Why is it that, when the mayor of Montreull-sur-Mer demonstrates strength that Javert has only seen from the probation-violating Jean Valjean, it convinces him that clearly some other guy must secretly be the escaped convict? “I’ve only ever seen one man who has the strength you demonstrate, Monsieur Mayor…so clearly that guy must be Valjean!”
Final Fantasy and Philosophy: Kupo For Karl And The Materialist Conception Of History
In which Michel S. Beaulieu conflates economic class with character class.
That’s just a snarky opener, though. So far as I can tell the paragraph in which Michel says he tends to privilege his mages while treating knights and thieves like expendable laborers is just a joke, or maybe an example of how all-pervasive the paradigm of economic class conflict can get. He doesn’t actually rest his conclusions on it.
This essay asks the question: Are any of Final Fantasies heroes Marxist heroes? A Marxist hero being one who seeks to overthrow an oppressive regime in order to usher in a new and better society. Not even necessarily a utopian society, as Marx posited that society had progressed from tribalism, to feudalism, to capitalism, and only from there would it progress on to the final stage of communism. That last one didn’t actually go so well, but the basic concept of a Marxist hero is nevertheless someone who leads society to a new and better way of doing things in a time of upheaval.
You’d expect the answer to be yes, that Final Fantasy heroes are frequently Marxist heroes. I mentioned in an earlier post that Final Fantasy is rife with ecoterrorists, sky pirates, and rebel alliances. Nevertheless, Michel makes the claim that none of the Final Fantasy heroes are Marxist heroes – and I think I agree with him. In FFXII, Vaan and company thwart a belligerent emperor’s plan for world domination using his newly built superweapon, although the real emotional climax comes a few scenes earlier when Princess Asche rejects the use of magic nukes to defend her kingdom’s sovereignty. The thing is, the game calls her “princess” because that’s the title she held at the time when Dalmasca recognized her authority, but by the time the game takes place, her parents are already dead and she is the queen in exile of Dalmasca – and is reinstated on the throne afterwards. So far as we can tell, Dalmasca was a capitalist constitutional monarchy under both Vayne and Asche’s rule, Vayne was just more of a jerk about it.
Final Fantasy II? Same deal, evil emperor taking over the world, heroes defeat him, reinstate deposed monarchs who are capitalist if not feudal. Final Fantasy I? You restore like three kingdoms to power. Final Fantasy VI? It’s not entirely clear what happens to the world after Kefka is defeated, but our heroes were fighting to restore conquered monarchies before the world ended and are some of the last potential leaders of society left standing after Kefka’s near-omnicide, so probably they’ll be able to shape society in their image, which seems like it’s either feudal or maybe a constitutional monarchy (a variant on capitalism, by Marxist reckoning).
What about Final Fantasy IX, in which the heroes are a scrappy thief who robs from the rich, a member of an oppressed artifical class used as cannon fodder, and a runaway princess enemied to her monarchial mother? Capitalist Lindblum and its regent Cid is an ally of the party and the runaway princess is crowned queen partway through the game, not as a betrayal of all the heroes stand for, but simply because replacing an evil queen with a good one is how you solve the problem of evil queens in Final Fantasy IX.
What about Final Fantasy VII, the one with an evil megacorporation as the primary villains? A distinctly modern world, not the magepunk Renaissance or Victorian (ish) settings common in other games. Surely this one gives us Marxist heroes? …Kind of? Final Fantasy VII ends very ambiguously. All we know is that centuries later, the destroyed Midgar remains depopulated and has been reclaimed by nature, and at least one party member survived. The others presumably do not live for centuries, but the fact that Red XIII made it out alive does imply that the party in general didn’t immediately die as a result of the massive clash between Holy and Meteor immediately following Sephiroth’s defeat. Advent Children also confirms that society is actually mostly intact after the fall of Shinra, and also that the former president of Shinra is apparently explosion-proof but reliant on a handful of his elite corporate goons rather than commanding all of society like he did during the original game.
So, Shinra was defeated, and in its place there is…some kind of society. Advent Children was mostly about fan service – the entire second act was basically just a deluge of callbacks to Final Fantasy VII while the plot waits around for Sephiroth to come back – and doesn’t really do a whole lot of worldbuilding about how things have changed. It doesn’t seem especially communist, though, which means Cloud et al sure didn’t push the change that Marx claimed would follow on from the failure of capitalism. So, no, not even Final Fantasy VII really has Marxist heroes, despite using a megacorporation as a villain.
