Dexter and Philosophy

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

  “Well, Dr. Frankfurt, it seems that I only have two choices: I am either a compulsive who is so compelled that he is not fully a person capable of making free decisions—not so much a person as a machine—or I am blameworthy because I want to be a serial killer and that want is a free choice. I think I like option #1 better” he says as he begins to raise the syringe. “Either I’m killing innocent people and am innocent myself, or they are guilty and I too am guilty.”

  As Professor Frankfurt asks one more question, he pointlessly raises his hands to defend himself, “But Dexter why is it that you are willing to kill me, an innocent person?”

  “Well that should be obvious to you, Professor Frankfurt . . . because, otherwise, I am guilty.”

  Later that night, out on his boat, Dexter watches the pieces of Dr. Harry G. Frankfurt sink down into the depths and realizes that in choosing the first prong of the dilemma, because it was a choice, he’s still guilty . . . and smiles the emotionless smile of the truly free.

  5

  What Dexter Doesn’t Know Can Hurt You

  RACHEL ROBISON-GREENE

  You’ve been called for jury duty. Don’t worry, it won’t take long. The cases you will consider are not arduous civil suits or petty misdemeanors, so your charge certainly won’t be boring. The crimes under consideration are the most ghastly kinds of murders. What would your verdict be in the following cases? The jury instructions are simple: in each case the life of the defendant is on the line, so to be justified in finding him or her guilty, you must be sure.

  Case #1. Suspect: Jamie Jaworski. Jaworski runs a truly disgusting rape and torture website. The distinctive devil tattoo on his arm is present in one of the online videos featured on the site. There is violent pornography in his house. Jaworski fell in love with a married mother of three who is now missing.

  Case #2. Suspect: Jeremy Downs. Downs is a teenage boy who was institutionalized after killing a young man four years ago. He claimed that the boy he killed tried to rape him and that the murder was retaliation. Another boy of a similar age ends up dead and the wound patterns are very similar.

  Case #3. Suspect: a nurse at a local hospital. The nurse gives off “killer vibes.” A sick man doped up on drugs reports that she is giving him too much medication. She keeps a scrapbook of deaths that occurred at the hospital where she works.

  Reasonable Doubts

  If the verdict you came to is that, based on the evidence, you can’t be sure that any of the defendants are guilty, I’m not surprised. A good defense attorney would rip these cases to shreds. There may be enough evidence to make their guilt probable. But Dexter’s Code requires certainty. As he says “My father taught me one thing above all others—to be sure.” This certainty requirement ensures that he only kills the bad guys.

  What is certainty? Let’s consider two different definitions. The first is that to be certain is just to have a particular kind of feeling. To have certainty is to feel sure that your belief is true. Cops on crime shows operate on this definition all the time when they pursue a particular perp because they “feel in their bones” that they have the right man. The problem with this definition is that we can feel this way even when we’re wrong. I’m sure every one of us has felt sure of something that turned out not to be the case.

  The other sense of certainty demands a lot more from us and finds its most famous expression in the work of seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes. In his Meditations on First Philosophy Descartes attempts to find one thing that he can believe beyond any doubt. This means that nothing can possibly call into question the truth of that belief. He raises doubt by considering whether his beliefs hold up in the face of various skeptical hypotheses. For example, his senses may be deceiving him as they do in the case of a mirage or an optical illusion. This hypothesis calls some beliefs into doubt, but others remain steadfast. He considers that he might be dreaming and all of the things he thinks he is experiencing are actually just products of his imagination. Since this hypothesis still leaves plenty of beliefs immune to doubt, he considers the possibility that an evil demon might be deceiving him, tricking him into believing all of the things he presently believes, though his beliefs are in fact false. One can be certain of only the beliefs that stand up to this kind of scrutiny.

  This certainty requirement for knowledge is . . . ahem . . . certainly not foreign to contemporary popular culture. Scenarios from movies like The Matrix and Vanilla Sky involve skeptical hypotheses that force us to think about what we really know about the external world. After all, we may actually be plugged in to some fancy machine and all of our experiences might just be programmed algorithms whirring around in the body of a supercomputer.

  Typically, however, we don’t tend to think that certainty of this type is required for day-to-day knowledge. Dexter knows where he docks his boat Slice of Life. Astor and Cody know that Rita is their mother. Brian Moser knows how to amputate a human leg, and so on. If you think this is true—that we can know things about our day-to-day lives without ruling out Matrix-style counterexamples—then you’re an infallibilist rather than a fallibilist about knowledge. An infallibilist believes that knowledge requires certainty. A fallibilist believes that we can have knowledge, even in cases when we fall short of certainty in the Cartesian sense.

  There is no reason to believe that when Harry tells Dexter to “be sure,” he wants his son to be able to rule out the possibility that an evil demon is tricking him into believing everything he believes. More plausibly, Harry is advising Dexter to know that someone is guilty before killing them.

  Traditionally, for a person to have knowledge they must have a belief, the thing they believe must be true, and they must be justified in holding the belief that they hold. This is a view that traces back to Plato and the majority of philosophers today still accept it (though a number of them add additional requirements). Each of these requirements is intuitively appealing. Let’s start with belief.

