Ender's Game is an interesting story. If we were to simplify the scenario to a lab, in which a monkey gets trained to play an abstract game to get food, the resolution is trivial: if soneone wired the game to act as a trigger for an A bomb under the enemy's capital, hoping to blame the monkey for pushing the final button, they would clearly be in the wrong. The monkey would not be capable of understanding his choice or his actions. The moral responsibility and guilt lies entirely with the people planning and executing that plan.
Ender is different: he knows about the war. He knows that he is being trained to fight in it. His fighting game gets ultimately wired up the the actual battlefield. The book is actually surprisingly ambivalent on whether Ender truely believes that this is still a simulation or something else. And when he is presented with the trigger (the MD device) he decides to press it. If I remember, he even kills half of his own fleet with that thing just because he does not see any other way to win.
I don't quite buy that Ender is complete innocence in this. He was trained to command these battles and knew what consequences his decisions have. Yet he makes the conscious decision to act as an intelligent being who is fundamentally able to decide otherwise if he wanted to. The alternative is set up to have terrible consequences, but it exists and Ender understands it. And the most damning aspect of all in my opinion is that Ender seems to suspect that it is not just a simulation anymore. Yet he continues as he always has.
Then again understanding your choices and actions relies heavily on being aware of their consequences. So a soldier trained to kill cannot be judged by what he does in a simulation (or what they believe to be one). The consequences of your actions are what really define them.
So an Ender playing in a simulation is no different from a monkey being taught to press a button. One of them doesn't know why it's doing that and can't fathom the consequences but there's a reward at the end, the other concludes there are no real consequences but there's a reward at the end. He has not yet been faced with the real situation so it's impossible to to decide whether he would act the same way or not.
Speaking as a veteran and someone who was in an OPFOR unit, we trained in "simulations" as close as possible to the way we fight.
> So a soldier trained to kill cannot be judged by what he does in a simulation (or what they believe to be one).
Interestingly, EXROE (exercise rules of engagement) violations are subject to article 15 non-judicial punishment, so they are judged by what they do in a simulation in the US military.
Our simulations are more realistic than the ones depicted in Ender's game, which were pretty strange looking back at it. In ours, you're in full kit, you're carrying your service weapon with a MILES laser attached and a blank fire adapter, there are helicopters flying overhead, and we have villages with imams and such, etc. And there are consequences... if the OPFOR wins the town will go "red" and demonstrations will break out, if BLUFOR wins the town goes "blue" and OPFOR is forced to leave.
The big misconception people have is there are all these instant decisions you have to make or ironclad orders that have to be executed in an instant. The reality is you're responsible for what you shoot at, and that's why you're trained in target identification to know what you're shooting at. You generally don't want to be in a tactical situation where you have to make instant decisions; that's why the cordon and search tactics (similar to SWAT tactics) were so controversial precisely because going room to room meant making large numbers of snap decisions. The results were pretty predictable.
Well developed rules of engagement and tactics help soldiers distinguish clearly between enemy combatants, friendlies and civilians. For example, if you are defending a gate, you're going to set up barriers to slow vehicles down so you have plenty of time to identify a potential VBIED. And you mark out different zones... this is where you flash lights, this is where you fire a warning shot, and if they get past this point you open up.
That's not the kind of sim I was thinking about. That's the case because the rules of your sim precisely replicate real life and that's the only point of it. You're "playing" following a very clear rule book. And they are still "real life", you are not put in a virtual training/learning environment where you write the rule book and can expect mistakes to have 0 consequences.
The question was what if the simulation didn't replicate real life? What if you were expected or requested to do more by being told "it's a simulation and your ONLY goal is to win". It's GTA, Counter Strike, StarCraft, etc. Would knowing the person you just ran over while trying to win is a real person that just died or that you sent a real squad of marines to die so you can save one tank change your decisions? It's a hypothetical exercise, just like the Ender story.
My main point is that even if you're trained to kill in real life the decisions you take in a sim with "fictitious" rules and scenarios can't be considered a breach of morality.
