#meta ethics

[theidealistphilosophy]

That is why I go into solitude— so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern. When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think as I really think; after a time it always seems as though they want to banish me from myself and rob me of my soul— and I grow angry with everybody and fear everybody.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality.

#philosophy tumblr #philoblr #german philology #philosopher #friedrich nietzsche #meta ethics #daybreak #morality #existentialism #solitude #dark academia #life quotes

[lgbtlunaverse]

It seems the dash has been talking about the Lan Xichen - Nie Huaisang post-canon dynamics and it's gotten me thinking about how discussion around post-canon Lan Xichen's absolutely horrendous mental state often center around the question of "who is Lan Xichen angry at and who does he feel guilty about" which, at its worst, seperates into 2 camps where according to one side he feels guilty about not protecting jgy and hates the Nies and, on the other side he has completely flipped on jgy and despises him now while being filled with regret towards both nmj and nhs.

And I dislike both of these takes not just because it often feels like people projecting their own Blorbo opinions onto Lan Xichen which is never a fun time but also because that central question is flawed to begin with. It treats anger and guilt like opposing emotions that can't coexist or, if they do, have to compete until one wins and cancels the other out.

And that's not how that... works.

To be clear, the reason why Lan Xichen is so supremely fucked up at the end of the story is that he believes on some level he fucked over everyone in this situation. And, even more importantly, that even with hindsight he can't actually think of what he should have done instead. Every attempt to do better by one seems to involve fucking over the others even more because these people were in conflict with each other and choosing one would mean standing against another

And none of this would actually stop him from feeling angry at any of them. It's not "who is he angry at and who does he feel guilty about" it's: "he is angry at everyone and feels an immediate and bone deep guilt for daring to think badly of them."

Speaking from personal experience here, but feeling like you're not allowed to be angry at someone because you wronged them really doesn't stop the feeling, it just maks you feel like shit for feeling it. And this is all worsened by the fact that what he's in seclusion for is, at the end of the day, a moral question of what he, Lan Xichen, did wrong and every single emotion serves as further proof of the ways he's failed them.

Is he angry at Jin Guangyao, for killing his oldest friend, using Lan xichen's trust in him to do it, and then lying to him about it and countless other things for a decade when Lan Xichen thought of him as the person he trusted the most in the entire world? Yeah. That's a thing people get angry about! Except Jin Guangyao also saved his life and protected and helped him more times than he can count and never ever hurt him and can Lan Xichen say the same? No. He had to clean A-Yao's blood off Shouyue, he has to be haunted by the fact that if he just hadn't listened to Huaisang- hadn't been just like everyone else, in the end, and believed a lie about Jin Guangyao just to think the worst of him- then Jin Guangyao might still be alive.

Is he angry at Huaisang? For orchestrating the death of his best friend? For making him do it? For knowing what the real cause behind Nie Mingjue's death was and never telling him until he found out in the absolute worst way? Absolutely. But didn't Huaisang hide it from him for a reason? Wasn't it his clan's techniques and his personal faith in Jin Guangyao that cost Huaisang his brother? How dare he demand that Huaisang let him in on the secret of his brother's murderer when Lan Xichen is here wondering about how he should have protected that murderer better!

And I do even think he's angry at Nie Mingjue, sometimes I think it's pretty normal to be angry at your friend for kicking your other friend down the stairs and threatening to kill him, even when you know his mind is being poisoned. And years later the last thing he ever saw of Nie Mingjue was Nie Mingjue's thoughtless corpse coming to kill him before Jin Guangyao pushed him away and then proceeded to graphocally snap Jin Guangyao's neck in front of him. And if what he wants to do is protect Jin Guangyao, shouldn't he be mad at Mingjue? Didn't this whole mess start because Jin Guangyao was afraid Nie Mingjue was going to kill him?

Except holy shit, can you imagine? Lan Xichen feels like he personally has Nie Mingjue's blood on his hands. Your oldest friend is killed in front of you and you happily believe it's an accident for 11 years and now you think you have the right to be mad at him? You watched him get worse as he was being poisoned and attributed it to his illness and not to the techniques stolen from your library with the token you give his murderer. Does he think Nie Mingjue knew who he was in that moment and wanted to kill him? That he blamed Lan Xichen for his death? (For the record, I don't. I don't agree with most of what Lan Xichen thinks about himself, but I've been in a self-blame spiral and I know how it feels)

But what was he supposed to do then? Choose Mingjue's side and let A-Yao die? That's also unacceptable. But so is letting Jin Guangyao get away with it. Every single outcome is unacceptable. And really, if Jin Guangyao felt like he had to kill Nie Mingjue to save himself, when it was Lan Xichen who was supposed to keep the peace between them, isn't that another mark of his failure? That he couldn't protect Jin Guangyao well enough that he felt he had to do something so horrible?

But that's not an answer! He's supposed to know what he should have done different, and all he can come up with is "what you were already doing, but without failing this time" He can't pick a side because that means betrayal, but he's already tried not picking a side and it ended like this! There is no right answer, which can only leave him with the idea that he was simply doomed to hurt the people he loved from the start. No wonder the guy looks like shit when we see him post-canon. They put him in a real life trolley problem and gave him the lever as a souvenir.

#mdzs #mdzs meta #lan xichen #nie huaisang #jin guangyao #meng yao #nie mingjue #personally i LOVE high stakes ethical dilemma tragedies where there's not a clear right or wrong #and i can enjoy them without picking a side because it's fiction to me and i can admire the complex web of love hurt and betrayal from afar #but this is lan xichen's actual life. he HAS to have an answer to this question in a way I don't #but there isn't one

[ao3cassandraic]

As far as they can

At the end of the Job minisode, Crowley inaugurates Their Side by proclaiming Aziraphale "an angel who goes along with Heaven... as far as he can," parallel to his own stated relationship with Hell.

