The Walking Dead and Philosophy

Shotgun. Machete. Reason.

Christopher Robichaud, William Irwin, Christopher Robichaud

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118346686
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The story of The Walking Dead chronicles the lives of a group of survivors in the wake of a zombie apocalypse. The Walking Dead is an Eisner-award winning comic book series by writer Robert Kirkman. Started in 2003, the comic book continues to publish monthly and has published a total of 92 issues. The popularity of this comic book series led to graphic novel publications (see competing titles) as well as the critically acclaimed TV adaptation on AMC. The Walking Dead is AMC's highest-rated show ever surpassing even Mad Men 's ratings at its peak. Both the comic book series and TV show force us to confront our most cherished values and ask: would we still be able to hold onto these things in such a world? What are we allowed to do? What aren't we? Are there any boundaries left? The Walking Dead and Philosophy will answer these and other questions: Is it ok to "opt out?" Is it morally acceptable to abandon Merle? What happens to law in a post-zombie world? Does marriage have any meaning anymore? What duty do survivors have to each other?

Chapter 1

Opting Out: The Ethics of Suicide in The Walking Dead

Christopher Robichaud

In the opening scene of Robert Kirkman’s television series The Walking Dead, a show based on his ongoing comic book series of the same name, Deputy Sheriff Rick Grimes stops by a gasoline station hoping to collect some fuel to take back to his car (“Days Gone Bye”). From the look of things, the world as anyone knew it has ended. Rick already understands this, and so do we. We’re watching for the zombies, after all!

It’s not long before we get our first look at a zombie. After Rick comes up empty-handed, he hears something shuffling nearby, and he knows all too well what that most likely means. Getting on his hands and knees, he peers underneath a car and sees the legs of a child shambling along on the other side. The child then stops, bends down to pick up a stuffed animal, and continues walking. Rick jumps to his feet and does what comes naturally to him. “Little girl! I’m a policeman. Don’t be afraid, okay?” he tells her, trying not to scare her away. No worries, though; he’s not going to.

As he approaches, the girl turns around to reveal what we knew was coming. She’s a grotesque zombie! Her mouth is torn open, revealing teeth that still have braces on them. She lurches toward Rick, her pace changing quickly from a walk to a near run. And what does the deputy sheriff do? He takes out a handgun and, pausing only a split second to register the burden of his decision, pulls the trigger, putting a bullet in the head of the zombie girl and thus stopping her in her tracks.

Cool? Awesome? Hardly. Our introduction to the world of The Walking Dead is a man shooting a little girl in the head. If he hadn’t done so, however, she would have torn off his flesh and eaten it. It’s no accident that this is our welcome to Kirkman’s nightmare. He wants us to understand, from the very start, that his world is a nightmare, and an endless one at that. The horror of The Walking Dead is clear. It’s not about some rotting zombies jumping out at Rick, his family, and the rest of the survivors. That’s merely scary. It’s not about zombies lumbering along after these people, never tiring, no matter where they go. That’s merely terrifying.

The horror is that little girls become zombies. The horror is that they need to be shot in the head. The horror is that after enough relentless zombie attacks, the survivors no longer even recognize the horror of all of this until, midway through the second season (“Pretty Much Dead Already”), they are forced once again to confront the ghastliness of it all, in a scene that makes a nice bookend with the opening of the series.

Who would want to live in such a world? No one sane, presumably. Even Shane, whom Dale rightly challenges for being the survivor who best fits into this world gone mad, doesn’t want to live in it. But that’s just acknowledging what the survivors want. We would want the same thing, but there’s often a gap between what we want and what we’re morally permitted to do.

Among the many difficult things that The Walking Dead forces us to think about, perhaps the hardest is suicide. Is it morally permissible for the survivors to “opt out,” as they put it? Did Dr. Edwin Jenner do something morally wrong by committing suicide at the end of the first season (“TS-19”)? Was Jacqui right or wrong in joining him? Would any of us be obligated to keep on living in a world as horrific as that of The Walking Dead, or would it be morally acceptable to kill ourselves in order to avoid its horrors?1

Blameless Suicide

Reflecting on suicide is not easy. Many people have lost someone close to them because of it. Some people kill themselves because they are suffering from a mental illness. Others kill themselves because they underwent a traumatic event and didn’t find a helpful way of dealing with it. We should approach the topic of suicide with sensitivity. And the first thing we should acknowledge is that people who kill themselves for reasons like this are in no way morally blameworthy for their actions, even if it turns out, as many people believe, that killing oneself is wrong.

