10 ms·

Creating the Innocent Killer (2009)

39 points by mlevental 8y ago

ikeboy 8y ago
(2004)
- jacobush 8y ago
  Postscript 2009
talltimtom 8y ago
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. Also obligatory: Han shot first!
- loup-vaillant 8y ago
  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.
  - jacobush 8y ago
    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.
  - LordKano 8y ago
    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.
- zaarn 8y ago
  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. [0]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KillingInSelfDefense https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KillingInSelfDef... [1]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThouShaltNotKill https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThouShaltNotKill [2]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SelfDisposingVillain https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SelfDisposingVil... [3]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HeWhoFightsMonsters https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HeWhoFightsMonst... [4]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IfYouKillHimYouWillBeJustLikeHim https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IfYouKillHimYouW...
deew9023 8y ago
This is just another "if you kill your enemies they win" idiocy.
- duckerude 8y ago
  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.
  - merpnderp 8y ago
    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.
jstanley 8y ago
I've never read Ender's Game but I enjoyed this essay very much and recommend reading it. It's as much an essay on morality as it is a book review.
- glitchc 8y ago
  I highly recommend the book itself. It is far deeper and more nuanced than the essay.
AllegedAlec 8y ago
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.
- jacobush 8y ago
  Interesting - I didn't read malice into it at all.
  - AllegedAlec 8y ago
    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.
    - ikeboy 8y ago
      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.
- nostrebored 8y ago
  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.
scotty79 8y ago
> 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.
- Ntrails 8y ago
  > 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.
  - mcguire 8y ago
    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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
gmueckl 8y ago
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.
- close04 8y ago
  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.
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    But if you are that soldier and you develop reasonable doubt that whatever is said to be a simulation is in fact reality, what do you do?
glitchc 8y ago
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.
- mcguire 8y ago
  Doesn't Ender continue to attack Stilson and Bonzo after they are down? Are we to assume that he doesn't know that doing such a thing could be lethal? If I remember correctly, isn't the military surprised that Ender uses the super-bomb against the bugger's planet? By the way, what's your take on "Cold Equations?"
  - glitchc 8y ago
    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.
stone-monkey 8y ago
Here's another good take on the moral killer in Ender's Game: http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/13/13857.html http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/13/13857.html
mcguire 8y ago
“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.
HONEST_ANNIE 8y ago
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).

39 points by mlevental 8y ago

ikeboy 8y ago

(2004)

jacobush 8y ago
Postscript 2009

talltimtom 8y ago

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. Also obligatory: Han shot first!

loup-vaillant 8y ago
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.
- jacobush 8y ago
  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.
- LordKano 8y ago
  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.
zaarn 8y ago
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. [0]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KillingInSelfDefense https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KillingInSelfDef... [1]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThouShaltNotKill https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThouShaltNotKill [2]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SelfDisposingVillain https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SelfDisposingVil... [3]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HeWhoFightsMonsters https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HeWhoFightsMonst... [4]: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IfYouKillHimYouWillBeJustLikeHim https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IfYouKillHimYouW...

deew9023 8y ago

This is just another "if you kill your enemies they win" idiocy.

duckerude 8y ago
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.
- merpnderp 8y ago
  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.

jstanley 8y ago

I've never read Ender's Game but I enjoyed this essay very much and recommend reading it. It's as much an essay on morality as it is a book review.

glitchc 8y ago
I highly recommend the book itself. It is far deeper and more nuanced than the essay.

AllegedAlec 8y ago

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.

jacobush 8y ago
Interesting - I didn't read malice into it at all.
- AllegedAlec 8y ago
  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.
  - ikeboy 8y ago
    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.
nostrebored 8y ago
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.

scotty79 8y ago

> 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.

Ntrails 8y ago
> 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.
- mcguire 8y ago
  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.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

gmueckl 8y ago

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.

close04 8y ago
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.
- gmueckl 8y ago
  But if you are that soldier and you develop reasonable doubt that whatever is said to be a simulation is in fact reality, what do you do?

glitchc 8y ago

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.

mcguire 8y ago
Doesn't Ender continue to attack Stilson and Bonzo after they are down? Are we to assume that he doesn't know that doing such a thing could be lethal? If I remember correctly, isn't the military surprised that Ender uses the super-bomb against the bugger's planet? By the way, what's your take on "Cold Equations?"
- glitchc 8y ago
  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.

stone-monkey 8y ago

Here's another good take on the moral killer in Ender's Game: http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/13/13857.html http://adamcadre.ac/calendar/13/13857.html

mcguire 8y ago

“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.

HONEST_ANNIE 8y ago

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).