So, let me finish looking at Coel’s idea of subjective morality by touching on a debate he had with Anthony Freeland. I’m just going to go by Coel’s two posts on the subject, and even though obviously the two posts will have points that are followed up on in the second from the first I’m going to go through the first post first and then move on to the second post, because I’m lazy.
The previous post on the topic is here.
Anyway, the first post:
I regard human morality as part of our evolutionary programming. We have evolved to have feelings about how humans treat each other in order to enable and facilitate our cooperative way of life. If a species evolves to cooperate, say by hunting communally, then it needs ways of policing the divvying up of the meat.
Let’s suppose that there were some objective “oughtness” about the universe, such that particular acts were objectively moral or immoral. Evolution, being a “blind watchmaker” with no insight or foresight, would have no way of knowing about that objective morality.
Our evolved intuitions and feelings would not be about that objective morality, they would be about the subjective moral feelings that evolution programs us with for the entirely pragmatic reason that, in a cooperative ecological niche, those who cooperate best and succeed best socially will (in general) be best at surviving and leaving descendants.
Once we discount our feelings and intuitions as arguments for objective morality, the moral realists are then left with essentially no good arguments.
As I’ve noted before, this actually introduces a pretty serious issue in his view. Our feelings and intuitions about morality are going to be precisely what evolution gave us. If he’s going to ask us to discount them, then he can’t appeal to those feelings and intuitions and thus to their role in our evolution either to tell us what morality really is. Thus, he will have to at best argue that what morality really is is precisely and nothing more than what evolution has determined morality is. This, however, will mean that he can’t question those feelings and intuitions, or at least not the ones critical to the evolution of the concept. It also means that he has to claim that evolution gets it right, when we have to accept that evolution is a process that cobbles together concepts and processes and so often gets things at least somewhat wrong. The only way out of this is to declare the principle that evolution selected for — for Coel, that’s usually social co-operation, as seen in the quote above — to be what morality is really about … but this needs to be justified in the same way as all of the principles and concepts that everyone else in moral philosophy are proposing, and Coel in all of our discussions have never provided such a justification. The main idea behind that is this: if I can defeat Coel’s argument simply by denying that morality is about social co-operation, then his view is unfounded unless he can justify it. Since I do deny that, he would need to demonstrate that, and at that point he can’t appeal to our feelings and intuitions because he has argued that we should discount them. This leaves him with a bit of an issue.
Also, his comment that evolution could not know about objective morality also applies to objective truth. In our discussions, Coel has tried to dodge that by appealing to there being real “truths” out there that it can align with, but to insist that there are no real “moral truths” out there is him assuming his conclusion, and beyond that all we had was that Coel could not grasp what such truths could be, but that is again precisely what is up for debate, and his being unable to conceive of it does not work as an objection to proposals that they exist. So he still has to explain and justify on his own why evolution can get objective facts but not objective moral facts.
So we start by looking at what it would mean, in Coel’s view, for something to be evil:
Was what Hitler and the Nazis did, in exterminating the Jews, evil? . . . do you believe that the terrorism perpetrated on 9/11 was evil?
Most humans regard the Holocaust as among the vilest and most abhorrent crimes ever, and I hope that all readers feel the same way. That condemnation comes from human feelings on the matter. But, Anthony asks, is it objectively wrong?
But that regard comes from our feelings and intuitions, which are precisely the things that Coel says we have to discount. Given that he still hopes we feel that, how does it follow from his view that we should all feel that?
Now, let me accept that most humans have an intuition that their moral feelings reflect an objective standard. I suggest that that intuition was programmed into us as an easy way of making our moral feelings more effective. If you try explaining to people that our morals are “merely” evolutionary programming and do not reflect an absolute standard, they often accuse you of debasing morals and making them sound unimportant — and from that you see why the trick works!
Even though most of us do have an intuition that morals are “objective”, I see no reason why our intuitions would be reliable on that point. As above, our intuitions would have evolved for pragmatic reasons that had no way of knowing about any “objective” standard of conduct.