If you’re wondering how materialism – that is, the belief that all that exists is the material world, and that consciousness therefore arises from some kind of physical thing – factors into all this, so far as I can tell, it doesn’t. Marx was materialist, but his materialism never seems to actually come up.
Final Fantasy and Philosophy: Shinto and Alien Influences in Final Fantasy VII
If you’re asked to contribute an essay to Final Fantasy and Philosophy, you are immediately faced with a problem straight out of game theory: Do you write about Final Fantasy VII, by far the most well-known game in the franchise, or do you write about one of the other installments? Writing your essay by itself, picking Final Fantasy VII is a no-brainer, but there are other contributing authors, a dozen or more of them, and they’ll also want to pick Final Fantasy VII. If you went with Final Fantasy IX to make your point, you’d probably have that whole game all to yourself, and your essay would be burned into the memory of all FFIX fans. But what if everyone else thinks the same thing, leaving FFVII vacant, or even just underpopulated? After all, if there’s only one or two other FFVII essays in the collection, yours could still stand out. And if everyone avoids FFVII for fear of the competition, you could have that sweet, sweet FFVII turf all to yourself. But what if half the other authors decide to take that same gamble? Then you’d be better off staking a unique claim to FFIX again.
Jonab Mitropolous took the gamble of writing for FFVII and lost, submitting the fourth (and counting) essay rooted that talks mostly or exclusively about that game (and I’m being generous in not counting Objectification as one of them, since it discusses FFVII, VIII, and IX – and gets VII and VIII confused with each other). Special shout-out to Greg Littman, who did the smart thing and drew from just about every main line game in the series, thus guaranteeing that he’d have an exclusive claim to whichever game the other authors didn’t land on.
Jonab argues in this essay that JENOVA, the evil alien entity seeking to annihilate all life on the planet, is analogous to western influences on Japan. He also asserts that the Shinto religion/culture that gave rise to this depiction totally isn’t xenophobic, you guys. You can’t really have a culture that depicts foreigners as world-devouring aliens and claim it’s not xenophobic. The analogy between JENOVA and western influence is pretty much completely unsupported to begin with (it pretty much begins and ends with “they’re both some kind of outsider”), but the weird doublethink that 1) JENOVA represents western influence but 2) the game is about (among other things) Shinto’s adaptability and ability to incorporate new thought into itself without abandoning old traditions hangs over the entire essay like a specter. JENOVA is not negotiated with. It is pure evil that corrupts everything around it and both it and those who serve it must ultimately be destroyed. The essay even specifically highlights later on that JENOVA is a source of corruption that turns everything exposed to it for too long into a tool of evil. You can’t reconcile that with JENOVA being a metaphor for western influence and the ultimate point being Shinto harmonizing with (rather than being radically, xenophobically opposed to) foreign influence.
Basically, the whole essay just free associates between plot elements of Final Fantasy VII and cultural elements of Shinto, completely ignoring things which very obviously don’t fit and even forgetting its own metaphors halfway through. It does the same thing to Japanese history, strongly implying that the militarization of Japan in the 20s and 30s was a result of a failure to keep out western influences, but Japan’s xenophobia was never stronger than in the years during and immediately before World War II, when they were raping Nanking and all. The essay tries to attribute this to western influence, but it’s not exactly out of step with Japan’s long history of militant xenophobia leading up to that point. Quite contrary to the essay’s implication that the Expulsion Edict of 1825 was the first time Japan had tried to close itself off from outside influence, but Japan closed itself for the first time in the 17th century under the Tokugawa Shogunate, 150 years before then. In the 1850s when the United States showed up with a few gunboats full of diplomacy, the reason why this relatively small flotilla was able to intimidate an entire nation into (briefly) reversing their centuries-long policy of total isolation because their cannons were far more modern and thus had much better range and could bombard Japanese ports with impunity.
Like, look at this:
As three different forces (Lifestream, Meteor, and Holy) converge, the same image of Aerith’s face from the beginning of the game flashes across the screen, suggesting that the way of the Earth (as Aerith’s name shares a phonetic correspondence with the word Earth) mediates this convergence. We see her mediation, like Shinto, is not articulated but simply lived.