Anyway, there is no justice or real consequences even for mistakes made in real life when it comes to the military. As evidence stands the mountain of innocent civilian victims. And to make the parallel with real life, Ender is not a soldier, he's a general. And just like in real life a decision that costs millions of lives on any side can still be rewarded with medals, glory, fame, as long as you're on the winning side.
As a civilian I am certain my reactions, instincts, and decisions are vastly different from those of a soldier. I am not trained to follow orders and take lives regardless of my opinions. I am allowed to have doubts and act on those doubts as I see fit without fear of a court marshal.
At this time in real life any soldier should have reasonable doubt about whether their next target is an enemy combatant or a civilian based on an almost endless record of mistakes and mishaps. But questioning the order or entertaining that sense of doubt could be the difference between surviving and getting your whole squad killed.
Now take that soldier and put them in a simulation and you raised the bar 1000 fold on whether they should worry about real life consequences. They're trained not to worry when they know it's real, let alone when it might not be real at all.
The thing with soldiers is that the whole military culture instills a sense of following orders, the "reasonable doubt" bar is set a lot higher before you can expect them to oppose or even entertain that doubt and investigate.
I was a conscript in the German army and there the emphasis is definitely not put on creating soldiers that follow orders mindlessly. The way the German army is organized allows (and to some extent demands) that soldiers get a degree of freedom about how to arrived at their set goals (in contrast to micromanagement by commanding officers). Attached to that is a responsibility for every soldier to recognize unlawful orders and disobey them.
It is barely even ambiguous. Bean absolutely knew, and showed it; Ender probably also knew, but intentionally hid the fact that he knew from the adults. The whole battle school was filled to the brim with brilliant, command-trained, engineered psychopaths, as a design feature of the program. They needed someone just empathy-deficient enough to sacrifice most of the human combatants, if it meant annihilating the enemy.
Ender may have suspected that the command would turn on him once the war was won, as they turned on Rackham, so established a public facade of a personality that would struggle morally with winning a total war by any means necessary. He had to be a good guy, rather than a captive, monster-fighting monster, and then keep up the act until he could escape the ensuing post-victory political meltdown on Earth.
I'm not sure if Card even knew at the time he was writing it, or if he left that intentionally ambiguous, to be filled in later if necessary. But as I read it, Ender knew, and was already playing at least one move ahead, past the victory against the aliens.
Empathy deficiency is definitively not what the battle school was looking for. It's the reverse - they wanted someone capable of emphathizing with his enemy while still willing to destroy them with no hesitation. The obvious counterpoint in the story is his brother Peter: he's just as brilliant as Ender, but gets rejected by the academy explicitly for being a sociopath.
Interesting read. It seems very connected to the constant trope in American movies of “Hero capture villain but is good so doesn’t kill him.... but villain grabs for gun/knife/nuclear device, forcing hero to kill him”
I always feel it’s such a horrible deux ex machima. As a writer, if you want the villain to die have the hero bear the responsibility of the act, don’t just try to morally whitewash it by engineering the circumstances.
That would be the Killing in Self-Defense[0] trope, mixed with a dash of "Thou Shalt Not Kill[1]". There are many ways to pull this kind of scene of, having the hero kill in self defense preserves the hero's status as "doesn't murder". You can have self-disposing villains[2] so the hero even preserves "doesn't kill" or alternatively you go for "He Who Fights Monsters"[3] (if the hero is corrupted)/"If You Kill Him You Will Be Just Like Him"[4] (corrupted and/or breaking their no-kill rule makes them the villain).
I don't recommend to click the links, TvTropes is a black hole that'll change how you enjoy media forever if you go deep enough.
Even Han was kinda forced to shoot Greedo. Greedo said in no uncertain terms that he'd kill Han, and judging by the rest of the scene, it's fair to assume Greedo would have pulled the trigger on the spot, and walked away without anyone disturbing him. If Han didn't shot first, he'd be dead. That's close enough to self defence that Han can still have the sympathy of the public.
Actually bearing the responsibility of the murder would have Han kill Greedo for something Greedo did. It would at least mean Han initiating hostilities.
Even Han was kinda forced to shoot Greedo. Greedo said in no uncertain terms that he'd kill Han
I'm going to have to vigorously disagree with you. You must have only seen the Special Edition. Greedo makes it clear that he plans to take Han back to Jabba. He says "You can tell that to Jabba. He may only take your ship."
