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An early short story by Orson Scott Card, Eumenides is about a selfish, manipulative man who finds a baby drowning in a toilet. It’s short and devastating, and I’d prefer not to spoil it, except to say that the ending of this story is what I think of when I think of what atonement and forgiveness really mean. Have it for free: http://www.e-reading.club/chapter.php/72261/20/Card_-_27_Short_Stories.html
Fiction for Utilitarians: Ender's Game
Dec. 8th, 2018 06:09 pmWhen 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.
( Read more... )
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.
( Read more... )
The Two Rabbis and Jesus
Dec. 8th, 2018 05:18 pmThis is an excerpt from Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. I post it whenever I want to talk about what religion should be, and what it often is.
A great rabbi stands teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife’s adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine, a speaker for the dead, has told me of two other rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I’m going to tell you.)
The rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears, and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. “Is there anyone here,” he says to them, “who has not desired another man’s wife, another woman’s husband?”
They murmur and say, “We all know the desire. But, Rabbi, none of us has acted on it.”
The rabbi says, “Then kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong.” He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, “Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he’ll know I am his loyal servant.”
So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.
Another rabbi, another city. He goes to her and stops the mob as in the other story, and says, “Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone.”
The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated.
As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brain among the cobblestones.
“Nor am I without sin,” he says to the people. “But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it.”
So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.
The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far, they die. Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him.