Aerith is supposed to represent the Earth because her name kinda sounds like the English word “Earth,” and the mere presence of her image at all is supposed to imply a mediation (rather than conflict) between powers that up until now had very clearly been split into good (Lifestream, Holy) and evil (Meteor), this mediation apparently being “not articulated but simply lived” because there is no dialogue that would, y’know, lend any credence at all to this interpretation.
This whole essay is just Jonab Mitropolous free associating from the contents of Final Fantasy VII to the conclusion he wants to push, and no effort is made to actually chain a coherent line of reasoning from one to the other.
Corporatist Paranoia
One of my professionally GM’d games recently ended, which means I’m firing up the ads for a bunch of different systems, which means I’m looking at Paranoia again. Paranoia XP and the closely related Paranoia 25th Anniversary had a thing where the Computer was switching to a more capitalist economy, in an effort to better parody the rise of corporatist dystopia ongoing in America and Britain even back in 2004. Unfortunately, it was all a bit short-sighted. It is very obvious here in 2019 that a corporatist dystopia can get much, much worse than the US and UK were at in 2004, but Paranoia XP was glued pretty tight to the trends that were already happening, just replacing “you get fired” with “you get fired upon.” “Service firms” sold goods and services semi-independently but were wholly subject to the demands of government bureaucracy, the internet was rife with scammers, and they didn’t even have the guts to replace “communists” with “terrorists” for the 2004 release when that actually would’ve been relevant and interesting.
Side note: RED-Clearance edition gave itself a big ol’ pat on the back for switching from “communists” to “terrorists” in 2016, at which point they may as well have not bothered because the moment had already passed by, like, a decade, and in any case RED-Clearance backed away from all the capitalist trappings of XP and 25th Anniversary, which makes direct comparisons to America more toothless and would have made the double think of a de facto communist dystopia using de jure Communism as their ultimate bogeyman more entertaining.
Anyway, reading back over all of this I began thinking: What would an actual corporatist Alpha Complex look like?
Its Holiness, Computerus III, Your Best Friend
Your friend the Computer is more-or-less a fiction used to keep the IR proles in line. Alpha Complex is still a smart society in the “smart house” sense where every door, vending machine, and CCTV camera is part of a vast network, but that network is maintained by a corporate conglomerate, not all of Alpha Complex. Friendly conglomerates have limited data sharing between their compnodes to allow the Computer to keep track of who’s a terrorist and which clones have what clearance when they move between different sectors, and this makes it appear as though it’s only one big Computer. The truth comes out when conglomerates become unfriendly with each other. They cut their compnodes off from one another to prevent hacking or other sabotage, and suddenly what one compnode sees, the other does not know.
Sometimes the vital information about terrorists and security clearances and so forth will go through a trusted third party conglomerate and the Computer in FUN sector will know about the crimes you committed in NUF sector. If there is no such trusted third party, though (and this is Paranoia, so trust is not exactly common)? Once the conglomerate owning FUN gets into a row with the conglomerate owning NUF, “the” Computer is bisected, with the compnode in FUN totally unaware of anything learned by the one in NUF. If you bomb an IntSec precinct while shouting “workers unite! Praise Lenin!” in FUN sector and flee to NUF, you don’t need to change your identity. The Computer has no idea what you’ve done. At least until NUF sector wins the war, takes over FUN sector, and adds the FUN compnode into their network under their conglomerate’s control (or vice-versa).
The problem is, while the war between different conglomerates is pretty easy to keep track of, on account of all the tanks and bombings, generally speaking no one below BLUE clearance has the slightest idea whether or not things like criminal databases are still being shared through third parties. If you commit your bombing for the glory of Communism and flee to NUF, you may find that actually NUF has been getting updates on such acts of terrorism from the neutral UNF sector and you’re arrested the moment you triumphantly stride into the atrium of a NUF sector hab-block, having thought you’d just escaped to safety.
The Computer can also be thought of as The Algorithm, which should fill a clone with the same sense of superstitious fear that is currently rife amongst YouTubers. The Computer is used to perform background checks and administer ability tests that, together, provide security clearances, which determine both that you are loyal and trustworthy and also that you have a skill valuable to your superiors. In corporatist Alpha Complex, nobody cares how trustworthy an INFRARED is unless they also have skills that necessitate giving them power.
