Futurama and Philosophy

by Young, Shaun P. , Lewis, Courtland

  To see the difference between a just and unjust cause clearly, take the first two Omicronian invasions of Earth. In the first case, the Omicronians declared war and held the planet hostage because someone had interrupted a TV show (a Fox show, at that). The second time, the people of Earth were (albeit unwittingly) feasting on Omicronian children. In the first case, the Omicronian invasion clearly did not meet the just cause criteria. In the second case, it plainly did.

  One of the reasons why the first Omicronian invasion didn’t meet the just cause criterion is because it fails to meet another criterion: that of proportionality. War is a costly business. Before engaging in it, we must decide whether the object or goal of the war is worth the cost of the war itself. A television show is not worth a war—not even Single Female Lawyer. Nor, for that matter, is the pride of one person. In “A Taste of Freedom” (Season Four), the Decapodians invade Earth after Zoidberg refuses to apologize for eating the Earthican flag. Saving someone’s dignity (especially Zoidberg’s) is not worth the price the Decapodians pay for it.

  Both the Single Female Lawyer debacle and the Decapodian invasion have at least one other moral failing in common: aside from being massive over-reactions, they were also far too hasty. In light of the seriousness of war, it makes sense that it should be used only as a last resort. The Omicronians made no attempt to contact Earth and express their disappointment in the interruption of their TV show—they just showed up and started blowing stuff up.

  The case of the Decapodians is a bit less clear, largely because they were actually provoked—as Ambassador Moivin explains to Zapp, “This embassy is sovereign mud of the mud planet Decapod 10. Invading these mud premises is an act of war.” So, there’s a case to be made that the Decapodians actually did have a just cause for war—they weren’t just defending Zoidberg’s pride, they were defending their embassy on Earth. But a full scale invasion followed by the enslavement of an entire planet is still an over-reaction.

  While these invasions made little or no sense from a practical standpoint and were overly hasty, at least they were properly declared. The Omicronians only go to war on the word of Lrrr, the supreme ruler of Omicron Persei-8. The Decapodians invade Earth at the say-so of an ambassador. Both of these figures have some right to declare war. In the Season Two episode “Brannigan, Begin Again,” however, the court-martialed former captain attempts to declare war on the Neutral Planet. Set aside the facts that he does this through an act of terrorism while flying “the white flag of war,” and that he had done everything in his power to give the impression that he was there with peaceful intent, the acting captain of the Planet Express ship has no authority to declare war. Even had Zapp been in command of his beloved Nimbus, it’s doubtful that he would’ve had such authority.

  War Is the H-Word

  Some scoff at the idea of rules for conducting war. War, after all, is hell. Hell doesn’t have rules—does it? But the fact is that both war and hell have rules. In the Futurama universe, we see that Robot hell has any number of rules governing who gets in and under what conditions and how to get out—as per the Fairness in Hell Act of 2275 (“Hell Is Other Robots,” Season One), for example. War, likewise, has rules—the Geneva Convention, for instance. The rules of just war theory primarily govern who may be targeted and what means may be used.

  The first rule of war is the rule of discrimination and non-combatant immunity. Both sides in a war are expected to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate targets. Combatants and military installations are legitimate targets; non-combatants and civilian installations are not. So, when Zapp blew up the Hubble telescope instead of the Omicronian mothership (“When Aliens Attack”), he was both stupid for firing on the wrong target and immoral, for firing on a civilian target. Similarly, when the Decapodians invaded, they were acting within the rules by attacking the Nimbus, but went out of bounds in targeting Hair King Unbreakable Combs and Johnson’s Collapsible Top Hats. They were, however, totally justified in attacking E-Z Squeeze Accordions, but for reasons entirely unrelated to the war.

