On morality, Buffy and the Domination of the Draka

[cdybedahl]

This entry by brandnewgun made me think about a matter of moral philosophy that I've never been able to resolv to my own satisfaction.

I think that most people here will agree that freedom is, generally speaking, good. It usually has to have some limits, for practical reasons, and those limits can be discussed. A lot. But let's leave those discussions aside for now and try to look at why freedom is good. Which is, as far as I can tell, that it allows us to chose a life that coincides with our desires, a life that we experience as pleasant and rewarding. As long as we are able to choose most or all of the things we want, we will be content. Preventing us from choosing as we wish will piss us off, and generally be considered bad.

So far it's reasonably clear.

The next step is that which is touched on in Buffy. What if someone somehow changes our decision-making apparatus? When Willow erases a part of Tara's memory, she influences the information that Tara uses to make her decisions, and thus makes Tara make decisions that she would not otherwise have made. But even after that Tara still chooses freely. Willow has not limited Tara's available courses of actions. She has not made Tara less free. Or has she? Now, in Buffy there is external evidence that tells Tara that her mind has been tampered with. There are the memories of others, and there is physical evidence. Once she discovers this, she gets hurt, since she feels (quite rightly) that she has been violated.

But what if Willow's spell had been more powerful? Suppose that, rather than changing Tara's memory, she had changed the Buffyverse reality so that the quarrel had never happened at all. The effects would be the same, in that Tara would have no memory of fighting with Willow. But there would be no external evidence to make her aware of the tampering. Nobody would remember the quarrel (possibly not even Willow, if the spell was powerful enough), there would be no physical evidence. She would never find out. She would never feel violated. Given those changed circumstances, is the tampering still wrong? If so, why?

The issue gets even murkier when we move on to the Draka.

The Domination of the Draka, for those of you who aren't familiar with them, is a very seriously unpleasant dictatorship in a series of novels by S. M. Stirling. The series is a fairly improbable alternate history, and the Draka are a slave society so nasty and cruel that they in the second novel make the Nazis look like good guys. Yes, really. The Draka divide their society very, very strictly in the masters, the draka, and the slaves, the serfs. In the first three novels the morality of the situation is clear: the Draka remove (almost) all choice for their slaves. But in the fourth novel, Drakon, it gets interesting. It shows a glimpse of the Draka's so-called Final Society, which is their version of Utopia. In the Final Society, everyone is happy. There are the masters, the Homo Drakensis, and the slaves, the Homo Servus. The interesting thing is that both of them are for all practical purposes allowed to choose their lives as they wish -- it's just that the Drakensis are biotechnologically designed to want to lead and the Servus are designed to want to follow. The Servus blindly obey the commands of the Drakensis because they honestly want to. It is their choice. They do not have much freedom in an absolute sense, that is true. But they do have all the freedom they will ever want. If all restrictions were removed, they would still chose the same. And if one were to remove the slave mentality from a Servus, would not that be exactly the same sort of crime that Willow commited, the external manipulation of the apparatus of choice?

I feel that in the case of Willow and Tara, most of the wrongness comes from the fact that Tara feels hurt. Even in the case where she never finds out, I still feel that Willow has done wrong, although I can't quite put the finger on why. When it comes to the Drakensis/Servus situation, I am honestly stumped. The Servus have very clearly been manipulated, but for each individual the manipulation have taken place long before their birth. If not for the manipulation, the individual would not exist. I can't really see any meaningful difference between a Servus, who is formed into a specific person by biology and society, and myself, who has been formed into a specific person by biology and society. If the Servus are somehow victims of a crime, aren't the Drakensis victims just as much? They, too, have been manipulated long before they were born. Indeed, they have been manipulated to a far greater degree than the Servus (since the Servus are interfertile with Homo Sapiens while Drakensis aren't). And if the Drakensis are also victims, who are the perpetrators? Furthermore, given that the Final Society actually is a Utopia -- everyone in it is happy, they are designed to be! -- wouldn't changing it be a crime in itself?

What was it Xander said to Willow that time? "You have too many thoughts"?

Comments

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

Pity the journal that inspired you is Friends Only. But I shall think on your comments today and try to reply tonight.

Gina

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

The entry just served to kickstart my train of thought, so you don't miss out on anything.

[apel.livejournal.com]

Your view seems rather results-oriented. What bearing do you feel that the intent of the people who introduced the changes has on the morality of the situations?

