Fiction for Utilitarians: Ender's Game
Dec. 8th, 2018 06:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feotakahariWhen a story is written to promote a way of living, there’s a very specific formula to how it will go. The protagonist encounters problems, adopts the way of living, and the problems go away because their way of living fixes everything. There’s often another character who follows an inferior way of living, trying and failing to solve the same problem, and they’ll either die or change their minds upon seeing the protagonist succeed. There are a few wrinkles in the formula–the protagonist dies saving everyone, the protagonist loses his love interest because his way of life matters more to him than love–but by and large, any story about how to be a good person and live a good life can be summed up in this way.
As a Utilitarian, I naturally have a grudge about how this tends to play out. It’s the tragic villains who tend to espouse Utilitarian values, doing something horrible because every alternative they see is worse. The heroes are the ones who refuse to accept this, then pull off a solution that saves everyone, because the person writing the story made there be a solution that saves everyone. If the Utilitarian was right, and there weren’t any other choices, then by stopping him, the heroes would be responsible for something horrible, and we can’t have that, now can we?
Of course, I can’t claim the rules work any differently for moral relativist heroes. I once read a truly vile book called The Soprano Sorceress where the protagonist murders her way onto the throne, kills thousands of civilians to stay in power, and justifies it all as being for the greater good. Apart from all the bodies she piles up, it basically works out like she planned. You can’t have your hero killing people if there was any better solution to the problem. You can’t, unless you’re Orson Scott Card and you’re writing Ender’s Game.
Ender Wiggin is a Utilitarian, although the book never uses the term. He loves everyone, even people who hate him, and he wants to do what will bring about the greatest good. He will do anything, go to any lengths, once he’s certain that there’s nothing else he can do–but he won’t twist the knife any farther than he thinks he needs to, because that’s not the kind of person he is.
He screws up. He screws up hard. Without spoiling too much, a great number of people would have been a lot better off if Ender Wiggin had never existed. And then, kneeling in the rubble of all his mistakes, he finds one last chance to make up for some small part of what he’s done, and he takes it, because he can’t give up trying to do the right thing.
I’d never seen fiction that brave before, and I’ve never seen it since. It’s easy to defend your moral code when you can make up instances of it working out for the better. But it takes a lot of guts to show your readers the worst possible way you could fail, then say that it was still right to try.
(Yes, I am aware that Orson Scott Card has gone off the deep end and blames gay people and Muslims for everything he doesn’t like. It’s still a good book.)
As a Utilitarian, I naturally have a grudge about how this tends to play out. It’s the tragic villains who tend to espouse Utilitarian values, doing something horrible because every alternative they see is worse. The heroes are the ones who refuse to accept this, then pull off a solution that saves everyone, because the person writing the story made there be a solution that saves everyone. If the Utilitarian was right, and there weren’t any other choices, then by stopping him, the heroes would be responsible for something horrible, and we can’t have that, now can we?
Of course, I can’t claim the rules work any differently for moral relativist heroes. I once read a truly vile book called The Soprano Sorceress where the protagonist murders her way onto the throne, kills thousands of civilians to stay in power, and justifies it all as being for the greater good. Apart from all the bodies she piles up, it basically works out like she planned. You can’t have your hero killing people if there was any better solution to the problem. You can’t, unless you’re Orson Scott Card and you’re writing Ender’s Game.
Ender Wiggin is a Utilitarian, although the book never uses the term. He loves everyone, even people who hate him, and he wants to do what will bring about the greatest good. He will do anything, go to any lengths, once he’s certain that there’s nothing else he can do–but he won’t twist the knife any farther than he thinks he needs to, because that’s not the kind of person he is.
He screws up. He screws up hard. Without spoiling too much, a great number of people would have been a lot better off if Ender Wiggin had never existed. And then, kneeling in the rubble of all his mistakes, he finds one last chance to make up for some small part of what he’s done, and he takes it, because he can’t give up trying to do the right thing.
I’d never seen fiction that brave before, and I’ve never seen it since. It’s easy to defend your moral code when you can make up instances of it working out for the better. But it takes a lot of guts to show your readers the worst possible way you could fail, then say that it was still right to try.
(Yes, I am aware that Orson Scott Card has gone off the deep end and blames gay people and Muslims for everything he doesn’t like. It’s still a good book.)