Greedo didn't intent to murder Han. He was just after a bounty. Han killed Greedo to avoid apprehension and buy enough time to get the money to pay off Jabba.
Also it establishes Han as a thug (for, if nothing else, associating himself with such unsavoury characters as Greedo), so he can begin the Hero's Journey throughout the rest of the film.
I find this essay to be poorly written and wrongly positioned. Ender is an anti-hero. He does what he has to because he is a useful tool, a pawn in the hands of people more powerful than him. His motivations are intertwined with theirs because he is fighting to save the same people they are (for him it's his sister Valentine really).
The author of the essay recognizes Ender's portrayal of guilt, but suggests that Card wipes the slate clean with every incident. It is quite the opposite. Much of Ender's internal monologue is about him trying and failing to rationalize his actions. He has nightmares. "Speaker For The Dead" and "Xenocide" are about Ender struggling to come to terms with his xenocide, inventing new ways of assuaging that guilt. It is telling that Ender carries his burden for roughly a millenia (a terrible punishment), and only <spoiler alert> sacrificing himself allows some manner of redemption. He also <spoiler alert> saves the buggers after all. No one except Ender knows the location of the young queen's cocoon. He could easily let her be captured or killed, yet deliberately places her in a secluded part of the galaxy where she can grow and repopulate. These are the actions of an ethical human being, not an amoral, cold-blooded killer.
Good sci-fi builds on moral conflicts in present-day society. Card is keenly aware of this. Ender's Game is an unrealistic sympathy card? The pilots of the Enola Gay pushed a button and instantly exterminated 50,000 people. How do they feel about this? Does one think it was just another day at the office for them? Just another flight? We have drone pilots kill people daily. They burn out after a few years, suffer from PTSD. Xenocide has a very tense scene where the Admiral <spoiler> has to make an Ender-like decision. People like Ender exist because we as a society demand that they exist. That's ultimately Card's moral message.
Doesn't Ender continue to attack Stilson and Bonzo after they are down?
Stilson, yes. Bonzo, no. Bonzo was effectively dead but still standing when Ender kicked him in the groin.
Are we to assume that he doesn't know that doing such a thing could be lethal?
Ender was 6 when he killed Stilson. I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that a 6 year old, even one of the smartest on the planet, might not have a full appreciation that kicking someone who had just attacked him might kill him or a full appreciation of what death is.
Maybe the scenarios are contrived but I still maintain that Ender is an innocent in both cases because his use of force was intended to prevent serious injury to himself. He was facing superior numbers of physically stronger adversaries.
If I remember correctly, isn't the military surprised that Ender uses the super-bomb against the bugger's planet?
I think they intended for him to use the MDD but none of them wanted to take the moral responsibility for telling him to destroy an entire species. They wanted Xenocide without being responsible for it.
Ender is a survivalist. It's a character trait some people have. He never starts fights, but he finishes them. It is prudent defensive strategy in conflict to neutralize the source in some permanent fashion, just to ensure that this source will never threaten you again. Stilson and Bonzo could have stopped the fight at any time by conceding, giving up, walking away, showing remorse. They don't. They fight till the end. In both cases, Ender finishes the fight, but doesn't know how his opponent fared. It's third-party accounts and glimpses of evidence that hint at the truth, and Card makes more hints available to the reader (through third-party conversations) than what Ender is exposed to.
Regarding surprise: Remember that Ender is not just chosen for his intelligence, but also his temperament. Peter and Valentine are just as smart, Peter probably the smartest out of the three. Graff and the others are banking on Ender's survivalist trait to do the hard things when necessary, make the decisions that no one else had the courage to make.
In the final battle, Ender's rationale was this: The yield of the MD device was too low to take the bugger fleet down by itself. The hive knew about the MD device and was countering his actions by constant movements to minimize local clustering. The only option was to target the planet to yield a large enough cascade. Even then, he didn't know if it would be large enough to take out the entire enemy fleet. In the end, it was large enough to destroy half the human fleet as well. He was taking a calculated risk. It was cold, ruthless and utterly unexpected. Even the Hive Queen, who was in touch with his thoughts on and off, didn't think he would do it. When she realizes his true intentions, she tries her best to block his path, throwing ships directly in the line of fire. It was a very high-risk strategy. He could have run out of ships before he got close enough for instance.
