Dexter and Philosophy

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

  13

  Deontology in Dahmerland

  SARA WALLER and SEAN MCALEER

  Is Dexter a good citizen of Miami? He doesn’t want people to know what he really does; rather, he tries to avoid showing society what his talents are. He does not expect that the sandy beaches will make him mentally well, or that the bright sunlight will light the way for his Dark Passenger. But he loves his city—because it’s “Dahmerland” with “a solve rate for murders at about twenty percent.”

  He’s not interested in Miami for its justice, but rather for its injustice. Indeed, the longer Miami remains a murderous city, the longer he can practice his craft, because he must follow the rule of only killing other killers—those who haven’t been brought to justice by other means. So, is Dexter a bad guy who does good things in Miami, or a good guy who does bad things in Miami?

  Before we look at what kind of moral theory applies to Dexter, we have to ask whether morality applies to Dexter at all. Is Dexter moral—or is he just amoral?

  Why Might Dexter Be Amoral?

  When someone or something is amoral, that means that they are neither moral nor immoral, but rather, not able to be placed on a moral scale. For example, someone who cannot be responsible for his or her actions is amoral, because he or she is not making choices that we can praise or blame, or consider to be right or wrong. This is why we have an insanity defense; if someone doesn’t understand the consequences of his actions or what he is doing, perhaps because he has mental deficits, then we say that he is not to blame for his actions. He may have done something we don’t like, but we still consider him to be (in a sense) innocent because he did not choose his actions and did not intend their consequences, so he’s not responsible for them.

  New research has shown that sociopaths may well be amoral, that is, their brains simply do not connect emotional responses to their desires, thoughts, or actions. They don’t realize how painful and terrifying their urges to kill are, and so they don’t have enough information about their own urges to make deliberate, responsible decisions about acting on them; they don’t understand what morality is, so they don’t understand the difference between right and wrong. We see this sort of aspect of sociopathy in Dexter, who says at a funeral, “Most people have a hard time dealing with death, but I’m not most people. It’s the grief that makes me uncomfortable . . . I just don’t understand the emotion, which makes it tough to fake. In those cases, shades come in handy” (“Popping Cherry,” Season 1). Dexter doesn’t feel what other people feel, and so when he chooses, he chooses without evaluating all the information available.

  Secondly, Dexter may be amoral because he sometimes believes that he can’t control his urges to kill. He believes he has a Dark Passenger inside him, something that forces his behaviors, something over which he has no control. As Dexter says to Lila, “I never expected to get better” (“The Dark Defender,” Season 2) and Harry, his step-father, seems to feel the same way, remarking to Dexter that Dexter has “a Dark Passenger that’s always got one hand on the steering wheel” (“Remains to be Seen,” Season 4). If we can’t make choices because our mental faculties are somehow stunted, or if we’re compelled to act and have no control over which choice is made, then we’re not responsible for our actions.

  So, if we are to argue that Dexter is, in fact, a moral being, then we must first show that Dexter does have access to some emotions and the information that they bring us. After all, no one has a perfect understanding of the world, or perfect access to every detail of every choice, and yet, we do consider most people, most of the time, to be responsible for their actions. If Dexter is missing a little information, about as much as any other person might be missing as he or she makes choices, then he is on par with every other human in terms of responsibility. Similarly, we must show that48 Dexter, though he suffers from a compulsion to kill, can and does control when he kills. Such control would make his actions not compulsory, and therefore subject to moral evaluation.

  Does Dexter have access to emotions, or is he as empty as a box of doughnuts? As much as he protests that he has no feelings, his actions in the show tell a different story. When push comes to shove, he does not kill his sister. He knocks out Rita’s treacherous husband Paul and frames him because he is upset at seeing Rita suffer. He may feel uncomfortable at funerals, but even then he’s experiencing emotional discomfort. In numerous episodes, he actively misses his step-father Harry. He feels very strongly, while practicing what he wants to say to his mother’s vicious killer, “I feel like . . .I am not the person I’m supposed to be . . . I hide . . . unable to reach out to people close to me, afraid . . . I’ll hurt them” (“The Dark Defender,” Season 2). Perhaps even more poignantly, in Season 5, he sobs over the body of a man he killed in a bathroom after realizing that a good murder won’t make him feel better about Rita’s death. Dexter may have deficits in his emotional life, but he has emotions. His brain is not radically different from the normal, responsible, human brain.

  Does Dexter have control over his actions? The very fact that Harry trained him and developed a code for him reveals that Dexter is not an out of control killing machine. He deliberates and chooses who to kill, and when. As Harry Morgan says in the very first episode: “Okay, so we can’t stop this. But maybe we can do something . . . to channel it; use it for good.” Dexter has urges just as we all do, and he controls them, according to his judgment and through reflection, just as we all do. His Dark Passenger is merely his version of all of our socially unacceptable, immoral, desires and urges. It’s the thing in all of us that causes us to create moral systems. Dexter is a moral being. Which then leads us to the question: What kind of moral being is he?

