Fiction for Utilitarians: Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice

[feotakahari]

That is entirely too many colons, isn’t it?

The sixth main game in the long-running Ace Attorney series relocates to Khura’in, a vaguely Himalayan country ruled by the descendants of a legendary medium. Queens are the ultimate authority in both politics and religion, mysticism determines court verdicts, and questioning any of this is tantamount to blasphemy. Few people even remember a time when courts were fair and thought was free. But when a foreign lawyer wins the first innocent verdict in twenty-three years, he sets off a chain of events that will lead to revolution.

There’s a lot to be said about the way the game handles concepts like faith and duty, how it deconstructs the idea of accepting what you can’t change, its parallels and contrasts with previous games … But as a Utilitarian, I want to focus specifically on how it treats divination, both as a religious practice and as something to be studied and utilized.

In most games, the idea of divination seances as a courtroom practice would be inherently ridiculous, and the plot would be about proving the seances are fraudulent. Spirit of Justice can’t do that, since mediums have been a plot element since the first game. So it does something more interesting: the mediums have discovered a genuine phenomenon, found a way to use it effectively, and still managed to screw it up through pride and blind faith. They really do have the power to convey the last sensations someone experienced before death, and those sensations really are an accurate depiction of what the dead person experienced! They’ve also taken it upon themselves to interpret those sensations, and for the most part, they have the experience and knowledge to interpret them accurately. But the current royal priestess, Rayfa, has fallen into the trap of taking her own words as unquestionable holy writ. She fails to recognize that her ideas of what happened may be incompletete, inaccurate, or even manipulated.

Enter Phoenix, who isn’t a follower of the local religion and doesn’t know what to make of all this “divination” stuff. At first, he takes it as something to be opposed, doing his best to discredit Rayfa’s insights as unreliable. But a local who remembers how the justice system used to be tells him something important: in the days before the courts were an assembly line churning out guilty verdicts, divination was a tool of both the prosecution and the defense. From then on, Phoenix treats it just like any other source of evidence, allowing for it to be misleading or manipulated, but still looking into what it shows and what it means. Rather than tearing down Rayfa, he works together with her, and when she realizes how she’s been used to prop up a corrupt system, he’s the one who insists that her divination still has value.

I’m only a scientist in the dismal sense, but I have an interest in the body of scientific knowledge, and in learning about things so as to use them more effectively and provide greater utility. Part of that is studying and understanding ideas that originated outside of European science, like tree bark that can treat malaria or more water-efficient terrace farming. But it’s important to recognize when someone’s just talking out of their chakra, and Spirit of Justice does a magnificent job of drawing a line between understanding and simple blind acceptance.

(Warning for multiples: one case contains a multiple witness, and the player character accuses them of murder based on tired old tropes. Both the accusation and the tropes are proven false, however.)