As such, low-ranking (principally YELLOW and lower) citizens desperately want to convince Friend Computer that they are both loyal and competent, and because the Computer is always watching, these low-ranking citizens feel the need to put on an act of both devoted righteousness and total capability at all times. When either facade slips, it is important to immediately push blame to someone else.
Final Fantasy and Philosophy: The Four Warriors of Light Saved the World, But They Don’t Deserve Our Thanks
This title is one of the ones where I have no idea which words should be capitalized. Maybe I should do what the book itself does and get around this problem by just screaming the title at the reader in all caps.
Essay author Nicolas Michaud is a professor for at least one Flordia university. Rate My Professor gives me three different results, all in Florida, so I’m pretty confident in the accuracy of the contributors’ section claim that he uses university teaching as a cover while training an army of minions for world domination. For one thing, look at that name.
The title gets my hackles raised that this might be one of those “free will doesn’t exist if you redefine free will to mean something dumb” essays, though. We get confirmation on page two that this is, in fact, the case:
But to know whether we should thank the Warriors for saving the world, we need to know whether they have free will. If they don’t have free will and have no choice but to save the world, then why thank them? Why thank someone who has no choice but to do something?
The practical answer is because gratitude is an instinct for long-term cooperation by establishing trust that debts incurred will be repaid, and it is beneficial to demonstrate this in general even if the specific person you’re repaying would keep helping you regardless of your reaction. Also, if you’re belaboring whether or not to express gratitude to people who have already fulfilled a prophecy to save the world, then whether or not they will continue to help you is up in the air, so it’s a good idea to encourage them to keep protecting you from danger.
The moral answer is that gratitude is an expression of justice and fairness, that people who help others deserve to be helped in return, and the fact that someone was able to predict in advance that the Warriors of Light would be both capable and generous enough to get up to world saving does not change the fact that they were willing to risk life and limb to help others. The prophecy didn’t single them out by name, only number and accomplishment, so it’s not like they knew in advance everything would turn out okay. For that matter, the prophecy never said all four would survive the final battle.
The whole premise of the front half of this essay is redefining free will from “capable of choosing one course of action over another based on internal deliberations” to “capable of making completely and utterly unpredictable decisions,” and then after switching to the second definition, pretending that you’re still using the first to make declarations about morality and justice. If “free will” just means “unpredictability,” then who cares whether or not the Warriors of Light have it? You’ve redefined “free will” to have nothing to do with making decisions, and the Warriors of Light still made the decision to help the world, regardless of the fact that the decision was predicted in advance. This is the part where Nicolas Michaud would say “aha! But if you can predict in advance with perfect accuracy how someone will decide, was there ever really a decision made at all?” The answer is yes, and also, why would you think otherwise? Holding someone accountable for their decisions is about intention, not predictability. If we can perfectly predict in advance that these four level 1 losers have the intention (and ability) to save the world, not only should we thank them, we should start thanking them right now rather than waiting until they pull it off. Whatever future-predicting magic we have in this hypothetical is perfect, so we don’t need to wait for them to prove they deserve our gratitude. We already know. Thanks in advance for saving the world, have a free sundae. This argument is literally “they only saved the world because they’re kind, generous people who believe in justice and want to help others! What’s so praiseworthy about that?”
This argument always comes off like “it’s not my fault I missed my kid’s baseball game! The universe is deterministic! I never had a choice!” When we say “you had a choice” we aren’t talking about the boundary conditions of the universe, dumbass, we mean that the critical factor that led to you missing your kid’s baseball game was you. Your car didn’t break down, you didn’t forget, you just decided to stay home and watch TV instead, which means we can expect you to act selfishly as a general rule and we will repay your anti-social behavior by excluding you from the parts of society that we reserve for people who act in a reasonably pro-social manner.
(I apologize to any people named You who may have felt attacked by that last paragraph.)
Side note about forgetting, the reason why there’s no point in blaming people who forget to do things is that this is an engineering problem, not a moral one. If someone is genuinely forgetful and not just selfish, setting up a system that reminds them to do things will solve the problem.
Additional side note, addressing kleptomania:
Consider someone who can’t help stealing. If someone is unable to refrain from committing a crime, we often absolve the person of blame. That is the whole basis of the insanity defense.
