Hey Dan, Dan said: The character of Dexter is not a psychopath in the strict sense of the definition: A social predator who charms, manipulates and ruthlessly plows their way through life...completely lacking in feelings for others, they selfishly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt or regret.
The fact that Dexter is a serial killer immediately brings to mind the likes of Ted Bundy, Richard Speck, John Gacy, and other notorious psychopaths. But Dexter isn't that kind of serial killer... he is more a vigilante like the character Charles Bronson played in Death Wish. Dexter is a normal, every day person... he is a loving father, he cares deeply for his wife and sister. Matt: It's funny, but we have completely different perspectives on these shows. I see Dexter as exactly fulfilling the definition you just supplied (though I care much less about strictness in fittingness). The problem of Dexter, and why he's interesting, is exactly because he is _not_ Bronson: a vigilante who cares. It is because his mode of being a predator doesn't fit our notions of what patterns usually do fulfill that type. I don't have time to accumulate textual evidence, but it seems to me that a mountain of it is on my side. Without a doubt, Dexter is evolving through the seasons (and I haven't seen the last season, so no spoilers) and is having more and more existential crises, but at the beginning of Season 1, there seems to be several internal monologues that spell out that the only reason he _behaves like_ a loving boyfriend (eventually father) and brother is because it's what he needs to do to fit in, not because he feels the emotions. (As I believe Arlo also articulated.) And Walter of Breaking Bad! No way. Not a psychopath. At the beginning of Season 1 and even through the end of Season 2 (no spoilers on 3!), he is a broken man who wants desperately to leave his family with enough money to survive after he dies. Again, no doubt he's evolving like Dexter, but it strikes me that he's evolving normally as one who begins to taste specific kinds of power that had been withheld him (for various reasons). But an underlying psychopathology? Don't see it. Dan said: You seem to be saying Dynamic Quality is what the law meant in the past, means now, and will mean forever. I think of law, common or codified, as purely static quality. Dynamic Quality, or the notion of what is better, is what's behind the continuing evolution of law... it changes with the social circumstances of the times via intellectual arguments and judgements. If that's what you mean... then I agree. Matt: Yes, the notion of "common law," as opposed to other understandings of the relationship between laws and the rulings of judges, is such that the Judge tells us what the law _is_: which means that seeming changes of law are, according to the cover story, _seeming_ and rather what later judges do is tell us what the law has always really meant. This, in practice, is exactly the opposite of static, and is in fact the very picture of reason-guided evolution. The theory of common law that, say, Oliver Wendell Holmes (who figure into Louis Menand's story of pragmatism) had was that the idea that the law always says one thing is only a cover story, but a necessary one for it codifies the rule of precedent, which I'd like to think is analogous to Pirsig's notion of static latching. But, on the other hand, it is only an analogy, no near perfect (for what's "passing a new law" on this analogy: I have no idea). Matt Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