The real question is: Would he do it again if placed in the exact same situation with the exact same facts and resources at his disposal? Ender spends the rest of the series struggling with that very question. Ultimately, he comes to realize that, yes, he would do it all over again if he had to.
Thank you for the recommendation on "Cold Equations". Haven't read it, will happily take a look. Hopefully my local library has a copy.
Ender is a survivalist. It's a character trait some people have. He never starts fights, but he finishes them. It is prudent defensive strategy in conflict to neutralize the source in some permanent fashion, just to ensure that this source will never threaten you again. Stilson and Bonzo could have stopped the fight at any time by conceding, giving up, walking away, showing remorse. They don't. They fight till the end.
Did you actually read the whole essay? The author makes exactly this point about Ender's mindset. The only thing you seem to be disagreeing on is whether it's a good one.
I did read the essay. The author's portrayal of Ender winning at any cost is correct. But the rest is not. Ender feels remorse (the author doesn't acknowledge it much). Rather, the author says that Card lets Ender get away with it in the universe he's created. That's not what happens either.
Thanks. I read it. It's touching. It has a different moral message from Ender's Game though IMO.
<spoilers>
The aviation part of me feels the scenario a bit contrived (20% reserve on flights is common). The lack of resistance on the girl's part also strikes me as a bit contrived. She should maybe fight, try to knock the pilot out and jettison him instead. She may go to jail, but that's better than death. Maybe that's what Ender would do...?
Here is a slight modification to consider: Skin in the game.
If we separate motivation and act as completely as Card suggests, we should separate motivation and personal consequences completely as well.
This would effectively prevent hypocrites and those without pure motivation rationalizing their actions.
Card's 'martial philosophy' mixes western legal tradition (where intention is important) and martial tradition and moral philosophy in a way that perverts both.
Hyrum Graff and bunch of others should have been tried, convicted and executed. Give them hero's funeral by all means. They should have gone into the project knowing for sure that nobody of them will come out of it alive. Horrible act for good reasons should should always be a personal sacrifice.
In many old classical stories in the Chinese and other East Asian cultures the same dilemma would be solved just like this. True warrior should have no desire to kill and should act selflessly. But he should face the consequences under strict legalist tradition (Faija).
> though he ultimately takes on guilt for the extermination of the alien buggers, his assuming this guilt is a gratuitous act
> ...
> In this Card argues that the morality of an act is based solely on the intentions of the person acting.
This book must be a mirror where different people see different things.
For me, morally, it was a tale about how some deeds are so horrible, that no matter what your motivations or circumstances were they can never be good. You saved humanity? Doesn't matter if you exterminated entire intelligent species for that. You were decieved to do that? Still doesn't matter.
It resonated with me, an atheist, very strongly that some evils while might be forgiven by some people for some time, they can never be "absolved".
For me on personal level such unabsolvable deed is killing. By extension I think that army won't be moral untill each soldier comming back from the war is ready to be tried and sentenced for each life he took. We are probably closer to singuarity than to morality defined like that.
> You saved humanity? Doesn't matter if you exterminated entire intelligent species for that.
Do you truly believe that? In a war of extinction you feel the moral choice is to allow humanity to be exterminated instead?
Surely inaction is just as morally unjust as action? I do not believe that not switching the train onto the track which doesn't kill someone is different from switching it onto a track which does.
In more direct terms I, for one, would feel no guilt killing to save my own life from an aggressor, or to save those of my family/friends.
> In a war of extinction you feel the moral choice is to allow humanity to be exterminated instead?
Moral choice is not always the right choice. The fact that the choice is right or logical doesn't make it moral.
> Surely inaction is just as morally unjust as action?
Nothing sure about that. For example in case of "trolley problem" I would not reroute the trolley so that 1 person dies instead of five because I believe that saving people is optional, but not killing them is mandatory. Or I would reroute the trolley accepting that even though it might be correct it was immoral.
