Alien and Philosophy

I Infest, Therefore I Am

Jeffrey A. Ewing, Kevin S. Decker, William Irwin

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781119280811
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119280842
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Alien and Philosophy: I Infest, Therefore I Am presents a philosophical exploration of the world of Alien, the simultaneously horrifying and thought-provoking sci-fi horror masterpiece, and the film franchise it spawned.

• The first book dedicated to exploring the philosophy raised by one of the most successful and influential sci-fi franchises of modern times
• Features contributions from an acclaimed team of scholars of philosophy and pop culture, led by highly experienced volume editors
• Explores a huge range of topics that include the philosophy of fear, Just Wars, bio-weaponry, feminism and matriarchs, perfect killers, contagion, violation, employee rights and Artificial Intelligence
• Includes coverage of H.R. Giger's aesthetics, the literary influences of H.P. Lovecraft, sci-fi and the legacy of Vietnam, and much more!

Part I
Identity and Moral Considerability: “We Made You Because We Could”

1
“No Man Needs Nothing”: The Possibility of Androids as Lockean Persons in Alien and Prometheus

Chris Lay

Most of us probably take it for granted that “human beings” and what philosophers and lawyers call “persons” are one and the same thing. The Alien franchise often challenges this idea, though. To first‐time viewers of Alien, seeing Parker knock Ash’s head clean off his shoulders while the android’s body continues to fight back is just about as jarring as the Xenomorph Chestburster exploding out of Kane in the middle of the Nostromo mess hall. Why? Because, up until that point, Ash looked and acted like a perfectly normal human person (albeit an emotionally detached one). In Aliens, the synthetic Bishop balks at being called an android, demurring, “I prefer the term ‘artificial person’ myself.” When someone else calling himself Bishop shows up on Fiorina 161 at the end of Alien³, Ripley elects to throw herself into the active smelter because she cannot be sure that this “Bishop” isn’t an android sent by Weyland‐Yutani to harvest the Xenomorph queen gestating inside her. Another android, Call, from Alien: Resurrection, both rejects and is disgusted by the fact that she is something that is less than human. However, the Ripley clone Ripley‐8 seems to imply that Call’s compassion for others supersedes her synthetic programming and allows her to transcend being a mere “auton.”

In each of these cases from the Alien films, the franchise asks us to question both what it is to be human and whether or not beings are possible that are like humans, even if they are not biologically human. This is where a distinction between “human” and “person” comes in. Bishop wants to be treated like a human (despite the fact that he’s not, biologically speaking, a human being). Call is ashamed of and appalled by her synthetic nature, but might Ripley‐8 be right in thinking that certain features—such as her capacity to self‐reflect—make Call more “human” than she realizes? If something shares certain relevant traits with humans (without being biologically human), we may be able to group that something and humans into a common category. Let’s call this the category of “persons.” For philosophers, deciding what belongs in this category and what doesn’t is the question of personhood—that is, what makes something count as a person, and can there be persons who are not human?

Perhaps more than any other film in the franchise, the Alien quasi‐prequel Prometheus directly engages this question of personhood. To the viewers, the android David at least appears to be a person: we see David play basketball, worry about his looks as he grooms himself in a mirror, and express his love of Lawrence of Arabia. These certainly seem to be things that bona fide persons would do. Yet, many of the characters in the film treat David as if he could not possibly be a person. In a hologram played to the crew of the Prometheus after they wake up from hypersleep, Peter Weyland, David’s creator, says of his creation:

There’s a man sitting with you today. His name is David. And he is the closest thing to a son I will ever have. Unfortunately, he is not human. He will never grow old and he will never die. And yet he is unable to appreciate these remarkable gifts, for that would require the one thing that David will never have: a soul.

If we assume that Weyland is right and that David does not have a soul, why should that matter to whether or not David counts as a person? If “having a soul” is essential to being a person, and if devices, no matter how complex, don’t have souls, then David definitely cannot be a person. On the other hand, the relevant features of David that make us think he seems like a person might not necessarily be attached to the idea of a soul. In that case, we might have good reason to say that David is a person after all.

