This is the final installment in my series of philosophical commentaries on season one of “Pluribus.” To read the whole series (seven posts including this one) start here.

Contains spoilers for the entirety of season one, especially the finale.

This week, Rhea Seehorn won the 2026 Critic’s Choice award for Best Actress in a Drama Series for her portrayal of Carol Sturka in “Pluribus.” It is a well-deserved win.

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I’m with Manousos: The Joined are not human, even if they are made of humans.

The Joined seem to have incorporated the memories and knowledge but not the personalities of humanity. The personalities are all replaced with the same pleasant but vacuous one. Maybe we should call it a persona rather than a personality, anyway. It isn’t that having an individual personality is definitive by itself of being human, but that is certainly part of the equation.

Carol and Manousos don’t get along when they first meet, not even agreeing to the conditions of their parley let alone on the facts and their plans. A major point of contention is that they disagree about the humanity and moral value of the Joined.

C: They’re still human beings.
M: They’re not human.
C: They are, they’re just different…. They are not evil. They wouldn’t even kill an ant.
M: And isn’t it evil to value a man the same as an ant?

Manousos conducts experiments on the Joined, using something Carol discovered, namely that the whole hive overloads and goes into seizure when one of them is confronted with loud, angry yelling. There’s still no explanation of why that happens, but Manousos proves that the radio signal he detected is disrupted during the seizure.

Then, while his target is having a seizure, he tries to talk to him as an individual, to recall him to his self, as if will could overcome the biological change wrought by the virus: “Rick, I know you are there. You come back. You can do it. Remember.”

Two things to point out here. The first is that Manousos believes that the individuals who have been assimilated still exist and can be recovered. When Star Trek’s Captain Picard is assimilated by the Borg, he is eventually freed and becomes himself again (with some residual PTSD). I’m not convinced this is going to work with the Joined. I bet a new virus will have to be designed, to undo whatever the first one wrote into our DNA.

The second thing to note here is that Manousos doesn’t think it is wrong to experiment on the Joined, even if it causes them harm, since they are not human. Carol fires a shotgun over his head to make her point that she thinks it is wrong to harm them. Clearly, though, Manousos’s discovery of the radio signal is going to be a key to future plot developments in season 2.

The Joined’s biological drive to not cause harm, and to promote happiness among certain intelligent creatures, seems to not be accompanied with a drive to prevent all harm. In other words, they treat not causing harm differently than preventing harm. For example, they let Diabaté act in shallow ways that harm his own dignity, they don’t stop Manousos from attempting to cross the Darien Gap — and they give Carol an atom bomb.

This idea is counterbalanced by the fact that they medevac Manousos when he is about to die, they want to save Zosia when Carol is interrogating her on truth serum, and they prevent Carol from accidentally blowing herself up with a grenade (though not with fireworks, since they aren’t close enough to intervene at the time). So, preventing some extreme harms does seem to be part of their drive. The Joined seem to want to prevent the deaths of the unjoined. But they don’t seem overly concerned about preventing their own eventually dying off of starvation. (How to square this with the way they wanted to save Zosia isn’t clear to me.)

Then there is the Joined’s attitude to causing good. They are intentionally doing whatever they can to make Carol and the unjoined happy, although this seems to be an interim measure. They won’t violate autonomy to make the unjoined happy, except when their “biological drive” insists that the unjoined must be forced to join. This will again be a major issue in season 2.

The Joined don’t seem to be able to weigh and balance goods of different kinds. But at the same time, they don’t seem to have a view like Kantian deontology, for example, where there’s a principled difference between the “perfect” duty not to harm and the “imperfect” duty to prevent harm or provide aid to others. Kantians think that perfect duties must always be followed, and imperfect duties must be followed when it is possible/reasonable to do so. (Another reason to think the Joined are not Kantians is that Kantians include respecting autonomy in the list of perfect duties that can never be violated, even for very good reasons.)

Picking apples and harvesting wheat are certainly less bad than letting humanity starve out, right? And where does this put us with the Joining itself causing nearly a billion deaths? This isn’t just a utility calculation, where a small harm is allowed because it is overbalanced by the great good that results, since they don’t think this way about picking fruit vs. the survival of the species.

All this seems like a philosophical complaint against the writers, but maybe the correct attitude is that the writers have succeeded in constructing an “alien” ethics, utterly different than ours, inscrutable with our assumptions, capabilities, and theories.

Socrates thought that no one does evil willingly, because everyone chooses what they believe to be good. When we are incorrect about what is good, we do wrong things. In other words, moral mistakes derive from cognitive or epistemic mistakes. When you know more, you make different choices. To do good requires knowing what is good.

Do the Joined know what is good? The virus does not give them direct propositional knowledge (knowledge of statements like “killing plants to eat them is wrong”). Rather, the Joining seems to show them that being Joined is better than being unjoined, that completely avoiding killing is better than harvesting fruit, that spreading the Joining as far as possible is good, etc. Either the Joining changes their intuition, or their judgment, or their access to information. By the end of season one, it isn’t clear which it might be.

The fact that the Joined (The Others, as the show sometimes calls them) are not human does not necessarily change our moral obligations towards them, however. There are plenty of non-human animals that deserve our moral consideration. If you think that sentience, consciousness, ability to use reason, ability to feel pleasure, or some other mental characteristic is what gives a being moral standing, then the Joined certainly have it. In fact, it is plausible to think that in the scale of moral being, the Joined entity is more morally significant than humans, or that killing the Joined is a worse moral crime than a genocide against humanity. Even if you accept that, however, there’s still the point that our self-defense, their having committed serious crimes, and their not respecting other moral beings’ autonomy, are reasons why we could be justified in harming or killing the Joined.

The scene in which Carol and Zosia get a couple’s massage explains that each body that is part of the Joined feels its own pleasure. The rest of them can access knowledge of any body’s feelings. Being aware of billions of experiences at once would be overwhelming, so they don’t pay attention to everyone else all the time, though they are able to selectively attend when needed. This makes it seem the Joined are less like a hive mind, and more like a corporate mind. (The Geth from the Mass Effect video game series are like this, for example.) But what this scene shows, and what the truth serum scene also shows, is that individual bodies in the Joined do (or can, in some cases) experience individual pain and unhappiness.

