I was recently re-watching “Becoming, Parts
1 and 2,” those Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes where geeky witch Willow does a spell to give the vampire Angel his
soul back. And suddenly I had a burning ethical question.
Spoiler alert, for people who haven’t watched “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” but plan to.
Why don’t they just keep doing the re-ensoulment
spell — on all vampires? Or at least, on all the vampires that
they can?
Yes, it’s a somewhat difficult spell — although given that Willow could
do it when she was a fairly inexperienced witch, it clearly can’t be
that difficult. And yes, it’s very likely (although I’m not sure
they specify this) that the spell can only be done one vampire at a time,
and that you need to know which particular vampire you’re re-ensouling.
But given what a scourge vampires are on humanity, wouldn’t it be worth
doing, as much as possible? At least from a harm-reduction perspective,
even if they could only re-ensoul a couple/few vampires a week, wouldn’t
that be worth it?
Besides, it’s not like Willow is the only witch in the world capable of
doing this spell. (The Romani magician who cursed Angel the first time
obviously could do it.) So when the Scoobies (Buffy’s gang, for those who
don’t watch the show) recovered the re-ensoulment spell, why didn’t they
immediately spread the word to every witch in the world? If every witch in
the world re-ensouled even just one or two vampires a week, doesn’t it
seem likely that the entire vampire population could be entirely
re-ensouled in a fairly short time? Vampires are easier to find than, say,
smallpox. Wouldn’t a concentrated vaccination program at least have
potential to be entirely effective, fairly quickly? (Unless, of course,
you started getting re-ensoulment denialists…)
In fact, I’m going to go further. I’m not just going to argue that this
global re-ensoulment program is possible. I’m going to argue that
not doing it is unethical. And not just from the obvious “reducing
the number of people who die from vampire attacks” perspective. It’s
unethical from the vampire perspective.
The fact that vampires can be re-ensouled puts them in a very different
good/evil category than other demons. Think about what both Angel and
Spike were like after they were re-ensouled. The fact that they can be
re-ensouled puts vampires more in the category of werewolves: dangerous,
but with potential to be, from an ethical perspective, essentially human.
And in the Buffyverse, it’s considered highly unethical to kill a werewolf
unless they’re putting people in immediate danger. The Scoobies go to
great lengths to make sure that Oz is caged when he’s in his werewolf
state — not just to protect other people from him, but to protect him.
So why is it ethical to go around killing every vampire in the world on
sight, without even trying to re-ensoul them? Wouldn’t it be far more
ethical to at least try to re-ensoul as many vampires as they possibly
could?
Now, when I brought this up with my wife Ingrid, she thought of an
interesting ethical concern that I hadn’t considered — namely, the
ecological one. Vampires are immortal: they can be killed, but if they’re
not staked or decapitated or exposed to sunlight, they seem to live
forever. So if every vampire on the planet were re-ensouled, there would
be a whole lot of living creatures (well, not living, but you know what I
mean), requiring a certain amount of blood, who would pretty much never
die. Would that, Ingrid wondered, put too much strain on the planet’s
resources?
But I’m not sure this concern holds up. There just aren’t that many
vampires in the Buffyverse: far fewer than there are humans. Assuming a
predator/ prey ratio of about 2000 to 1 (a rough ratio calculated by Brian Thomas, a PhD
candidate in ecology at Stanford University), that would mean that in a
world population of about 7 billion, there would be roughly 3.5 million
vampires — about the size of Los Angeles. And once vampires are
re-ensouled, they don’t seem to make (“sire”) new vampires (unless they’re
under the influence of a controlling external evil, like Spike was briefly
in Season 7). They’re immortal — but if they’re re-ensouled, they don’t
reproduce. So even if new vampires continued to be sired by any remaining
un-ensouled vampires during the vaccination program, it seems that
eventually the population would stabilize. Maybe at higher than 3.5
million; maybe at, to be on the generous side, let’s say 8 million. Let’s
call it New York City.
If we can feed the cities of Los Angeles or New York, surely we can feed
that many vampires. Especially since vampires feed on blood, which is at
least something of a renewable resource: blood can be harvested from
living animals, the way milk or wool is. (I’d be interested, by the way,
in hearing from vegan Buffy fans about the vegan ethics of this question.
Would it be more ethical to continue staking vampires, who don’t have
souls but are potentially pretty human-like — or to re-ensoul them if it
meant that some animals would have to be kept as food sources? Would
re-ensouling vampires fall into the category of keeping carnivorous pets,
like cats and dogs?)
What’s more, re-ensouled vampires are a powerful asset in the fight
against evil. Again — look at Angel and Spike. Both have become major
players in the demon-hunting, evil-resisting scene. Of course, not every
re-ensouled vampire would necessarily choose to do battle with demons and
evil law firms
and such. But even if they didn’t all go that route — even if Angel and
Spike were outliers, even if only one in ten or one in a hundred became
champions, and the rest became store clerks and software designers and
unemployed actors like the rest of us — that’s still a whole lot of
superheroes. Why on Earth didn’t the Scoobies take advantage of this
enormous potential, not only to rid the world of human-killing vampires,
but to create an army of super-strong, super-powered allies? I mean, Buffy
is always whining about the burden of Slayerdom, how she’s alone in this
fight and can never have a reprieve from it. Doesn’t the re-ensoulment
spell have “Slayer vacation” written all over it?
It seems to me that this is a serious plot hole. It’s in the same vein as
“Why don’t they keep using the lie detector on Star Trek in every
relevant episode?” and other convenient devices that are immediately
forgotten (is there a TV Trope for that?). But it’s a whole lot more
serious. It cuts to the very essence of the show. The show is about
slaying vampires. It’s in the title, for crying out loud. And yet, after
the discovery of a tool that could render vampire slaying obsolete, the
show still goes on for five more seasons — six, if you count Angel —
as if this had never happened, as if re-ensoulment were entirely
irrelevant to anyone other than Angel and Spike and Buffy and anyone who
has to listen to them gas on about their tormented romantic lives.
It’s entirely possible that there’s something I’ve overlooked in this
analysis. It is, after all, something I cooked up in an afternoon. (Maybe
Orbs of Thesulah
can’t be mass-produced or something.) But if I’m right, this doesn’t just
undermine the essence of the show from a plot perspective. It undermines
it from an ethical perspective. One of the most interesting things about
“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is its thoughtful, complex, nuanced ethics. It
is fundamentally about ethics — it’s about the battle between good
and evil, and the often murky waters that this battle stirs up — and it
takes the ethics of its invented universe seriously. It’s a little
unsettling to realize that, for well over half the life of the show, those
ethics had been quietly but profoundly blown to shrapnel, just so the show
could go on.
Greta Christina is author of Coming
Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, of Why Are You
Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and of Bending:
Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More. She
blogs at Greta Christina’s
Blog.
