the only person in the world that loves me. I think that’s nice. I don’t have feelings about anything but if I could have feelings about anything at all I’d have them for Deb.”

  Even his dating decisions are made without emotion. He decides to date Rita, a single mother of two who’s the survivor of domestic abuse. Her abusive past has left her afraid of intimacy and sex, which suits Dexter well because his impoverished emotional life leaves him incapable of maintaining relationships that require emotional depth and intimacy. One of the running themes in Dexter and Rita’s relationship is Dexter’s attempts to fake emotional intimacy with Rita despite his lack of feelings.

  The fact that psychopaths typically have an impoverished emotional life has led some philosophers to claim that they are incapable of being motivated for moral reasons. One reason for thinking that the average psychopath lacks the ability to be motivated by moral concerns is that psychopaths can’t feel empathy. They can understand that people guide their behavior by moral demands and that moral norms give reasons for why it is wrong to hurt people, but they do not feel any of the emotions that tend to motivate other people to act on moral norms. For example, they lack the ability to feel compassion for the suffering of others. And often, they can accomplish their own goals best by ignoring moral demands. Without the ability to experience the emotional component of moral demands, psychopaths have a hard time seeing why moral demands ought to take precedence over other sorts of demands.

  Like the businessman who says “I understand that it is morally wrong to harm the environment but this is business and I stand to make lots of money by harming the environment,” the psychopath finds it impossible to set aside her own wants and needs in order to muster motivation to act on moral reasons. The businessman is unlike the psychopath in one crucially important respect. When he decides that moral obligations are less important than his economic success, it is not because he suffers from a brain abnormality. It’s because of a moral failure that is directly attributable to his values and priorities. The psychopath, by contrast, lacks moral motivation, not because of a failure to properly prioritize the various demands that are placed upon him, but rather because of a physical inability to feel the emotions necessary to motivate himself to act upon moral demands.

  The Ice Truck Killer is clearly like t
his. He’s very bright and can understand the reasons people do moral things, like refraining from killing other people. He just doesn’t feel any motivation to act on moral reasons. He understands that it is morally wrong to kill people but he just does not care and cannot bring himself to care. And he thinks his little brother, Dexter, is making a silly mistake by allowing himself to be constrained by Harry’s Code. “You’re trapped in a lie, little brother, the same lie they tried forcing me into,” he tells him. “But you’re not alone anymore, Dexter. You can be yourself with me . . .” And what the Ice Truck Killer has in mind by this is “a killer without reason or regret.”

  There’s also reason to think that many serial killers are compelled to kill by irresistible desires. This is definitely the way Showtime portrays its serial killers. The second season’s story-arc for Dexter involves him dealing with his murderous impulses as an addiction which eventually evolves into identifying with himself as a killer. He joins a drug addiction support group and spends much of the season struggling to “stay clean.” Many of the serial killers we’ve seen in the series also experience their impulse to kill as an unwanted addiction. The Ice Truck Killer describes his desire to kill as a “hunger that is never satisfied.” Dexter’s Season 4 nemesis, the Trinity Killer, was compelled to recreate tragic deaths from his childhood again and again. He doesn’t want to keep doing this and we see him building his own coffin at one point during the fourth season. He’s thinking of killing himself to stop the cycle, to stop the irresistible homicidal urges he has grappled with for decades.

  Psychopaths look as if they’re incapable of being motivated by moral demands through no fault of their own. Many of the serial killers we see on Dexter look as if they suffer from an irresistible urge to kill. Many ethicists have argued that it would be unfair to blame someone if they couldn’t help but do what they did. If serial killers really are incapable of doing other than what they do, then it looks as if they shouldn’t be held morally accountable for their crimes.

  A Little Bird with a Broken Wing

  There’s a second kind of ability that serial killers lack that could exempt them from being held morally accountable. When we learn about the tragic history of Dexter and his brother, Brian Moser, we note that their psychopathic behavior has deep roots in tragic early-childhood events that they were not responsible for. Dexter and his brother did not choose to have their mother brutally murdered in front of their eyes and they definitely did not choose to spend days locked in a shipping trailer sitting in her blood. Yet it’s easy to see the traumatic, character-warping effect this tragic event had on the two boys. When forced to remember that event (“Truth Be Told,” Season 1), Dexter thinks, “A buried memory forgotten all these years. It climbed inside me that day. And it’s been with me ever since. My Dark Passenger . . . something nameless was born here. Something that lives in the deepest darkest hole of the thing called Dexter.”

  In flashbacks to a time before their mother’s death, Dexter and Brian look like normal, rather sensitive little boys. Brian even compassionately puts a bandage on his brother’s hurt knee. To oversimplify a complex psychological story, we might say that even though the brothers were predisposed to develop psychopathic tendencies they could have grown up to be productive, well-adjusted members of society. But their tragic childhoods combined with preexisting genetic dispositions caused them to become sadistic killers.

  And if we flash-forward a few years in each child’s life, it looks like it is sheer luck that placed Dexter in the care of Harry Morgan, the cop that discovers Dexter and Brian at the scene of their mother’s murder ( “Born Free,” Season 1). In a show of compassion for the suffering child, Harry carries Dexter away from the bloody crime scene and takes him home to live with his family, eventually adopting him. Dexter was only three at the time of the murder and fortunately, was too young to really understand what had happened. His brother calls him “a little bird with a broken wing.” Harry raises Dexter in a loving family and Dexter has a relatively normal childhood.