The Joined are more rational, consistent, and principled than the people out of whom they are composed. The Joined contains everyone — MAGAts, religious extremists, philosophers, and literally insane people included. It would be impossible for all of those folks to have reached rational consensus, even if they suddenly all had the same information. So, even if you believe in the wisdom of crowds, this suggests the personality change (and the consensus of opinion) is not due merely to the merging of minds. Given the lore of the show, we can’t attribute the personality change to sharing of information. There wasn’t enough communication bandwidth or processing time for everyone to agree. So, it must be part of the virus itself.

The Joined refer to themselves as “we”. (Zosia has a hard time, conceptually she says, using “I”, though she sometimes succeeds in doing it, perhaps mostly when she is trying hardest to manipulate Carol.) The hive mind “we” is common in science fiction. Recall ST:TNG’s, “We are the borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.” But there’s a philosophical burr in my saddle: Wouldn’t a true hive mind be an “I”?

Carol tries being happy with shallow pursuits on her own. She tries being happy with Zosia. A lot of it is good, but in the end, it is unsatisfying because it is fake. This is the thesis of The Matrix, too, and of Nozick’s “The Experience Machine,” both of which claim that experientially indistinguishable lives can be differently preferable. They assert that real (as opposed to fake) experiences are preferable even when they are experientially (especially, hedonistically) inferior. An aside: Anecdotally, philosophy teachers have noticed that in the last decade or so, there has been a cultural shift in attitudes about Nozick’s Experience Machine. It used to be that almost no one would want to live in the Experience Machine, but recently few students have taken that position. I blame science fiction for normalizing the concept of virtual reality.

The superficial life is not the kind of thing Carol hoped it was, at least. She wanted, and for a while thought she had, real connection with Zosia. Then Zosia tells Carol that the Joined love Manousos the same as they love Carol, and that they are going to assimilate her in a month. Not only do they not love Carol individually, they don’t even respect her individuality enough to preserve it despite Carol’s wish that it be preserved. That’s not the romantic devotion Carol’s ego was looking for.

(Another aside, this time on timelines: In the show, Carol and Zosia take their romantic trip only about seventy days after Helen’s death. Sure, it is party desperation, partly manipulation, but still that seems rather too quick after losing your life partner, not to mention the whole world, to be interested in romantic attachment. With the entity that killed your spouse and the rest of the world, no less!)

The Joined are faking it in all their interactions with the unjoined. We see this at the end of the casino scene: When Diabaté leaves after his poker fantasy, the folks who were cheering him on, and even the ones “having fun” in the rest of the casino, go blank and walk away. They were merely acting. The whole thing was an illusion for Diabaté’s sake.

We see this again in an especially stark way at the beginning of the final episode of season 1. After the young Peruvian woman is infected, the play-acting that had been going on around her, imitating village life and traditions, simply stops and everyone walks away, abandoning the settlement. The young Peruvian woman (well, the shell that was her and is now a terminal of the Joined) unlocks the goat pen and lets the animals wander away as she is leaving herself. Nothing that was there was real or valuable to the Joined, except as tools for placating/manipulating the unjoined.

Carol: “If you loved me, you wouldn’t do this.”
Zosia: “We have to do this because we love you.”

You can imagine this exact conversation between a sadistic torturer and their victim. Or between a daughter and mother when the mother is about to perform genital mutilation on her daughter. Or between a parent and needle-phobic child when the parent is making the child get a vaccine that is actually for their own good. Which is the problematic part of this whole setup. The Joined would say the same thing if they were wiser than us and paternalistically benevolent, deluded but honestly intending to do good, or lying and evil. The show so far makes it impossible to know which it is. But as I said at the beginning of this post, I’m with Manousos, though not for his religious reasons: I would do whatever it takes to undo the Joining. To my mind, the Joining is equivalent to a massacre, occupation of the planet, and enslavement of the remaining population by the aliens. Not resisting them would amount to being complicit in the worst crimes against humanity ever committed.

Ultimately, feeling personally slighted by the Joined, Carol concedes the same point to Manousos, setting up season 2: “You win. We save the world.”

There’s still lots more philosophical content in and inspired by “Pluribus” that could be explored more deeply. For example:

· Racism and white savior syndrome – perpetrated or commented on by the show?

· Can bad people do good?

· Colonialism, alien invasion, and cultural imperialism

· Do the aliens have the right to infect the whole galaxy with their idea of what is good?

· Is humanity worth saving?

· What makes something human? What makes something a person/morally valuable?

· Is ending the Joining a genocide? Is it justified anyway?

· Is Diabaté a utility monster?

· If, as season 1 seems to say, the meaning of life is togetherness and relationship, then why can’t Joining be the ultimate togetherness?

· Parfit style divisions and mergers of the self to make other selves; personal identity, memory, and so on.

· The duty to resist oppression.

But I’ll leave it here for now. I’ll come back to it for season 2. The current best guess on that, sadly, is late 2027 or early 2028!

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[This post contains spoilers for “Pluribus” season 1, episode 8, “Charm Offensive.”]

In episode 8, not much happens. Again. While I sometimes find myself impatient with the show’s pace and worry that it is because there is not enough “there” there, I can accept it as an artistic choice.

Episode 8 mostly follows Carol and Zosia after their reunion. The episode is called “Charm Offensive” and it seems to me that both sides are trying new tactics. Carol is still adding to her whiteboard list of things she knows about the Joined, this time reminding herself, “They. Eat. PEOPLE.” No one could forget that, of course, so this is a message to the audience that although Carol has seemed to be getting friendly with the Joined, she hasn’t wavered in her plan to find a way to undo the Joining. She says as much to Zosia near the end of the episode.

Carol stays over at one of the Joined’s sleep communes, then later back at her house “sleeps with” Zosia, a development that we saw coming for most of the season and which seemed too predictable. Except that it isn’t clear who’s zoomin’ who, as Aretha Franklin sang: Both sides seem to be thinking they are manipulating the other.

Meanwhile Manousos wakes up in a hospital somewhere in Panama, still very sick but determined to get away from the Joined. He holds one at scalpel-point while demanding another print him an itemized bill for the medical care they gave him. Eight-thousand-and-some dollars, the bill says, “+ one ambulance,” added in red marker because he needs a vehicle to continue his journey.