For me it's enough that the intent of the originators is to limit somebody's choice. On the other hand, just because something is morally suspect doesn't mean that it's imperative that it be changed. The results can still be good, whether that was the intention or not.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Your view seems rather results-oriented.

Well, yes. The results are what we can experience, so they're pretty much what matters. The intent of others never get any better than hearsay, really.

The results can still be good, whether that was the intention or not.

If I understand you correctly, you mean that the intent is a contributing but not solely determining factor in deciding if an action is morally right or wrong?

If so, there could be borderline cases where the exact same action could be either right or wrong depending on the intent of the actor?

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley? In Huxley's world, people are genetically and environmentally altered, before they're born, in order to fit into the place prescribed for them. (Some conditioning is also used on children after they're born - but I would guess that if the citizens of the "brave new world" could figure out how to do it all pre-natally, avoiding giving babies electroshock, they would: bear in mind at that the time BNW was written, it was a medical assumption that babies didn't feel pain the way grown people feel pain.) The insidiousness of Brave New World is that everyone is happy. They are conditioned to be happy so long as they are doing what the system wants them to do, and it is made very easy to do what the system wants them to do. There is no cruelty in the system: even those who rebel against it, or can't cooperate, are treated kindly. Is this system wrong?

Suppose that, rather than changing Tara's memory, she had changed the Buffyverse reality so that the quarrel had never happened at all. The effects would be the same, in that Tara would have no memory of fighting with Willow. But there would be no external evidence to make her aware of the tampering. Nobody would remember the quarrel (possibly not even Willow, if the spell was powerful enough), there would be no physical evidence. She would never find out. She would never feel violated. Given those changed circumstances, is the tampering still wrong? If so, why?

It would be wrong on a different level. It wouldn't violate Tara's memory - the quarrel never happened. It would mean that Willow didn't have to take responsibility for her own actions. If she does something and doesn't like the results, she just casts the "make it didn't happen" spell, and suddenly, it didn't. This is Star Trek style time travel, effectively - "we're just going back to change this one thing, it won't hurt a bit" - and the simplicity of this is, well, just wrong.

I haven't read The Domination of the Draka. But from your description, I would say yes, the Final Society is wrong. From the way you describe it, the biotechnological manipulation of Homo Servus designed to take choice away from them - to make it so that they can never choose to rebel.

And if one were to remove the slave mentality from a Servus, would not that be exactly the same sort of crime that Willow commited, the external manipulation of the apparatus of choice?

No. If one were to remove the slave mentality from a Servus, that would be the exact reversal of what Willow did. She removed the possibility of choice from Tara by manipulating her mind, just as those who created Homo Servus did. To return the freedom of choice is the exact reverse: it is no more a crime than Dawn telling Tara that Tara and Willow had had a quarrel the previous evening was a "crime", though that too was "external manipulation of the apparatus of choice", and Tara would have been much happier if Dawn hadn't told her.

Furthermore, given that the Final Society actually is a Utopia -- everyone in it is happy, they are designed to be! -- wouldn't changing it be a crime in itself?

No. See above. If Dawn hadn't told Tara that the quarrel had happened, Tara would have been happy, Willow would have been happy, and Dawn would have been happy. Everything would have worked the way Willow designed it to be. Do you really feel that Dawn committed a crime when she broke up all that happiness? I don't think so - because happiness is not an end in itself. It's nice, but it's icing on the cake.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Of course I've read Brave New World, and I note that in it Huxley has to bring in someone from outside the system (a very Rosseauean noble savage, at that) to prove his system wrong. We, also being outside that system, also tend to see it as wrong. But is that because it is somehow inherently wrong or just because it's very unlike our own system? What is the moral difference between bringing up children with a BNW reward/punishment system and the way we bring up our children with reward (like cookies) and punishment (like being sent to bed early) systems?

This is Star Trek style time travel, effectively - "we're just going back to change this one thing, it won't hurt a bit" - and the simplicity of this is, well, just wrong.

Sorry, "just wrong" isn't good enough. It's a cricular argument, "we think this is wrong because we think this is wrong". You have a lot of company there, though. A large majority of the moral philosphy I read at University boiled down to "contradicts our moral intuition", which is academese for "it's just wrong".

To return the freedom of choice is the exact reverse: it is no more a crime than Dawn telling Tara that Tara and Willow had had a quarrel the previous evening was a "crime", though that too was "external manipulation of the apparatus of choice", and Tara would have been much happier if Dawn hadn't told her.

Surely you can't mean that any change in the direction of more choice is good? Because that would mean, for example, that forcibly changing a hetero- or homosexual person to bisexual would be good. Which at least I wouldn't agree with.