  Most of the other agreed upon (in some sense) “rules” of war dictate the means warring countries can and can’t use to achieve their ends. They boil down to two: the means must be proportional to the ends, and the means must not be evil in themselves. The first is in some ways just a basic rule of practical reason: use the right tool for the job. However, in war, this practical rule requires two things: first, the use of enough force to achieve one’s goals, and second, the use of no more force than is necessary to do so. There are some weapons that are so destructive and, equally important, the consequences of which are so uncontrollable that they’re considered evil in themselves. Chemical, biological, and, arguably, nuclear warfare fall under this prohibition. Likewise, there are some techniques that are too cruel or too treacherous to use, even in war. Fortunately, Futurama is a comedy, so they’ve generally avoided crossing that particular line.

  Zapp often uses means that aren’t proportional to his ends, but mainly because he’s a moron. The best example, though, doesn’t come from a battle: it comes from the opening ceremony at DOOP’s new headquarters (“Brannigan, Begin Again”), when Zapp used his ship’s laser on its Hyperdeath™ setting to cut the ribbon for the ceremony. It might seem that Zapp’s battle against the Killbots is also a good example of him violating proportionality—after all, his strategy was to send “wave after wave” of his own men at the Killbots until they reached their “pre-set kill limit” (“Love’s Labours Lost in Space,” Season One). But while we can question the wisdom of Zapp’s strategy, there’s nothing contrary to proportionality in it. His end was to get the Killbots to shut down; his means was exactly proportional to that end. It’s not immoral; it’s just stupid.

  In “War Is the H-Word,” Zapp and President Nixon’s head’s strategy of turning Bender into an unwitting suicide bomber might likewise seem immoral. However, it might be argued that there really isn’t anything wrong with such a strategy. Sometimes winning a war demands sacrificing soldiers, and those soldiers don’t always get to know that they’re being sacrificed.

  However, the situation with Bender is against the rules for other reasons. First, Zapp and Nixon’s head acted treacherously by sending Bender to the Brain Balls on the pretense of negotiating peace—such treachery, while often advantageous, plainly falls under the category of means that are evil in themselves. Secondly, consider the power of the bomb in Bender’s chest. The bomb, we are told, is powerful enough to destroy the entire planet of Spheron-1. This likewise falls under the category of means that are evil in themselves. The Shrimpkins who made their homes on Bender during “Godfellas” violated this same precept when they resorted to nuclear weapons. In both cases, the effects of the weapons used were uncontrollable.

  Eating One Human for Each Omicronian

  Okay, the war’s over. Our side won (or lost). Now what? Strangely enough, the war isn’t over merely because the physical conflict has ended. There’s a great deal to be worked out in the aftermath.

  One thing we’ve got to work out follows directly from the rules of conduct during war. The people who broke the rules must be punished. Unfortunately, Futurama is quite realistic in this aspect, because, just like current real life, this rarely happens in the thirty-first century. Captain Brannigan and President Nixon’s head are never charged with using a ludicrously destructive weapon against Spheron-1 (“War Is the H-Word”), Mom seems to escape unscathed from her attempt to use robots to take over Earth (“Mother’s Day”), and the Omicronians continue to invade Earth with impunity.

  However, there are some ethical standards concerning behavior in the aftermath of war that are applied in the Futurama universe. For instance, it’s only fair that the aggressor in a war should compensate those who were wronged. However, this compensation has to be reasonable—it can’t be so stringent as to cripple one’s former enemy. For instance, in Season Four’s “Where No Fan Has Gone Before,” we’re told that the Star Trek War
s ended with the systematic execution of all Trekkies, “in the manner most befitting virgins.” This is a bit over the top. On the other hand, in “The Problem with Popplers,” Lrrr demands to eat one human for each Omicronian that was eaten—198 billion—which seems proportional. However, since there aren’t that many humans, and in spite of Zapp’s hopes, there’s no way to shore up the numbers in a couple of weeks, the Omicronians reasonably agree to eat only one human as a symbolic gesture of restitution.

  Their selection of which human to eat is likewise in line with a widely agreed upon principle—in this case with the principle of discrimination. This principle tells us that punishment for war crimes should be meted out only against those responsible. Just as in the conduct of war, where non-combatants have a degree of immunity, Lrrr and Ndnd choose to dine on Leela because she was the first human (or sort of human) to eat an Omicronian. While seeing Leela eaten might have been upsetting to Futurama fans, it makes a degree of sense from a moral point of view. She initiated the massacre of Omicronian children, and even though she tried to stop it in the end, she was still responsible. There’re other candidates who might have made good selections, though perhaps not the ones she thought.