  The Three Moral Theories

  One helpful way to organize the three main moral theories we will discuss is to see them in terms of three moral concepts—goodness, rightness, and virtue. Each theory takes one of these to be basic—to explain the others but not in turn to be explained by them.

  Consequentialist theories take goodness to be basic, defining rightness and virtue in terms of goodness: the right action to perform is the action that produces the best (or a good enough) outcome. Consequentialists might disagree about how to define goodness and how much goodness an action must produce to be morally right or required, but they agree that an action’s rightness depends upon the goodness of its outcomes, and they agree that a virtuous person is someone with a reliable disposition to produce good outcomes. John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism is the best-known version of consequentialism; it holds that an action is right if and only if it maximizes total happiness (for every being concerned, considered equally).

  Deontologists, by contrast, take rightness to be basic. Certain actions are right (or wrong) in themselves, without regard to their consequences, or right because they accord with a correct moral rule. These rules would not in turn be justified by one of the other key moral concepts. Kant’s deontology is the best known version of this theory, and it emphasizes actions done out of respect for a set of moral laws.

  There are utilitarians who believe we should adopt rules which will maximize human happiness, rather than looking at each action in isolation. We call these utilitarians rule-utilitarians. A rule-utilitarian looks like a deontologist because she holds that actions are right if they accord with the valid moral rules, but since she thinks that what validates a moral rule is that following it produces the best outcomes, she has made rightness depend indirectly on goodness, so she’s not a deontologist (even though she looks like one at first).

  A virtue ethicist takes virtue to be basic. For example, a virtue ethicist might hold that an action is right in a particular situation if and only if a fully virtuous person would perform the action in those circumstances, and that a good state of affairs is one that a virtuous person would choose or value. Aristotle is the best-known proponent of this view, and he emphasizes personal excellence through practicing moderate actions that lead to happiness, or the good life.

>   Dexter’s Deadly Virtues

  Followers of Aristotle, known as virtue ethicists think that the virtues are basic: virtue ethicists define right conduct in terms of the virtues, holding that an action is right if and only if a virtuous person would perform it in the circumstances.

  Now, if these virtue ethicists defined the virtuous person as someone who does what is right, their theory would be hopelessly circular. But virtue ethicists avoid this by giving rich accounts of the various character virtues that don’t appeal to the notion of right conduct. Aristotle thought the virtues were intrinsically connected to eudaimonia or happiness in that you can’t be happy or flourish as a human being without being virtuous and exercising the virtues. This is an interesting and surprising claim, since so many people think that being virtuous is at odds with happiness. It may seem more plausible if we think of what a virtue is. Our English word ‘virtue’ translates the Greek word areté, which could as easily be translated as ‘excellence’, for the virtues are excellences of various kinds. A virtue is the state or condition a thing must possess to perform its function or task well—and thus to be good.

  To take a prosaic example, think of Dexter’s favorite knife. Its purpose or function is to cut, and a knife cuts well (and is a good knife) when it is sharp. Hence sharpness is the virtue or excellence of a knife, and its vice—the state that prevents it from performing its function well—is dullness. Human beings are more complicated than knives—even more complicated than the most multi-functional Swiss Army Knife—but, like knives, Aristotle thinks we have a function, grounded in our being rational animals. Our function might be called rational agency, the capacity to act based on reasons (as opposed to having our actions caused by desire or instinct or design).

  The character virtues, states like temperance, courage, generosity, proper pride, are those states that enable us to act well or rationally—and thus to be good, just as a knife that possesses the virtue of sharpness performs its function well and is a good knife. Since happiness is the human good, the good all human beings seek, we are happy when we reason well, expressing our rational agency toward such social ends as justice, equality, fairness in government, magnanimity, and temperance.

  Aristotle thought that the virtues of character (which are often called the moral virtues) have a distinctive structure: each virtue is a mean between extremes of excess and deficiency. Take courage, for example, the virtue that concerns how we act in situations that typically arouse fear. A coward feels more fear than a situation warrants and thus doesn’t act well, while a rash or foolhardy person feels less fear than a situation warrants and thus doesn’t act well, since she takes too many risks.

  Is Dexter a virtue ethicist? Does he think that his actions are right because they are what a virtuous person would do in the circumstances? Aristotle thought that character virtues are means between extremes, but he also thought that some activities and feelings simply cannot express mean states: envy is an example of a feeling that can’t be a mean; adultery and murder are examples of actions that can’t express a mean state. There’s no such thing as committing adultery with the right woman, at the right time, in the right way. It’s simply impossible to commit adultery correctly. The same goes for murder.

  Thus it would be a deep mistake to think of Dexter as a virtue ethicist. While Dexter is a skillful killer, he hardly seems to be virtuous. What’s the difference? Virtues strongly resemble skills, and we often find Aristotle and his teacher Plato drawing an analogy between virtues and skills. But skills have narrower scope than virtues, and they do not seem subject to moral evaluation. Skills can be put to moral or immoral uses, but in themselves they are not moral or immoral. A skillful violinist—a virtuoso—is a better violinist than an unskilled violinist, but she is not thereby a better person.