Four scenes in this episode give us new information about the Joined hive mind. Carol and Zosia go for a hike and see a train from a high cliff. Zosia appears not to know that Carol loves a train horn. As soon as Zosia learns it, the train sounds its horn. So, the Joined don’t know everything, or at least each of them doesn’t know everything. In explaining how she communicated to the train driver, Zosia says it isn’t like conscious knowledge, more like a feeling. (I’m not sure that is enough to do some of the things the Joined have been able to do, like flying a jet with no previous experience, but okay as the official story.) The virus apparently activated an existing potential to utilize electromagnetic fields produced by a body for communication. Kind of like the “humans as batteries” explanation in The Matrix, that can’t possibly work, but take it as true for the sake of the story.

They go for a couples massage, and Carol get Zosia to explain that the massage is individually pleasurable to her, and that everyone else is aware of everything that is happening, but that they can’t pay attention to it all or it would cause them to go crazy. So, it sounds like each person could know the details of any given experience anyone is having, but they generally don’t attend to all that information. (There would have to be a sorting mechanism, a catalog or data server, or something equivalent, or else how could someone find a fact they needed in the moment among seven billion other minds? It hasn’t been addressed to this point how the hive mind deals with disagreement: After all, people in the Joined had very different, even incompatible, beliefs and attitudes before the Joining. How did they come to a consensus?)

Later, back at Carol’s house, Carol tries to get Zosia to use the pronoun “I” instead of saying “we” all the time. It turns out to be difficult for her: Even though the Joined want to make Carol happy by fulfilling her requests, Zosia trips on that one several times. Once Zosia starts using “I”, and once Carol gets her to say what her personal favorite ice cream flavor is, leading to a precious childhood memory, Zosia seems to glitch, as if she is struggling between a personal self and a hive self. But then she says, “You are going to have a visitor.” Cut to Manousos dressing his wounds and getting back on the road. Roll credits.

The fourth scene where we learn more about the hive mind was earlier in the episode when Zosia and Carol use a telescope to view Kepler 22, the star from which the virus code seems to have originated. This leads to a conversation that confirms that the Joined don’t know anything about the aliens — don’t and probably can’t know the aliens, because they are just too far away. Zosia also reveals that the Joined have an urge to share the “gift” with other intelligent civilizations in the galaxy.

This is not entirely unreasonable from a scientific point of view. Viruses getting integrated into a genome are already responsible for a lot of evolution, including human evolution. (Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio is one science fiction take on this scientific fact.) So, it makes sense that a virus could give us new biological abilities and even new biological drives. Though, to be fair, most insertions are neutral, and those that are deleterious and get selected against, so they don’t end up as permanent additions to the genome.

But two things don’t make sense with this: The first is that evolution (or a virus) cannot transmit propositional knowledge — birds and some other animals pass on “genetic knowledge” about how to build nests in certain styles, for example, or how to do a mating dance. The Joined seem to have gained both propositional knowledge about facts, and attitudes about values. For example, they adopt strict vegetarianism, not to mention the belief that the virus is a gift and not a curse. The second is that while it makes sense that Earth-viruses can affect Earth-genomes, it doesn’t make sense that aliens more than six hundred light-years away, beyond the possibility of communication, could know what an Earth-genome is like, let alone design a virus for insertion into the genome of the dominant species only, when they have no idea what our genetic code is like or whether we even exist.

The explanation must be that something like the theory of panspermia is correct, and it includes a kind of necessity that an intelligent species of a certain kind will eventually arise in every evolutionary environment. Panspermia is the theory that life originated elsewhere in space, and was spread to Earth — and presumably the rest of the galaxy, so that we should expect there to be life everywhere.

The aliens from Kepler 22b might have been responsible for spreading genetic material to Earth. Though in that case it was a lucky guess, billions of years later, that beings like us would exist and infect ourselves. Or we and they might be common products of some other species who seeded the galaxy. Or the Keplerians have figured out that there is a physical process that delivers/guarantees the creation of DNA and RNA on suitable planets.

Earlier in the series, Carol draws an analogy between the Joined and the awful people who tried to steal her personhood at a “conversion therapy” kids’ camp. The Joined do seem to have an evangelical streak: They want to convert all humans, and now we learn they want to pass on the “gift” to other civilizations in the galaxy.

This goes very much against the “Dark Forest” theory of science fiction author Liu Cixin, where civilizations throughout the galaxy avoid giving signs that they exist so that other more advanced civilizations won’t come and destroy them, and they make a point to snuff out other nascent intelligent life they do detect, so those planets never grow to be a threat to them. Perhaps the virus is a way to pacify and eliminate potential threats. Or perhaps the Keplerians really do have something valuable that they want to share with every possible intelligent species.

That’s the trouble with evangelizers. They are most often motivated by the belief that they know the truth, and that this truth is a great boon to everyone, so they feel compelled to spread the idea. But, as we know on Earth, even when sincere, religious evangelizers are often deluded, or simply wrong, about the supposed knowledge they want to spread. This must be so: There is at most one true description of the supernatural, and therefore at least most (if not all) attempts to convert people to a new religion are attempts to convert them to a false religion.

But let’s say the Keplerians do know the actual cosmic truth and benevolently want to share it with us and every other intelligent civilization. What is that truth?

So far, the show has only told us a little about it. In a previous post, I mentioned that the Joined are similar to the Jains in their desire to avoid killing. When I wrote that post, I didn’t think about the possibility that the Joined might actually have the same explanation for their nonviolence as the Jains. Now I wonder if that works as a motivation for the Keplerians. Let me explain.

The Jains avoid violence not merely because it causes harm to other beings, but because causing harm to other beings harms the one doing the harm. Causing harm to oneself in this way prevents ascension to higher levels of being, and delays achieving the goal of existence, namely eventual release from the cycle of death/rebirth and its inherent suffering. The Jain path to liberation involves always telling the truth, nonviolence, vegetarianism, respect for life, compassion for others, and fasting. Sound familiar?

So, here’s a possibility: Perhaps the Keplerian virus is an “enlightenment pill.” New Agers in the 1960s and 70s hoped for enlightenment through chemical means, and here are the Keplerians with the substance that actually does it. The Joining relieves suffering of all kinds in the immediate present. It leads to peace, equanimity, happiness, community, and knowledge; all the things you might have wanted from your hippy commune.