The thing is, the fact that our intuitions can be wrong doesn’t mean that our intuitions are wrong. If Coel had a solid argument for why it can’t be, then he wouldn’t need to insist so often that our intuitions are just plain wrong. This has come across here and in our discussions as the same thing as coming across a sensory experience that refutes his point and saying that our sensory experiences can be wrong so it doesn’t count. Yes, they can be wrong, but you can’t insist that they are wrong simply because they provide support for an argument that you dislike. The same thing applies to intuitions. If we find a result that’s strongly counter-intuitive, the right approach is not to declare intuitions unreliable and go with that result. It is instead to go look at that result closer to make sure that the result is indeed correct, and to come up with a good explanation for why the result is right even though our intuitions say otherwise. Only once that is done can we say that the intuition there is incorrect. Coel has not managed to do that, at least to my knowledge/satisfaction, and tends to spend his time denying that he has to rather than providing arguments for why his view is right and makes sense.
I’m going to skip the “blank slate” argument since none of us are arguing for a blank slate. Moving on to universal morality:
In virtually all societies, murder, rape, theft, and other moral issues are strikingly consistent. Professor Hellier would have us believe that it is because evolution has programmed morality in such a way that all peoples have essentially the same view on main moral issues. But would it not be more plausible, if the Moral–Evolutionary Theory were true, that evolution would be observably more advanced in some races of people than others?
One feature of the human species is that we have very little genetic diversity compared to most other species. Humans very nearly did not make it out of the Pliestocene (the era ending about 12,000 years ago). The evidence from our genetic diversity is that the total human population went through repeated “bottlenecks” where the total population of our ancestors dipped to perhaps only 6000 or so individuals around 50,000 years ago. That’s pretty recent in evolutionary terms. The result is that we’re all from pretty much the same breeding stock. It’s only in the last 20,000 years that human populations have climbed dramatically.
The result is that (barring a few minor local adaptations such as skin colour) humans are pretty much the same worldwide. Each of us is genetically about 99.5% identical to any other human! (Though that number depends a bit on how one quantifies differences.) Thus, the fact that human morality is basically the same worldwide is very much in line with my stance.
Given Coel’s stance that morality evolved to promote social co-operation, that most stable societies have a number of similarities, especially on the ones Freeland lists there, is only to be expected. Moreover, if you accept any idea of moral improvement we can see that it is indeed the case that some societies seem significantly more morally advanced than others. Thus, it is strange that Coel decides to defend his view on the basis that we share genes, especially given that even with those shared genes we have a wide range of behaviours. In fact, one of the most common subjectivist arguments is built around the fact that societies can have widely varying moral beliefs that no one can justify one way or the other, so Coel undercuts what is probably one of the best subjectivist arguments to defend … subjectivism. That’s a very odd response.
(4) As a fourth argument, Anthony turns to “expert testimony”, saying that “morality falls into the realm of philosophy”, and that philosophers are thus the experts on the subject, and he points to the fact that moral realists outnumber moral anti-realists among philosophers.
My response — sorry about this philosophers! — is simply to deny that philosophers are the experts on the matter. To my mind philosophers rely way too much on human intuition as primary. I consider that human intuition is very misleading on this question, and suggest that it has misled all of those philosophers.
The correct way of understanding human morality — as with most things about humans! — is in the evolutionary context. In the relevant sciences moral realism is much less prevalent, and it is taken for granted that human moral sentiments derive from evolutionary programming, which then gives us no reason to suppose that morals are objective.
Philosophy is the field that is actually studying it. We do not have any actual science of morality, and so only have some scientists — like Coel himself — wandering into the field and making pronouncements on it. It hopefully will not surprise Coel to know that moral philosophy itself has considered the evolutionary context, but it has major problems. And one of the issues is that the intuitions that it has given us — that Coel insists philosophers rely on way too much — contradicts Coel’s own view, which is why he has to deny those intuitions, but has a hard time doing that without simply declaring that the evolved goal is right regardless of how much we actually follow it or the intuitions actually support that as being the real goal of morality. And the issue with denying intuitions is that Coel quite often ends up describing something that’s nothing like what we call morality and insisting that that is what morality really is without any other argument.