  In Season 1 Lieutenant La Guerta does some sloppy detective work. She looks at the neatly wrapped body of one of the Ice Truck Killer’s victims. There is a difference between this body and those of previous victims. In the past, the dissection of body parts has been symmetrical. If the upper right leg is cut into two pieces, then the upper left leg will be cut into two pieces and so on. Not so with the most recent victim. One leg is cut into more pieces than the other. La Guerta surmises that the killer was interrupted before he was finished—there must be a witness! Track down the witness and it’s only a quick jump to tracking down the Ice Truck Killer.

  Now, as Dexter and Debra point out, it’s clear to anyone who gives the matter any thought that no one interrupted the killer while he was cutting up the body. If this had been the case, the killer would not have had time to wrap the parts. Deb and Dexter, therefore, believe that there was no witness. The available evidence justifies the belief that there was no witness. And, in fact, it’s true that there was no witness. But LaGuerta does not know it because she doesn’t believe it. Knowledge requires belief.

  Let’s move on to the second requirement for knowledge. In order for a person to know something, the thing they believe has to be true. A great example of this is when Deb comes to believe that Neil Perry is the Ice Truck Killer. He inserted himself into the investigation early on by claiming to be a witness, which is common for serial killers. Traffic violation records show him to be present at two of the crime scenes. He knows things about the crimes that were never released to the public. A dead body is buried in the backyard of his unbelievably creepy double-wide trailer home. He even confessed for Pete’s sake!

  As it turns out, however, Perry is in it for the notoriety and has never killed anyone. When LaGuerta brings a severed head into the interrogation room to spook him, he practically passes out. This is certainly not someone who could make super-killer Dexter Morgan feel like “a student in a master class” ( “Circle of Friends,” Season 1). Deb believes that Neil Perry is the Ice Truck Killer. She is just
ified in believing it. But Deb doesn’t know it because it isn’t true. Knowledge requires that that one’s belief is true.

  Knowledge also requires justification. It isn’t enough to merely have a true belief. Consider Astor’s claim in the first part of Season 5 that Dexter is, in some way, responsible for the death of her mother. As it turns out, there is some truth to her allegation. Dexter pissed off Trinity and Rita paid the price. But Astor certainly doesn’t know this. Her accusations are just the angry, desperate attempts of a hurt pre-teen to find someone to blame for a death she doesn’t understand. She believes Dexter’s to blame and it is, in some sense, true that Dexter is to blame, but Astor doesn’t know that Dexter’s to blame. Knowledge requires justification.

  Justification admits of degrees. A person can have some justification for their belief and still fail to have knowledge. For example, imagine that Masuka goes to a strip club and forms the belief that one of the strippers is “warm for his form.” He forms this belief because she smiles at him when he tips her and spends more time near him than anyone else when he starts whipping out the big bills. Masuka has some evidence for the belief that the stripper is hot for him, but nowhere near enough justification for his belief to count as knowledge.

  Bodies of Evidence

  The question of what exactly constitutes justification is a hot topic in philosophy, and there are several competing models of what counts for justification. It’s difficult to say exactly what model Dexter is thinking of, though it is clear that he does have a model, some sort of theory which tells him when he is justified in believing that a suspect is really guilty.

  This isn’t a mere philosophical question for Dexter. Without some idea of how he is justified in believing his victims are guilty, he can’t follow his Code. We’ll consider two main theoretical families. The first consists of internalist theories of justification. There are strong and weak versions of internalism. According to strong internalism, for a person to be justified in believing something, it must be the case that they are aware of their justifiers. Something is a justifier if it provides some reason to believe that the proposition under consideration is true. In other words, in order to know something, the reasons you have for believing it must be reflectively accessible to you.

  At least some of our intuitions should support this view. Imagine that a friend approaches you and says, “Dexter gets the chair in the last episode of the series.” First you are ticked off that they revealed such an important spoiler about one of your favorite shows. But then you start pressing your buddy about how they came to know Dexter’s fate. Did plot summaries get leaked on the internet? Did a writer or cast member spill the beans? “Oh, I don’t know what leads me to believe that. But don’t get me wrong. I’m not just speculating. I know he gets the chair.” I’m sure you would find this maddening. At least at first blush it seems that if a person truly knows a thing, they should be able to tell you the reasons they have for believing it.

  This is arguably the theory of justification that the court system operates under. Judges and juries expect witnesses to testify not just to what they know, but also to the reasons they have for forming the relevant beliefs. Dexter is quite familiar with this system. While on the stand testifying in a murder trial, he reports that he has investigated two thousand one hundred and three cases. And that isn’t give or take. So he clearly knows how the game is played. As a scientist, he realizes that he has to look beyond initial appearances when investigating crimes. Recall the “cokehead murders” from Season 1. All outward appearances indicate that the crimes were motivated by drugs. The victims were drug dealers and their associates. Doakes quickly forms the belief that they were killed by rival dealers and he demands that Dexter write exactly that in his report. But Dexter points out that the science doesn’t support this conclusion. It tells him that this was a crime of passion. The main target was not the dealer (who was dispensed with in a quick and sloppy way). The primary victim was the dealer’s girlfriend, who was killed much more elegantly. Dexter suggests that the killer is a jealous ex-boyfriend. Additional investigation into this hypothesis is necessary.

