"If someone is constantly irritating and pricking you to the point of freaking you out, and you could give them an odorless but deadly poison, without the slightest chance of being discovered, would you do it?" philosopher John Hospers asks himself this question in his book Human Behavior (1979). It is an essentially ethical question: what would we do or not do if suddenly the social eye could not see me, if I were, let's say, invisible.

Science fiction, the most moralistic and realistic genre of all those in childbirth literature, took this problem and transferred it to its fictional territory. It was in 1897, in England. That year, on the Big Island, Herbert George Wells publishes his Invisible Man, a science fiction novel, that is, a novel where fiction speculates in the fields of science to scientifically predict -in this case- human behavior. What would my behavior be if, suddenly, I could act without being punished? Would you perform the same acts? Would it harm anything, knowing that I was unpunished?

Science fiction, the most uncomfortable genre, perhaps the least understood of all. We could ask ourselves, with Hospers, would we be what we are if you could do what we don't do because of the constant threat posed by the social gaze on us?
Are we good, or are we trying to be good, just by being watched?

I remember, at this moment, another great literary work, brief: The barrel of amontillado, by Edgar Allan Poe. The story of a revenge, apparently; but in essence: it is the story of a man who seeks revenge "invisibly", considers his revenge just and, therefore, it seems unfair to be punished for his crime. Note that, in its foundation, Wells's text and Poe's are identical: human behavior parameterized by the gaze of the other.

And I close with this: ethics would then be, in this way, a question of sanctions. It is no accident that most monsters - vampires, werewolves, zombies, etc. - choose the night, the shadows, the invisibility of movements, to throw themselves on the world.