Re: Douchebag characters considered "Nice Guys" - example 1: Xander Ha
A demon is not a soul. The removal of the demon-spirit would be a rather bad thing; as in 'poof' - dust. The demon is what animates and holds the corpse together. Remove it, and it falls apart, dust to dust. A stake works just fine, it would be a wast of effort and a massive risk to try to magically remove demon-spirits.
Yes, I realize that a vampire body would probably instantly dust if that happened. However, what of the demon-spirit? Could it exist outside of the body? And if so, what would it be like?
What does that have to do with anything?
And where would it get this compulsion to do purely evil things? You claim that there is no such thing as innate morality; that humans make moral decisions based on what they've been taught regarding right & wrong. If that's the case, then how do vampires learn to be evil if the demon-spirit does not pre-exist the body?
Humans are not (vampire) demons. Just because we develop our conscience as we start out neutral, doesn't mean demons are the same. A cats eats mice and birds, and it'll do this even if it is never taught to do so. It's simple instinct.
I think it's much more likely that a vampire isn't good or evil at all. It is merely a rational animal serving its own appetites & desires without any concept or care for the moral standing of its actions. It may seem "evil" to us because:
1.) It has a predatory instinct to feed on human blood.
2.) All those little hateful or hurtful impulses that human beings have in a flash of anger? Imagine all those but without the other little voice that tells you not to act on them. Being a vampire means to exist in a world where you absolutely cannot think of any reason not to do whatever you want if you think you can get away with it.
Which makes them evil, period.
OK, I think I see where you're misunderstanding me.
Good & evil are universal.
No, they are not universal. What is good by one person's standards is evil by another person's standards. And that's just with people living in the same society raised by the same culture. That's not even talking of different cultures, or hell, different species altogether.
What is morally good for one person must be morally good for everyone & everything in the universe. Otherwise, it's not morally good; it's just convenient or advantageous for someone at the expense of someone else.
Good & evil are not human. They supercede humanity, existing in the realm of ideal Platonic forms.
That doesn't exist. Good and evil are defined only by humans (for now) by their ethical and moral standards. If you think that means there is no such thing as morality, and things only exist as convenient or advantageous for someone, then that's your view, but that's all that exists.
However, human beings have a conscience, which I would define as the rational part of the brain that can identify good & evil and give them those names. The conscience can identify those concepts in their raw form regardless of the upbringing or culture that the person is from. Because a human being can identify good & evil, he will, to the best of his limited abilities, endeavor to be good (unless he is a sociopath).
And yet, this does not exist, and no, a person does not "endeavor to be Good". They endeavor to follow what they think is right and wrong, as taught by their parents and culture. This is because humans have empathy. We can project ourselves into others. We do not wish to subject horrors upon someone else, because we can imagine those horrors visited upon ourselves, place ourselves in the other place. We thus don't want to inflict upon others what we don't want inflicted upon ourselves, because if we are allowed to those things upon them, they are allowed to do them upon us.
Funny thing, the moment we think that it can't be done, or won't be done to us, a human's morals slip rapidly. Just look at prisoners, criminals, prisons - the death penalty. Suddenly it's all about punishing, hurting these humans; because they are guilty, and you would never be guilty, or innocently claimed to be guilty, therefor inflict whatever you want on them. Rehabilitation? Good reasons why the actions were done? Doesn't matter.
There are but very few people who have defeated that extremely immoral part, animalistic part of themselves. We do not posses a lovely absolute conscience.
Unsouled vampires do not have a conscience. The part of their brains that can independently identify good & evil is broken or disconnected. Since vampires used to be human, they can draw upon their previous human knowledge & their surrounding culture to make an empirical judgment about whether or not they think human society would judge something to be "good" or "evil." However, they cannot identify good or evil for themselves, nor would they care. A vampire might try to be "good" to win the approval of others or "evil" to spite society. Either way, they do so because it pleases them, not because it fulfills some kind of moral agenda. They can't have a moral agenda because their brains are now incapable of determining morality.
