The Inherent Ethics of Vampirism

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The Inherent Ethics of Vampirism

Postby Hesperus » Fri Feb 21, 2014 1:59 pm

By Hesperus (c) 2012

"So...you're evil, then?" "You thrive on hurting others!" and, my personal favorite, "I love Jesus so I can't talk to you anymore." These are all actual reactions I received upon embracing my identity as a vampire and, after much internal debate, deciding that the best course of action for me was to openly discuss this identity with others. To chronicle all the accusations and assumptions made about my mental health would be less efficient than merely referring you to the entirety of the DSM-IV-TR but uninformed opinions on the psychological well-being of vampires aside, the next most frequent argument I faced was that vampirism, by its very nature, is evil.

As an inescapable consequence of my nature—both as a vampire and as a gay man—I have learned that the morality of the masses cannot be accepted as inarguably true merely because it is so widely accepted. Decisions on rightness and wrongness can so easily fall prey to personal prejudice and cognitive bias. This realization has driven the development and refinement of ethics throughout history and has resulted in many theories on how best to divorce the myopia of selfishness from a comprehensive ideology indicating proper action. Some great thinkers have argued that the rightness of an action should be judged by the motivation behind it; others have asserted that we must determine righteousness by the consequences of actions. Whatever the focus of a particular system of ethics, however, taking into account the effects of one's actions on a group larger than oneself seems to be universal.

Unethical behavior—evil—is, then, simply a matter of unawareness of or disregard for the well-being of others. Freud asserted that the desire for such behavior arises from primal urges, one's id, and is curtailed by one's superego as it takes into account the expectations of others; according to Freud, the conflict between the two results in anxiety resolved by one's primary sense of self, the ego. On an ontological level underlying psychology, existentialists have asserted that a sense and appreciation of Others as opposed to one's Self is essential to making ethical choices and is fundamental to one's nature. These perspectives agree that ethics is an expression of dichotomy—id versus superego, Self versus Other—and that the resolution of that dichotomy is a key element to the human condition.

What of vampires, then? People in general are capable of making ethical choices and may be evil or righteous in any given action but the vampire community bears a stigma, marking us as incapable or undeserving of the same choices; we are often seen as absolutely or unquestionably evil. By what criteria can this conclusion be upheld or challenged? To evaluate the assertion, the essential nature of vampirism must be explored. We are, at our core, those who feed upon others. It is our nature to invite into ourselves—by whatever means—that which is basic to another as an integral part of ourselves. As vampires, we define ourselves largely in terms of others, our donors. The acquisition of this source of vitality from others is the primal force within that drives us and sets us apart from the non-vampire.

Those outside our community often conclude from this that we must steal the life of those around us, that the vampiric id impels us to take the energy of others, fundamentally harming our donors by depriving them by force or coercion of that which they need. The only explanation I can find for the willingness to jump to such wild conclusions is projection; perhaps our accusers fear that, were they given the powerful drives within vampires, they would be unable to resist the temptation to harm. And yet, somehow, the streets are not littered with our victims, the world continues to turn and our donors do not widely report hollowness or abuse, but instead enlightenment and inspiration. What those fearing vampires have failed to take into account is the limitation of their senses.

Since that upon which we thrive is subtle and based upon the patterns of energy of our donors—the different patterns of these flows being commonly referred to as emotions—we must be aware, at least to some degree, of these patterns. Whether we develop these abilities to sense emotions by evolutionary means, needing them to feed and therefore survive, or such senses are inherent in us, both our senses and our Hunger effects of a single, earlier cause, is of little consequence here. Ultimately, we feed upon the energy of others and this requires us to detect and interact with the emotions of our donors. Furthermore, in feeding upon these emotions, we assimilate those energy patterns into ourselves, feeling our donors' emotions directly. This ability to sense and even to experience first-hand the emotions of others is commonly called empathy and, for many of us, it is just as inextricable a sense as taste or sight for those so gifted with those senses.

Given that we experience the feelings of our donors, willingly accepting them as our own, it follows quite naturally that we would have a strong interest in encouraging in our donors feelings that we would want to experience ourselves, quite literally not wanting them to feel anything that we wouldn't want to feel ourselves. Vampires, then, are the most likely to live unwaveringly by the Golden Rule. If we want to feel loved, we must show love to our donors; if we desire happiness, we must help our donors to achieve it; if we wish to avoid fear, sorrow and pain, we must strive to never inspire these emotions in those around us. Far from the heartless parasites typically depicted by non-vampires, we are compassionate and charitable, sincerely wanting to improve the state of those close to us. Many not within our community are also kind and charitable, of course, but I argue that no vampire could develop and thrive without first developing these traits. We are a race whose very nature demands high virtue, far more rightly compared to angels than to demons.

All of our kind Hunger for something that can only be found in the very essence of another person; this need drives us, not to malice and selfishness, as such would lead, in truth, only to starvation, but guides us rather to helping and guiding non-vampires, our donors, to greater happiness and stability. The satisfaction of our basic drives depends upon our compassion. Though we are capable of evil, any vampire's desire to harm others is an appetite for poison and cannot be long sustained. Humans, as a cost for their immunity to that poison, are free to act destructively, to deceive themselves in the justifications for their cruelty, and to ignore the pain that they inflict. Vampires are less free in this regard, but we are most assuredly not less ethical.
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Re: The Inherent Ethics of Vampirism

Postby The Madame X » Fri Feb 21, 2014 2:09 pm

A appetite for poison indeed.
These individuals tend to self-destruct relatively quick and careful, sometimes they take their best buddies right down with them...
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