Well, it finally happened. I got bored when doing schoolwork, and went through with my threat to apply my thoughts on personal identity to the Buffyverse. My next post will be the essay that I just cranked out for fun (about 3 and a half pages), while this serves as a short abstract. This is only an initial draft, and may very well appear in the All Things Philosophical on Buffy the Vampire Slayer forum at some point.
Abstract: I start by setting up the background, and how our concept of human person divides into two distinct concepts: human animal and person. Person is set up as having psychological persistence conditions, and note that we are primarily interested in preserving direct connections. This, I argue, allows at least some persons to concievably survive become a vampire.
I then sketch several possible implications for this theory on thinking about Buffyverse vampires, including the question of moral status. Finally, I have a brief section considering the cases of Spike and Angel, who are the problematic cases for identity.
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Vampires, Persons, and Survival
A brief sketch of my thesis, for those who lack the patience to read that: I argue that our concept of ‘human person’ breaks down into two different concepts with their own persistence conditions, one being the ‘human animal’ with biological persistence conditions, the other being the person with psychological conditions. Further, in the person we drop talk of identity as necessary to persistence and allow for only direct psychological connections.
What does this mean? Well, take a classic example where memory is the criteria. A young adult remembers all of his past as a child; then as an old man, all of the past as a young adult but nothing as a child. Call the child A, adult B, and old man C. On my account, B is a survivor of A, C of B, but not C of A. There is no more direct connection between C and A.
Vampires are certainly persons, in the same sense that human persons and demons are that they have the requisite psychological states to be considered ‘persons.’ Whether or not they are human persons, given that this concept is a conjunction of human animal and person, is also clear: the human animal is dead.
The idea here, following Olson, is that what matters for the human animal is the capacity to regulate life-sustaining functions. Though a vampire is maintaining this body which was a member of the species _H. sapiens_, vampires have different persistence conditions. These are organisms governed by a set of non-physical laws as well as physical in their persistence conditions. So, part of the conjunct is destroyed.
However, whether or not the human animal is lost seems a far less interesting question than this one: what happens to the person? Is the person lost? Our survival value seems that, for most of us, even if we had to jump kinds to a vampire or even a computer to keep the ‘person’ alive, we would think of this as a good deal. So, if our survival value is that we want to see the person continue, what happens here?
I will not argue that there is at least some psychological continuity between the human and the vampire, since others have already shown this. No matter whether or not we take the ‘soul’ to include the essential psychology, the psychology clearly does affect the personality the vampire has. At least in theory, a vampire with sufficient direct connections to the person instantiated in the human, would count as a survivor even though identity in the strict sense may be lost.
We clearly have one type of direct connection in the form of memory. All of the evidence we have seen suggests that if nothing else, the memory of the ‘host’ for the vampire continues to persist after the death of the physical body. Spike clearly remembers his life as William, Angel his time as the human. But memory is also not enough.
It is more than just memory that we wish to include in our survival. Things like close interpersonal relationships, our goals, beliefs, and desires are also things we seem interested in maintaining. All of these together, along with our dispositions to act, form what we might call the person. Whether or not our skills and knowledge can be included in this is debatable, especially since a skill is not always strictly psychological (i.e. my ability at locksmithing).
Clearly this set changes – indeed, can even change radically in vampires – but we must ask how they change. The implications I’ve seen most supportable is a lack of moral inhibition, which results in a sort of ‘warping’ of the character. This leads to an interesting consequence: vampires could arguably be classified as sociopathic in a sense, at least so far as ‘human’ social orders go. I think the degree of change in a sociopath who became a vampire would be relatively minor, aside from now adopting new dispositions such as avoiding sunlight that necessarily follow from the physiological changes.
In other words, at least some persons can continue to survive the change into a vampire due to the preservation of sufficient direct psychological connections.
This now raises the question: ‘at what point is there no longer sufficient connection to be considered to have survived?’ I think that the point where identity is lost is not useful, and consideration of the duplication cases is enough to show this.
Mary wanders one day into a philosophical thought experiment created by Derek Parfit. She is travelling to another world by means of a machine which will scan her body (destroying it in the process) and send a signal to another planet. Her body and relevant psychology is then reconstructed intact. Mary has certainly survived, but what about ‘double success?’
Suppose that because of an accident, a second beam is simultaneously sent to a third planet. Call Mary prior to teleportation Mary 0, and on each planet Mary A and Mary B respectively. There are clearly sufficient connections on a psychological account for Mary A to be the same as Mary 0, and Mary B to be the same as Mary 0. The transitivity of identity requires that Mary A be the same as Mary B, but this is impossible because identity is supposed to be a unique relation – and Mary A and Mary B are distinct.
The lesson of this is simple: survival is possible even though identity is lost. So identity alone cannot be our criteria for personal survival, even in the case of vampires.
But there is clearly a point where both identity and survival is lost, despite a directly causal connection. Take the case of an unrepentant killer in prison who, as a result of a religious experience, has such a radical change that the ‘person’ before is effectively dead. We would no longer hold the ‘new’ person responsible for the actions of the previous one because enough direct connections have been lost, though we may very well call that person a descendent of the original prisoner.
I will not try to create some formulaic method to determine whether or not a specific person survives the transformation into a vampire, though this is obviously a matter of degree. But there are some interesting implications for this account of personal survival on Buffyverse vampires.
First – “You are not looking at your friend, but the thing that killed him” becomes a more problematic statement. In fact, whether or not this is even a good general heuristic can be called into question depending on how much of base human nature we are inclined to thing is preserved in the transformation process. The second implication as well calls this into question.