No, it isn’t. The basis of the insanity defense is that someone who commits a crime because they have misunderstood the situation in a clearly deluded way is different from someone who commits a crime despite understanding the situation perfectly. The former is a medical problem. If we were able to cure this person of their delusions, they would no longer commit any crimes. The latter is a moral problem. The thief knowingly chose to harm someone else for their own benefit. The problem is not that they are confused, but that they are selfish. The problem is not with what they believe, but with who they are. Okay, so they didn’t choose to be a selfish person. So what? Why is “because I felt like it” suddenly a defense?
Video GM’s Guide 9 – Believability and Variety in Dungeons
Largely by coincidence, the monologue on this one was the exact perfect length for the slightly-relevant Hollow Knight footage I recorded. Like, that bit at the end where the Hollow Knight footage cuts out in the same bench it started from and almost exactly in sync with the background music? That wasn’t clever editing, that was serendipity. As the failed experimentation in the audio probably indicates, I did not have time for clever editing this week.
Final Fantasy and Philosophy: Final Fantasy and the Purpose of Life
Greg Littman is our first returning author from Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy (technically the other way around – D&D&P was 2014, FF&P was 2009). In our previous foray into Greg Littman’s literature, he tried to convince us that no one could be held responsible for anything because the universe is deterministic, and then implored us to change our perspective/behavior based on this, something which he’d just got done telling us was impossible. This time he’s gong to try and discover the meaning of life.
This essay examines the moral philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, and Aristotle by examining whether they would approve of the actions of the protagonists of various Final Fantasy games. It actually examines the actions of the protagonists of all main line Final Fantasy games released at date of publication (so, up to XII). Thomas Hobbes believes that all humans are fundamentally self-interested and that, in a state of nature, exist in a constant war of all against all, with a life that is nasty, brutish, and short. According to Hobbes, civilization is only possible because people give their absolute obedience to monarchs, and no matter how terrible a monarch’s rule, it is always better than civil war or revolution. Apparently he wasn’t familiar with Athens or Rome. Final Fantasy heroes get a poor grade from Hobbes, what with all the ecoterrorists, rebel alliances, and sky pirates.
John Stuart Mill generally approves of Final Fantasy heroes for all the world-saving they get up to. There’s an aside in each of these sections, more notable here than in Hobbes’, about Final Fantasy XI, the MMORPG, where it’s entirely unclear whether or not the vast and diverse army of PCs behave for one reason or another, but there’s also a discussion about whether or not the players themselves are moral for playing the game. According to Mill, kinda sorta, in that playing the game is fun and therefore increases utility, but probably players could get more utility helping other people even if they personally found it unpleasant. That’s true, but it’s not like John Stuart Mill didn’t live a life of idle leisure his entire life while the industrial working class lived in squalor, so what the Hell, man.
Aristotle claims to define his virtues as the balance point of moderation between two extremes, and like a lot of ancient Greek philosophy, this falls down under careful scrutiny because I guess once Diogenes bit it there were no more sardonic Devil’s advocates left in the entire Greek-speaking world and you could get away with practically anything. The flaw in this one is that you can redefine the extremes to push the middle wherever you want. Aristotle claims that courage is the balance point between recklessness and cowardice, but running away could just as easily be the balance point between fighting and being paralyzed with fear. Aristotle’s claim that being well-educated is the secret to virtue is not an easy one to evaluate Final Fantasy characters with. How did Cloud do in high school? How much education is involved in Yuna becoming a summoner? Even laying aside the fact that Aristotle’s virtue ethics are ultimately circular, we don’t actually know enough about Final Fantasy protagonists to determine if they’re keeping with the specific set of virtue Aristotle endorsed in the first place.
Overall, the essay is an exploration of three pretty well known philosophers through the lens of Final Fantasy. It’s pretty much exactly what you’d expect from a pop philosophy book and unlike Littman’s last essay it never ends up cutting off the branch of logic it’s sitting on.
Why Does Paizo Spend So Much Time On Backstory That Is Never Expressed?
Knowing a character’s backstory can be relevant to how they’re played. The backstory on the major faction NPCs in Petals and Thorns was given alongside their identity and motivation because that backstory played an important role in shaping their motivation and identity. Part of the reason the Lunatic Court ran on so long is because I was never quite satisfied with the chain of cause and effect that resulted in a Harlequin who is driven by equal parts fear and mistrust of others on the one hand and a general compassion for other people on the other. Things always seemed to be loaded too far one way or the another.