If you are proposing a theory as being obviously correct that the field that is actually studying it has already examined and at a minimum has declared problematic, it is quite arrogant to simply declare them wrong in favour of a non-existent field. Especially when you do that to people who know the field better than you do.
He goes on to respond to a point Freeland made with more detail on evolution:
But, on the mechanism for programming us with moral feelings. First, let’s consider aesthetic feelings. It is obvious that evolution would program us to like eating nutritious food such as sweet fruit, and to dislike bitter, poisonous food. An individual with reversed preferences would likely leave fewer descendants. Thus, natural selection leads us to have aesthetic preferences that align with having more descendants.
The same mechanism explains moral feelings. Suppose you’re in a small group who hunt communally and share the meat. Suppose one of your number then treacherously steals all the food and leaves you with nothing. Obviously such behaviour reduces your survival chances. Thus evolution will program you to dislike cheating, stealing and treachery, and to like fairness, loyalty and comradeship. You’ll be programmed to deter stealing and treachery by punishing it.
The problem is that sweet food isn’t necessarily more “nutritious” than bitter fruit, and bitter fruit isn’t always poisonous. So Coel misses the reason that we have a “sweet tooth”. The reason is that sweet food provides a burst of energy — as it usually contains a significant amount of pure sugar — and so when we come across it is is desirable for us to eat and hoard it since it is often rare and does provide that burst of energy. However, that evolutionary strategy only works if sweet food is rare. In modern society, where sugary foods are common, it’s hugely maladaptive, especially if we choose those foods over the more nutritious ones.
We can point out that the “sweet tooth” is maladaptive and shouldn’t be listened to because we have a clear objective principle for what eating is supposed to do for us: provide personal health and survival. Do we have that, under Coel’s view for morality? How can we say that some of our moral intuitions might be maladaptive? Coel could never answer that question in our discussions because it always came across as asking for a “right” answer, which he denies out of hand. But in reality, the question merely asks him to treat an evolved morality like everything else that has evolved and answer the same questions about it that we can do about everything else. And it is difficult for Coel to do that without introducing something objective to do the hard work.
I’ll skip the initial comment about objective morality and degrees because I agree that Freeland’s argument, if it is his argument, is a bad one, and move on to other points:
A minor part of Anthony’s argument is whether “truth” and “evil” can have degrees. Anthony says:
There is no scale by which to measure what is more true than something else.
I’m not so sure. For example, Newton’s theory of gravity is “roughly true” in the sense that it is good enough for most purposes and gives sufficiently right answers most of the time. Einstein’s theory of gravity is better, in the sense that it gives answers that are right all of the time (as far as we know). But, that’s a minor point about semantics more than anything.
If Newton’s theory gives wrong answers, in what sense does it actually capture truth any more than someone creating a theory of nothing more than the actual measurements would? It is a semantic point … but the semantics are on Coel’s side, so it’s good that he recognizes that it’s not an answer to Freeland’s comment.
More relevantly, Anthony says:
. . . if we are presented with two evils it makes no sense to say that one is more or less evil than the other.
This rather surprises me. I’d have thought that most humans would readily rank immoral acts according to how heinous they considered them. Indeed, if Anthony really does think that good and bad do not have degrees, I wonder why he started his post with the example of the Holocaust, and not, say, an example of social-security fraud. But, this is a side issue.