Jainism might be the wrong analogy. You could see the Buddhist idea of “no self” in the merged conscious of the Joined — there’s a We made of transient processes, but no I. Or you could see the Joining as mirroring or anticipating the Hindu notion of merging into cosmic oneness.

On this explanation, it isn’t a tragedy that the Joined human race will eventually starve out, since it thereby achieves liberation from the karmic cycle and the souls of the dead could go on to a higher state of being. (That’s not part of the lore of “Pluribus,” but it would fit with what we know so far.)

On this explanation, Carol and Manousos are wrong to try to avoid joining. They are making a mistake, trying to preserve a state that only leads to suffering, and traps them (and everyone else) in the cycle of death and rebirth.

Just one more episode left in this season! I’m guessing that most of the lingering questions will not be wrapped up. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next post in this series.

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[This post contains spoilers for “Pluribus” season 1, episode 7, “The Gap.”]

In episode 7, we follow two stories. In one, we see the Paraguayan from the self-storage lot make his way toward Carol. And, in the other, we see Carol trying to live with the knowledge that she has gathered about the Joined and about the other members of the unjoined.

None of it is good, especially since Carol is utterly alone, so she is only going through the motions: Demanding a fancy dinner with all the best dishes from her favorite dates with her now-dead partner, playing golf on a fancy course by herself, breaking high rise windows for fun, replacing the police cruiser she’s been driving with a fancier car, setting up vast firework displays in the cul-de-sac in front of her house. It is all just fiddling to prevent going crazy with boredom, loneliness, and lack of purpose. It doesn’t work.

During one of these firework displays, a huge mortar tips over and launches directly at Carol. She sees it, she knows it is going to explode and kill her, yet she doesn’t even flinch as it zips by inches from her head. Carol is so depressed she is willing to die.

The next scene we see her in, she paints a message to the Joined on the cul-de-sac’s asphalt, knowing they are watching with satellites: “Come Back”. The following day Zosia returns. Carol falls into her arms, weeping in complete surrender as the credits roll.

It occurs to me that Carol’s isolation is probably a commentary on what we all went through during covid lockdowns. Ironically, the alien virus actually does give everyone the equivalent of a 5G chip implant. If you are a conspiracist who thinks covid was bioengineered, the story of how the alien virus was made and spread also “rhymes” with that.

Carol has given up, it seems, but Manousos refuses to. The writers are, at the very least, trying to establish that Manousos is an upright, determined, and ethical person who won’t compromise with evil, even if he is unpleasant. He drives his car as far north as he can, stopping to siphon gas from cars parked along his route, always leaving cash under the windshield wipers to compensate, so that he is not stealing.

But who would he be stealing from? Is he assuming that the people who have been converted into drones will eventually be individuals again (or that they still are, even if they don’t know it), and that rules about property and ownership will have been taken to have been in force throughout the whole fiasco? What is money worth without the backing of governments?

His moralism seems dubious, or at least the symbols the writers use so he can act out his moral convictions seem a bit clumsy. In an apocalypse, anything you need to do or take to survive is fair, especially when there is no one else to claim them. And if the world does get restored, that will have happened through Manousos’s and Carol’s actions, so no one newly freed from the hive mind will resent Manousos for taking a bit of gasoline in order to save the whole human race.

Right before he enters the Darien Gap (that dangerous and roadless 60 miles of swamp and mountain between Panama and South America), the Joined earnestly beseech Manousos to not hike the Gap. They’ll give him a lift to Carol, no problem. This is too dangerous.

Manousos doesn’t trust them. He won’t collaborate with them by accepting their assistance. This leads to the stand-out scene of the episode, where he tells the Joined:

“Nothing on this planet is yours. Nothing. You cannot give me anything because everything you have is stolen. You don’t belong here.”

Then, before walking into the dangerous wilderness, he defiantly pours gasoline on his beloved car and burns it. It is an act of resistance and rebellion, a middle finger to the Joined, asserting that individuality and choice still exist, that the car is his to love and destroy, not theirs.

The show has been making an intentional habit of repeating sayings to the point that they get a bit annoying. There’s the voice message Carol hears every time she phones the Joined, of course, and we see Carol getting bored of the message, too. Then Manousos repeating cheesy lines from old cassette tapes for learning English. And, as he is trekking through the Gap, he practices his greeting for when he meets Carol: “My name is Manousos Oviedo. I am not one of them. I wish to save the world.”

It has the rhythm as, and is even spoken in an accent similar to that of, the famous, “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die,” from The Princess Bride, one of Rob Reiner’s most beloved movies. (May his memory be a blessing. The reference was intentional, though the timing could not have been.)

Manousos’s trek through the Gap does not go well. His self-sufficiency is not enough; just like Carol’s isn’t either. The final scene we see him in, he is dying of a horrible infection acquired from a gruesome injury foreshadowed in the conversation before burning his car. The Joined arrive by helicopter to airlift him to safety. The acting is deliberately ambiguous: Is he rejecting or embracing the help when he waves his arm at the helicopter’s searchlight?

Part Seven in this series will be published in just a couple of days. Thanks for reading! If you know someone who likes science fiction, or philosophy, please share this with them.

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[spoilers]

In episode 5 of “Pluribus”, the Joined “need space” from Carol after she almost killed her handler Zosia by trying to force her, with help from a truth serum, to divulge the method for undoing the Joining. The Joined give Carol the ultimate passive-aggressive silent treatment and evacuate the entire city, leaving Carol utterly alone.

They won’t even answer the phone, instead telling her via recorded message, “our feelings for you haven’t changed,” but she needs to leave messages to ask them things. Trash pickup is by drone, leading to a slapstick moment and an indication that the Joined are not infallible (or even that smart—surely one among them is a better drone pilot?).

It occurs to me that whenever Carol makes a phone call in this show, it is almost always on a landline. (In her house, at the hospital, in the hotel in Vegas; the exception might be the phone on the plane, but even that one is wired, not a cell phone. The Paraguayan answers a landline in his house.) Given that most of humanity is now communicating without any technology, this is at least symbolic if not a plot point that will be resolved later.