Giving Tara her lost memory back after she's discovered that it's missing is one thing, because she knows that she has lost something. She experiences loss. But for a Homo Servus, where the loss is several centuries and many generations in the past, the situation is different. Changing the personality there isn't liberation, it's murder followed by birth of a new and very different individual. And to pull that argument a little further, changing it so that all future children to Homo Servus will be baseline Homo Sapiens, with their larger set of available choices, would be genocide of the Homo Servus subspecies. Can that really be right?

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Of course I've read Brave New World, and I note that in it Huxley has to bring in someone from outside the system (a very Rosseauean noble savage, at that) to prove his system wrong.

Er... are we thinking of the same Brave New World? In the one I read, John Savage is introduced as the man from outside the system, but there are two men within the system who find the world intolerable as is. John doesn't prove that the system doesn't work: he just proves that someone who was not brought up inside the system - tailored to fit with electroshock and hypnopaedia - will never fit into it. Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson, however, were brought up inside the system, but are still uncomfortable within it. They are the real proof that the system does not work - it is intolerable except to those who have been successfully conditioned to tolerate it.

We, also being outside that system, also tend to see it as wrong. But is that because it is somehow inherently wrong or just because it's very unlike our own system? What is the moral difference between bringing up children with a BNW reward/punishment system and the way we bring up our children with reward (like cookies) and punishment (like being sent to bed early) systems?

The distinction is in what's left open to choice. I take the moral position that it's wrong to restrict people from making choices: granted that there are some choices we can't allow children to make, because they don't yet have a proper understanding of the consequences (you can't let children make the free choice to go play on the freeway...) but we can choose to bring children up either with free and questioning minds or with closed and locked minds. Closed and locked minds are much more comfortable for parents to deal with: the problem with bringing children up to think about everything and make their own moral choices is that sooner or later, your children will make different moral choices from you.

Sorry, "just wrong" isn't good enough. It's a cricular argument, "we think this is wrong because we think this is wrong". You have a lot of company there, though. A large majority of the moral philosphy I read at University boiled down to "contradicts our moral intuition", which is academese for "it's just wrong".

It wasn't actually intended as a moral judgement, more a condemnation of the simplicity that says "if I cast a spell and make it didn't happen, it doesn't matter that I did it" but if you prefer, I'll expand it. Let's suppose that you have a favourite treasured vase, and X breaks it. X has three choices: (1) to admit zie broke your vase, and resolve that in future zie will take greater care with fragile things. (2) to cast a spell making you think you hated the vase, so that you won't mind that zie broke it. (3) to turn the universe back in time by fifteen minutes so that zie never broke the vase at all.

Option (1) is the taking-responsibility option. X has learned from what happened and will break fewer vases in future. Option (2) is the diversion option: X did break the vase, but has means to make sure that zie doesn't get in trouble for it. Option (3) is the make-it-didn't-happen option: X chooses to decline to learn from zie's experience, and will continue to smash vases and keep making-it-didn't-happen.

[continued on next rock]

part 2

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Surely you can't mean that any change in the direction of more choice is good? Because that would mean, for example, that forcibly changing a hetero- or homosexual person to bisexual would be good. Which at least I wouldn't agree with.

Now that's an astonishing manipulation of what I actually said, and a still more astonishing refusal to meet with what I did say. You're using the classic poor-debater strategy of setting up a straw man, claiming that the straw man represents my opinion, and knocking it down to prove that my opinion is wrong. If you wish further lessons in how to do this, may I point you at this (http://facts4god.faithweb.com/thelist.html) website?

Meanwhile, may I restate what I actually said, which is: "To return the freedom of choice is the exact reverse: it is no more a crime than Dawn telling Tara that Tara and Willow had had a quarrel the previous evening was a "crime", though that too was "external manipulation of the apparatus of choice", and Tara would have been much happier if Dawn hadn't told her." Now if you're done with the cheap rhetorical tricks, feel free to deal with what I really said. Or not, if you find it so unanswerable that the only way you can deal with it is to pretend I never said it.

But for a Homo Servus, where the loss is several centuries and many generations in the past, the situation is different. Changing the personality there isn't liberation, it's murder followed by birth of a new and very different individual.

Well, you've read the book, I haven't. I don't know if you're describing the situation accurately - if it would be possible to convince a Homo Servus that they didn't have to serve their masters except by drastic personality transplants. If you are describing the situation accurately, then I'd agree that it would be wrong to force adult Homo Servus into personality transplants against their will.