To see why people who kill themselves might not be morally blameworthy, we need to use a distinction in moral philosophy between the moral status of our actions and the moral responsibility we bear in performing those actions. In the former case, we are concerned with whether a particular course of action is the morally right or wrong way to go. Is it required of us? Is it at least a permissible thing to do? Or is it morally prohibited? In the latter case, we are concerned with assigning moral praise or blame for performing certain actions. The important thing to keep in mind is that these two things can be separate. Just because one does the right thing doesn’t mean that one is morally praiseworthy for doing it, and just because one does the wrong thing doesn’t mean that one is morally blameworthy for doing it.

Consider when Rick first enters Atlanta, hoping beyond hope that he is about to find his wife, Lori, and his son, Carl, safe and sound at a well-defended haven (“Days Gone Bye”). He finds nothing of the sort, of course; instead, he stumbles on a city overrun by zombies. This discovery takes him by surprise, so much so that he quickly loses his horse and his bag of guns and finds himself crawling underneath an abandoned tank in order to escape the zombie horde. It doesn’t look like he’s going to make it. Zombies are coming at him from all sides, they’re very hungry, and he has only one bullet left in his pistol. He decides to use it on himself. “Lori, Carl, I’m sorry,” Rick says, putting the gun to his head.

Luckily for him, just at that moment he spots a way into the tank. But what if he hadn’t spotted it? What if he had pulled the trigger instead? Would Rick have done something morally permissible? We’ve postponed an answer to that question, but let us suppose that our answer is no. Does this mean that Rick would have been morally blameworthy for taking his own life? No.

Even if what Rick had done in that case would have been wrong, he would not have been morally responsible for doing it. That’s because he would have been acting under significant duress. Saying that he would not have been morally responsible for his action is not the same as saying that he would not have been causally responsible for his action. Obviously, he would have been causally responsible for killing himself. After all, he would have pulled the trigger. We wouldn’t judge him as morally responsible, however, because of the ghastly pressure he was under when making his decision. (See how well you deliberate when surrounded by ghouls who are about to scrape off your flesh, rip out your insides, and then eat you!)

We’re morally responsible only for actions that we perform freely, and we can perform an action freely only if we’re in an appropriate state of mind to think about what our options are. Otherwise, circumstances and the states of mind they give rise to can come together to coerce us into action. And if we’re coerced into action, we’re not morally responsible for what we do. If we’re facing life-threatening danger, if we’re in a physiologically depressed state, or if despite all our efforts we see no way of coping with a trauma that we didn’t bring on ourselves, then we rightfully think that these states of mind prevent us from being morally blameworthy for our actions, even if we do the wrong thing. We should therefore acknowledge that many people who end their lives do so blamelessly, even if we evaluate the action itself as wrong.

What about cases of suicide in which the people seem to be open-eyed and clearheaded? In such cases, it’s much less likely for moral responsibility to be separated from the rightness or wrongness of the action itself. In these cases, if we judge suicide as morally impermissible, then it’s likely that we’ll judge the person who commits suicide as morally blameworthy. Some people reject the possibility of cases in which calm, cool reflection leads to suicide. “No one in his right mind would kill himself,” it is often said. That doesn’t seem right, though. Let’s start looking at this issue more carefully.

Suicide as Self-Sacrifice

Reflection suggests that despite what we may think at first, there are indeed cases in which people can reasonably take their own lives and justify their actions as morally permissible. In “What Lies Ahead,” Carl is shot by Otis in a hunting accident. Rick and Shane rush him to Hershel’s farm, where Hershel, who is trained in veterinary medicine, gets to work on saving Carl’s life. It’s touch-and-go for quite some time, however, and along the way, Rick is repeatedly asked to give blood to his son. Of course, Rick does so without hesitation. And because of his blood, along with the medical supplies that Shane acquires—through reprehensible means, let us not forget—Carl’s life is saved. Hurrah!