Which, of course, makes them the TRUE evil. It's the same evil the kid had, that the demon looking for a "greater evil" couldn't deal with and got swallowed whole. Vampires are completely selfish, and couldn't give a shit about anyone or anything else. If they appear to do so, it's really ultimately only about themselves after all. The moment you have "a greater evil", a "purpose", you have in fact morals and join forces with others, think about others, consider their desires important, etc. etc. In fact, that description is a describing is good. It is no wonder that truly evil people, despicable evil people, often regard themselves as good. According to their morals they are good. And really there is not much difference between them and good.
But vampires, and the kid, they are the most purest form of evil. No allegiance, no trust, just plain slaughter.
Hardly. Look at my central moral statement: "It is wrong to cause undue suffering to other people." Every moral human being on the planet & every single society that ever existed has adopted some form of that principle. (Seriously, cite me an example of someone who hasn't.) All variations in human history merely come down to wildly different interpretations of the words "undue" & "people." Or else it's another case of imperfect humans failing to live up to their ideals (again). But that central principle has remained universal.
This is not true. Show me how it is possible in any way shape or form, that slaver of their own race, they're own skin color, could ever be construed as not being undue suffering. People didn't care; they had money, the other had not, was captured, and so you could happily use them into their graves. It is pure selfish use, and the people doing it couldn't give a rat's ass about "undue suffereing". Indeed, as the prison example above, undue suffering really only formed and is important between two equals. For you if you cause undue suffering onto an equal, he or she can cause the same undue suffering onto you. It was thus a simple self-preservation principal; I don't mess with you, you don't mess with me.
It is only recently, and as the prisoner example showed, even that isn't anywhere near universal even today, that we have finally started to see nobody as unequal.
That "morality" you state of "Protect your genes and destroy others' genes" is elegant in its simplicity. What could possibly be the evolutionary benefit to developing anything more complicated than that? There is no biological incentive to having a "morality" that goes beyond "Do whatever you want that you can get away with." So where did a more sophisticated, selfless morality come from?
From those very same elegant simple things. We just kept growing more complex, and decided that there are very few things simple. Along with what the genes, if they could thing, would consider a bad mutation or a misfire in the brain.
You can't be asking "evolutionary" benefit and decide that if there wasn't one, false or true, that therefor it wasn't evolution and other simple natural causes. Evolution is not a directed path, it does not remove bad mutations, it is not directed. Individuals survive better in their habitat; they pass on their genes, even those genes that are bad and would lead to the species annihilation a few millennia hence.
However, I also watched "Surprise"/"Innocence" and I came across something surprising that I had forgotten. Remember that bespectacled henchman that was working for Spike & Drusilla? The Judge was able to burn him! He wasn't able to burn Angelus when he tried but he was able to burn another unsouled vampire. (He also threatened to burn Spike & Drusilla but they only convinced him not to because they were the ones that reassembled him.) How could all unsouled vampires be pure evil if the Judge was able to burn one but not another?
In case you hadn't noticed, the Judge does not burn good, the Judge burns human. The vampire with the glasses for example, liked books. That was the human trait that got him burned. However, what has liking books got to do with good or evil? You can like books and still enjoy slaughtering whole villages. In fact, most knowledge you can get out of books, can be used for both good and evil. And yes, glasses guy, was using the knowledge from the books to do evil. So no, nothing good inside him.
If he burns humanity, then why didn't he burn Angelus? Afterall, Angelus was obsessed with tormenting his ex-girlfriend. You can't get much more human than that.
He was not obsessed with tormenting his ex-girlfriend. Buffy was never Angelus' girlfriend.
Aside from his Angel jealousy, cheating on Cordelia with Willow, and leaving Anya at the altar (which I often forget about since I hate most of season six and seven). 
Thanks for bringing it back on topic, Yarn. 
Brilliant. False, but brilliant. If vampires "were turning humans all the time", then at very least there would be so many vampires and so many people dying by vampires by now, there would be no way they were still a secret and hidden; if they didn't outnumber humans altogether.
Nah, I'm sure you actually went and did reseach, I'm waiting to get the stats on all the families of the vampires you have included in the sample. 