In moral philosophy, the idea that morality and evil does not have degrees is controversial at best and is not part of most moral systems being considered. The Stoics are probably the ones I know of that are strongest on this … and I agree with how they present it, which is that any moral failing is a failure of moral rationality and so it’s incorrect to make arguments like “Well, it’s only a case of X and not something more serious” or to compare yourself to someone else and note that their failings are worse than yours. If you aren’t moral, you aren’t moral, and that’s that. But if Coel thinks that evil has degrees, he has to show how that can follow from his system. Still, from the context my suspicion is that Freeland is arguing that since evil doesn’t have degrees and objective truth doesn’t have degrees, then it’s reasonable to think that morality is objective. I think that a weak argument, as it would work better to establish that there are moral truths than try a move like that that is debatable, especially given Coel’s own view so that it is clear that he will debate it.
On to the second post. We start with more discussion about evil:
Anthony feels that I hadn’t properly answered his question: Was the Holocaust an act of evil? He also complains that “with subjective morality … nothing can be considered evil”.
It’s clear that Anthony and I interpret the word “evil” differently. I had considered that my statement: “most humans regard the Holocaust as among the vilest and most abhorrent crimes ever” answered the question. Yes, subjectively, most people feel the Holocaust to be evil. But Anthony is presumably asking something different.
Actually, he’s probably asking on what basis Coel, as a subjectivist, calls it “evil”. That people feel that it is evil doesn’t make it evil. In fact, a number of people at the time — the Nazi leadership, at least — didn’t feel that it was evil at all, and in fact felt that it is good. Since as we say in earlier posts Coel believes in moral progress, he has to accept that people feel things evil now that people in the past didn’t, and that it is an improvement that we now feel that it is evil. What’s his basis for that? How can he justify that in his view?
Ultimately, the challenge here is this: it is not the case that simply because someone or even a lot of people think something evil that it therefore is evil. Since Coel only ever answered that most people feel that it’s evil, he never answered the question. And in our discussions, Coel did figure out that the issue is that if he claims that something is evil — or right or wrong — that seems to be an objective claim, which Coel can’t make. So he kept flip-flopping on those sorts of claims, justifying it on the basis that he needs to use objective language to be understood but then deliberately using it to provide a false impression to get his points across.
I’m going to skip the dictionary analysis. Coel would have been better served to simply ask what Freeland meant by that rather that retreating to a dictionary to guess at it.
But, let’s return to Anthony’s complaint: “with subjective morality … nothing can be considered evil”. The one thing one can do in subjective morality is consider something to be “evil” or “profoundly immoral”. We humans all have opinions and feelings, and we’re generally keen on expressing them! Thus plenty of us do indeed consider things to be “evil” and say so.
The only thing we can’t do is appeal to a god or to an objective standard to back up our opinion. But nothing stops our opinion being sufficient on its own!
This is semantic wrangling. In line with the discussion above, the point is that no one can considered something “just plain evil”, no matter how strongly they express their opinion on it. On what grounds would Coel oppose the Nazis’ opinion that the Holocaust was not evil? If the Nazis had won the war and convinced most people that the Holocaust was morally required and necessary, would that mean that because most people feel it is good that it is really good?
People can express opinions all they want, but no one has to take that opinion seriously. And that, in fact, is pretty much the meaning of “That’s just my opinion”. If Coel wants to say that the Holocaust was evil, he needs something other than opinion to back that up. As noted above, he tended to avoid actually saying that in our discussions, probably from having realized the problem it makes for him.
For example, Anthony says:
If a man cheats on his wife with his own teenage daughter, according to Coel’s view, if they both think it’s ok then no evil has been committed. You see, there is nothing the Professor can say against the molestation of a little girl as long as they both think it’s ok.
Well no, there is plenty I can say! I can say that I consider the man’s actions to be harmful and that I want laws against such acts to deter them. Similarly, the man’s wife can also deprecate the man’s actions. So can anyone else. Just ask them! You’ll see that the idea that people can’t say anything on the matter is just wrong.
But if the two of them think it’s okay, then why would we take Coel’s opinion as mattering any more than if I like listening to AC/DC and he hates it and he says that that means that I shouldn’t listen to AC/DC?