  While awaiting her execution, she tells Fry and Bender that they should both be eaten instead of her, since they kept right on eating and selling Popplers after it became clear that they were intelligent. Actually, the best candidate other than Leela is “Fishy” Joe Gillman. He’s the one who escalated the Poppler harvest to the point where 198 billion of them could be eaten.

  Oddly enough, the one human in the whole scenario who was blameless is the one who winds up getting eaten—Free Waterfall, Jr., affectionately known as Smelly Hippie. Waterfall didn’t eat a single Omicronian, yet he’s the one who paid the price for everyone.

  Don’t Mess with Earth

  We shouldn’t be too hard on Zapp for not following all of the rules of war—to my knowledge, no war in history has ever been fought strictly in accordance with just war theory. Consequently, many argue the whole “just war” enterprise should be abandoned—why have rules, they reason, if no one’s going to follow them and there’s rarely any consequences for violating them? Against this backdrop, contemporary philosopher Michael Walzer argues that a state’s moral authority hinges on its conduct while engaged in war. If a state doesn’t at least acknowledge the rules of war in its conduct, then the state’s population will lose faith in that state and the war being fought.

  On the other hand, there’re some who argue that a “just war” is a contradiction in terms because, no matter how well defined and well respected the rules of war are, war itself is inherently unjust. There’s something to be said for this position, but pacifists don’t play a large role in Futurama—at least not since their defeat at the Gandhi Nebula at the hands of Zapp Brannigan.

  The Scary Door of Self and Existence

  5

  Sexlexia and Other Sexy Learning Disabilities

  JERRY PIVEN

  LEELA: You know Zapp, someone ought to teach you a lesson.

  ZAPP: If it’s a lesson in love, watch out. I suffer from a very sexy learning disability. What do I call it, Kif?

  KIF: (Sighs.) Sexlexia. . . .

  —“War Is the H-Word”

  Do velour fetishes, bare-bottomed spanking policies, and monocular mother-daughter ménages make a man perverse? For that matter, is love really just a concatenation of excruciating lies all told to delude someone into having a little “bra”? A whimsical cartoonish future reflects our own sexual disabilities, our obsessions with sexual conquest, the lies upon lies upon lies we need to heap in order to finally make the crustacean with two carapaces. The erotic exploits of thirty-first century captains, sea-creatures, and sundry skanks, provide an excellent opportunity to explore the questions, “What is love?” and, indeed, “What is sexually perverse?”

  Sexlexia and Sexual Cluelessness

  FRY: She’s really strict.

  BENDER: And mean.

  ZAPP: I see. Does she by any chance give the crewmembers spankings?

  FRY: No, she just makes us do work and stuff.

  ZAPP: Good, good. But should she ever institute some sort of bare-bottom spanking policy, let me go in your place. I won’t have my comrades harmed.

  —“Brannigan, Begin Again”

  Zapp Brannigan is a famously sex-crazed, smug, pompous buffoon who can neither pilot a space bistro nor satisfy a woman. A parody of the swaggering, libidinous, cavalier Captain Kirk of beloved Star Trek lore, Zapp similarly struts his sexuality (however demented), sports a gargantuan paunch (occasionally restrained by a space girdle), dons a pate-obscuring toupée (occasionally blown aloft by explosive decompression), and believes that his mission as captain is to seduce hot alien women.

  Coiffure and sexual incompetence aside, Zapp also seems to yearn for spankings, loves to stroke his velour uniform, and often commands his lackey Kif to shave and scrub the dark depths of uncharted gluteal spaces (where no brush has gone before).

  Alas, this tells us little about the meaning of sexlexia. Though suffering from a very sexy learning disability, Zapp seems fairly proud of his sexlexia, as though revealing it to Leela were a means of seduction. That in itself seems fairly learning-disabled, if one thinks that telling a woman that one is sexually impaired would somehow arouse her into crawling back to the Zapper like a horny bird on its belly.