“Well, I guess that’s because I’m a human being, and you’re a robot”

René Descartes (1596–1650) would have agreed with Weyland’s take on David. Descartes thought that humans were made of two distinct substances: a body (made of physical stuff), and a soul (made of nonphysical stuff). It is the soul that gives us the features that make us persons, though. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes says:

I know certainly that I exist, and that meanwhile I do not remark that any other thing necessarily pertains to my nature or essence, excepting that I am a thinking thing, I rightly conclude that my essence consists solely in the fact that I am a thinking thing [or a substance whose whole essence or nature is to think].¹

Here, Descartes means that thinking is the one feature of himself that he can be absolutely sure of. So, for example, Ripley could hypothetically doubt that she has a body or that she has been safely rescued from the Narcissus (the Nostromo’s shuttle). In these cases she might just be dreaming, or, in the case of Ripley’s dream of a Chestburster in Aliens, having a nightmare. However, she cannot doubt that she exists and that she thinks. Indeed, she would have to both exist and think in order to conjure up the dream! For Descartes, the upshot is that our mental features are part and parcel with the soul, or a “substance whose whole essence or nature is to think.”

Of course, human beings also have bodies, but these account only for the biological features of humans. To Descartes, our physical features have nothing to do with our essential nature—as things that think—because the body is completely separable from the idea of thinking. Thoughts are not physical things and bodies are. The two are thus wholly different in kind. Since for Descartes the essential features of humans are mental features, and mental features are features exclusively of souls, this means that the criteria for personhood—those essential features that other things might be able to share with humans—are only features of souls. Lots of things have bodies, but only souls (and, by extension, things that have souls) can think. So, for example, Descartes claims that animals are “automata” whose behavior, though similar to that of humans, can be explained entirely “as originating from the structure of the animals’ body parts.”² Animals don’t have the ability to think because they don’t have souls.

The same argument can, I think, be extended to androids like David. Androids appear to act like human persons—they communicate, evidently emote, and are outwardly human in nearly every way. However, their behavior is strictly mechanical. Without a soul, David cannot think. Without thought—the essential Cartesian criterion of personhood—David cannot be a person. He is just missing the right sort of features. This is exactly how David is treated by the other characters in Prometheus. Weyland explicitly points to David’s lack of a soul in his speech to the Prometheus crew. A despondent, half‐drunk Charlie Holloway condescends toward David while shooting pool, all the while noting that David is lucky that he—an unfeeling android—cannot experience disappointment like a real person could. Even the generally optimistic and kind Elizabeth Shaw sees David as nothing more than a sophisticated machine. At the film’s end, when a bodiless David wonders why Shaw is so eager to track down the Engineers and seek answers from humanity’s creators, she matter‐of‐factly asserts, “Well, I guess that’s because I’m a human being, and you’re a robot.” These characters apparently adopt the Cartesian view of persons in denying David personhood. David cannot feel emotions like disappointment or empathize with those who have a desire for answers because he does not have a soul, which is the seat of such capacities.

“Technological, intellectual, physical…emotional”

The Cartesian take on personhood is not the only way to read Prometheus, though. In a promotional short film for Prometheus called “Happy Birthday David,” David is introduced as an “Eighth generation Weyland TIPE: technological, intellectual, physical…emotional.”³ Two of these qualities are primary features of persons, according to John Locke (1632–1704). In contrast to Descartes, Locke believes that what makes something a person is not tied up with having a soul. Indeed, a “person” is something completely different from a “human,” or any other animal, for that matter. The primary feature of animals—including humans—is, for Locke, a certain functional organization of their bodies. That is, their organs work together in particular ways to make sure that the being can perform basic life functions.

At the same time, we can distinguish persons from mere animals with a certain functional biology. Locke defines “person” at two points in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. First, he says that a person “is a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places.”⁴ So, persons are able to think, can be rational—or follow some set of logical rules—and have the capacity to self‐reflect. This last idea is especially important....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Identity and Moral Considerability
• Part II: Ethics
• Part III: Moral Psychology
• Part IV: Horror
• Part V: Sex and Gender
• Part VI: Continental Philosophy
• Index
• End User License Agreement