  Aristotle’s claim that the virtues are necessary for happiness might be controversial, but the claim that the virtues are necessary for moral goodness will seem a platitude. An upshot of this is that possessing and exercising the virtues can’t make one morally worse. So the skills possessed by a terrorist aren’t really virtues, though they look like virtues, since—assuming terrorists are morally bad—these skills make him a better terrorist and thus a worse person. A skillful killer is good at being a killer. Much of Harry’s Code concerns skills that anyone striving to be a good—meaning efficient—serial killer would want to master, such as avoiding detection, being careful to clean up and not leave evidence, not making things personal, or being able to fake emotions so as to appear normal. Fostering these traits will make one a good killer, but being a good killer does not make one a good person—just the opposite, usually.

  But if we attend to some of the other elements of Harry’s Code, we may be less certain that it’s a mistake to think of Dexter in virtue-ethical terms, for some parts of the Code have a moral dimension, for instance: Don’t kill innocent people, and be sure that your potential victim is not innocent and is likely to kill again. As Dexter internalizes these rules, he develops reliable dispositions not to kill innocent people, and to kill only non-innocents who are likely to kill again. Though it sounds a bit weird to say it, these dispositions are moral virtues. Most of us don’t have to work at developing these virtues as Dexter does, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not genuinely virtues. So while it’s true that there is no mean and thus no virtue with respect to murder, since Dexter kills only killers who have escaped justice and who will kill again, he is not murdering innocent victims.

  While he certainly strives to be excellent, he strives to be excellent at anti-social, anti-humanistic ends. He does not strive to be an excellent murderer for the sake of honing his character, or to increase justice, equality, or fairness within the city of Miami. Though he may make Miami a safer, better place to live, Dexter ultimately is acting on his urges rather than on higher, more contemplative Aristotelian ends. He’s not trying to improve himself through practice, nor attempting to flourish as a human being. Indeed, he often finds his neat, but monstrous, tendencies to be at odds with flourishing in the rest of his life. Rather, he strives to be excellent in order to follow Harry’s Code—to not get caught. His practice of his craft is the result and continuing cause of his perpetual feelings of hollowness rather than inner fulfillment. Dexter does not do things “at the right time, for the right reason” as Aristotle would wish, but rather, he does things that might seem to be right for all the dark, wrong reasons we can imagine.

  The Dark Defender and the Needs of the Many

  Dexter is perhaps most plausibly seen as a utilitarian when he finds himself identified with “The Dark Defender” in Season 2. This super-hero sacrifices himself, and his very guilty, evil victims, to bring happiness to the world and protect the many from the few. Utilitarians, being consequentialists, define what’s right in terms of what’s good. And being hedonists, they hold that pleasure, and only pleasure, is intrinsically good (and pain and only pain is intrinsically bad). Thus, for a utilitarian, right conduct is what maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain for the greatest number of people. It’s not the agent’s own happiness that is the utilitarian standard, but the greatest happiness of all involved.

  For utilitarians, the end justifies the means—literally. The end, total happiness, will justify actions such as killing so long as the killing is a means to more happiness than any available alternative. If Dexter’s killing brings about the best balance of pleasure over pain, then his actions would be permissible (and, indeed, required) by utilitarianism. While this approach appears promising as a way of understanding Dexter’s actions, the appearance is misleading: Dexter is not a utilitarian.

  For starters, Dexter does not reason as a utilitarian would, he does not ask himself whether killing will maximize total happiness and then kill if—and only if—it will. But this objection might not be decisive, since many utilitarians think their theory is about what justifies actions rather than a theory about how people do or even should deliberate about what to do: Dexter need
not think about whether his actions promote the greatest total happiness; what matters is whether his actions have the desired effect. Still, there is something unsettling about a moral theory telling us that, though our actions will be assessed according to that moral theory, we need not—and perhaps even should not—use that theory in deliberating.

  For Dexter, actions are not required because they promote the greatest good, they are required because the rules—Harry’s Code—require them. Even if a killing would not maximize total happiness, it would still be required, if Harry’s Code requires it. Since what is required does not depend upon how an action contributes to human well-being, Dexter can’t be seen as a utilitarian.

  Not so fast, the utilitarian says, for we should distinguish between act- and rule-utilitarianism. According to act-utilitarianism an act is right if and only if it maximizes total happiness—this is the theory as we’ve been discussing it. According to rule-utilitarianism, on the other hand, an action is right if and only if it follows the correct moral rules—and the correct moral rules are those would maximize total happiness if they were generally followed.

  Suppose that a doctor kills a patient to harvest her organs and distribute them to half a dozen other patients. Many people would find the doctor’s action profoundly immoral, even if it would maximize total happiness. The rule-utilitarian shares this moral judgment, but can’t shake his deep sense that moral rightness makes sense only if it is connected with human well-being. So he reasons that a moral rule prohibiting harvesting the organs of unwilling “donors” would produce more happiness than a rule allowing it, since the members of a society allowing involuntary organ harvesting would be forever on their guard, terrified that they might be treated as organ-fields, afraid to go to the doctor and consequently living with more pain than they otherwise would. So involuntary organ-harvesting is wrong because it violates a moral rule.