  The irony is that while Zapp describes himself as sexlexic, he seems utterly clueless that his pathetic attempts at seduction are ridiculous. He really does seem to think that a revealing velour uniform will send Leela into heat, and that offering his gorgeous posterior to the Amazon women, while haplessly shackled, will entice them erotically. That’s not all, he honestly seems to believe that showing up at Planet Express with an offer to satisfy Leela sexually might gain him employment; that the line, “the most erotic part of a woman is the boobies” is sexy repartee with Amazon women; and that smugly predicting that Leela will come back begging for “sweet, sweet candy” will somehow not enrage her into despising him.

  The only times he seems self-conscious of his sexual ineffectuality are early on in the series, when he’s forced to admit his pathetic failures before Leela (a singular admission in “Love’s Labors Lost in Space” that may well be yet another pathetic part of the ridiculous seduction act), and in “War Is the H-Word” when he starts suspecting that his desire for Lee Lemon (Leela in male disguise) is homoerotic. When Lemon displays his/her athletic prowess, Zapp says “Private Lee Lemon may well be the finest recruit I’ve seen in all my years of service. That young man fills me with hope and some other emotions that are weird and deeply confusing.”

  Only when Lemon finally gives him a thorough whooping, does he/she reveal her true identity, after which Zapp says cathartically, “Leela! So it’s you I’ve been attracted to. Oh God, I’ve never been so happy to be beaten up by a woman!” He’s entirely relieved when she reveals herself to be a woman, because of all the sexually demented stratagems and fetishes he enjoys, the homosexual tendency is the one he deems perverse or embarrassing.

  So, the irony here is that Zapp really is sexlexic, not in the way he imagines, but because he’s stunningly clueless about women, what they find seductive, and what inane behaviors (which he somehow believes are sexually arousing) actually may result in a vicious beating. A guy who believes that he can actually moisten the woman of his dreams with the line, “If I said you have a beautiful body, would you take your pants off and dance around a little?” is truly learning-disabled.

  Dramatis Perversae

  ZAPP: Brannigan’s law is like Brannigan’s love: hard and fast.

  —“Love’s Labours Lost in Space”

  ZAPP: (Burping sounds.)

  UNIVERSAL TRANSLATOR: I’d like to spank your sister with a slice of baloney.

  —“Zapp Dingbat”

  A further irony is that he’s really no more sexlexic than the other perverse characters (dramatis pe
rversae) of the Futurama universe. They all seem fairly clueless about love and sex. Fry is missing the normal delta brain wave, so it’s no surprise that he’d bring a baggie of massage oil to his rendezvous with Leela (and then mention how it worked with Amy), or date a dictatorial yenta (and never notice how she’s obviously cheating on him), or tweet a video of Leela’s embarrassing a cappella duet with the Scottish boil on her butt (and its subsequent lobotomy).

  Fry’s foolishness is the leitmotif of the show, but Amy is neither her own love(grand)child nor lacks the Delta wave, and yet she’s aroused by thugs and criminals, jumping the bones (or circuits) of any man or robot who abusively demeans her. Zoidberg is so clueless about seduction that he enlists Fry to instruct him in the art of love, and Leela is so naive that the very same intellectually-flatlining Fry enlightens her about the shams, lies, and crocodilian tears of happiness men exude when trying to get women in the sack.

  Meanwhile, Professor Farnsworth once fell in love with a robot and a domineering malignant narcissist (“Mom”) long before the onset of his senility. (At least his parallel universe counterpart has the excuse that he went mad from trying to remove his own brain.) Hermes seems fairly levelheaded, but he still opts for a cylonic penis upgrade and believes that replacing all his human body parts with robotic organs is a fine idea, which indicates a serious identity disorder. And Kif is the epitome of the clueless, flaccid, emasculated wimp who, despite his sensitivity, is entirely blind to how his incessant whimpering might exasperate and enrage his girlfriend. (And this is probably not because he seems to lack actual testicles, though that does seem to capture his personality.)