The Walking Dead and Philosophy: Shotgun. Machete. Reason.

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?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Mar 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781118346686

Book preview

Introduction

Thinking Your Way through a Zombie Apocalypse

Zombies! We just can’t seem to get enough of them. There are zombie walks, zombie toys, and zombie snacks. Zombies are in board games and video games. Heroes and heroines of literary classics fight them, and a bunch of famous superheroes got turned into them. Let’s face it, these days we are all about zombies, and wherever they rear their rotting heads, we just eat it up (while watching them eat the rest of us up).

Where does The Walking Dead fit into all of this? Without a doubt, it is at the very top of the squirming, groaning heap of zombies in popular culture. The comic book series has been around for close to a decade now. It led the way in the horror-comic renaissance that the industry is currently enjoying. The television show is a big hit on AMC, reviving quality horror programming on television.

But its impact goes far beyond this. What makes The Walking Dead special is what it accomplishes in storytelling. Think about your favorite zombie movie. I know there is a long list, but pick one from it. Now let’s state the obvious. Because it is a movie, it has an ending. And because it has an ending, there’s really only so much that can happen. We know how this goes. The survivors individually encounter zombies and then barricade themselves together somewhere (a farmhouse, a mall, a bar, or what have you), spending a good deal of time keeping the zombies out and fighting among themselves. But uh-oh, the zombies get in anyway, some folks die and others don’t, and one or two are surely zombified. By the end of the movie, we watch whoever’s left running off—anywhere. Peace out. The end.

But what if there isn’t an end? What if the story picks up the next day, then the next day, and on and on? What if the story is not about surviving a bad night or two in a zombie apocalypse but about living day to day in one? That’s what The Walking Dead is all about. It’s about the long game. It’s about survival when the movie never ends, unless mistakes are made and every person alive dies. The Walking Dead shows us, panel by panel, issue by issue, and episode by episode, what it is like to have to live every day in a world overrun with carnivorous, animated corpses.

You know what? It totally sucks to live in that world.

The Walking Dead stands out because it is not afraid to show us what we become when we have to deal with zombies day in and day out, clinging to some meager life and hoping that our fellow survivors aren’t as bad, or even worse, than the zombies themselves. The Walking Dead forces us to confront our most cherished values and ask the following: Would we still be able to hold on to these things in such a world? What are we allowed to do? What aren’t we allowed to do? Are there any boundaries left?

These questions scream out (imagine a blood-curdling scream) to philosophers because they are the sort of questions we reflect on in many different contexts. They’re very hard questions with uncomfortable answers. How are we to treat zombies? They were once human, after all. How are we to treat one another? Some survivors don’t play nice. What social norms still survive a zombie apocalypse? The institution of marriage is in bad shape when the justice of the peace is trying to eat you. Are there laws anymore? Rick’s badge and uniform sure seem impressive, but maybe they’re just for show. Is a zombie world meant to be lived in? Suicide doesn’t seem so crazy when children come back from the dead and try to rip your face off.

Thinking about these things just might help you to survive the inevitable zombie apocalypse in our world.

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