Only it... doesn't actually work that way. Their exactlies are different exactlies.

Crowley defies and lies to Hell as often as he thinks he can get away with it. He never disabuses Downstairs of their misconceptions about his contributions to human atrocities. He cheerfully lies in his reports Downstairs, something Aziraphale briefly turns on his Baritone of Sarcastic Disapproval about in s1. Crowley even turns evil homeopathic in the latter part of the 20th century, likely in hopes that it will look good to head office while accomplishing essentially nothing. (This, of course, is another way he Crowleys himself, both with the London phone system and the M25.) After Eden, Crowley's default given an assignment from Hell is to see how he can subvert it.

Aziraphale, on the other hand, defies Her and Heaven as little as he possibly can. Sometimes, as with his sword giveaway, his compassion gets the better of his anxiety. Sometimes, as with Job's children in the destruction of the villa, he can try to stay within the letter of the law by leaving the defiance to Crowley.

His default, however, is "'m 'nangel. I can't dis- diso -- not do what 'm told." This comes out most often as respect for the Great/Divine Plan, which to him is sacrosanct. He sounds quite sincere in s1 when he says "Even if I wanted to help I couldn’t. I can’t interfere with the Divine Plan."

Aziraphale quite frequently Good Angels along by parroting Heaven's party line, whether it's "it'll all be rather lovely" or "I am good, you (I'm afraid) are evil" or droning on about evil containing the seeds of its own destruction, or condemning Elspeth's graverobbing as "wicked" (a stance he offers absolutely no reasoned support for, no logic, no "but She said," not a word -- that's very Heaven; most of Heaven's angels have the approximate brainpower of paramecia). Maestro Michael Sheen even has a particular voice cadence -- I think of it as Sententious Voice -- he uses when Aziraphale is thoughtlessly party-lining.

When the angel's conscience wars with his sense of Heaven's orthodoxy but (and this is an important but) he can't feasibly resist whatever's wrong, he offers strengthless party-line justifications he clearly doesn't agree with (as with the "rain bow" in Mesopotamia) or resorts to a Nuremberg defense: "I'm not consulted on policy decisions, Crowley!" Once or twice, he's even vocally aware of Heavenly hypocrisy: "Unless… [guns]'re in the right hands, where they give weight to a moral argument… I think." This isn't Sententious Voice. It's I-can't-disobey-and-I-hate-that voice.

But at base, the angel prefers obedience (not least because it's vastly safer), and he'd rather have someone else do his moral reasoning for him. Honestly? Pretty relatable. I know lots of people like this -- hell's bells, I've been this person, though I grew out of it somewhat -- and I daresay you do too. Moral reasoning is hard and often lonely (since it can be read as self-righteousness or even hypocrisy) and acting as it dictates can hurt. Nobody would need ethics codes if The Right Thing was also invariably The Convenient Thing.

Many GO fans find these Aziraphalean traits frustrating! Especially his repeated returns to parroting Heaven orthodoxy! Sometimes I do too! (Not least because I'm rather protective of my own integrity, and it's cost me quite a few times. I'm well-known in professional circles for picking up a rhetorical spear and tilting at the nearest iniquitous windmill. I often lose, but I sure do keep tilting. Every once in a blue moon I actually win one.)

The key, I think, to giving our angel a little grace on this (beyond honoring the gentle compassion that is pretty basic to his character) is noticing how often he can be induced to abandon an unconsidered Heavenish default stance. As irritating as his default is, and as consistently as he returns to it, it's not really that hard to talk him out of it. Crowley, of course, is tremendously good at knocking Aziraphale away from his default -- he's had to be. But Aziraphale even manages to talk himself away from his default once, in the form of the Ineffable Plan hairsplitting at the airbase!

I think the character-relevant point of the Resurrectionist minisode is making this breaking-the-Heavenish-default dynamic as clear as the contents of the pickled-herring barrel aren't. "That's lunatic!" Crowley exclaims, when Aziraphale Sententious Voicedly parrots Heaven's garbage about poverty providing extra opportunities for goodness. Aziraphale isn't quite ready to let go yet, replying "It's ineffable."

But Dalrymple (who, I think, parallels Heaven, perhaps even the Metatron -- there could be something decent there, but it's buried too deep under scorn and clueless privilege for any graverobber-of-souls to dig it out) manages to break Aziraphale's orthodoxy by explaining the child's tumor.

Once released from his orthodoxy, Aziraphale can't be trusted to handle moral reasoning well; his moral-reasoning ability is not-uncommonly (though not always) portrayed as vitiated. When he gives Elspeth the go-ahead to dig up more bodies, his excuses are just as vacuous as they were when he was convinced of her wickedness. He knows that he's crossed Heaven's line, too, and just as at Eden it's worrying him. That's why he has to talk to Crowley to nerve himself up to help Wee Morag... only he spends too much time talking, and it's too late.

But Crowley can then talk him into bankrolling Elspeth toward a better life. Aziraphale doesn't even put up any fight, both because he's compassionate and because Crowley is temporarily taking the place of Heaven (he's even Heaven-sized and staring down at them!) as the angel's moral compass.

S1 has an even worse example of Aziraphale's moral wavering, actually. Crowley yells "Shoot him, Aziraphale!" and Aziraphale sure does try to murder Adam. Again, he's adopting his morals from the nearest (and loudest) convenient source. Madame Tracy, thankfully, has enough of a moral backbone to save our angel from himself and Crowley.

(With my ersatz-ethicist hat on: this is a fight between utilitarianism and deontology. Crowley is the utilitarian, which is actually a bit of a departure for him, but he's admittedly desperate. Madame Tracy is the deontologist: One Doesn't Kill Children. Aziraphale is caught in the middle.)

I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason we start s3 with Aziraphale and Crowley separated is so that Aziraphale finally has to do his own moral reasoning, without Crowley's nudges. I don't think it'll be easy for him. It will absolutely be lonely. And it may well hurt.

