A new television series has hooked me, more so than it probably should. For those of you not familiar with Dexter he is an affable, even likeable, policeman who works for the forensics lab of the Miami police department. Apart from being adopted and hints of childhood trauma, he seems perfectly normal; enjoys popularity amongst his colleauges, has a sister to whom he is close, has a girlfriend and holds down a good job. The problem is that Dexter is a psychopath, a fact he hides well using a lifetime of entrenched learned behavior used as a tool to integrate into society. Let me clarify a little on the term psychopath, he is not your average ‘eat your liver with fava beans’ type psychopath; in the series this distinction is made very clear. Sure he is completely dysfunctional, has murderous urges and is emotionally barren however he does not pray on the helpless or the ‘innocent’ – a term I choose to use rather loosley. Dexter does however allow his aberrant personality full sway when it comes to the careful selection and killing of the real underbelly of society, the sociopaths and fellow less controlled psychopaths and it is this moral dillema, this socially unacceptable yet thoroughly understandable dichotomy that I find so fascinating.
One cannot help but empathise with Dexter, obviously a terrible past trauma has led to the total destruction of his normal coping mechanisms, he – through the tuition of a loving father has learned to channel his destructive impulses into something different. On a certain level this show reminds me of The Equaliser; a series I followed as a child about the detective Robert McCall who was available for hire to ‘equalise’ situations and bring justice to those for whom the normal channels of justice and retribution had failed. Mcall used brain over brawn and in the end always got the bad guy – Dexter is no different apart from the fact that he really enjoys the killing bit at the end and it here that my decades of well honed morality run into a proverbial brick wall.
I sit now and wonder whether the moral issues presented in this program aren’t there to test our grasp on what we find right and wrong and where the boundaries lie in terms of an almost societally or biologically programmed sense of morality. The experiment that comes to mind is famous in psychological circles – for some the decision is easy, for others much harder:
experiment 1:
You have control of a switch on a railroad station. An empty train, completely out of control is hurtling towards five people on the track. If you act quickly you can press a button which will divert the train onto an alternate track on which only one person is walking. If you do nothing, 5 people will die. If you flick the switch one person will die, but 5 will be spared. What will you do?
Experiment 2:
You are an emergency room doctor. Five trauma patients urgently need organ transplants to live. In the waiting room is a healthy young man who has all the organs necessary to save these five people. Would you sacrifice the live of this man to save the five?
The question really boils down to what is the difference between the two experiments? Marc D. Hauser, a professor of psychology at Harvard university notes that humans may be endowed with a moral faculty evolved to generate intuitive judgments about right and wrong. He suggests that morality and decision making might have a biological aspect that, like most human traits, were shaped by evolutionary as opposed to cultural or societal forces. If he is correct, this decision making accumen would come from the unconscious mind and thankfully be immune to cultural influence. As an atheist I love Hauser’s statement that ‘the influence of Sunday school may pale in comparison to the effect of thousands of years of genetic programming.’
One of the keys to understanding the dillema is that of intention. People ‘judge’ it morally worse when harm is intended as a means to an end as opposed to an unforeseen side effect. The second key to understanding this problem is that of action, harm caused by direct action is worse than harm caused by omission. The last key is the one of contact which states that harm caused by direct contact is worse than equivalent harm caused by non-contact.
It is the third one which plays out for me most in conflicts like the Iraq war; it is one which is made to seem so easy in movies and the media. It is easier to sit in an air-conditioned control room and press a button in an almost arcade game manner; ending the lives of many enemy combatants [such a cushy term] or civilians. It would be harder to take a knife and butcher those people directly.
Morality for humanity is often worn as a garb, a raiment if you will to conceal what lies within. We aren’t that far removed from out primate ancestors and still destructive impulses lurk deep with the remnants of our reptilian brain. Morality is often used as a garb of disguise until the lie is uncovered, the preacher expounds it while committing fraud and sleeping with the prostitute. Morality is malleable, it shifts, it is hard to pin down.
I guess it is for these reasons that I enjoy Dexter. It makes me think about societal boundaries, about morality and the greater good. Is it better off to kill the psychopaths before they hurt others – most would probably say yes, is it ok to enjoy killing the psychopaths …. now the waters become muddy.
Whatever your moral standpoint, Dexter will challenge you on these pre-conceived and very poorly thought about ethical questions; it gives you a good hard poke in your moral center which I find both refreshing and vastly entertaining.
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