I stumbled across this 2004 essay by John Kessel entitled “Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention and Morality.” Ender’s Game is a 1985 novel by Orson Scott Card which is the basis for a movie coming out this week.
I always enjoyed the book. Over the years, I’ve come to enjoy the author less and less based on his strident and, what I regard as backward, social positions.
In any event, Kessel points what a great adolescent revenge fantasy the book is. I’m sure that was part of the appeal for me. The child, Ender, is picked on in spite of — in fact, because of — how unique and special he is. Kessel further describes how relentlessly Card stacks the deck in favor of Ender’s righteousness and the against the two dimensional malice of his tormentors. Ender strikes out against his tormentors with extreme violence but, because his intentions are pure, he is an innocent killer.
Described as an adolescent revenge fantasy, I was reminded of the works of Ayn Rand. The superior individual is oppressed and held back by ordinary people.
But, Kessel’s main point was to challenge Card’s position that the morality of an act is entirely based on the intention of the actor. He suggests that intent is an important factor, but not the only factor.
Not discussed by either (at least in Kessel’s piece) is the reasonableness of the intent. If intentions are good, but completely divorced from reality, I think the action can still be immoral. I’m not convinced that killing is inherently moral or immoral. I think it can be a moral act if your intent was, for example, to save the life of an innocent. But, if the innocent was never in any real danger and you just somehow were unable or refused to process the information allowing you to accurately assess the danger, then your good intention does not make an otherwise immoral act a moral one.
Playing into this refusal or inability to assess the context of one’s actions is the fact that the antagonists in Ender’s Game and Ayn Rand are generally two-dimensional caricatures. Political discourse is also, of course, well populated with straw men of this stature. In the real world, antagonists are more nuanced. Everyone is the protagonist in their own story; and almost no one is the bad guy in their own internal narrative. There is usually a frame through which the “bad” guys can plausibly see themselves as good guys. Failure or inability to consider that frame can taint the otherwise good intentions upon which claims of morality are based.
I read the book a couple of years ago, I found it fascinating and yet I felt some what detached from the characters. I would much rather read a author like Isaac Asimov who gives a rational argument for each of his characters actions. Arthur C Clarke told Asimov he never wrote a good villain, which Asimov replied that no one see them self evil in there own eyes and he wrote from their perspective.
great blog breaking down the ridiculousness of Ender’s Game:
http://somethingshortandsnappy.blogspot.ca/search/label/Ender%27s%20Game?max-results=20
So torn. I loved the book; but the deconstruction highlights that the reasons for enjoying them are probably not admirable.
agreed. If I pick it up, I tend to read it straight through, but after all the WHAT!’s are pointed out, kind of makes it harder to read again. But that very first time when I didn’t have any information on the author…
Doug wrote ” If intentions are good, but completely divorced from reality, I think the action can still be immoral.” Given the context it was written I take it Doug is questioning the morality of Ender’s actions, particularly the near eradication of another intelligent species.
When I read Ender’s Game though I didn’t find the character Ender particularly interesting. It was the adults around him who were pulling all the strings. That was where I thought the real morality tale was. The adults around Ender who put him in situation after situation where Ender could not help but be divorced from reality. They even went so far as to tell tell Ender that the final battle was a “simulation” apparently so he would feel no hesitation in sacrificing the lives of his own soldiers and so he show no mercy to the “enemy.”
But, as it turned out, it was the adults in “Ender’s Game” who were fighting an imagined, not real, enemy and pushing their distorted concept of reality down onto the children whom they would use as tools for the offensive war they were planning. Somehow it reminds me of our own, perpetual “war on terror” and a little of the M.O. of the Department of Homeland Security.
None of that addresses what society does with an “Ender” when it is finished with him. Whether he was innocent or not probably has nothing with the answer to that question.