But I will watch for it, because it's how he will become his own angel, independent of Heaven and even of Crowley. And he must do that.

#good omens #good omens meta #aziraphale #the resurrectionists #good omens s3 #s3 speculation #ethics #deontology #utilitarianism

[lizkreates]

Alright, I have a plant theory! I vaguely remember reading a theory that went something like: Plants were discovered, buried within the Earth's crust; humans then experimented on them Jurassic Park style to bring them back to life, and in the process they genetically modified them for their needs. (If you have a source for this theory this plz let me know!) Let's not forget the canon cloning either.

I couldn't help but notice after watching Akira, how eerily similar the technology integrated with Tetsuo and the plant patterns were.

Could plants be part synthetic too? How were they brought back?

To be fair, it could be a stylistic choice of the time. Fullmetal Alchemist uses similar patterns to depict alchemy. From an artistic perspective, this is an easy way visually to communicate that something has been manipulated non-organically, like a circuit board or a grid, a short hand for something man-made.

Not to say natural geometry doesn't occur in like in the structure of crystals or rocks, but it's hard to not see the technology (hard angels) vs organic (soft curves) design elements.

Stampede goes even further to integrate both the organic and technological.

Don't tell me that it doesn't look like a circuit board AND plant lines!!!

UV Plant Photography by Craig Burrows

I'm left wondering what they were like before humans changed them. Were they more like the independents, reverting back to the way they were? Or were the independents an adaptive response to extreme circumstances? What did they truly look like?

It hurts to think how plants were manipulated to generate matter and power and that their suffering was so great they changed, either knowingly or spontaneously, their own bodies to produce offspring to bridge the gap between them and humans as a cry for help.

Anyway, I'm not okay about plants. : )

#trigun #trigun maximum #trigun stampede #vash #vash the stampede #spoilers #trigun spoilers #trigun meta #the plants from the earth sounded very Evangelion #the science and experimentation ethics is whole other bag of worms I don't have spoons or expertise in - art is my thing #go watch akira if you haven't #it's a classic for a reason #akira #fma #fullmetal alchemist #my trigun meta

[pluckyredhead]

ur post abt the green lantern’s political leanings was so interesting!! can you do one for the bat family? (but only if u wanna!!)

Honestly, I can't, because their politics are so incoherent.

Like, take Bruce. (And again, like with the Lanterns, I'm talking about canon here, not how I wish things were.) On the one hand, you would imagine he's pretty progressive, right? He's almost certainly a single issue voter and that single issue is gun control. He believes in rehabilitating criminals and in fact a lot of Wayne Enterprises hires are formerly incarcerated people. He is an active philanthropist who pours money into schools, orphanages, hospitals, public spaces, and the arts. These are all leftist values!

And yet the modern Batman is also a completely unrestrained violent anarchic-libertarian power fantasy. Bruce has invented his own law, which he enacts and enforces completely arbitrarily, however he feels like doing so. He obeys the laws he wants to obey and ignores the ones he doesn't care about, while insisting he is law-abiding. He tortures people literally constantly and considers it righteous. He uses the profits from his publicly traded company to become a one-man military industrial complex. (The emissions from the fucking Batmobile alone...!) He illegally surveils the entire city and sometimes the entire planet (Brother Eye, anyone?) because he has decided that his moral authority overrides literally anyone's right to privacy, anywhere. He allows his defeated foes to be locked up indefinitely regardless of their mental state in an institution that would make any qualified mental health professional run screaming in the opposite direction. He's sexist. All of these things sit on the right of the political spectrum, but imagine me pointing to the right like Charlie from It's Always Sunny pointing to his murder board.

And none of the Batfamily is any better. Some of them are honestly worse in certain aspects. Dick was a cop. Jason loves guns. Babs and Tim are even more in love with surveillance than Bruce is. Remember when Tim wanted to replace the police with, like, a Bat-army??? BECAUSE I DO.

It's not really "their fault," as much as anything can be a fictional character's fault. It's the result of being written by writers who are, for the most part, consciously trying to write the Bats as good Samaritans, but are also living in a world where we have had our brains warped by all of our blockbusters being funded by the US military, in a medium where badassery is prized above everything else, and so all this really problematic shit spills out onto the comics page without being questioned. It's also kind of a boiling frog situation: i.e. Batman has always had a cool car, so as he got tougher and tougher, of course that car would eventually become a tank, and no one stopped to go "Wait, what the fuck? What the fuck? How is this billionaire driving a tank around helping anyone???" I guess god bless Zack Snyder for inadvertently highlighting how fucking stupid and counterproductive a Batman taken to his worst extremes is.

To be clear, I don't think this is what most writers are trying to do with Batman (some of them are, but fuck those guys). But it's what happens when all you care about is rule of cool, and the more I think about it the more I'm like...shit, maybe Alan Moore was right and superheroes are just stupid.

Anyway in conclusion, comic book writers should consider the ramifications of what they're writing occasionally. But Bruce Wayne probably still votes blue, at least.

#also not for nothing but this is why i like superman and green arrow better #because they are designed as characters who actually THINK about the ethical application of power and privilege #as opposed to chucking it around willy nilly because it looks cool #batman #meta

[feverdreamsandlucidnightmares]

I keep thinking about moral vs ethical authorities and actions in the Trigun animes. I hope this ramble about it makes sense.

I think most of us will agree that morality is perfectly capable of secular development and is unbeholden to religion in general, though religions can certainly serve as a moral authority and inform specifics. But they are not, or at least not the only, source of morals.

And while ethics and morals are often used as synonyms, they do actually have different meanings. The short version is that ethics are the rules and standards of a social system/culture/etc and morals determine what a person individually thinks is wrong or right. Often, people’s morals and ethics follow the same principles and authorities. They don’t have to, though.