  Brian was not so lucky. He was never put up for adoption. He was more severely traumatized by the incident, probably because he was old enough to understand what was happening and to vividly remember the horrific event. He ends up in a mental institution diagnosed with anti-social personality disorder. At twenty-one he is released and goes on to become the Ice Truck Killer.

  What really distinguishes Dexter from his brother is that Dexter was raised in the loving home of Harry and Doris Morgan and educated in the Code of Harry by his adoptive father. When Dexter’s father sees signs of psychopathic behavior in Dexter, such as killing small animals like dogs and cats, he realizes that there’s a good chance that Dexter will grow up to be a killer. Harry loves his adoptive son and decides to train the boy so that he will know what police look for at crime scenes and be able to avoid getting caught. He also teaches Dexter a Code that ensures that the person he is killing is a ‘bad’ person such as a serial rapist or killer. Reflecting on his upbringing (“Popping Cherry,” Season 1) Dexter thinks, “I am lucky. Without the Code of Harry I would have surely committed a senseless murder in my youth, just to watch the blood flow.”

  It’s a matter of mere luck that Dexter and Brian end up as they do. Neither played any role in becoming a psychopath. This was something that happened to them. Furthermore, the fact that Dexter kills other serial killers and Brian kills prostitutes is ultimately because of factors beyond either of their control. Brian kills prostitutes because they’re easy prey and maybe because his mother was also a prostitute, while Dexter kills serial killers because his adoptive father taught him to. Neither killer plays a role in developing the motivations that guide their behavior. And in Dexter’s case, the values that make him in some sense more admirable than his brother are those that he was indoctrinated into by his adoptive father.

  You Can’t Help What Happened to You. But You Can Make the Best of It

  All of us undergo some degree of childhood indoctrination by parents, our education, our culture and other sources. This gives us character-traits that influence how we interact with the world and values and beliefs about right and wrong and the way the world is. Much of this is positive. We are usually taught that we’re members of a moral community and that other people are also members of that community who should be treated with respect. We learn that others are intrinsically valuable and we learn to emphasize with their needs.

  This all happens before we develop critical thinking skills and before we gain an ability to reflect on what we’re learning. In significant ways each and every one of us are passive when it comes to what values and beliefs about the world we initially adopt.

  Some of us are unlucky, like Dexter and Brian. Traumatic childhoods can twist and break us. And if we truly come out of our childhoods so damaged that we are incapable of being motivated by moral reasons or of emphasizing with the suffering of others, then it might be unfair to treat us as fully morally accountable agents. We’ve become something else more akin to a genuine monster or a rabid dog. And the serial killers that Dexter grapples with are indeed monsters. Deadly, yes. Do they need to be locked up? Clearly. But morally accountable? Probably not. Like the rabid dog the serial killer does not deserve to be held morally accountable.

  But Dexter is a more complicated creature than your average psychopathic killer and his moral standing is just as complicated. The supportive environment his adoptive family provided and the moral code that Harry indoctrinated Dexter with leave Dexter with the ability to respond to moral demands. Whereas the Ice Truck Killer indulges in murderous behaviour that targets innocent individuals, Dexter has managed to direct his psychopathic tendencies so that he only targets other serial killers. While Dexter’s behavior is still morally problematic, some might think he deserves at least a little praise for using his own deficiencies to protect the general public from other monsters.

  Dexter is not merely performing actions that are more desirable than those of other serial ki
llers. He actually evaluates the code that Harry gave him. He questions it, even thinks about abandoning it, and eventually decides to embrace a modified version of Harry’s Code. This shows that Dexter has the ability to critically reflect on his moral beliefs and values and modify them if he finds they are mistaken. Paradoxically, this gives us reason to think that Dexter is more morally accountable for his murders than more mundane psychopaths. This is because he can appreciate that what he’s doing is wrong. It is true that he can’t help himself but he recognizes that there are good reasons why he shouldn’t be allowed to continue to kill people. At one point he even decides that he should turn himself in and atone for his crimes. It would be fair to hold him morally accountable for failing to turn himself in.

  At the same time, the justification that he gives for not turning himself in is tied to the exact sorts of concerns that someone might think make him praiseworthy. Dexter, despite all odds, has built deep relationships with his sister Debra, Rita’s children, and to a lesser extent, Rita. He cares about their well-being and for all intents and purposes really does value them. And he reasons that turning himself in would cause these people immense pain. Considering the effects his actions would have on someone else, putting the needs of others ahead of his own, and emphasizing and showing compassion for another human being are huge achievement for Dexter. The growth he goes through in his quest to become more human is admirable, perhaps even praiseworthy.

  I confess that I’m conflicted about this, and I can imagine a lot of readers thinking that I’m trying to have my cake and eat it too. Does Dexter deserve some moral praise? If so, it’s probably not for following Harry’s Code. Even Dexter recognizes that he should be locked up and made to atone for his murders even if he’s murdering people that deserve to be brought to justice. No, if Dexter does deserve moral praise it’s because he strives to be a better person, he genuinely loves his family, and is trying to be more human. Maybe that’s not enough, for the hard-hearted moralists out there. And maybe they’re right. But I think many of us can find something admirable, and perhaps even praiseworthy in Dexter’s quest to become a better human being. As Dexter himself puts it, “Score one for the little wooden boy . . .”10