The Moral Cowardice of not Becoming a Vampire

Imagine if a vampire came up to you and asked if you'd like to become one of them. It's an opportunity to be an eternal being, but there’s some tradeoffs. Let’s say the friendly vampire would be happy to introduce you to other vampires, show you around, and candidly answer any questions you may have about their nocturnal existence. You could even take as long as you like making the decision, because they want you to do the right thing for you. I'd assume this would be beneficial for them too, because they face the prospect of having someone who would be whining about the wrong decision for, literally, ever. What would you choose after you exhaustively researched the pros and cons? 

Being a vampire sounds fun now, but would you miss not being able to eat real food or the feeling of sunlight on your skin as you lay on the beach? On the flip side, living forever means you could lose yourself in learning for eternity. You could see the world evolve. Being cut off from so much mortal stuff may send you into an everlasting depression though. And just because Steve the vampire, who you met at that cool rave, would never dream of going back to regular life doesn't mean you won't feel differently. Steve is a dumb vampire name, so maybe Steve has bad taste and shouldn't be listened to. We are still no closer to figuring things out.

This vampire dilemma is the example philosopher and cognitive scientist L.A. Paul gives in her book Transformative Experiences to express that we can't know how certain life decisions will change us. It's impossible to forecast if we made the right life altering choice. From getting married and having children to moving to another city, there's no way to calculate how everything will play out and whether or not we will like the results of the path we walked down. As the world increases our options like a grocery store stocks beverages, it can feel overwhelming as we implicitly grasp what's at stake. Because our reactions to the choices we make can range from regret to liberation, transformative experiences present a perfect condition for intense anxiety and paralyses to transpire.

A solution to getting around the problem of infinite combinations of life trajectories is culture. Having standards that society lives by can curtail certain issues that arise with decisions. Some predetermined cultural examples include middle class American teenagers going to college after high school and Judaism’s strict bereavement practices. Following collectivist rules helps the individual maintain value by keeping alive habits that have been known to work to certain degrees. It gives clarity about what one should do in difficult situations. Here lies a major problem then. If morality is the question of what to do next, and we constantly export our decisions to something outside ourselves in order to avoid the responsibility of transformative experiences, how can we act as true moral agents?

The short answer is that we can't. This is why most of us are moral cowards. We know that we may regret becoming a vampire, so we leave things up to the fate of cultural dictates without figuring out why. Under this condition we don't own our lives. Further, we're off the hook when things don't turn out because we can say, "I was just following orders”. Offloading decisions to others results in us not being able to generate new answers to novel problems. The idea is somebody else's, so we feel no ownership or right to change it. Usually we don’t even want to, because our fingerprints would end up being all over it, which would make it ours.

Since everyone's lives are novel in many ways, there's no way around each of us choosing what transformative experiences we wish to have and not have. Afterwards, what were left with is the inevitable, yet unforeseen, results. The earlier we can assume this courageous responsibility the more moral we'll have a chance to become. We don't need to be a vampire in order to avoid moral cowardice, we just can't abandon the decision to be or not to be. In assuming this commitment we gain a stance that enables us to error correct. Unfortunately, in doing so, we also give up much of our right to complain. We could blame the friendly vampire for giving us a choice in the first place though.