Functionally, let’s say that ethical choices are social goods, and thus social authorities are the ethical authorities within a given society or culture. Much like laws and power structures are meant to protect and benefit the people they govern, a social or common good is something that benefits the largest number of people within a society. In Trigun, these authorities include the Bernardelli Insurance Society (in a limited capacity), the JuLai/July military police, the Eye of Michael, and (notably, but discretely) Millions Knives.

There’s plenty of speculation on and textual implication within Trigun Stampede that Knives and Conrad having their hands in a lot of JuLai’s governance and polices. This is where the moral value of the ethical systems in place becomes questionable.

There are a lot of implications to unpack within an ethical system potentially developed and controlled by a genocidal semi-immortal being using it as a shadow government. The abridged, most important point is that there is no reason for Knives to be a part of a system that allows humans to flourish, build community, and grow. There is every reason for him to convince/allow everyone to think that he is.

A social good is one with the support of those in authority. It has no innate moral value. Laws and orders from unjust governments do not absolve anyone of the weight of their actions. But they determine who is punished.

So, the Eye. The church of No Man’s Land. A social authority for people in Hopeland, at least to some extent. Enough so that the orphanage cannot stop the Eye from taking its children. And Windmill Village to a much larger extent. So much so that its people volunteer their children as sacrifices. And it’s implied to have a much wider reach than just that. The Eye of Michael is a cult that preys upon the planet’s most desperate. Rollo - sick and poor and unlucky. Blessed. Made new, made whole (everything down to his emotions tampered with). Monev the Gale. Wolfwood and Livio - orphans and poor. Wolfwood, the handpicked Child of Blessing. The perfect candidate to be a child soldier. Nicholas the Punisher. Livio, the volunteer. The good and faithful brother follower. Livio the Double Fang. The other Gung-Ho-Guns. Dominique the Cyclops, Midvalley the Hornfreak, Rai-Dei the Blade, E. G. Mine, Leonof the Puppet-Master, Hoppered the Gauntlet, Caine the Longshot — volunteers? Desperate people doing desperate things? Or violent people playing at divine intervention? Social authorities in their own right, in the sense that they can do what they want without repercussions from the masses. They answer to Legato, to Knives, not to the traditional governments of No Man’s Land.

And Legato has been desperate. He would kill almost anyone before suffering that again. He would die to escape it, too. Life holds so little meaning to him. The end is near and he is both hierophant and harbinger. He lays no claim to justice, only ruin, but it’s all in Knives’ name.

Knives, who plays god. Who puts a bounty on his brother’s head to drive him back to him. All that power, he gets to determine what is wrong or right and people can either agree or die. It’s easy to see where his morals fail, but there isn’t a higher power to enact justice. So, he has the authority, what goods does he perform with it?

It’s also important to note that Zazie does not perform moral or social goods. Zazie serves themself, for their own betterment. And this is not a moral failing because applying human morals to a multi-consciousness conglomerated hivemind controlled collective of bugs can’t make sense. Zazie is all of the wams on No Man’s Land. All of their collective experiences in the species’ existence. All of their lives, all of their loss. It’s all Zazie. And Zazie believes that the needs of the many (themself in all their facets) outweigh the needs of the interlocutor few (humanity, Plants). Tentatively willing to coexist and adapt, unwilling to accept their own destruction. Allies or enemies. They work with Knives until it no longer benefits them. Very utilitarian.

Nonetheless, the Eye of Michael and its chosen crusaders, its sychophants, its priests are a definitive social and tentative moral authority within No Man’s Land. So, who can tell Conrad that he is performing anything other than a social good by doing his experiments? He claims he’s trying to save humanity and the only authority over him wants humanity dead. A flawed system. The Gung-Ho-Guns perform social goods by killing whoever they are sent to exterminate. This, of course, includes Vash without regard to whoever might be caught in the crossfire. Vash, who unwittingly takes the blame for his brother over and over. Vash, who has a bounty placed on his head by his brother and his misguided puppet government. Vash, who is being mocked and chided, his bounty the same as the cost of a new Plant. Vash, the Humanoid Typhoon, legally an act of God, the first “human” natural disaster. Destruction in his wake.

Wolfwood performs a social good by betraying Vash. He has the authority to justify his actions through his ordainment.

And Wolfwood performs a moral good by saving Meryl. It’s the first unilaterally moral good he performs in Trigun Stampede. That’s important. The thing about Wolfwood is that he knows the difference between moral and social goods. He knows whatever values he’d like to act on don’t align with his orders, but there’s always other lives at stake. Wolfwood doesn’t kill because he’s particularly bloodthirsty. He’s pragmatic. Other people have to die to keep the orphanage safe. An unfortunate, but necessary cost that he’s willing to pay. Until he isn’t anymore. Monsters don’t need morals, but if Vash can afford them maybe he can, too.

And normal, everyday people perform social goods, too, by trying to stop bank robbers and bandits and the Nebraska Family. And Vash. Those are ethical decisions, stopping criminals threatening your home is ethical. You just have to remember who determines who the criminals are and why.

Your moral and ethical authorities, ideally, should be in alignment. This is not a utopia, so they aren’t. And these random people living on the planet he forced them onto are continuously subjected to the so-called social good of Knives enacting his divine plan in order to force Vash’s hand. They are a necessary sacrifice for his greater good. The greater good that is Knives’ Eden, that is a world remade in his image. Vash remade in his image.

#trigun #trigun stampede #tristamp #trigun 98 #trigun stampede meta #trigun 98 meta #ethics in Trigun #morals in Trigun #tristamp Zazie #bc tristamp Zazie is always more interesting to me #tristamp Rollo|Monev backstory #trigun spoilers #trigun stampede spoilers #trigun 98 spoilers #trigun rambles #vash the stampede #nicholas d. wolfwood #millions knives #meryl stryfe #livio the double fang #gung ho guns #zazie the beast #feverdreamsandlucidnightmares

[rokhal]

Talking about inhibition vs resolve in Blue Beetle (2023) as displayed by Jaime Reyes and Khaji Da.