So what I’m saying here is that when I say that Paizo has a weird habit of drowning us in totally irrelevant backstory, it’s not because backstory is somehow inherently irrelevant. NPCs whose decision-making is important to the story and who interact with the PCs need to have a solid backstory informing their current motivations and why they do the things they do. The problem is that Paizo loves to load its villains up with a whole lot of backstory and then have them appear exclusively for boss fights. If the only purpose of a villain is to provide a climactic encounter at the end, then the only thing that matters is their current scheme. “Nualia is an aasimar corrupted by the Runelords’ power who seeks to use that power to destroy the town of Sandpoint.” Bam, done. If we’re never going to have a conversation with her, we don’t need to care why she hates Sandpoint. Her ultimate goal is to raze it and that’s all that matters.
It all feels very cargo cult-y, like, roleplay-driven games have villains with long backstories, so we’ll set aside a page or two for the backstory of each module’s villain and that’ll make it more roleplay-ish! But, no. Roleplay-driven games include backstories because they’re structured such that the backstories are relevant. You actually need to know what the NPC’s motivations are because the PCs can actually influence their decision-making or at least get to talk to them long enough for the NPC to explain their point of view. Without that, background is just an outline of a short story that will never be written and that only the GM will even know about.
Final Fantasy and Philosophy: Objectification of Conscious Life Forms in Final Fantasy
This essay discusses objectification from the three dominant ethical philosophies in our society: Kantian duty, utilitarianism, and Aristotle’s virtue ethics. Except that’s actually a lie, because objectification means to treat someone as though they have no ability to make decisions on their own, but this essay uses it to instead mean to use someone else as a means towards an end. These are obviously related, but the essay early on declares that Final Fantasy VIII protagonist Squall willingly allowing himself to be flung back in time to further the (pro-social, world-saving) agenda of Ellone is an example of objectification that would be moral according to Kantian ethics (contrasted with another example where Kantian ethics would oppose an act of objectification). But if Squall exercised agency, then he was not objectified. Although initially used as a tool without knowing what the Hell was going on, the essay claims that this is moral only because (and presumably, starting from when) he started going along with it willingly. At that point, his will is no longer being subverted, he’s not being objectified anymore, he just agreed to help someone.
For Kant, things like “don’t objectify people” are moral imperatives, inviolate laws which are always wrong, regardless of circumstance. Kant is someone who, when Nazis come to your house asking if you’re sheltering Jews, it’s immoral to say “yes, they’re in the basement” because being an accessory to murder is wrong, but it’s also immoral to say “no” because lying is wrong, so you have to say “I’m not helping your campaign of genocide” right to the Gestapo’s face and hope that turns out well not just for you, but also for the Jews, who now face a higher chance of capture because you’ve drawn so much attention to your house, specifically, as a place where they might be hiding. To Kant, the much higher chance that the Nazis successfully murder a few more innocent people doesn’t matter. What matters is that you, personally, kept the moral imperatives against both dishonesty and murder.
There’s obviously some room to argue with that, but there’s no actual conflict within Kantian ethics on the issue of objectification. If one person decides, for their own reasons, to act in the interests of another, that’s not objectification. That’s just cooperation. Even if Squall is behaving exactly as Ellone would want him to if Ellone were to use him as a tool, if Squall is doing it of his own volition, then he’s not being objectified. It’s just super convenient for Ellone that he has decided to help her.
In the next section, after claiming to have demonstrated Kant’s incapability to resolve objectification (but not actually doing that), the essay claims to demonstrate utilitarianism’s inability to resolve objectification (but doesn’t actually do that). It does land closer on the mark this time, in that it hits upon the common objection to utilitarianism that it theoretically demands that people sacrifice their lives or well-being for the greater good, whether or not they want to. I’m not surprised that people first encountering utilitarianism frequently raise this objection to it. I am surprised that academia hasn’t followed that thought experiment to its obvious conclusion: Demanding that people sacrifice themselves (either by literally dying or by giving up their own happiness so a greater number of people can benefit) requires a coercive organization of some kind to force the sacrifice, even if you somehow managed to guarantee that organization was always and forever operated only by solemn utilitarian martyrs who used it solely in situations where those who benefited genuinely outnumbered those who were harmed, people would still live their lives in constant fear of being the next target of that organization, which would be a constant downward pressure on utility that the organization couldn’t realistically outpace, which means it ultimately creates negative utility which means utilitarianism is opposed to the creation of such an organization.