We have to note the trick pulled here, which is common among at least amateur subjectivists. Coel appeals to objective and generally agreed upon criteria to make the criticisms seem meaningful while insisting that there is no sort of objective criteria. He talks about claiming that it causes harm, but that’s an objective criteria that we can actually find a true statement about: does it cause harm or not? He also talks about the wife, but then that appeals to the marital contract and agreement. But if the two of them don’t care about either of those criteria — which is an implication of any actual subjective morality — then what can he say, and what validity does his criticism have? Coel has never been able to answer that question other than by appealing for force to enforce it.
So let me digress into that. Coel has a nasty habit of trying to talk about views and use technical terms that he doesn’t understand to describe his view, which then leads to people reacting as if those are his actual views, which then leads to him often correcting them in a frustrated way, which leads them — or, at least, me — to point out that he doesn’t get what the views were. I ultimately recommended that he simply describe his view in detail and stop trying to classify it to avoid those questions. The success of that was mixed, but ultimately the underlying reasoning is that to achieve his goals Coel doesn’t need to get into discussions about whether his view is really emotivist or subjectivist or an error theory or whatever. All he really wants is to convince people that at least the objective moralities that he’s most concerned about — here, generally religious — are wrong. By talking about those specific ideas he ends up opening up these mostly irrelevant discussions that only confuse the issue because his view is not consistent enough to actually fit in one of those, which then makes him insist that philosophy is wrong for trying to classify views anyway, which opens up another irrelevant discussion, and so on.
The thing is, on reading this, I actually think that the idea of whether or not morality is really “subjective” is irrelevant to Coel’s main purpose as well. Coel really wants to establish and maintain the idea that the main purpose of morality is to provide social cohesion. He justifies that using evolution as a basis. From moral philosophy, there are two views that seem to fit with Coel’s general idea: the Social Contract theories of Hobbes and Rawls. Hobbes fits Coel’s evoluitionary basis better because he explicitly justifies the move on the basis that the State of Nature without it is worse than we have with it, which is why we all accept it. Rawls’ view fits into Coel’s general idea that the underlying motivation for us accepting restrictions is that we understand that we have to allow that we might be on the receiving end of someone acting selfishly and so accept restrictions that we might be able to exploit because we’re concerned that others will exploit it. Either way — of even with a combination of the two — this pretty much works out to what Coel wants. Morality’s main purpose is to preserve society and so what we’re arguing over when we argue over morality is what will preserve society. Thus, what we mean when we say “X is immoral” is really “You’re breaking the rules of society in a way that threatens it”. This is generally how Coel uses the terms when he’s not hiding behind “like and dislike”, so it fits better than anything else he wants to do.
Other than that, the biggest benefit is that Coel can get away from having to worry about whether this is really “objective” or not. It follows from evolution and from the reason that we at least evolved to follow morality, so that part of his view is preserved. Whether that counts as being objective or not is not something he has to worry about. And it ties into our individual feelings about how we want society to be, and a lot of arguments are going to be over whether those feelings work or not. And those statements are important and meaningful to everyone because they are accusations of violating social rules. Whether or not this counts as objective or subjective is not something that need concern Coel. All he’d have to do is establish that this is the right way to look at morality, not whether or not it is objective or subjective.
There is one issue with this for Coel, though: there is no society where people will agree that things should be strongly restricting simply on the basis of someone’s opinion. We will never accept that we should have laws or even strong moral consequences against something that we like and want to do simply because someone else — or even most other people — don’t like it and don’t want people to do it. To return to the AC/DC example, we would never accept banning all AC/DC albums because someone or even most people don’t like it. There would have to be other reasons for doing that, such as it causing harm to people. And what we see in reality and even in Coel’s own behaviour is that: we appeal to harms and the like because those are things that we can relate to society itself (under this theory). While we won’t accept someone insisting that we not do something because they don’t like it, we will accept an argument that it harms them — or ourselves — because a stable society will always have a rule that says that you are not allowed to take an action that harms someone else simply because you like it and want to do it. So given this approach, we can actually justify Coel’s own claims, and to reject this idea means allowing things that no societal agreement could ever allow. So I think simply becoming a Social Contract Theorist and not worrying about whether or not this makes the view objective or subjective would work far better than Coel getting dragged into arguments about that debate that he is, at a minimum, interpreting in a very eccentric way.