Spoilers!

OK so. Jaime is a nice, well-adjusted kid. Every iteration, that's true: he was raised well by loving parents and he wants to be a good person and generally succeeds. He's not totally naive, but he's been insulated from life's darker realities in the ways that loving, successful parents want their children to be insulated, so he has faith in human good nature and the social contract. Jaime is an adult who finds the idea of taking a human life viscerally horrifying. He has strong inhibitions against harming others at the start of the movie.

Khaji Da is a literal alien killing machine. It doesn't give a shit about anyone but its host, because why would it? It's not programmed that way. Social contract, what social contract? It's not a social being. Assuming that it is a damaged Reach infiltrator scarab as in the comics, it has self-awareness but no knowledge of its purpose, so it's starting from scratch. It doesn't kill for sport, but based on its programming, it has surely deduced that killing is its purpose. It doesn't experience guilt or horror and has no inhibitions.

At the climax of the movie, Jaime's faith in human good nature and the social contract have been shattered. Victoria Kord's goons have destroyed his home, tortured him, left his father to die in the street, and shot a rocket at his uncle. His grief and rage have grown more powerful than his horror of killing; like his uncle and grandmother, he is ready to bloody his hands. This is the fate that his father brought the family to the US to spare his future children from, and Alberto is no longer there to steer him away from it.

Khaji Da, meanwhile, has bonded with Jaime and absorbed not only Jaime's memories, but Ignacio Carapax's. What a contrast a loving family makes. Khaji Da is not social itself, but it learns intimately what social bonds and the lack thereof can do to human personality, and the self-denial and isolation that killing brings. It learns from Carapax how lasting the wounds of moral injury are, and that to be a sentient weapon is an appalling violation. Khaji Da resolves to save Jaime and itself from the trauma that Carapax lives with.

Jaime's inhibitions against killing falter, because he had never contemplated ever needing a reason not to kill and had no framework to argue himself out of it. Khaji Da learned and applied Jaime's compassion and adopted a new moral code, counter to its own programming, that values human life. In a way, Khaji Da copied a part of Jaime that Victoria Kord destroyed, and gave it back to him at the critical moment.

#meta #my meta #blue beetle #blue beetle (2023) #jaime reyes #khaji da #blue beetle spoilers #ethics

[whetstonefires]

I think a part of the reason I feel so connected to JGY and XY is that I, too, think everyone is lying about what a good person they are. Sure, there may be a few genuinely good people, but those are in the minority and never claim the title.

I don't know about never; some people are pretty straightforward.

And in some ways the whole point of the concept of 'a good person' is that the feeling of losing the right to consider yourself one can impose instinctive recoil from doing wrong, in situations where you don't have the leisure of working your way through an ethics diagram and choosing the logically moral path before reacting to a situation. It has practical utility.

But that system can backfire pretty horribly too, in a lot of ways. It can be hijacked by definitions of 'good' that actually make you recoil from ethical acts because they're deviant. It can lead to disappearing up your own ass lmao.

And definitely the threshold for 'talking about how you're a good person' enough that it makes you suspect as either a) a liar or b) someone who values that self-image over objective reality and other people's wellbeing is. Not very high.

Jin Guangyao, ironically, is one of those people who's so performatively A Good Person in his public life that in retrospect it looks like a red flag. Which knowing this about himself in an ongoing fashion ofc just reinforces his own cynicism about everyone else lmao.

Even Lan Xichen, who I think he may see as a genuinely good person, he also sees as an easy mark who will reliably choose what is comfortable over what is 'right,' if you just structure the scenario to make that an easy choice that's easy for him to justify.

Xue Yang's bitterness is in many ways more exciting than Jin Guangyao's because he has a way more unusual relationship to reality, but it does share a lot of notes.

The role of deception in his psychology fascinates me because as far as I can tell he's as instinctively straightforward a person as Lan Wangji, albeit along quite different lines involving a total lack of impulse control, but has adopted 'deceit' as a weapon against the wicked world in the same way he has adopted 'murder.'

But when he feels someone is not merely lying but papering over bad behavior with principles they are not living up to he is livid.

People claiming to be better than him because they're 'good' when 'good' is a construct of privilege, is the underlying idea he's not equipped to articulate. Except he takes that and applies it to 'hitting me to interrupt my random murder of some guy who happened to be within arm's reach when I wanted to hurt someone.'

Which isn't like philosophically perfect, but the underlying problem he's actually reacting to is that he understands the social contract as a lie that has never protected him but seeks to control him, while protecting rich men it has no power to control.

Which it is fair to be mad about, but then his feeling is that since that's the nature of the world and all people, he is entitled to amass for himself the power to inflict hurt without consequences as much as he possibly can, and to use it against the vulnerable for fun, and no one is entitled to interfere.

Which brings him to a place where he is violently angry at anyone talking about trying to treat other people well as a value, because either they're a hypocrite and a liar or they threaten his entire system of rationalization for why he can be The Worst and still In The Right.

'Everyone is equally bad, actually' is like, an understandable take for anyone who's had cause to become embittered. Everyone is free to make whatever philosophical peace they can with the world and by and large there's no ethical weight to any such opinion, in itself.

But it's an ideological crutch people tend to wind up leaning on very heavily when they can't or don't want to take responsibility for their own behavior.

Which is an approach that Xue Yang, Jin Guangyao, and Su She all share, and which not only is shitty of them, it...traps them in a wheel of doubling down on their own worst impulses because rather than going 'that was bad and I shouldn't do it again' they've repeatedly invested all this energy into making what they did actually the correct thing, according to their interpretation of the context. Which means they're more likely to do it again.

(I think this is how Jin Guangyao became a serial killer, for example. He followed a doing-a-murder-impulse and then internally doubled down on how he had nothing to be ashamed of, so he was more likely to do it again, every time.