> In more direct terms I, for one, would feel no guilt killing to save my own life from an aggressor, or to save those of my family/friends.
I don't believe that the dilemma faced by Ender is akin to the traditional trolley problem. It's not a straight utilitarian choice of 1 innocent or 5 innocents die based on your decision to act or not.
Namely, the people on the trolley have intentionally run down innocents in the past and to the best of your knowledge, they are doing so again.
You have the choice to do nothing and allow those innocents to be killed or to throw the switch and kill those whom are trying to kill the innocents.
If you are seeking analogy he had a trolley problem where 5 people are his family and on the other track there is a guy who commited serious crime, maybe killing, some believe it was even a murder. Everyone around agrees he should make every effort possible to throw the switch while he himself is led to believe that he's throwing training switch and even after throwing real switch the bad guy will rather be maimed not killed.
Still, he throws the switch, it was the real switch, guy is killed and eventually it turns out his offence was an accident and if left alone the trolley wouldn't kill 5 people.
Ender is guilty of killng a guy even though what he did was perfectly reasonable considering circumstances.
The occupants of the trolley had intentionally run over many people in the past. Ender had reason to believe that they intended to do so again.
We only have the word of the dormant hive queen that they didn't intend to again.
(Spoiler Alert)
In the Shadow series, it's revealed that the hive queen lied to Ender about some things. The formic males struck a deal with Bean's children to keep Ender from finding out.
Even if he had known, his actions were still just.
Take care that you can distinguish "allow humanity to be exterminated" from "there is a vague possibility that some people may be hurt." In the heat of the moment it's not always an easy line to distinguish.
Way back in the early 2000s, there was a discussion of the morality of torture; would it be moral, or should it be legal, to torture someone if they know where the bomb is?
My answer was that it was the wrong question. Torture is wrong, and should be illegal, but a true patriot (or a reasonable facsimile) would certainly be willing to do it anyway if necessary, and if the bomb is defused I'm sure everyone would pardon him.
> For me on personal level such unabsolvable deed is killing. By extension I think that army won't be moral untill each soldier comming back from the war is ready to be tried and sentenced for each life he took. We are probably closer to singuarity than to morality defined like that.
We've already been there, and still are — there were & are Christian churches which prescribe confession & penance (to include temporary excommunication) for those who return from war.
The major part of this article that I find convincing is that Card worked hard on the structure of the story to make Ender innocent. Sure, he may guilty and tormented about what he's done, but you and I, the readers, know he doesn't need to. He was tricked! and It was necessary! and all that.
Some deeds may never be good, but it sure looks from the story like what Ender does isn't one of them.
> but you and I, the readers, know he doesn't need to. He was tricked! and It was necessary! and all that.
That's the whole point. It's constructed this way to show that no matter how innocent circumstance make you, you are still guilty.
> Some deeds may never be good, but it sure looks from the story like what Ender does isn't one of them.
Did you read the second part? "Speaker for the dead"? Few hundreds years have passed and he's remembered by everyone as genocidal murderer of the past.
Maybe that's why for me "Ender's Game" means what it means, because I read it back to back with "Speaker for the dead".
I haven't read Speaker, so I don't know, but from everything I've seen, Ender is still the "hero" and the one leading the speaker-for-the-dead movement. He's portrayed as good but misunderstood.
Please, read it. Speakers are just a sort of secular religion focused on speaking thruth about the dead. Ender is just one of the "priests".
He's not a hero. He's remembered as the guy who commited xenocide. Highly regrettable affair. Nobody remembers circumstances.
Imagine living in a remote village and suddenly in a conversation it turns out that your local pastor, Khan, is actually (let's say) the Gengis Khan, responsible for wiping out whole nations.
You still say 'hello' to him as usual because he's thoughtful, helpful and impeccably polite but you can't help feeling bit uneasy.
“The only way to end things completely…” Ender thinks, “was to hurt Bonzo enough that his fear was stronger than his hate”
It's interesting to think of this in terms of global politics, and the "fearing for his life" defense of shootings in the US. A pushes B down in a parking lot; A could kill B in hand-to-hand combat; therefore B is justified.
In historical terms, humanity seems incredibly benevolent, even when engaged in total war.