While looking for signs of life in the city, Carol notices many empty milk cartoons, and no other trash, after the evacuation of Albuquerque. She feels like it is a clue to something nefarious and decides to investigate. In a cold storage facility attached to a dairy, Carol finds a lot of food left behind. The episode ends on a cliffhanger, with Carol lifting a plastic sheet in the cold storage and seeing something that leaves shock and disgust on her face. At first, I hoped it was an alien, but instead it is a “Soylent Green is people!” kind of reveal.

This is confirmed in episode 6 when Carol records a video tour of the facility to send to the other members of the thirteen unjoined, in which she shows butchered and wrapped human remains being stored next to fruits and vegetables. Just before calling to have the video picked up and distributed, she realizes she doesn’t trust the Joined to pass on the message. She remembers that Diabaté is at the Westgate Hotel in Las Vegas, so she decides to drive to see him. (That’s about an eight-and-a-half-hour trip from Albuquerque under normal circumstances; somewhat shorter with absolutely no traffic, one assumes. We never see Carol stop for gas, but I guess the Joined have left the gas stations operational for her.)

Carol is sure that her information will make the rest of the unjoined turn against the Joined. But when she tries to tell Diabaté, the moment is anticlimactic: She finds out the other eleven already know, and don’t much care. It turns out that since the Joined won’t kill any living thing, they are forced to seek calories and nutrition where they can, and the 100k humans who die each day are part of the mix. (“HDP” for “Human-Derived Protein” is a nice bit of 1984-style euphemism.)

The Joined claim (here, and in previous episodes) to abide by a very strong Do No Harm principle. It reminds me of Jain priests, who sweep the ground in front of themselves as they walk, to avoid killing even insects. The Jains eat plants, of course, despite their strong principle of non-violence; there is no way not to eat something. The principle of non-violence among the Jain is, interestingly, to avoid doing violence to oneself: Harming others harms oneself, and this prevents achieving release from the cycle of death and rebirth. The philosophical justification for eating plants is that it is the best way to do the least harm possible in pursuit of release from rebirth.

The Joined go farther than the Jains, being unwilling even to harm plants by harvesting fruits. Though they are willing to eat windfall. As I’ve said in other posts in this series, the Joined (or the show writers) are apparently inconsistent about this: The Joined were quite willing to harm humans in order to force them all to join. This is a harm insofar as it is a violation of autonomy (there was no informed choice), and also a harm in that the Joining itself caused about ten percent of humanity to die. If the Joined had an absolute Do No Harm principle, they wouldn’t have done either of those things.

Given that the joined were willing to force Carol to join — not just without but against her autonomous choice — it is very strange that in episode 6 the Joined now say they won’t forcibly harvest the stem cells from Carol that would be necessary to make her Join. If Carol’s explicit denial of permission to harvest her stem cells binds the Joined, why doesn’t her explicit denial of permission to be Joined also bind the Joined? The paternalism justification for forced Joining discussed in the previous post would work equally well for forced harvesting of stem cells. So far, it doesn’t make sense.

One option for why it doesn’t make sense is that the hive mind of the Joined is not a mind of unanimity: It is unlike a hive with a queen, in that each unit is a thinker. Then, “the” opinion of the Joined is something like an average, or is negotiated among them, or is the result of a vote, or something like that. Given that the Joined contains all moral philosophers, and given that moral philosophers often disagree with each other, perhaps it is to be expected that the Joined’s moral opinions are not self-consistent. (Thanks to Tom Cochrane for a comment on the previous post in this series that sparked this thought.)

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One of the philosophical questions lurking behind episode 6 is this one: Is it unethical to eat dead humans? While we in the West tend to think eating dead humans is wrong as a voluntary practice, this has not been the case in every human civilization. In any event, we don’t usually blame people in emergency situations who have to resort to cannibalism (or, as John Cena calls it in a delightful cameo as his Joined self, anthropophagy). For the Joined, eating people is also a last resort, a way to slow the inevitable starvation of the Joined, given that they won’t even harvest plants for moral reasons.

The argument against killing and eating people is just the argument against killing them. What about bodies that are already dead?

“Eew, that’s gross,” is not a moral argument against eating the dead, though it is plenty motivation enough for most people to avoid it.

The fact that cannibalism can be unhealthy — Papua New Guineans who ate their dead often ended up with a horrible prion disease they called Kuru — is also neither a moral reason nor a decisive reason not to do it. After all, we eat plenty of things that are unhealthy, even things that will eventually kill us, and we don’t generally think that doing so is immoral.

Vegan and vegetarian objections to eating meat are normally not about the eating of the meat itself, but about not being complicit in or benefiting from the killing and suffering of agricultural animals.

One could construct an argument against cannibalism on the basis of a principle of “the sanctity of the dead,” but this won’t be convincing. A dead body cannot be harmed. One way or another, every dead body is going to be digested — by bacteria and worms, or by something larger first.

Another version of the sanctity of the dead argument could be a “respect” for the dead argument. For example, dead bodies aren’t really morally significant, but out of some sort of extension of the moral specialness of being human, we agree to not to eat each other’s bodies, in the same way we agree not to desecrate each other’s graves. This seems a bit too precious, if you ask me, more like a way to avoid having to confront our own mortality, so I don’t think it adequately grounds a moral rule against eating human remains.

You could perhaps say that the decisions of a person before they died should govern how their body gets treated after death, a kind of extension-by-courtesy of the principle of self-ownership and autonomy. Most people don’t make an explicit statement of their choice to not be eaten after they die. Perhaps that simply goes without saying in our culture, and someone would have to “opt out” and explicitly allow themselves to be eaten after death in order to override the presumption it is not allowed.

In movies and TV, at least, we sometimes seem to think that a person’s final wishes become promises on the part of the person they tell the wishes to. This could be either because the person agrees to (promises to) fulfill the dying wish, or because a final wish binds the hearer just in virtue of it being a dying wish. I don’t give much credence to the latter option. Perhaps there is, though, an implicit “and don’t eat my body” attached to every final wish by default.

Besides not being definitive (there are some kinds of posthumous wishes it would be immoral to carry out), neither the posthumous autonomy explanation nor the promise explanation lines up with how we evaluate cases of emergency cannibalism. Most who get eaten in that circumstance haven’t said, implicitly or explicitly, “Go ahead and eat me if it is the only way to stay alive,” and yet the ones who resort to cannibalism are usually not morally blameworthy for doing so anyway.