Wei Wuxian's strain of self-righteousness about his revenge was less...thorough than Jin Guangyao's, because he had the benefit of going after people on the opposite side of a war from him while Meng Yao's first known murder plot was against a shitty boss. But it probably didn't help him not try to solve army-shaped problems with mass murder, even after that stopped being allowed.)

If any of them had just like, zero moral sensibilities they would have created very different problems, and very possibly fewer of them. It's making a central goal of your operations 'self-vindication in your own internal narrative, created retroactively via reframing' rather than 'figuring out what I think I should do and trying to do that' that traps them in the self-reinforcing murder pissbaby vortex.

So if you look at it one way, these three villains are themselves perfect examples of how pursuit of the 'feeling of being good' (or at least 'not the bad guy') can make you worse.

Notably Wei Wuxian was also extremely sensitive to hypocrisy in his youth; it was the only part of Madam Yu's behavior he was ever shown objecting to. But he's sufficiently mellow and cynical from regret and burnout by the 'present' timespan after his resurrection to just get disgusted and alienated about it, rather than outraged.

He wasn't even all that mad at Xue Yang, though honestly that may be partly because he stopped entirely characterizing him as a person at some point during their interaction. Like, there's no point being angry at someone whose moral sensibilities operate exclusively on the plane of 'is this unfair to me' for manipulating and destroying people who were good to him, and then getting obsessed with his own self-pity about it. This is not a person who understands how not to be, metaphorically speaking, a cannibal.

And Wei Wuxian did know better and still got roughly the same result, so what business does he have getting angry?

Anyway yeah those two villains are both delightfully relatable if you sit down and put their perspectives together; they are clearly operating with the same basic suite of human needs and emotions as everybody else, without that being in itself particularly exculpatory, which is honestly refreshing. They've just got the most fantastically toxic interpersonal habits that knowing them counts as some level of Suffering A Curse.

Jin Guangyao and Xue Yang do both stand as scathing rebukes of the society that created them. But within the narrative, wherein they're people, the fact is that each of them had agency and one of the things they chose to do with it was develop rationales for why they were the most special little guy and everything was someone else's fault.

And their moral nihilisms, while also grounded in serious trauma, ping me as emotional masturbation of this variety.

#ask #hoc est meum #Anonymous #rambling about ethics and villains lol #this isn't an organized essay but it's the best i'm going to manage #wei wuxian #xue yang #jin guangyao #meta #mdzs #this is why wwx is not that invested in how the underlying machinations made his bad choices 'not his fault' btw #spending too much time chewing your own vomit narrows your view until you can only be selfish #jiang cheng is also somewhat trapped in the pissbaby vortex #but he did get deliberately stuck there by people who loved him (his mom and wwx mostly) #and he has much higher standards than the villains about who he takes it out on and how #and there is a non-zero chance he will claw his way out post-canon #which none of those three was ever going to do no matter how much time and paradigm shifting information you gave them #so i cut him more slack

[time-is-restored]

by the way this is not gonna do the subject NEARLY enough justice BUT i do really wish there was more keeley appreciation in the main tags... like not only is she an Extremely explicit parallel for ted, but she's also at the heart of SO much of the show's themes - and you'd never know it from reading most of the meta that goes around!

[content warnings for sexism, sexual harassment, Locker Room Talk™]

okay, so like, in no particular order, here some of the criminally underrated + under-explored things we know abt keeley jones:

she has an almost identical social strategy to ted: being earnestly, and oftentimes defiantly herself, regardless of what assumptions it pushes other people to make abt her (i.e.: her description in the pilot, 'used to having her book judged by its cover'). and then, in spite of the ppl around her belittling her/writing her off, she STILL approaches them w genuine intent to connect + get to know them.

i think it was an EXTREMELY deliberate choice in episode 3 for both keeley and ted to give rebecca 'a compliment she's never heard before'. they're not merely skating by on small talk or doing the bare minimum to show their appreciation for killing the photo (which rebecca would be prepared for), they're subverting her expectations by going for genuine (if bemusing) compliments.

then ofc w keeley's s3 arc, you can see how she's trying (and slowly succeeding, judging by that nervous worker guy's attempts to start joking around with her) to get her PR firm's culture to the same, easy-going, more-friends-than-coworkers vibe of richmond. she even specifically asks ted for advice (and, again, i think its relevant that the advice he gives refers to his most effective team building moment - the ghost banishing ceremony). it's very important to her that ppl feel comfortable in her presence, and we can see her getting genuinely distressed whenever she struggles with this.

she says EXPLICITLY in that one exchange w sassy + rebecca that she freaks out whenever she thinks she's being abandoned - she delivers it like a joke, but she's visibly off-kilter and nervous while she says it, apparently still coming down from the anxiety of thinking she'd been ditched. and again, after the gala when she goes to (presmably) get back together with jamie, she says outright that she really struggles to ever break up with people - even people she's no longer interested in, like jamie! - because she second guesses her own judgement so much. on an adjacent note, imo the melt down she has when roy was crowding her was only as abrupt + extreme as it was because she had been repressing her feelings about it for so long. which is SO interesting in the context of her being one of the most upfront and outspoken characters in the show!!!! like. she literally contains multitudes!

and, also, while i do think there's some genuine critical analysis to be done abt the normalisation of what is, essentially, sexual harassment at richmond (it's... extremely uncomfortable to go on such a long tangent about how attractive a stranger's boobs are, even if ur also a woman), i think keeley's active flirtation + general horny-on-main behaviour is ALSO extremely under-explored. bc, in the context of her being a WAG, and also a model, keeley recieves completely unprompted + unwarranted comments abt her body all day every day. when sassy told her that her ex-husband used to masturbate to her photos, she's hardly shell shocked. it's pretty clear that that's something she's used to being known for, and being told about in gratuitous detail. in this context, you can really see how the way she leans in to flirtation, and talking about sex and the hotness of various ppl around her (ie: her entrance in the pilot, making a show + joke out of how she must Obviously want to see all of the footballers naked), is her way of pushing back against the way others don't respect HER boundaries. ie: 'if my body's fair game for everyone to talk about + sexualise, so is theirs!'. it's an extremely interesting coping mechanism, especially in the context of it leading to her oftentimes perpetuating the cycle of harassment herself. and then there's also how the locker room culture OF richmond involves a significant amt of talking about sex, past partners, etc - since she spends so much time in that environment, you can pretty clearly see how that'd influence her decision to go with the current, rather than against.