The essay doesn't sit right with me to be honest. The author seems to attribute no small amount of intentional malice on Card's part, which their talk of manipulation of the readers, and whatnot. Malice which, at least I believe, isn't truly present (at least in this; OCS has some pretty outlandish believes).
To me, the core tenet of OCS' philosophy in the book is something along the lines of the following:
- the preservation of society comes before the preservation of the individual
- Sometimes, in order to preserve society, harm must be done to an individual
- The people causing this harm are not morally bad for causing it; since they do it in the pursuit of a more important goal
You can agree with it or not, but I feel it's in bad taste to compare this to someone abusing people because they were abused in the past.
The essay doesn't sit right with me to be honest. The author seems to attribute no small amount of intentional malice on Card's part, which their talk of manipulation of the readers, and whatnot. Malice which, at least I believe, isn't truly present (at least in this; OCS has some pretty outlandish believes).
It is not "attributing malice" to suggest an author knows what they are doing. A good writer crafts their words carefully, to send the message they wish to impart, and evoke a response in the reader, whatever that might be. This is the foundation of writing itself, and the foundation of literary criticism is the analysis of what that message might be.
The essay refers to another by Radford, which ends with this note:
"To this day, the most common response by Card fans to my essay is that they just don't see it. My goodness gracious, why should anyone imagine that hundreds of pages of meditation on genocide and forgiveness wasn't just pure science fiction, with nothing to say about the twentieth century or its most notorious genocide? To which I can only shrug and say, Hmm-kay, I start with the assumption that the guy is not a complete idiot and that he knows what he's doing and that he actually had something to say. I don't agree with what he had to say, but he did have something to say. The argument that he's an oblivious airhead is not particularly flattering to either you as a fan or Card as an author. If that's your argument, fine, but you'll have to forgive me if I think it's pathetic."
To say the author has no intentions is, for a start, an interesting tack to take in response to an evaluation of Card's own intention-based model of morality, but also potentially takes no more charitable view of Card than that of the essayist.
I didn't even read this far into it; I think the book is supposed to prompt readers to think _why_ they think that relative morality is absolute. I.e., if there is an absolute morality, there are a lot of barriers to personally realizing it.
Maybe malice is the wrong word, but I feel that the essay strongly implies that the author believes that the morality outlined by OCS is reprehensible, and that OCS is actively guiding the readers to agree with his morality by constructing a situation in which it seems reasonable.
It cites Card himself which supports that, though:
>Despite their similar public image, however, every other element of Ender’s story is designed to show that in his case the image is not reality—he is not like Hitler or Stalin, exactly the opposite of what Radford claims.
Card's clearly trying to get people to agree with him that Ender is an "innocent killer", based solely on this quote.
- The total value (in some grand sense) of a human life is greater than their comfort or happiness at some moment.
- I am not a bad person (I am not responsible for the Holocaust; I didn't even vote for Bush), but the apparent abuse I suffered is part of what made me the strong individual I am now.
- Therefore, although I feel bad about it afterwards, it's necessary that I treat the next generation with suitable punishment---to make them better people.
Are you sure? I think this essay asks whether Ender is responsible for the things he did, not whether the things he did are bad. The books agree that they're bad, but they carefully place the responsibility outside Ender.
I don't recall the first book stating what he did was bad. The war was presented as the survival of the human species being at stake from an unrelenting murderous alien species.
Ender is different: he knows about the war. He knows that he is being trained to fight in it. His fighting game gets ultimately wired up the the actual battlefield. The book is actually surprisingly ambivalent on whether Ender truely believes that this is still a simulation or something else. And when he is presented with the trigger (the MD device) he decides to press it. If I remember, he even kills half of his own fleet with that thing just because he does not see any other way to win.
I don't quite buy that Ender is complete innocence in this. He was trained to command these battles and knew what consequences his decisions have. Yet he makes the conscious decision to act as an intelligent being who is fundamentally able to decide otherwise if he wanted to. The alternative is set up to have terrible consequences, but it exists and Ender understands it. And the most damning aspect of all in my opinion is that Ender seems to suspect that it is not just a simulation anymore. Yet he continues as he always has.