feotakahari

I was disappointed in Hive Minds Give Good Hugs. It ends up being about the standard utilitarian villain who kills and conquers for the greater good. But it rules out or doesn’t address the ways in which the villain could fail. What if their conquest doesn’t actually make anything better? It doesn’t ask that, because they succeed and the process is skipped over.

“So when push comes to shove, even you side against me.”

“You used to know there was no such thing as sides.”

“Bullshit. Every damn person who thinks they’re ‘normal’ put themselves on one side, and they set me on the other because I’m a ‘monster.’ I’m just playing by their rules.”

“Rules they made up. There was never a real reason you were a ‘monster’ and they weren’t. And now you’re hurting people who are the same as you, pretending they’re different, just like they did. When did you forget?”

Person A says that even though they personally like fashion and would rather live in a world where fashion is more important, they think it’s good overall for people to be less pressured to participate in fashion when they don’t want to. Person B says A’s take is “obviously retarded.”

Consider the opposite of A’s take. Some people really like the trad lifestyle and would love it if society was more trad. If they push to make being trad a requirement to participate in society, do you think they’re doing a good thing or a bad thing?

(Personally, I think if fashion is less important, then people who do weird things with fashion have more room to be considered harmlessly weird rather than threats to society. Bring on the drag queens!)

There’s a story I like where a lifeboat is sinking because too many people are on it. One person organizes two others to throw people off until it stabilizes. Then, after the boat is stabilized, the two others find a guy who hid at the bottom of the boat, and they throw him off even though they don’t need to, because they like throwing people off. The one who initially organized this is charged with murder, and he doesn’t contest the charge, but he receives a lesser sentence compared to the other two.

The organizer’s actions are a trolley problem, but the court’s decision is also a trolley problem. Do you let this man go, because he wanted to prevent at least some deaths? Or do you punish him, in the hopes that fear of unavoidable punishment will prevent people from killing needlessly like the other two did? The court judges him for doing the same thing it does every day, and that’s why it can’t judge him too harshly.

1): This is as close as you can reasonably expect to Warren Spector’s “One City Block” game idea.

2): I post about some games as being pro-Utilitarian or anti-Utilitarian. This one seems like it was made by people who’ve never heard of Utilitarianism and would be confused by the concept. There’s so much consideration over who deserves to be punished and when they deserve to be punished, and yet everyone still thinks punishment is a thing you can “deserve.”

Reading fanfiction: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15928223/

-- -- -- --

“All my life, way before this even,” said Meg, gesturing at the trial around them, “there have been so many things that happened that never should have happened, and it was always somebody’s job to make it not, but those people were never there. I’ve seen it happen to friends, and family. Everyone. And sometimes it’s a mom who never said the right things, or a dad who wasn’t there, a friend that didn’t look out for you, or a god who abandoned you when you needed them, but I’m sick of all of it.”

As Tapp watched her expression, he believed she meant it. She looked tired, and resolved, the kind of strong that came from knowing how to survive. A lonely kind of strong.

“It’s not that she reminds me of myself,” continued Meg, glancing over at him. “I’m not that self-centered. It’s like…she reminds me of what it felt like being alone when I shouldn’t have been. Nobody was there for me so much when I needed it growing up, and there’s nobody here to save all of us now, and nobody for her either. I don’t care if she deserves my help or not. I think to end up like she has, probably a whole lot of somebodies did something really wrong, or not at all, and that’s not fair.” She paused for a second, glancing down at her feet, and then looked back up at him and kept going. “I’m not stupid. I know I’m not the person whose job it is to make it better for her, or who would even be good at it, but I want to do this. Because if I don’t try, there isn’t going to be anyone who ever does. And that isn’t fair. I have to. Because I can, and somebody should.”

Luka finds insect monsters slaughtering defeated, helpless plant monsters. He attacks and drives them off.

The plant monsters declare that they don't want to fight, and enlist him to "end this war." He single-handedly incapacitates the insect queen.

The plant monsters immediately start slaughtering the defeated, helpless insect monsters. They'll "end this war" once all the insect monsters are dead.

Luka starts attacking the plant monsters, and keeps bashing heads until both sides stop killing and start listening.

Me: Good, good. Give in to the Utilitarian side.

I’m much less concerned with getting people to do good things than I am with getting people to not do bad things. There are a lot of ways to say that someone deserves to be hurt, or that hurting them is for their own good, or that you’re not really hurting them. If you’re not actively causing harm, you’re already doing an above-average job.

One of multiple things I’ve never understood about villain fandom: why would you accept that the characters you like and relate to always die or get “redeemed” into not being like you anymore? I’ve read far too many utilitarian villains who die for the happiness of the deontologist hero. I want to see more utilitarians who get to succeed in their goals and feel happy about doing so.