AND OFC. HOW could i get this far w/o talking about the sheer narrative weight that's given to her relationship with rebecca!!! not only is she arguably the first character to befriend rebecca (beating ted out by several episodes, at least by my count), she is ALSO the reason that rebecca ever tells ted the truth ('it would change how i feel about you'!!!!!!! AGH!!!!), and honestly i think keeley's disappointment in her is what leads her to finally accept that. sabotaging richmond is a cruel thing to do and she doesn't want to do it anymore! like. keeley's unabashed admiration of + love for rebecca, and rebecca's eventual reciprocation is quite literally the driving force for both of their arcs ('thank you for teaching this panda how to be a lion'!!!!!) and i just!!! i care them!!!!!!!!!!!!

tldr; keeley jones is a blorbo of absolutely apocalyptic proportions PLEASE let her into ur heart the next time ur writing analysis + meta....

#ted lasso meta #keeley jones #ted lasso #i basically wrote this whole thing just so i could plead for ppl to accept narrative parallels keeley : ted #into their hearts. like u can learn SO much abt keeley by analysing ted and vice versa! #the anxiety the Baggage the motivations the fears.. #even their professional goals + ethics and shit!!

[unbidden-yidden]

Something I don't usually see talked about in political discourse around major societal problems is that you can have more than one position on a given topic because you think there's an ideal solution, a position that is morally the most correct, and a practical position based on the hard reality of the facts on the ground. In a perfect world, these positions would line up: the end-goal ideal would be accomplishable using the most morally correct methods. We don't live in that world, obviously.

A lot of this is the result of my legal background helping people navigate extremely non-optimal systems to get to a liveable solution. (Also probably being Jewish, let's be honest.)

Let's take a scaled-down example; a classic legal problem: Person A sells a house to Person B and pays off their mortgage. Person A then also sells the house to Person C as an investment property, pockets the profits, and disappears into that goodly night. Person B moves into the house unaware that Person C has a functionally equal claim to the property. Person C discovers this problem when they go to record the deed and sue Person B to clear the title.

Obviously Person A is the bad actor here, and if they can be caught, they will owe a house to one party and the value of the house to the other (which that person will have to extract from them slowly over time, because lbr, Person A already blew that cash and likely doesn't have an equal amount just lying around to give to that person.) At the end of the day, either Person B or Person C are going to get hosed for something that wasn't their fault.

Personally, my ideal solution is that actually private property as we currently understand it wouldn't exist, and we would all each have rights and responsibilities to the land and the environment that were proportional, in which case this scenario wouldn't have happened in the first place. My morally correct answer is that the state should have a fund for innocent third party buyers out of which Person C would get paid, and leave Person B alone with good title while the state goes after Person A. My practical answer is that Person B was the first purchaser who is actually living on the property and so their need is greater than Person C's need. That should give Person B the stronger claim to the actual property and give Person C (essentially) a property right in the lawsuit and potential recovery against Person A. That answer gets much more complicated and fact-specific if there are other factors in favor of Person C, such as they have lost their housing and will be homeless if they can't move into what was originally intended to be an investment property.

I think most people have this sort of variable response to large, complex societal issues, but our discourse on the subject suffers a lot when people refuse to acknowledge what sort of place they're speaking from or that different discussions have different purposes (thus requiring different answers.)

[theidealistphilosophy]

The first duty of love is to listen.

Paul Tillich, Source Unlisted.

#philosophy tumblr #philoblr #german philology #philosopher #theosophy #paul tillich #love #meta ethics #existentialism #listening #dark academia #life quotes

[lgbtlunaverse]

I'm chewing on this and my thoughts aren't fully formulated yet but i have been having Thinking about and jgy and his definitions of harm and his moral framework and generally he seems to very much come down on the side of consequentialism- what with him considering himself as having "murdered" qin su when her death was unambiguously a suicide. But she killed herself because of things he did, so even if he never wanted her to die or took actions toward that, he considers himself as having killed her.

And yet every single time he is confronted about his actions, he is incredibly quick to emphasize that he had no choice, he didn't really want to, there was just no other way out. It's a complete 180 from the motive not mattering at all to it mattering a LOT.

And that has led me to me believe that when he's talking about his lack of choices he's- the uncharitable might call it lying for sympathy, but that's not it, jin guangyao does sincerely believe he had no other choice (except, as nmj so nicely put it, sacrificing himself) but he's also not defending himself with full sincerity. It's more that his motive doesn't really matter much to him as a matter of morality, but he knows it matters to other people. He is not genuinely defending himself and arguing he doesn't deserve blame, he is arguing he shouldn't be punished. There seems to be a very strict barrier in his mind between accountability in the moral sense (what does he hold blame for) and in accountability in the practical sense (What punishment should he get.)

Which makes perfect sense for a guy who is well aware that the justice system will never actually be just for him. That any punishment levied toards him within the legal and politcal system he lives in will primarily be because of who he is and who his mother was and not because of what he actually did. Yes he thinks what he did was wrong yes he thinks that is morally repugnant no he shouldn't get punished for it.

And well. I don't agree that people should just get away with mass murder because the judicial system sucks but... is he wrong? I mean, what did him in at the end? Payment for his actual crimes? No. It was a lie that was believed just because he was the one being accused.