If this analysis is right, there doesn’t seem to be a good reason not to eat dead human bodies. The complaint against the Joined can only be, “That’s icky,” or, “We don’t do that kind of thing around here.”

A final consideration is this: Our moral rules bind individual humans. The Joined, while composed of human bodies that were formerly individual humans, are something different than the sum of their parts. Human moral rules probably don’t all apply to non-humans, which the Joined definitely are. Aliens, for sure, have different moral rules than we do. I don’t remember right now who gave this example of how absolute moral rules can be relative to circumstances, but if we were made of metal, then throwing knives at each other would no longer be immoral. (Google’s AI said it was Terry Pratchett, but I doubt that.)

Next up, Here’s Part Five in this series on philosophy in the show “Pluribus.”

Maybe I’m missing something, but to me the first eleven minutes of episode 4 of “Pluribus” are not terribly interesting. I found myself fast-forwarding thirty seconds at a time, looking for bits of action or even plot amid the brooding. We see the last member of the Thirteen, a Paraguayan who seems to have been misanthropic even in the before-times. He is holed-up in the “bunker” of his fenced-off storage facility, systematically checking HAM radio frequencies and finding nothing. A Joined abuela driving a Volkswagen leaves him a meal on a small table outside the gate; he knocks it to the ground in an act of defiance, then breaks into his clients’ storage lockers until he finds some canned dog food to eat.

The idea here, it seems, is that the only valid response to the sort of situation the Paraguayan finds himself in — world taken over, everyone assimilated or killed, and he’s next — is resistance, even if futile. To interact with or accept help from the Joined is to be complicit with them. Freedom or death. He hangs up on Carol when she tries to phone him, assuming it is another attempt at contact by the Joined. (It seems likely he and Carol will later find ways to connect that will allow them to challenge the Joined, since the story is trying so hard to keep them apart now.)

Meanwhile, Carol is finding herself increasingly emotionally enmeshed with her handler, Zosia, in complex ways she doesn’t want. The more they interact, the more she feels connected to Zosia. It is not irrelevant to this process that Zosia was picked as her handler because she looks like the romantic lead in the lesbian version of Carol’s latest fantasy romance book — the one she wouldn’t let herself publish. As Carol remarks to herself in a truth-serum aided scene so the audience can see what she is thinking: “She is so goddamned fuckable.” This attraction is something Carol doesn’t seem to have control over, pointing to the limits of human freedom and the ways in which we are predictably manipulable. How can we make truly free choices if our preferences themselves are outside our control in the first place?

An aside: Carol’s unwillingness to publish the lesbian version of her romantasy book is very much out of touch with current sci fi, fantasy, and romance, where LGBTQ+ is currently very fashionable (emphasis in many cases on the +, i.e., sex with aliens and elves, often pluribus, if you know what I mean).

Carol learns that the Joined can’t lie. But they won’t tell her everything, either. (Kind of like they won’t kill, not even insects, except when they kill millions of people to become Joined.) Carol asks whether undoing the Joining is possible; Zosia’s evasive non-answer tells Carol that it is possible. To get more info out of Zosia, she tries a truth serum, testing it on herself first.

This moral refusal to lie is very non-Utilitarian, challenging that interpretation raised in the second post in this series, of why the Joined feel they must make the Thirteen Join. Utilitarians are happy to accept that sometimes lies promote overall happiness (even though they try to construct reasons to think that, in all but extreme cases, truth-telling promotes the most happiness). Usually, it is Deontologists who are thought of as the ones who have hard rules about never lying, not even when doing so would lead to better outcomes.

Given that the Joined are a hive mind, it is a bit of an unlikely guess that a drug that acts on a “local terminal” will affect its ability to go against instructions from the “mainframe.” In other words, there isn’t a good reason to think it will work. But I suppose Carol has few other options. She doses Zosia against her will. (Maybe hive minds don’t have autonomy so this isn’t a moral crime? Or maybe it doesn’t matter if they do because they are trying to kill Carol’s individual self, so this is self defense?)

When questioned while drugged, Zosia resists but seems about to give away the information. Either her internal conflict or the conflict with the hive mind puts Zosia’s body into cardiac arrest. Hundreds of Joined encircle them, shouting “Please, Carol!” (Why so many? One witness would have been enough for a hive mind, no? Why not just let Zosia’a individual body die?) Carol eventually relents and lets them save Zosia’s body.

The Joined may not even have agency themselves. They are unable to lie. They don’t act for themselves. Individuals receive instructions from the collective and obey like drones, apparently without rest or any choice of what they do. (Fly this plane. Clean up these bodies. Fix the grenade damage to Carol’s house.) They have “biological imperatives” (programming from the alien virus) that they cannot resist. Their cheeriness seems ominously fake (as other commentators have said, Stepford Wife-like). There’s an argument that the collective is more like an AI than a mind or an individual.

There are interesting questions about individuality and self-identity when it comes to animals like bees and ants, where individuality is minimal to non-existent, and the hive (or its queen) is the biological unit of significance. (Orson Scott Card played with those notions in his Ender’s Game series. Other science fiction examples are the insects in “Starship Troopers,” and the race called the Geth in the “Mass Effect” videogame.) Individual worker ants, for example, hardly matter. They can be used up and discarded for the good of the colony. A solo ant cannot survive for long. They exist only for the colony, which exists only for the queen.

Is there a queen among the Joined? Perhaps the aliens? So far we are still in the dark.

Here’s Part Four in this series on philosophy in the show “Pluribus.”

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Episode 3 of “Pluribus” faced the issues about consent head-on, though nothing was resolved.

[spoilers]

“I’m fucked.”

That’s the main character, Carol, speaking with Zosia, her handler from the Joined — the hive mind that has taken over all of humanity except thirteen people.

Carol knows that they’re going to make her join the hive mind as soon as they figure out how to do it. She is going to lose her individuality, and she doesn’t have a choice about it.

The response is, “Sorry, Carol, we have a biological imperative.” If that excuse is a genuine defense, I bet some criminals would be eager to try it.

The Joined have this biological imperative in the first place because the code for a virus was sent to Earth by aliens from 600 light-years away, and once humans synthesized it and infected themselves with it (SMDH), the whole population acquired both the ability to become psychically joined and the impulse to make sure every human joins the collective. (Echoes of Borg philosophy, for sure.)