And to pull that argument a little further, changing it so that all future children to Homo Servus will be baseline Homo Sapiens, with their larger set of available choices, would be genocide of the Homo Servus subspecies. Can that really be right?

If Homo Servus is an artificial creation that has been so crippled that individuals of the species have had their freedom of choice taken away from them, then I would certainly argue that it's no worse than deliberately discouraging the breeding of artificially-created breeds of dog where purebred puppies are intentionally born crippled.

Re: part 2

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Now that's an astonishing manipulation of what I actually said, and a still more astonishing refusal to meet with what I did say. You're using the classic poor-debater strategy of setting up a straw man, claiming that the straw man represents my opinion, and knocking it down to prove that my opinion is wrong.

Well, what do you know. I thought I used the debate technique of reformulating how I interpreted your statement and asking if that really was what you meant, since it seemed unreasonable. Lucky for us that you knew better, so that neither of us runs the risk of actually understanding what the other party thinks.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

I don't think a Utopia is a place where everybody is happy. The furtherance of happiness/avoidance of pain is very important. But you also have to let everybody live fully in the world. That means engaging with the pain, and exerting your will in the world. I think so anyway. Otherwise the perfect society would be drugged brains in jars.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

What does "live fully in the world" mean, exactly? The brain-in-jar scenario is one that is frequently used when discussing moral philosphy, particularly one of the utilitarianist variants. Usually it's not drugged brains, though, but brains living in perfectly rendered virtual realities. Many people feel that living in an artificial reality perfectly optimised to be maximally rewarding and "good" for a particular individual is somehow wrong, but it is very hard to explain why. It usually boils down to the VR being "not real", but what does that mean when it's not possible for the person living in it to detect any difference between the virtual reality and the "real" reality?

Actually, that touches on the transhumanist answer to the Pauli Paradox. Hm. Must think more about that.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Duh! Fermi Paradox, not Pauli. Can't keep my old physicists straight...

[communicator.livejournal.com]

What does "live fully in the world" mean, exactly?

Good q. I suppose for me it is interacting with the otherness of the universe. I guess that includes sticks and stones (and stars etc.) which are completely other and can not be enslaved to my own projects, and also interacting with other human beings who have projects of their own, which they pursue just as vigorously as I do mine.

That's the paradox. You want things to go your own way (well, I do anyway) but a system which was set up so that things always went your own way, would render the triumph meaningless. It would also render love and co-operation and transcending the ego meaningless.

I suppose I'm Hegelian in as much as I think that the tension of unreconciliable opposites, is what creates the universe.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

You want things to go your own way (well, I do anyway) but a system which was set up so that things always went your own way, would render the triumph meaningless. It would also render love and co-operation and transcending the ego meaningless.

I fully agree that constant success would quickly become meaningless (it's pretty much that same as playing computer games in unbeatable "God Mode", which is mostly boring). The Experience Machine (I think that's the proper English term, I read all this stuff years ago and in Swedish...) scenario is a bit more sophisticated than that. The "false" reality is specified as maximally rewarding, which means that it gives the person in it just enough opposition/tension to grow and feel true accomplishment. It is part of the argument (or thought experiment or whatever you want to call it) that the artificial existence be perfect in every sense, since the purpose of it is to try to figure out why we tend to feel that it is inferior to real life in spite of being better in every way.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

The Experience Machine (I think that's the proper English term, I read all this stuff years ago and in Swedish...)

Yeah, that's the right phrase. Nozick's thought experiment. There's a whole dialogue to be had about experience machines and sexbots, but I'll draw a veil over that...

FWIW I think that if an experience machine was maximally rewarding it would be indistinguishable from real life. In effect it would be real life. That's because it would engage you with an 'other' as challenging as the entire universe. If it engaged you with anything more limited (for example the imagination of an author or a team of games programmers)then it would be inferior.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

That's my feeling too. It sure wasn't the answer our lecturer wanted, though. We ended up having quite the shouting match... He wasn't a very good lecturer, and the faculty kicked him out after his first semester at LiU.

[archbishopm.livejournal.com]

Have you watched season 4 of Angel yet?

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

Nope. Haven't even watched season three, in spite of having bought it on DVD already.

[kittydragon.livejournal.com]

I happened to notice that you have me on your friends list... since I don't see any of my friends there, I wonder where you found me? Ah well. From what I've read so far I think I'd like you as a friend anyway.

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

You probably got in when I added just about everyone on LJ who admits to living in Sweden and being interested in wicca.