  He claims to be even more diligent about gathering evidence when it comes to determining the guilt of his victims. In fact, he says “My Code requires a higher standard of proof than your city’s laws, at zero cost to the taxpayer. If you ask me, I’m a bargain” (“There’s Something about Harry,” Season 2). But is this really true? Dexter often proceeds without evidence that would be necessary to procure a conviction in court. Consider the investigation he does into the case of Jeremy Downs. As we saw earlier, the only real evidence he has on Downs is that he killed someone before and the knife patterns on the most recent victim are very similar to those involved in the murder four years ago. He also witnesses Jeremy taking a teenager off into a swamp to see an alligator, which is how he lured away his first victim. But, I would point out, this may not be merely a ruse. After all, there is actually an alligator in the exact spot where Downs brings the boy. Dexter practically steps on it. There’s hardly enough evidence to know that Downs is killing again, though there may be enough to make this conclusion probable.

  Dexter goes after Downs, presumably to mete out his form of justice. But the cops beat him to the punch. Masuka lifted a print from the alley where the boy was killed and the department sweeps in to make an arrest. This evidence, which actually ties Downs to the crime scene, was evidence that Dexter didn’t have when he decided to attempt an abduction of Jeremy at the park.

  There are many cases in which Dexter abducts his victims before he even has all of the pieces of the puzzle. Early in Season 1, he abducts Jamie Jaworski at a construction site. Jaworski is real scum. He operates a website featuring rape and snuff films. A young wife and mother named Jane Saunders goes missing and Dexter suspects Jaworski. The department pursued a case against him, but it was dropped because of a faulty search warrant. We see Dexter thumbing through a case file, but all it contains are a bunch of glossy photographs. He doesn’t even know how the murder was committed. When he has Jaworski strapped to the table, he says “Talk to me about Jane Saunders.” Jaworski replies “Alright, I did her.” But Dexter has to ask “How?” Jaworski replies “A snuff film. And I’m not sorry.” Dexter responds, “Of course not. And now I’m not sorry either.” How can Dexter possibly have the justification that strong internalism requires if he doesn’t even know how the murder was committed?

  This happens again in Season 2 when Dexter tries, unsuccessfully, to kill a practitioner of voodoo named Jimmy Sensio whom he suspects of poisoning people to create the appearance of a successful death curse. Dexter did do some actual science in this case and was able to ascertain that all of the victims were poisoned. But he doesn’t even know how the poison was administered. Again, he has to ask his victim while he is strapped to the table. The absence of this crucial information would most likely lead to an acquittal in court, if the case even ever made it to trial. After all, how can you be sure that a person poisoned someone if you don’t know whether or not they had the means to administer the poison? What Dexter is doing is like asking a killer for a vital piece of evidence related to determining their guilt while they are strapped to the electric chair. What is Dexter going to do if he finds out his victim couldn’t possibly have committed the crime, let him go? Doing so would present a real problem for following one of Harry’s other rules—don’t get caught.

  But maybe Dexter doesn’t violate Harry’s Code by not having all the evidence available to reflect upon. Perhaps this is not the right account of justification anyway. The courts arguably require something more than knowledge. Detectives may know that a suspect is guilty, but fail to obtain a conviction in court. Though there is some intuitive support for strong internalism, there are also reasons to believe that it is too strong. It may be that there are some things that we know, even if all of our evidence isn’t currently available to us.

  Consider the case of “super-cop” Frank Lundy, who has
been investigating the Trinity Killer for years. On the basis of his extended investigation, spanning numerous states and inquiring into multiple murders, he comes to believe that Trinity always operates in sets of three murders (actually, it turns out to be four, but at least we can say that Lundy knows that Trinity operates in sets of at least three). He may not be able to, at any given time, call up all of the evidence he has for this belief. But it might be enough simply that he is capable of calling it up if absolutely necessary. If this is the case, then weak internalism fits the bill quite well. According to this view, in order for a person’s belief to be justified, it must merely be the case that they are capable of becoming aware of their justifiers.

  This, however, can’t be the theory of justification that Dexter is operating in accordance with either. It isn’t as if he has some additional information about Downs or the others that he just can’t call up to his conscious mind at the moment. He didn’t have strong enough evidence to begin with.

  If this isn’t Dexter’s account of justification it’s no great loss, because there are some problems with this view as well. Consider the case of a child who knows where the cookie jar is kept. Imagine that the child is so young that they do not yet even have the concept of memory or evidence, but when they want a cookie they push a barstool up to the cabinet and find what they’re looking for every single time. The child isn’t even capable of calling up her justifiers. She doesn’t even have those concepts, yet it seems that she knows where the cookies are.