Today’s been decent.

In the morning, I had TV Viewing class. It’s where we watch a bunch of episodes of something that we might want to pitch to some day.

Today’s show was I, Zombie. It’s a show about a hyper-achieving medical resident who goes to a party on a boat one night and gets attacked by zombies. She wakes up the next morning a zombie herself, but not the sort that is all mindless. She’s still the same person, more or less, and in the show’s universe, she can only stay that way fi she keeps getting her brain fix.

So she gives up on being a cardiologist and instead goes to work at the morgue, where she can get a ready supply of grey matter. She discovers that when she eats someone’s brain, she gets some of their personality traits, skills, and memories, and she uses this ability to bring these people’s killers to justice, along with her cop friend (who thinks she’s psychic… which she is… sorta… ).

It’s an odd but fun premise, and I enjoyed the episodes we watched. It’s reasonably well written and kinda funny. I wouldn’t call it brilliant but I would definitely say it’s considerably above average. I especially liked the third episode, where she ate the brain of someone who turned out to be a sociopathic hitman obsessed with trivia contests. As a result, she did acquire mad trivia skills, but she also learned what it was like to be a sociopath and genuinely have no human emotion. To be completely selfish not by choice but because you’re fundamentally broken. She describes it as “like everyone is behind fifty feet of glass”.

I have somewhat of a fascination with sociopaths. To a very sensitive person like me, being a sociopath seems like a special kind of hell, and while it might be nice to get a break from all the empathic noise in my head from time to time, being cut off from all empathy would be far, far too steep a price to pay.

Still, the idea of an absence of moral feeling fascinates me. I am someone with a very deep sense of right and wrong, and I have pursued the understanding of ethics as a philosophical discipline ever since my first year of college. And that’s only my official start. I had been pondering the question of what is the right thing to do for a lot longer than that.

I just didn’t have a name for it.

They also fascinate me because they seem like the sort of people society should know about. It would be great if there was some sort of test, like the Voight-Kamph test from Blade Runner, that could be administered at a certain age that would flag people as sociopaths. Maybe something more sophisticated and fMRI based.

No idea what we would do with that information, though. That’s a tough nugget to chew. It seems horribly wrong to lock people up for failing some sort of test, even though that might be what’s best for society in terms of safety. Giving them some special set of rules to follow seems pretty heavy handed too. Modern society simply cannot tolerate creating any sort of special class of citizen that doesn’t have the same rights as everyone else.

The only exception is the criminal class. And to qualify for that, you kind of have to commit a crime. And being a sociopath can’t ever be a crime in and of itself. It honestly seems to me that knowing who the sociopaths are can only be used in retrospect.

“Well, Bob Henderson committed a heinous crime today.”
“*looks up Bob on the Sociopath Index* That figures. ”

Another thing that fascinates me is the fact that the majority of crime is committed by a small group of hardcore criminals. That makes it seem like a vast reduction in crime is tantalizingly possible. That’s why I support Dangerous Offender type legislation that allows for keeping some people locked up indefinitely because they pose a real risk to the community if released when their sentence is up, as long as it is very narrowly construed to only apply to people with a seriously nasty record replete with recidivism.

My support is not without reservation. Anything that violates the basic human ethic principal of fairness cannot be considered lightly. And it doesn’t seem fair to tell someone they will be going to jail for X number of years then change our minds and say “Psych! You’re never getting out. ”

But there are some people who just plain should not be allowed access to the public any more. It’s a very small number of people, thank goodness, but nevertheless, I think it’s justified in those cases to just keep them locked up indefinitely.

However, I also think that if we are keeping someone past their sentence, they should be transferred to a nicer sort of prison. After all, we don’t have to scare them into never committing a crime again… they are never going to have the opportunity. And we are tacitly admitting that these people can’t help themselves. I know that this would offend people’s sense of punitive justice, but that was taken care of by their original sentencing.

After that, we are just warehousing them. So why be harsher on them than we have to be? Like Bentham said, no law and no punishment can be allowed to be any more severe than that which will provide sufficient deterrent to crime. Anything more is tyranny.

That’s why I agree with Nietzsche (check out the philosophical name dropping on this one) when he says to mistrust all in whom the urge to punish is strong. It’s not that there is something wrong with just punishment. It’s that those kinds of people cannot be trusted to limit themselves to what is merely just. They tend to want to vent their frustrations on whoever gives them a pretense.

I hate people like that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.