#mdzs #meng yao #jin guangyao #mdzs meta #or in the process or becoming meta i suppose #i am quite literally reading academic papers about the moral arguments for and against duress as a legal defense for murder rn #just to make an ethical analysis about this little guy that goes further than the usual 'is this character evil' discourse #and like. examine morality without judgement on whether you should like a character #which is sorely lacking on this hellshite

[ser-zoras]

jaime is so gender in a way that makes sense. like he is a dude who is totally comfortable with being a dude. he could be the younger more beautiful queen if he wanted to but even then he would be doing it in a very man way. he crossdressed his way through childhood but he doesnt really care. despite all of his problems and his flaws, he knows how his gender works and nothing's really a threat to it.

CERSEI, meanwhile, is so gender in a way that is so deeply confusing i get a headache every time i think about it.

#tyrion isnt really gender. hes kinda like that ethics teacher at my school who called me a nobody underclassmen last week. #spiritual successor to the brienne gender meta #jaime is extremely comfortable in his masculinity. dont have a fucking clue what cersei's on though. #cersei lannister #jaime lannister #asoiaf #house lannister #a song of ice and fire #my posts #tyrion lannister

[magnus-rhymes-with-swagness]

hi yeah so to this day i’m still thinking about the direct aftermath of the betrayal. about how we still don’t know exactly what happened - maybe the movie will give us some backstory! obviously we know the long-term effects of it, but what happened directly after the button was pushed? like did ambrosius realize what he’d done at first? was there instant horror and regret the moment it happened? or did it take a moment to register that he’d blown off ballister’s arm?

and how long did it take ambrosius to realize that the worst mistake of his life had been by design, planned all along? how long before he realized it was never really his fault, but rather the director’s? was it right after he’d stood up in the arena only to find that ballister was still on the ground, or was it a slow reconciliation with the truth that stretched across years?

and about the feud/breakup itself, too - how much of it was pushed by the director and the news, and how much was it ballister himself, rightly angry that he’d been betrayed? how many times did ambrosius try to tell ballister it was an accident before it became clear ballister didn’t believe him, and how many times after that was he just repeating himself over and over? did he ever mention that he’d tried to help, that he’d seen the spreading pool of blood and tried to rush over, only to be held back? did anybody ever find out that beneath the triumphant, untouchable king’s champion was a scared and bitter young knight, forever regretting something that was out of his control from the very beginning? that the price of his victory was so, so much higher than a broken lance and an arm?

what would it feel like, i wonder, to be a golden boy on a pedestal, exalted as a hero but despised by the person who mattered most to you? to be rewarded with fame and glory and a statue in the town square for something you never even meant to do, something that ruined everything? to be celebrated for the worst thing you ever did, crowned king’s champion and gilded in the eyes of the whole kingdom but knowing their approval means nothing compared to the love of the person you’d hurt, someone you’ll probably never get back again because why would you after what you’d done? to get everything you’d ever thought you wanted, at the expense of the one person who mattered most?

#nimona #nimona comic #ambrosius goldenloin #ballister blackheart #nd stevenson #something about this stokes some insane fire in my brain. i think about it every fucking day #picture me pacing in circles with a wild look in my eyes putting it into words lmao #anyway i spend a lot of time thinking about ambrosius and i wanted to get these particular thoughts out there before the movie #and i was listening to into the woods again and thinking about how its themes of ethics and morality are kind of similar to nimona #how the line between heroes and villains and the subsequent line between good and bad is very blurry. convoluted. maybe even nonexistent #how the characters must weigh one thing - one life! - against another and decide which one is more valuable #to what lengths would you go to achieve the thing you want most in the world? what would you give up? *who* would you give up? #what happens when you get what you want more than anything and it turns out to not be what you expected but you can’t go back? #what happens when you have to choose? and what about when you don’t get the choice at all??? #anyway i’ll save my other thoughts for later so this doesn’t get too rambly! [gets dragged offstage] #my words #meta #into the woods #nimona spoilers

[whitmore]

are we excited to approach qniki with nuance

#eleanor.txt #i have the same issue with courtney whitmore that the fandom excuses a lot of her actions that should not be excused #this may shock some of you. female characters can be flawed #they will make mistakes. and do bad things #i do think half of it is jokingly #but holding women and female characters to this impossibly high standard of moral perfection and excusing their every single action #is not a great move imo #she’s going to fuck up and we need to let her and be normal about it #this goes for qrivers too #qsmp #when i start posting qniki meta and i WANT to post qniki meta. i will be tapping this sign #going to ask that everybody gets real thoughtful real quick #going to request we stop reductive ethics in female character critique. please. for me #it’s very much the same vein as (but not identical to) the reduction of her to her relationships w male characters #she’s going to be friends with some of them and you Have to be normal about it #she may even flirt with some of them! she may be in a canonical relationship at some point on the server! be regular about that #nihachu

[saints-who-never-existed]

Sometimes, I wonder what would have become of certain characters - guys like Gore and McDonald, for example - if they hadn't been killed extra-prematurely.

Would their continued presence have made any difference, and if so, how? What would it have taken for them to be pushed truly to the brink, to their absolute limit?

In essence, and for lack of a better phrase, they died as "heroes" but would they ever have become "villains" had they only lived longer?

#I always feel the need to clarify that I'm not actually calling any of them 'heroes' in any traditional sense #I mean it only as an imperfect synonym for 'protagonist' #Like they're heroes insofar as they're the main people in the story we're supposed to care about #More specifically for the likes of McDonald and Gore I mean it in the sense that they die before they can really be challenged #Before they face the huge ethical/moral quandaries that the others do #Before they have the chance to really do any bad or morally questionable things #They're heroes insofar as they're presented as 'good guys' and we never get the chance to see them be anything else #But yeah just a fun little hypothetical for a random Thursday #The Terror #The Terror AMC #Random Observations #Meta #Graham Gore #Alexander McDonald