Welcome Back! What was it like being a Zombie?

If you could bring a loved one back to life, would you? Is it the right thing to do? This is a question that has probably been on your mind at least once if you have experienced the death of someone close to you. Luckily, if there is a question, then there is a zombie movie that offers an answer.

In Boy Eats Girl, a high school boy Nathan wants to go out with his crush named Jess who does not meet up with Nathan for a first date because her overprotective father forbids her from doing so. Nathan, not knowing why Jess did not see him, assumes that he was rejected and goes home depressed to drink away his problems alone in his room. In a drunken daze, Nathan contemplates hanging himself. At this time, Nathan’s mother returns home from her job as an archeologist at the local monastery’s crypt. Conveniently, she discovered a book on voodoo magic earlier that day. She puts down the book and tells Nathan to turn down the loud music coming from his room. Nathan slips his head inside the noose and dangles his feet just at the edge of the chair, but then thinks better of killing himself and tries to get out of the noose. Nathan’s mother comes into his room and accidentally knocks him off of the chair and he accidentally hangs himself.

So, how was your day, Nathan?

            In a panic, she tries to reanimate him using heretical rituals she found in the crypt, despite a priest’s warnings that it would lead to unleashing evil. The ritual succeeds and Nathan wakes up the next day, but he seems abnormal to his mother: he is no longer his lively self and he is constantly thirsty and hungry, but otherwise he is the same. Suspecting something, Nathan’s mother reviews the ritual and finds that a page was missing from the book and she discovered that her ritual actually turned Nathan into a zombie instead of a true human. Nathan’s cravings for flesh become uncontrollable and he eventually bites part of a bully’s face off. This turns the bully into a zombie and by the next day almost the entire town has become a horde of ravenous zombies. After about 20 minutes of spirited zombie killing (including one incident with a woodchipper attached to a Bobcat)

It was pretty awesome

  Nathan’s mother discovers that a snake bite will cure the infected. After the snake cures Nathan, he finally gets to go on a date with Jess. The End.

            But was Nathan’s life worth the trouble that reanimation caused? Boy Eats Girl demonstrates how even people with the best intentions can take action leading to disastrous consequences, but her actions are justifiable if we consider her intentions only, since she didn't fully understand what could happen if the ritual went wrong. In this case, Nathan’s mother’s actions led to the deaths of dozens of people: no Utilitarian could justify the death of many for the sake of one tragically lost life. In contrast, Kant argues that in order to be good one must be acting morally out of a sense of duty (Salazar, 2) and we can consider  that all humans “have the right to life” according to The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Blackwell, 137). So a Kantian might argue that as a society we are obligated to reanimate someone if we have the means to do so because we believe that life is a universal and self-evident right. Nathan’s mother knew there might be repercussions, but had no idea that she would cause a zombie outbreak. She had just lost her only son so it would be unreasonable to expect her to not reanimate Nathan since she had the means to. It is difficult to fault her motivations in the face of such a tragedy, despite the unforeseen consequences and the fact that she was not acting in a purely Kantian sense. She wanted her son back partly because he made her feel happy, not solely because it was her duty.

            Let us suppose that medical science progressed far enough to so that it were possible to bring the dead back to life and that they would be people and not zombies. A Kantian might say that we are obliged to do reanimate the dead since we have the means, but Utilitarians would claim that Earth has only so many resources to support humans at an acceptable living standard and it may be unreasonable to demand people who are on their “first” life to share resources with people who are living a “second” life when resources are scarce to begin with. One could argue that only certain people should be brought back, and that the law can judge who should be reanimated such as murder victims or people who died in natural disasters or wars. However it is unreasonable to expect society to allow only certain people to be reanimated, because most people would consider the law to be reaching too far in the case of reanimation, similar to how most people would not consider the government’s authoritative regulation of abortions to be permissible (Blackburn, 63-4). We do not have judges come into the clinic and tell a woman she cannot have an abortion: many people would have a serious problem with that. Like abortion, reanimation would have to be deemed ethical on an individual basis by those who are willing to reanimate the deceased. An accidental death or being a murder victim may be enough justification to some people, perhaps some people would want to reanimate the parents of orphans, and some would reanimate their friends to go out partying like old times. Reanimation itself is not bad, but the intentions behind reanimation are ultimately what determines if it is right or wrong regardless of whether one uses a Kantian or Utilitarian perspective. There are justifications for reanimation that are better than others, but denying people their autonomy by demanding they adhere to a law or one ethical code over another to make that decision is a greater fault that would go against Kantian and Utilitarian ethics at the same time.

References

Salazar, Heather.“Kantian Business Ethics,” in Business in Ethical Focus, ed. Fritz Allhoff and Anand J. Vaidya. Broadview Press, 2008.

Blackburn, Simon. Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc. 2001. Print.