But rarely do things work out quite that nicely in the world of The Walking Dead (if we consider Shane sacrificing Otis to the zombies a nice thing). Let us suppose instead that Carl needed a more complicated surgery to save his life. Hershel was capable of performing it, but for it to succeed at all, Carl was going to need a lot of blood. And Rick, let us suppose again, has the only blood type that will work. It’s made clear to Rick that he faces a difficult choice. He can save his son’s life, but only at the cost of his own, because the amount of blood he will need to provide for the surgery will surely kill him.

Is Rick permitted to save his son Carl’s life at the expense of his own? It is difficult to see how the answer could be no. Rick may not be required to sacrifice his life, although some people might think that as Carl’s father, he is. All the same, that’s not what we’re asking. We’re asking whether it is morally permissible for Rick to give all, or at least most, of his blood to his son for the sake of saving his son’s life. And here it seems that the answer is yes. But why?

It may be tempting to rely on a popular moral principle to justify our belief, that of the doctrine of double effect.2 Alas, that won’t help us in this case, but it is interesting to understand why. The doctrine of double effect tells us that it is permissible to perform an action that we foresee as having both a good effect and a bad effect as long as certain conditions are met. There is a lot of debate among philosophers over just what these conditions are, but here are some popular suggestions.

First, the action must be performed only with the intention of accomplishing the good effect, not the bad one. The bad effect can be foreseen but not intended. With Hershel’s help, Rick can keep giving up pints of his blood for the surgery as it is needed, up to and including the pint that will do him in, but only if he intends to save his son’s life and doesn’t intend to die. He might foresee that he is going to die, but he can’t intend for that to happen.

Second, the good effect has to be at least as good as the bad effect is bad. The good effect in this case is saving Carl’s life, and the bad effect is Rick losing his own. Those effects satisfy this condition. Rick would violate this condition if he were to sacrifice himself in order to prevent his son’s arm (rather than his son’s life) from being lost.

The third condition is that the good effect cannot be achieved by means of the bad effect. So Carl’s life cannot be saved by Rick losing his own life. Would Carl’s life be saved this way? What would appear to save Carl’s life is Rick giving up his blood with Hershel’s help. That is, it’s his blood, not his death (the bad effect), that would save his son’s life.

So far, so good. But there’s a fourth condition. The action in and of itself, independent of context, must be morally good or at least morally neutral. Is Rick’s action morally good or neutral in and of itself? We are about to bump up against one of the biggest problems with the doctrine of double effect, because our answer will depend on how we describe what Rick would really be doing. So far we have been talking about an action, Rick giving up his blood, and two effects, Rick dying and Carl living. If that’s correct, then Rick giving up his blood can perhaps be viewed as morally neutral in and of itself.

Maybe, but there’s a bigger worry. Surely, Rick giving up his last pint of blood—the one that will do him in—is the same thing as Rick killing himself. To suggest otherwise should strike us as just playing with words. If that’s right, however, then we are in a bit of trouble here, because the only way to satisfy this fourth condition of the principle is to take a stand on whether killing oneself, in and of itself, is morally good or neutral. And it is quite obviously neither.

We need to be very careful at this point to distinguish between an action being good, bad, or neutral, on the one hand, and it being obligatory, prohibited, or permissible, on the other hand. These are different ways of morally evaluating actions, and they intersect in lots of ways. Taking one’s own life, in and of itself, independent of context, seems to be a bad thing to do, although it might also be a permissible thing to do.

The doctrine of double effect, then, is a bust for us. In order to justify our verdict that it is permissible for Rick to sacrifice himself to save Carl, we would need to either defend the idea that giving his last pint of blood is significantly different from killing himself or defend the idea that killing oneself, in and of itself, is morally good or neutral. Neither one of those approaches is remotely attractive.3

Kant, Consequences, and Killing Oneself

How, then, do we defend our verdict that it’s morally permissible for Rick to kill himself to save Carl’s life? Rather than coming up with a positive line of reasoning for our conclusion, we might simply dismiss any arguments against our position. We have a case in which a father, with a clear head (let us suppose that Lori makes sure that Rick doesn’t act rashly), decides to sacrifice his own life for the sake of his son’s life. The father is acting freely, and a life is being saved. All else remaining equal...