Some anti-utilitarians are clever enough not to point out that their alleged knock-out punch against utilitarianism is a thought experiment in which a bunch of utilitarians go around decreasing utility, i.e. doing the one thing their philosophy tells people not to do. Robert Arp and Sarah Fisk are not this clever:
Although mandatory self – sacrifice would create a tremendous amount of happiness for some people, the amount of misery for the widows, the families, and the friends of the departed would be just as substantial. Such a system would induce paranoia, undermine security, and destroy humanity as we know it, thereby making it worse.
If you admit that this scheme would ultimately result in negative utility, why do you insist that utilitarians are compelled by their philosophy to pursue it?
The essay’s ultimate goal is to establish virtue ethics as superior to moral imperatives or utilitarianism. The essay claims that Aristotle’s virtue ethics oppose objectification because they are actions of someone with a vicious (i.e. characteristic of vice rather than virtue) character, which is tautological. Aristotle’s virtue ethics doesn’t actually oppose objectification at all. Aristotle was explicitly in favor of slavery. Now, virtue ethics is inherently tautological, in that its fundamental statement is “the right thing to do is whatever a virtuous person would do,” which is synonymous with “the right thing to do is whatever a person who does the right thing would do.” For any specific virtue ethicist philosophy to be valid, it must first define and defend some specific virtues. Aristotle did this, but as mentioned, that set of virtues was totally okay with slavery. You can argue in favor of a different set of virtues, but then you have to lay out what specific virtues you’re defending. Without an actual list of virtues, virtue ethics is a hollow shell with nothing to say on any subject. When someone mentions “virtue ethics” it’s usually safe to assume they specifically mean Aristotle’s virtues, but again, Aristotle believed that some people were naturally fit only to be slaves, so it is difficult to imagine how an essay could get the issue more wrong than by saying that he’s the one who got the issue of objectification exactly right.
The essay does acknowledge other virtue systems than Aristotle’s. Specifically, it recognizes Nietzsche’s:
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) advocated a form of virtue ethics that was very different from that of Aristotle. Nietzsche believed that power was the ultimate virtue, and that we all must express power if we are powerful. Society consists of domineering master – slave relationships.
This is a technically true but extremely misleading summation of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche saw “master morality” and “slave morality” as opposed ideologies locked in eternal struggle with one another, and didn’t really endorse either of them (although his philosophy was closer to master morality). Nietzsche’s historical perspective is wrong – “master morality” and “slave morality” crop up as situationally useful ideologies that people and nations tend to rapidly and hypocritically bounce back and forth between based on which is presently more useful to them, not declare their allegiance to permanently and use as banners around which a battle for society is fought – but his ultimate philosophy is one of individualism, of not letting other people tell you what to do whether through sheer power or by trying to convince you that it is immoral. He frequently expressed this as some variation on “imposing your own power on the world,” but saying “Nietzsche believed that power was the ultimate virtue” as the introduction to the concept is not helpful to getting people to understand his philosophy.
It gets better, though:
For example, the character of Cloud in Final Fantasy VIII is attracted to being in control, whereas his nemesis, Seifer, is prone to being controlled.
For those unfamiliar with the games, Cloud is the protagonist of Final Fantasy Seven, Seifer is a villain from Final Fantasy Eight. This is not a case of putting the wrong number of Is on the end of the Roman numeral. This is either getting the names of the protagonists of two different games confused or getting the games themselves confused with each other. How did neither the original essay writers nor the compilers of the book catch this in editing?
Ultimately, this is an essay about how great virtue ethics is that mainly just expresses an inability to understand how moral imperatives or utilitarianism actually work.
Final Fantasy and Philosophy: Gaia and Environmental Ethics in The Spirits Within
Good God, what is this book’s obsession with the Spirits Within? It came out in 2009! We all knew the movie was terrible since it came out in 2001! Photorealistic CGI wouldn’t be ready for prime time for at least another decade! Granted, that doesn’t mean it can’t be philosophically relevant, but most of its philosophical concepts also come up in Final Fantasy VII, which is far better regarded.