Then Carol responds with the point I made in my first post about consent in “Pluribus”:

“You people make no goddamn sense…. We want to make you happy, you say. Your life is your own, you say. And agency, I’ve got all this agency but, I mean, I guess I have agency just until I don’t.”

The chilling response is, “Carol, if you were walking by a lake and you saw someone drowning, would you throw them a life preserver? Of course you would.”

To connect back to my first post on “Pluribus,” where I remarked that the Joined had done the equivalent of flinging Carol in a dungeon while saying, “Hey, do whatever you want down there,” another carceral metaphor relevant here is institutionalizing people against their will, for their own good. “A rubber room and a straitjacket might feel like prison, but actually, it is freedom.”

The Joined, besides (or perhaps as part of) their biological imperative, appear to feel empathetic and paternalistic towards the unjoined: They see the unjoined as suffering, stunted, inferior, and want to “fix” them, “for their own good.” Maybe this is what the aliens thought about the human species, and why they sent the virus.

It is true that empathy and compassion are moral goods, despite what Kirk, Vance, Miller, et al(t right) try to tell us. And it is true that rendering aid to someone in need is a moral good, even a duty. Paternalism, though, is bad, because it doesn’t respect autonomy and free choice. You don’t get to impose your ideas of a good life on others who are fully competent, without their consent. And especially not against their informed consent.

Offering aid to someone in distress seems quite different, anyway, from forcing them to accept a kind of “help” that completely undermines — you could even say, destroys — who they are. If *I* am drowning, you don’t help *me* by turning me into a fish.

It remains unclear why the Joined bothered to give the Thirteen unlimited freedom and support in the first place. They could have just rounded them up and kept them in a holding area until completing the research needed to add the Thirteen to the Joined. (That’s just days or months away, Carol is told.) The Joined are proxies for aliens, and by sci fi tradition aliens are weird and incomprehensible, so maybe the show doesn’t need to explain.

The as-yet unresolved contradiction in the Joined’s attitude to the unjoined is this: The Joined say that they would do anything to make the unjoined happy. But, while not being forced to Join would make some of the unjoined happy (or, at least, it is their strong autonomous preference), they will not be allowed to not Join. The Joined seems to be thinking like Meatloaf: “I would do anything for [the sake of making you happy], but I won’t do that.” The making-happy is a stop-gap, second best, temporary measure in the meantime, until they can do the thing they think will really make the unjoined happy, namely becoming Joined.

If the Joined are Utilitarians, this attitude makes some sense. If the Joined are Utilitarians, then they conceive their moral obligation as being required to maximize happiness overall. In the short term, that means being solicitous towards the unjoined. Later, once the possibility of making them Join exists, the requirement is to make them Join, because then they will be even happier. Any temporary unhappiness at the prospect of becoming Joined will be replaced with the joy of being Joined.

This would also explain why the Joined don’t seem to care too much that nearly a billion people died when they “failed the update” delivered by the virus. The loss of future happiness from those people living out their lives unjoined is far outweighed by the happiness produced by the Joining: Billions of people in peace, harmony, abundance, and apparent happiness. (And maybe the hundreds of millions of deaths are not such a big deal in the Utilitarian calculus anyway, since most ordinary humans are barely happy or are unhappy to begin with.)

There’s a common objection to Utilitarianism that is similar to this set up. If enslaving part of the population would make the total happiness of society higher overall, it is morally required on Utilitarianism to enslave those people. Even though doing so makes the enslaved unhappier, that is not an immoral action according to the Greatest Happiness Principle, because the happiness gained by other people over-balances the unhappiness of the slaves. This outcome, critics of Utilitarianism say, shows that the theory is an incorrect account of morality: Slavery is bad in itself to a degree that it should never be allowed, the scenario doesn’t respect individual autonomy or freedom, and it privileges the collective over individual justice.

One (kind of unconvincing) response from Utilitarians is to say that the “violation of the principles of Justice” in this example creates a kind of “higher” unhappiness, such that the merely hedonistic (lower) happiness of a population enjoying the benefits of having slaves could never over-balance it. (If the GHP is the whole of morality, where do these supposed higher principles of justice come from?)

As the prime proponent of Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill, said, if a satisfied pig doesn’t realize it is less happy than an unsatisfied but enlightened human, that is because it only knows its own side of the situation. In one speech, the Joined echo this sentiment nearly exactly. The Joined have been unjoined, and they recognize that being Joined is much better than being unjoined. So much better, in fact, that they are willing to override individual autonomy so as to rescue individuals from the terrible fate of individuality.

This adds a wrinkle to a point made above: Maybe, from the Joined’s or the aliens’ perspectives, because we lack the relevant knowledge, individual humans are not mentally or morally competent to make a choice about Joining. We don’t let children decide what medical procedures to have. When a parent or guardian makes medical decisions for a child, that’s not paternalism, that’s parenting. Maybe, in a similar way, being a good alien involves making decisions on behalf of intelligent but immature species like humans.

Of course, Carol cannot accept this (and it is a surprise that most of the other Thirteen don’t mind). We, the audience, can’t accept it either. It is likely (isn’t it?) that the happiness of being Joined is a delusion that comes from the same genetic programming that creates the other “biological imperative.” Once de-joined, the formerly Joined might realize how bad it was to be Joined and be happy to be unjoined again. They don’t know that side of the situation. But maybe they will be upset over what they have lost, instead.

Then again, maybe it is our genetic programming that incorrectly makes us think being individuals with minds of our own is such a great thing. More to come in Part Three.

I know you want to “join” my Substack. Please subscribe. I promise I have no nefarious motives and am not an agent of any alien species.

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“Pluribus,” a new sci fi series about a global infection that turns the human population into a hive mind, debuted to strong reviews and immediately shot up to the #1 spot on Apple TV’s top ten shows list.

And thank goodness for Apple TV, while we are here: A lot of the best science fiction television is playing there these days. “Severance,” “Foundation,” “Murderbot,” and “Silo” are among my recent obsessions; “For All Mankind,” “Dark Matter,” and “Extrapolations,” also get good viewer ratings.

The acting in “Pluribus” is strong, production values are high, the cinematography is good (remarkable in spots), I’m engaged with the script but still confused. Our protagonist is not the most sympathetic character, it is true, but we see ourselves in her flawed humanity: self-doubt, self-loathing, compromising her values for a buck, disappointment with her till-now-actually-pretty-successful life, anger issues, determination to right a major wrong.

