Your point is my argument against using my fiction to argue for my political views — it's too easy to use author control to rig the game. I don't know if you have read my _Salamander_, but the antagonist (not the villain, who shows up later) is an intelligent and, on the whole, admirable person acting for defensible motives. One of the themes that appeared in the course of writing it was the issue of the end justifying the means — because there is a sense in which it does, as the antagonist makes explicit early on in an exchange with the protagonist.
I agree! Fiction can be very useful as illustrations of views, or to help people imagine particular ways they might work or fail (like _Animal Farm_), but fiction doesn't work as an argument.
Overegging the pudding is perhaps the most common flaw of fiction which tries to examine ethical issues.
For example, the past week I saw _Avatar 2_; the big moral theme of it is a 'save the whales' theme, about how evil the humans are for hunting space-whales, even if the humans get something important out of it (instead of lamp oil and perfume ingredients, _Avatar_ says they extract a literal cure for human aging). OK, fair enough, certainly this is an issue which is still live, as whale hunting is still done by a few countries and tribal groups, and more broadly about the ethics of meat-eating, it is worth examining... except then _Avatar_ goes on to describe how the space-whales in question are not just intelligent animals which are a major part of the ecosystem, but in fact, *superhumanly intelligent*, possessed of vastly greater emotional sensitivity than mere humans, and spend their leisure time pursuing superhuman mathematics and art we can't understand. At which point Cameron has overegged the pudding: no one will endorse killing space-whales who have more moral personhood than we do, as intended, but by rigging the thought experiment so badly, it now has no more relevance to the intended analogy than the question 'is murdering humans bad?' is relevant to whether Alaskans should be allowed to hunt the occasional bowhead whale. Yes, it's bad to kill humans or space-whales, but they are so different from real whales that Cameron's multi-hundred-million-dollar thought experiment is of zero interest.
This also happens almost every single time consequentialism is critiqued in popular fiction: the villain is always consequentialist, arguing that reaching the ends is too important to quibble about the means... and then in the end, the heroic heroes demonstrate that the means were not necessary to reach the ends at all (and therefore could not have been justified by the ends), thereby not refuting, or even critiquing, consequentialism at all. (You might hope that they would salvage such terminally stupid plots by at least throwing in a rule-consequentialism moral - 'you shouldn't be hasty about using bad means because you may be mistaken about them being necessary' - but they never do, they are entirely un-self-aware of how they are trying to have their cake & eat it too.)
My first post here, (I love SF and such) I just wanted to say I enjoyed the third volume by Novik "The Golden Enclaves" more than the first two. Maybe I'm just a simple man, who likes it when good and evil are well defined. I'll have to read them all again. I certainly think she's set things up for a fourth book in the series. (It might have to cook in her brain for a while.)
Long ago, I belonged to a book discussion group whose other members were all passionately fond of Katherine Kurtz's Deryni novels. I remember a new one that came out where the antagonist was a king who oppressed and exploited his people. And then midway through the novel he had sexual relations with his sister and, I think, begot a child. I objected to that as bad storytelling, because given the character's abuses and cruelties, it was already clear that he was wicked, and the incest was superfluous for that purpose. I don't think they got the point (and probably I stated it unclearly), because it got into the minutes as an argument against the condemnation of incest; I assumed that even someone who found incest profoundly horrifying might still think that at least consensual sexual relations between adult siblings were less monstrous than tyranny over an entire population. And I had already read several novels by Kurtz in each of which the antagonist violated conventional sexual mores in one way or another; she seemed unable to imagine a wicked person who was not also unchaste, at least back in those days (I haven't kept up with her later fiction).
Your point is my argument against using my fiction to argue for my political views — it's too easy to use author control to rig the game. I don't know if you have read my _Salamander_, but the antagonist (not the villain, who shows up later) is an intelligent and, on the whole, admirable person acting for defensible motives. One of the themes that appeared in the course of writing it was the issue of the end justifying the means — because there is a sense in which it does, as the antagonist makes explicit early on in an exchange with the protagonist.
I agree! Fiction can be very useful as illustrations of views, or to help people imagine particular ways they might work or fail (like _Animal Farm_), but fiction doesn't work as an argument.
Overegging the pudding is perhaps the most common flaw of fiction which tries to examine ethical issues.
For example, the past week I saw _Avatar 2_; the big moral theme of it is a 'save the whales' theme, about how evil the humans are for hunting space-whales, even if the humans get something important out of it (instead of lamp oil and perfume ingredients, _Avatar_ says they extract a literal cure for human aging). OK, fair enough, certainly this is an issue which is still live, as whale hunting is still done by a few countries and tribal groups, and more broadly about the ethics of meat-eating, it is worth examining... except then _Avatar_ goes on to describe how the space-whales in question are not just intelligent animals which are a major part of the ecosystem, but in fact, *superhumanly intelligent*, possessed of vastly greater emotional sensitivity than mere humans, and spend their leisure time pursuing superhuman mathematics and art we can't understand. At which point Cameron has overegged the pudding: no one will endorse killing space-whales who have more moral personhood than we do, as intended, but by rigging the thought experiment so badly, it now has no more relevance to the intended analogy than the question 'is murdering humans bad?' is relevant to whether Alaskans should be allowed to hunt the occasional bowhead whale. Yes, it's bad to kill humans or space-whales, but they are so different from real whales that Cameron's multi-hundred-million-dollar thought experiment is of zero interest.
This also happens almost every single time consequentialism is critiqued in popular fiction: the villain is always consequentialist, arguing that reaching the ends is too important to quibble about the means... and then in the end, the heroic heroes demonstrate that the means were not necessary to reach the ends at all (and therefore could not have been justified by the ends), thereby not refuting, or even critiquing, consequentialism at all. (You might hope that they would salvage such terminally stupid plots by at least throwing in a rule-consequentialism moral - 'you shouldn't be hasty about using bad means because you may be mistaken about them being necessary' - but they never do, they are entirely un-self-aware of how they are trying to have their cake & eat it too.)
My first post here, (I love SF and such) I just wanted to say I enjoyed the third volume by Novik "The Golden Enclaves" more than the first two. Maybe I'm just a simple man, who likes it when good and evil are well defined. I'll have to read them all again. I certainly think she's set things up for a fourth book in the series. (It might have to cook in her brain for a while.)
Long ago, I belonged to a book discussion group whose other members were all passionately fond of Katherine Kurtz's Deryni novels. I remember a new one that came out where the antagonist was a king who oppressed and exploited his people. And then midway through the novel he had sexual relations with his sister and, I think, begot a child. I objected to that as bad storytelling, because given the character's abuses and cruelties, it was already clear that he was wicked, and the incest was superfluous for that purpose. I don't think they got the point (and probably I stated it unclearly), because it got into the minutes as an argument against the condemnation of incest; I assumed that even someone who found incest profoundly horrifying might still think that at least consensual sexual relations between adult siblings were less monstrous than tyranny over an entire population. And I had already read several novels by Kurtz in each of which the antagonist violated conventional sexual mores in one way or another; she seemed unable to imagine a wicked person who was not also unchaste, at least back in those days (I haven't kept up with her later fiction).