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about Spike.
Between reading ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jennyo's post and the subsequent discussion of redemption in the Jossverse, and sitting here writing a soulless but redeemable Spike...
I'm wondering about the dividing line between 'conscience' and 'empathy' for vampires. It seems like vampires don't really have either, I suppose. They do bad things without feeling guilty; they hurt people and don't understand that another person's pain means something. But then again... humans judging vamps is like caribou, sitting around looking at wolves and thinking, man, they clearly have no care for anything, they keep killing us. And it's not that wolves don't have a social structure, not that they don't care about each other and potentially members of other species as well. It just means that caribou are food.
So, here's what I think. I think that vampires, being, like humans, essentially social creatures, have conscience. They have a sense of what's right and wrong; it's just that that sense is attuned to, y'know, being a vampire. So it's probably wrong to kill your sire, and right to kill the slayer, and so on. There are probably plenty of rules, because otherwise my guess is that vampires would wipe each other out - sort of like the reason people were all so polite in societies where dueling was common.
I think what vampires lack is empathy. All they're concerned with is getting what they want, and they couldn't care less about how that makes anybody, vampire, human, demon, or house cat, feel. They still adhere to, or at least understand the existence of, a set of rules, a code of conduct, because that doesn't rely on feeling bad when you hurt somebody's feelings, it's a system of self-preservation.
And so I think that where Spike is different from your average run of vampires is that he's got some kind of selective empathy. Sort of like selective deafness; there's a subroutine in his brain somewhere labeling everyone he interacts with: food, food, food, food, food, ignore, food, poker stakes, food, food, shag, kill, food, and then every once in a while the cherries line up and some part of Spike's brain ticks over and says, Hey, that's a person, and then, whether he likes them or not, he's conscious of their feelings in the way that a regular person with a normal amount of empathy would be.
jennyo's post and the subsequent discussion of redemption in the Jossverse, and sitting here writing a soulless but redeemable Spike... I'm wondering about the dividing line between 'conscience' and 'empathy' for vampires. It seems like vampires don't really have either, I suppose. They do bad things without feeling guilty; they hurt people and don't understand that another person's pain means something. But then again... humans judging vamps is like caribou, sitting around looking at wolves and thinking, man, they clearly have no care for anything, they keep killing us. And it's not that wolves don't have a social structure, not that they don't care about each other and potentially members of other species as well. It just means that caribou are food.
So, here's what I think. I think that vampires, being, like humans, essentially social creatures, have conscience. They have a sense of what's right and wrong; it's just that that sense is attuned to, y'know, being a vampire. So it's probably wrong to kill your sire, and right to kill the slayer, and so on. There are probably plenty of rules, because otherwise my guess is that vampires would wipe each other out - sort of like the reason people were all so polite in societies where dueling was common.
I think what vampires lack is empathy. All they're concerned with is getting what they want, and they couldn't care less about how that makes anybody, vampire, human, demon, or house cat, feel. They still adhere to, or at least understand the existence of, a set of rules, a code of conduct, because that doesn't rely on feeling bad when you hurt somebody's feelings, it's a system of self-preservation.
And so I think that where Spike is different from your average run of vampires is that he's got some kind of selective empathy. Sort of like selective deafness; there's a subroutine in his brain somewhere labeling everyone he interacts with: food, food, food, food, food, ignore, food, poker stakes, food, food, shag, kill, food, and then every once in a while the cherries line up and some part of Spike's brain ticks over and says, Hey, that's a person, and then, whether he likes them or not, he's conscious of their feelings in the way that a regular person with a normal amount of empathy would be.