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

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

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