The inclusion of this essay is particularly egregious, because it’s basically just The Lifestream, Mako, and Gaia but much stupider. Take this description of the philosophy referred to as “mechanism” in that essay:
[General Hein] espouses a view that is often criticized as a short – sighted, male conception of nature. Hein views nature at best as a collection of inanimate objects subject to humanity ’ s desires and, at worst, something hostile to the human species that needs to be dominated and made to conform to humanity ’ s will.
Thus essay author Jason P. Blahuta has become the eighteen billionth nominally feminist writer to discuss how awesome gender roles are. Bonus points: Jason is a man (confirmed in the contributors section), and his own opposition to the perspective he describes as a “male conception of nature” fundamentally proves that it’s not somehow inherent to maleness. Anyone who thinks he might have been a closeted transwoman back in 2009 when transgender people had basically no popular acceptance at all is going to be disappointed by his current faculty page at Lakehead University. Another gem from that page verifies for us that his interest in Machiavelli isn’t because he’s one of those “literally every book Machiavelli wrote except for one was about how great republics are” people, but because he’s one of the edgelords who thinks the Prince should be taken seriously.
That quote isn’t the last time when Blahuta brings up gender issues despite their being completely unrelated to the subject of his essay. And I don’t mean that he goes into a random digression on gender issues in the way that, I dunno, male General Hein interacts with female Dr. Aki (this probably wouldn’t be much of a contrast anyway – good guy science team is made up of not only female Dr. Aki but also male Dr. Cid). He just randomly asserts that holistic views of the environment are more feminine or feminist or whatever. There is never any support for why this reinforcement of gender roles is in any way relevant.
Even from the paradigm that gender roles are valid, Blahuta hardly seems to be arguing for any set of gender roles other than the one we’re familiar with: Men as aggressive and enterprising, women as demure and compassionate. He’s flipping the script and saying that the female perspective is superior to the male, but so far as this essay reveals he stands by the traits associated to each gender. And yet, when discussing the last essay, I somehow managed to give a very aggressive defense of holism without bursting into flame:
[H]olism posits that people die when you remove their vital organs, even if their brain is completely unscathed, which is obviously true, and mechanism posits that this for some reason doesn’t apply to any complex systems except human bodies (and also anything else that obviously works holistically).
Blahuta’s incapacity for clear reasoning is evidenced elsewhere in the essay:
The Gaia hypothesis maintains that humans (and not only lawyers and politicians) have no more moral worth than does any other member of the biotic community, maggots included.
No it doesn’t. Nothing about thinking of the Earth as a giant super-organism requires valuing maggots the same as humans. Gaia hypothesis is a hypothesis, not a moral philosophy. It doesn’t state anything about the value of human life. It does implicitly push an environmental morality in which being capricious with nature is unwise because we need it to live, but only because the presumed audience is human and therefore cares about humanity’s survival.
Really, the consistency with which Blahuta likes to paint demographics he is personally a member of as less worthy or having less moral worth than is typically assumed is coming across as resulting from either self-loathing or fetishism.
Particularly noteworthy how he actually calls attention to non-human threats to Gaia that humans are able and naturally incentivized to thwart:
[I]n the long run Gaia is doomed anyway. Gaia and all of life that she makes possible will die in about five billion years when the sun dies, and that’s assuming her ability to self – regulate is not destroyed first by a gamma ray burst from a nearby star going supernova or maimed by a massive meteor impact.
And yet a few paragraphs later, this is his concluding statement:
[H]umanity is little more than a cancerous tumor inside Gaia, and the fate of the species depends on whether we choose to be a benign or a malignant tumor.
This puts me in the weird position of having already delivered an impassioned rebuttal to this essay in my last post, which leaves me with not much to do except to point out that this conclusion has not only overlooked the fact that we are Gaia’s only hope of surviving major cosmic extinction events like gamma ray bursts or the expansion of the sun, Blahuta actually explicitly brought up exactly those threats and somehow it never even occurred to him that humanity is not only theoretically capable of defending against them, but actively working towards doing so. So I again bring up how relentlessly Blahuta hates on demographics that he is specifically a part of, and how this colors his perspective on the world far past the point of reason.