I could address some of his comments about divine morality, but I’m not going to bother. So let’s return to the expertise of philosophy:
I simply disagree. The origin of morality is our evolutionary programming. We have been programmed with feelings about how humans interact with each other because that is a necessary part of living together in a social and cooperative way of life. Given that we have evolved to occupy a cooperative ecological niche (one in which we are more successful by cooperating communally, and sharing the proceeds, rather than by acting alone) we have been programmed with moral feelings as a social glue.
It follows from this explanation that morals are subjective (which means that they are human feelings, they are not about any supra-human standard of “morally correct” conduct). Note, also, that other social animals, such as chimpanzees, also clearly have moral feelings about how they interact with each other.
This is a philosophical argument, not a scientific one. The reason is that in order for it to work, we have to argue that the true origin and definition of morality is the one given us by evolution. Once we have that, then we can discover the details scientifically, but we cannot answer anyone who denies that first point scientifically. So here he does philosophy and in no way demonstrates that science can do this, let alone that it is the best field to do it.
Anthony continues:
Let me end my rant about philosophy and science by posing a direct question to Prof. Hellier: If philosophers aren’t the “experts” on moral questions, then who is?
Scientists are. Our understanding of the above questions (“the origin of morality, the reasons that we have morality”) was first put forward by Charles Darwin in the Origin of Species, and then at greater length in Chapter 5 (“On the development of the intellectual and moral faculties during primeval and civilised times”) of The Descent of Man. That scientific understanding has been hugely developed since then. As Anthony quotes me saying, in science it is “taken for granted that human moral sentiments derive from evolutionary programming”
There is no actual field of morality in science. Darwin was simply opining on what he thought, and had no particular expertise in morality while doing so. And if he had, it would have been philosophical expertise, as there was no science of morality at the time. Coel cannot declare scientists the experts because a scientist came up with the answer he likes best. Even if it happens to be right — which is debatable — would a philosopher coming up with a breakthrough in neuroscience — which, since many of them participate in Cognitive Science, is actually quite possible — make philosophers the experts in neuroscience? The idea is absurd, and Coel’s defenses of the idea even more so.
I’m going to skip evolution and the scientific method and move on to ask whether Coel is being consistent:
Anthony’s last major argument is that people like me “take an objective approach to morality when it’s convenient”, and he says that reading my blog “it becomes abundantly clear that [I] believe that freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and tolerance are objectively good”.
Let me admit one part of Anthony’s claim. Since most people have been moral realists, our language is steeped in moral realism. Therefore, when writing about ethical issues, it is hard to avoid sounding as though you’re a moral realist. When discussing meta-ethics, as now, it’s easy enough to clarify what one means, but if we were discussing, say, equality legislation, such caveats and clarifications would just get in the way. The only way to write well is to use the normal language that everyone uses, and that can make one sound like a moral realist.
But, there is no inconsistency. It is equally easy to interpret such writing from the stance that morals are subjective.
In our discussions, Coel admitted that he used the terms because they convinced people. Since this would be him deliberately using them in a way that he thought false but that he knew they thought true, that was far beyond simply using the terms and since it relies on equivocation is not a valid way to “write well”. So the defense that he’s just using the terms that everyone uses isn’t a valid one against the charge that he’s being inconsistent.
For example, Anthony writes:
If morality is merely relative then how can one say that anyone has a right to anything?
To people with my view, a human “right” is not something objective or granted by God; instead, a right derives from agreement among humans. We have a right to “free speech” or “religious freedom” because humans have collectively agreed to grant each other such rights. Documents such as the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights might specify lists of rights, but they do so as agreed by humans. The American Constitution outlines a Bill of Rights, but it does so on the authority of “We the People”.