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[spoilers]

At least now we know why Trump wanted Qatar to give him that new presidential plane: The old one was on loan to film “Pluribus.”

We don’t get to meet the aliens, but they are there and clearly know a lot about our biology and bumbling psychology. This despite the fact they live 600 light-years away — did they seed the Earth, is that how they knew how to reengineer us? Are they a hive mind and want us to join? Are they trying to make us docile, so it is easier to take over Earth? The first two episodes give no hints.

The aliens send a powerful, directed, repeating radio message that encrypts an RNA sequence. (As soon as the astronomers said, “The message is in base-4!” I knew it was a virus.)

Ever the curious idiots, humans spend millions of dollars to synthesize the virus, even though they don’t know what it does and even though at least some of them, surely, have read the story about the Trojan Horse. The humans inject the virus into increasingly larger animals until — surprise! — someone for no reason breaks protocol in a level 4 biocontainment lab and gets themselves infected, and then someone else breaks an even more important protocol and takes the infected person out of the secure environment. Hijinks ensue.

They don’t quite play it for comedy, but the first few human-to-human transmissions of the virus are from non-consensual full-mouth kisses. There’s no time to see how people react to being assaulted, because they go into seizures and look dead for a while before (mostly) waking up as happy drones. The virus makes humanity a hive mind (out of many, one — get it?).

Another early scene has “patient zero” licking all the donuts left out for the lab employees, thus ensuring that everyone gets non-consensually infected. (Practical question: If you saw someone having a seizure with a partially eaten donut in their hand, would you eat the next one?)

The violations of consent only keep getting worse, until they culminate in a scene where the sky is covered by a network of airplane contrails. The implication is that the equivalent of chemtrails spread the virus across the whole world, infecting the entire human population. The series writers are apparently aware that UV light at a plane’s cruising altitude would destroy a virus, so this scene is at night. They then conveniently ignore the fact that it would take months or years for small particles like that to eventually float down to Earth from such a height: By the next day, the whole world is infected. Everyone except the main character, Carol Sturka, and — as she learns from a White House news conference on TV directed specifically at her — just twelve other people around the world.

The Joined tell Carol (and the rest of the thirteen who are immune to the virus) that their lives are their own. This is more than a bit odd, given that they treated everyone who is now Joined as if their lives were not their own, with forced kisses and mass infections that erased their very selves. Not to mention the hundreds of millions who died when their brains “failed the update.” Those people didn’t get a choice at all, and no payoff. Plus, how can your life be your own if the whole world has been replaced with a hive mind? Everything that Carol might have chosen (improving relationships, publishing better books, etc.) is no longer available to her. It is like throwing someone into a dungeon and saying, “Hey, do whatever you want down there!”

The Joined seem to pity us for our handicap. (The viewer is implicated as one of the non-infected, of course.) The Joined say they are ready to do anything to make us happy. Why they would care at all is not really explained. If I had a hive mind, I’d spend my time with the billions of people there, not worrying about the thirteen who didn’t make it into the club. Ignoring the thirteen seems both a better strategy and more reasonable. (Or killing them? But it turns out that the Joined are nonviolent vegetarians — except when they kill hundreds of millions to steal the free will of billions.) It feels like there is something nefarious behind the Joined’s (sorry, terrible word) intentions toward the thirteen, so all this makes me think there is more to be revealed.

Like the “Matrix” character who prefers the illusory steak over real life, one of the thirteen unjoined is perfectly happy to take advantage of what the Joined tell him they want for him, even though it is all fake and unearned. He gets a gaggle of models to join him on Air Force One (which he just asked for, and the Joined just gave him), along with pilots, fuel, ground crew, luxurious food and drink, and everything else he wants.

I could see this character, Koumba Diabaté, implementing a kind of Ring of Gyges arc: In Plato, Gyges finds a ring of invisibility and starts using it to do the things he wasn’t able to do while being seen to do them. Diabaté may have been a playboy/hedonist before the Joining, but after, now that there’s no one to restrict his behavior, he certainly intends to make the very best of things. He pursues his personal self-interest with gusto, and no concern for anyone else.

Lucky for him, the Joined are all too happy to be used as his sexual playthings. Here again is another problematic case of apparent lack of genuine consent. Their lives (the people who are Joined) are not their own, apparently: The body verbally assents, enthusiastically participates, and so on, but it is not the individual whose body is in question who is consenting, rather it is the whole of humankind in a hive mind. It is as if a culture decided for individuals what they were allowed or required to do. The body that until a few days ago belonged to/was an individual who is now erased, that same body is now just a tool or vessel for carrying out the wishes of the collective, which apparently include fulfilling the base desires of Mauritania’s Zaphod Beeblebrox.

Carol objects, kind of, but since she doesn’t care about and is suspicious of all the Joined, she doesn’t stop it. But isn’t the reason to undo the Joining precisely to prevent this kind of abuse of individuals, so people can make their own choices? Maybe Carol believes that the “units” of the Joined aren’t individuals so it doesn’t matter, but still thinks that they should be restored to being individuals? I guess it is no surprise that we don’t have intuitive moral scripts for this sort of situation since it isn’t one we have ever encountered. Anyway, Carol apparently realizes she is lonely and wants some semblance of personal contact from her personal contact to the Joined, or something, and stops her from leaving with Koumba at the very last second.

The show seems to tell us that the lack of freedom, the lack of individuality, is a compromise worth having in order for there to be perfect peace and safety. (It reminds me a bit of the post-9/11 era, when people told us it was worth giving up on freedom and privacy for the sake of security.) But in this case, freedom or peace for whom? And to what end? And why do the aliens want that?

You could say that the show presents a complex, nuanced, and ambiguous account of consent. But it seems just as likely that it is presenting a contradictory, inherently inconsistent, and confused account of consent. We’ll see!

Here’s a link to the Part Two in this series on philosophy in “Pluribus.”

A fun etymological fact (or, at least, an etymological fact, depending on your feelings about such facts) is that the spelling “consentual” is an informal back-formation from “consent,” but the correct spelling, “consensual,” is from the Latin consensus (aka agreement), from which we also get the word “consent.”

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