I’m not per se disagreeing with your sentiment about Odysseus, but it would be helpful if you could model it more explicitly than “lies like he tells are okay”. I can see why SPOILERS not telling Polyphemus your real name is potentially acceptable dishonesty, but Kant would disagree, I guess.
The problem with setting a fictional hero as your standard for any component of morality is that the omniscient narrator will often have your back in edge cases. The best example to me is Ender’s Game, SPOILERS in which he kills two people without intending to, but also intends to attack them in potentially deadly ways and does so; yet in the next chapter, the literal adults in the literal next room are there to tell the audience, “If Ender hadn’t killed Bonzo, Bonzo would have killed him, and we then wouldn’t win the war, so it’s fine.” To me, their belief is maybe true but definitely not justified on the evidence. Bullies don’t kill people all the time. Card is heavily motivated to protect Ender’s morality for various reasons and builds the story around him for that particular goal.
Recall how he tricked Achilles into dropping his woman disguise (by sounding a war trumpet outside). That’s a lie, but I can’t seem to find anything wrong with it. It’s not an edge case and doesn’t need authorial fiat—many people have done similar tricks in reality, like the Sokal hoax.
Totally fair point. I agree that not all fictional heroes’ possibly justifiable lies are subject to my “author writes the story to protect reader perception of hero” concept. Maybe narrow my comment to “When using a fictional character’s lies as a model for when lying is acceptable, one should be alert for situations where the author has built the fictional world in such a way that Lie X is maybe justifiable in the fictional world but would not be in nearby counterfactual worlds.”
I’m not per se disagreeing with your sentiment about Odysseus, but it would be helpful if you could model it more explicitly than “lies like he tells are okay”. I can see why SPOILERS not telling Polyphemus your real name is potentially acceptable dishonesty, but Kant would disagree, I guess.
The problem with setting a fictional hero as your standard for any component of morality is that the omniscient narrator will often have your back in edge cases. The best example to me is Ender’s Game, SPOILERS in which he kills two people without intending to, but also intends to attack them in potentially deadly ways and does so; yet in the next chapter, the literal adults in the literal next room are there to tell the audience, “If Ender hadn’t killed Bonzo, Bonzo would have killed him, and we then wouldn’t win the war, so it’s fine.” To me, their belief is maybe true but definitely not justified on the evidence. Bullies don’t kill people all the time. Card is heavily motivated to protect Ender’s morality for various reasons and builds the story around him for that particular goal.
Recall how he tricked Achilles into dropping his woman disguise (by sounding a war trumpet outside). That’s a lie, but I can’t seem to find anything wrong with it. It’s not an edge case and doesn’t need authorial fiat—many people have done similar tricks in reality, like the Sokal hoax.
Totally fair point. I agree that not all fictional heroes’ possibly justifiable lies are subject to my “author writes the story to protect reader perception of hero” concept. Maybe narrow my comment to “When using a fictional character’s lies as a model for when lying is acceptable, one should be alert for situations where the author has built the fictional world in such a way that Lie X is maybe justifiable in the fictional world but would not be in nearby counterfactual worlds.”