Second – It makes the question of survival value-relative to the person who becomes a vampire. Whatever the person pre-vamping would consider their essential psychological traits which defines who they are must survive the process in order for the vampire to count as a survivor of the previous human.
Third – The moral status of killing vampires vs killing humans is made even more ambiguous. On this account, a vampire is clearly a person. If we are to accept it is wrong to go around killing humans at random, but acceptable to go around killing any vampire we run across, personhood must lose its special moral status.
It may be that vampires do have the same moral status as humans and the killing prohibition remains intact. Which makes the justification for killing vampires more a question of defence, and actually carries another implication: we are not justified in staking a vampire who feeds on willing victims on the grounds that person is a vampire.
Fourth - These three implications of my theory of personal identity must call into question the standard justifications used by hunters and watchers in the Buffyverse for the killing of vampires. I list this as a separate implication which may or may not be true if three is the case. Even if the third implication is right, it may be that we are still generally justified in staking vampires except for a small subclass who enjoy protected status.
However, the fourth implication could be that even a general justification for killing vampires fails. That is, if persons and not human animals have this special moral status, hunting vampires could have some problems with moral justification. It may be the case that we are only justified in killing a vampire after they have initiated an attack on someone or when they are clearly about to do so.
SPIKE AND ANGEL
I wish to now consider the two problematic cases we’ve seen in the show, the two ‘vampires with a soul’ though a Buffyverse soul may very well just be a conscience. I’m going to follow the convention and call Angel’s human form Liam. So we can trace for his life the following transformations: Liam->Angelus 1->Angel 1->Angelus 2->Angel 2.
Spike is a much simpler case, having gone: William->Spike->Chipped Spike->Souled Spike.
These cases on my account are not as problematic as they seem. In both cases, they have gone through enough radical transformation processes that they are now both only descendents of their human selves; we cannot hold Angel responsible for Liam’s actions or Spike for William’s. Which makes the interesting question: is Spike a survivor of himself when he got a soul? What about Angelus and Angel?
Spike has clearly had the smoother transformation process. Spike Chipped is a clear survivor of Spike because of the amount of direct connection preserved. However, these connections are lost when he gets his soul; even if Spike Souled survives Spike Chipped, Spike Souled does NOT survive Spike.
Angel I am prepared to argue has undergone sufficient changes that he is now Angel 2. His change in tempermant was so radical from each Angelus that little direct connection is preserved. The one underlying thread of connection is memory, but this alone when we consider the whole of the person is enough that at the very least identity is lost.
Whether or not Angel 2 ‘survives’ Angelus 2 or is merely a ‘descendent’ is a question that I’ve run out of time to address, however, and leave to y’all to consider for yourselves.
Vampires, Persons, and Survival
Technically, its Angel 3. Following your argument that Angel's "change in tempermant was so radical from each Angelus that little direct connection is preserved," the following 'liniage' is indicated:
Liam->Angelus 1->
Angel 1 was in First/second season Buffy
Angelus 2 was released when he "slept with" Buffy
Angel 2 returned from hell
Angelus 3 was released in Season 4 Angel
So the current incarnation is technically Angel 3.
Vampires, Persons, and Survival
Usually i'm very lazy and leave long articles as such for last mintute reading. However after i read the summary i was quite intrigued to read it further. I must say i don't understand it all but it does raise lots of great points we can all use to look at vampires and there existance in a different way.
One statement i don't understand is:
Ok, so if Mary A and Mary B were "created" from Mary 0, doesn't that make both their identities as Mary 0 "cloned"? or something. I mean, i agree that identity is a unique thing but once you make two objects which are exactly the same as the first object, in this case Mary A and Mary B from Mary 0, shouldn't Mary A=Mary B for the second they are created? However it can be arguable that after Mary A and Mary B start "living" they no longer equate to each other as they will both take different steps influenced by their surroundings, but surely at the tme they are created their identity is the same?
Vampires, Persons, and Survival
There are a number of replies that can be made to that - aren't they the same for that moment? Well, one reply is to grant that they are, but at least after that moment identity is still lost. So if Mary survives, identity still can't be what matters primarily in survival.
Another is to say we are still dealing with two different persons because they will have different experiences upon leaving the machines. This is enough to make sure that they are not numberically identitical, and will become less qualitatively over time.
But the best reply is probably that even though our concept of person may be psychological, that psychology must be supported by the appropriate parts of the brain in a human animal. In this case, the psychologies are supported by two different human animals.
In this respect, our concept of person is closer to our concept of instantiation of a computer program. My copy of Word on my machine, and your copy, are the same program in the sense of having the same code. But they are clearly two different copies of word by virtue of the fact that they are realised in different machines.
Vampires, Persons, and Survival
OK, having skimmed through this during a free at college, I have drawn the following conclusion:
Fleeblewhoopy?!?
With roughly translates as: this is something I grasp at the beginning, lose thread of about halfway through, and at the end my head hurts. By then I've completely forgotten even the last paragrah I've read and nothing makes sense anymore.
With that, I return to something I actually understand ie; English Literature and History and leave the Psychology (which is a subject I don't actually take :P) far, far away with Maths (which I do, but still don't understand :P)
Hehehehe...Yes, I'm bored :D
Vampires, Persons, and Survival
Fleeblewhoopy??? i think us labners need a dictionary of words now...this should go in nicely with SQUEE lol :D
Vampires, Persons, and Survival
I didn't know where to put this, and didn't wanted to create a separate thread so i'll post the link here...its starburst talking about vampires over time.