The problem here is that there are a number of posts where Coel says that even the Constitutions of nations have defined those rights incorrectly, especially when it comes to freedom of religion. I’ve argued over that with Coel on a few occastions. He can’t do that under his own view. So either he’s being inconsistent or he’s lying about his own view in the hopes of sounding more convincing. So that doesn’t save him either.
Note that with my view above, he can do that by arguing that rights are precisely those things that are required to preserve a society, which is generally how he use the terms anyway.
He also makes an incredibly bad argument here:
But, again, the concept of “rights” as collective agreements works fine. For example, in many countries a worker has a “right” to a minimum wage, a set number of days holiday, and protection from unfair dismissal. Surely no-one would argue that these are anything other than collective agreements made by society? Surely, even someone who argues that morals are objective is not going to argue that the level of the minimum wage and number of days of holiday entitlement are “objective facts” set by God?
A second example is the UK concept of a public footpath over which the public has a “right of way”. Again, what is or is not a “right of way” is quite clearly an agreement among humans, not something drawn on a map by God.
The last paragraph is the egregious one here, but in all cases he’s appealing to things that happen to use the word “right” to claim that rights aren’t objective, but no one who thinks rights are objective thinks that something like, say, “the right of way” while driving is an actual right. It’s a way of talking, and nothing more. For the first paragraph, those claims are usually made on the basis that they follow from an actual right, not that it’s a right in and of itself … and when it isn’t, again it’s clear that they don’t think it’s really a right. So this is just a really, really bad argument.
Ultimately, Coel bases all of this on having a society that we like and can live in, which coincidentally fits in with Social Contract Theory which provides a solid basis for the claims Coel makes. He really should just become one and use that to smooth out the inconsistencies in his view, and ignore whether it’s really objective or subjective.
That ends my look at Coel’s moral theory. I’ll be doing … something else next week.
The Verbose Stoic 
Final Thoughts on the “Leprechaun” Series
April 30, 2020The premise of the “Leprechaun” horror movies is one that doesn’t lend itself to standard slasher-style horror. Horror based around a small, magical creature is at a minimum going to be based more around creative kills than around simple bloody slaughter. Given the image of leprechauns as more trickster-style supernatural beings, the ideal move is to show the leprechaun tricking its victims into creative deathtraps, whether you want to take the premise seriously or not. But the premise does seem to work best with a horror/comedy notion, similar to the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series, because it is always going to be too difficult to take a small, green-clad leprechaun seriously.
The “Leprechaun” series, as a whole, fails to do this properly.
The best movies are the first one and the last one, its direct sequel. They take the premise lightly, but slip in lots of humour to turn it into more of a horror/comedy than a serious horror movie. They also have an interesting female lead where the actress playing the part does a good job with it. The plot also follows more from the situation and so mostly gets out of the way when the horror and killing has to come in, and also supports the humour aspect fairly well. Yes, the plots and notions are often stupid — the first one, for example, is spawned by someone swallowing a gold coin thinking it was chocolate — but we’re okay with stupid in a movie that’s not really trying to be serious anyway.
And the best of the lot are still mediocre at best.
Ultimately, the problem is that most of the movies never managed to find a decent balance of horror and comedy. “In Space” is a prime example of where they dragged down the overall humorous tone with an out-of-place serious tone in places, while “In Tha Hood” and “Back to Tha Hood” mess up the more serious background plot by attaching it to the ridiculous leprechaun premise. “Origins” is so serious that it doesn’t even fit with the other movies at all, while the other two are closest in tone but are ruined by very poor writing and lead characters. For the most part, then, the execution is sorely lacking in them which is what makes them range from “Meh” to “Ugh”.
I can’t imagine watching the entire series again. There’s a chance of watching the first and last again, but that’s pretty unlikely as there are much better horror movies for me to rewatch than those if I want to.
Tags:horror
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