Month: February 2019

This essay uses Final Fantasy X as the lens through which to examine Nietzsche and Machiavelli’s opposition to religion. The essay draws on Machiavelli’s non-Prince work, so it’s not in maximum edge mode, but it does still describe the situation of FFX like this:

The people of Spira suffer for the promise of an otherworldly reward. They want the Calm, but the religion preaches something more. Beneath the veneer of the Calm is also the complete eradication of Sin, which can be accomplished by the piety of the people. They shun technology as forbidden, in the hope of this potential reward. But should they?

“Sin,” by the way, is the name of the kaiju that constantly wrecks Spira until someone manages to kill it, which results in a temporary period of peace called the Calm before Sin’s inevitable return. So, don’t be fooled into thinking that “the complete eradication of Sin” is a reference to some promised utopia. It’s just a military objective. Also worth noting that the shunning of technology, though taken as a matter of dogma by the people of Spira, also serves a military purpose: For various convoluted backstory reasons, Sin wants to keep the people of Spira too low-tech to explore the ocean, and will prioritize places that use technology for attack. There’s no actual connection between the piety of the people and the final defeat of Sin, so that part actually is pure dogma, but it’s not like the true secret to defeating Sin is being kept secret (the theocratic government is keeping some secrets from the populace, but they don’t know how to perma-kill Sin). People are just turning to faith to give themselves hope in what otherwise seems to be a hopeless situation. Without knowing the secret truth about the Final Aeon (the only weapon known to be powerful enough to destroy Sin but which, unbeknowst to its wielders, also allows Sin to regenerate), Sin is ultimately indestructible.

The weird thing is that trying to attach an afterlife to the Yevonite religion of Final Fantasy X is not hard. There is an actual afterlife that you go and visit. It’s called “the Farplane” and it’s a place where weird astral spirit things called pyreflies congregate. Pyreflies are released by creatures upon death and, when successfully sent to the Farplane, reform into visages of the departed. According to the heretical Al Bhed, this is just pyreflies reacting to memories of visitors, and the reason why the departed can’t hold intelligible conversations is because you can’t remember a new conversation. According to the Yevonites, it’s just a limitation of being dead. The people are still there, they just can’t talk to you.

The ending of the game implies the Yevonites are actually correct, in that (spoiler alert) protagonist Tidus dies and either (possibly metaphorically) ascends to the Farplane with the dead father he’s finally reconciled with. Sort of. In the final battle, he expresses continued spite towards his father, but then in the ending cutscene they’re friends. Tidus being angry that his father died before he ever got to tell dear old Dad how much he hated him was an ongoing theme of the story, so I think at the final battle, confronted with his father’s departed spirit possessed by an evil demi-god (it’s complicated), he just felt the need to get it out of his system, despite having come to understand his father better during the quest.

Final Fantasy X always gets me sidetracked like this. That game’s plot makes sense upon close analysis, but dear God is it a mess in the telling. The important thing here is that the Yevonites do have an afterlife, which could either be a real thing where the spirits of the dead end up or else a natural phenomenon without any particular deep spiritual importance, and the essay ignores that to instead talk about Sin, the evil kaiju which presents an inarguably real military threat to the world, the end of which would be a better world for entirely non-spiritual reasons. It has to do this, because its whole point revolves around people making worldly sacrifices for otherworldly rewards, and Yevonites don’t do that. They do have a false dogma about Sin being a punishment for Spira’s transgressions, but the actual actions taken by the Yevonite religion to fight Sin are simply using the most effective weapons they have to destroy a worldly, military threat.

Continue reading “Final Fantasy and Philosophy: Sin, Otherworldliness, and the Downside of Hope” →

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.

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?

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.