Huh. My first thought was simply to argue that a work of fiction is rarely improved by attempting to make it meet certain moral standards; The Kreutzer Sonata isn’t any less great for espousing despicable beliefs, and plenty of terrible novels inspire laudable ideas of human society. So, if artistic quality and moral quality are unrelated, better that an author write what comes from their heart rather than attempt to teach what they haven’t yet interiorised themselves, and risk coming off as insincere or overzealous.
However, MoR is ostensibly meant to be an educational and inspirational story as much as an entertaining one, so in that particular light the suggestion carries more weight. Even so, it wasn’t Eliezer’s decision that the fated hero be male and the well-meaning-but-over-her-head companion be female. Perhaps more importantly, had Ron kept his canon role instead of being replaced by Draco, there would have been a second, male WMBOHH companion, Hermione’s frustration would not have been framed in terms of perceived sexism in the first place, and there probably would not have been a S.P.H.E.W..
However, MoR is ostensibly meant to be an educational and inspirational story as much as an entertaining one, so in that particular light the suggestion carries more weight. Even so, it wasn’t Eliezer’s decision that the fated hero be male and the well-meaning-but-over-her-head companion be female. Perhaps more importantly, had Ron kept his canon role instead of being replaced by Draco, there would have been a second, male WMBOHH companion, Hermione’s frustration would not have been framed in terms of perceived sexism in the first place, and there probably would not have been a S.P.H.E.W..
I mostly agree with this. But with an extremely lengthy qualifier:
My take, as a storyteller, is that your collective work should meet your moral standards. (I mean, they’re YOUR standards, your work should be meeting them, whatever they are). That doesn’t mean jamming morals down people’s throat, it doesn’t mean making sure each work conveys every single positive thing you believe in. But I think it does mean that you should consider what impact your story might have on the people who read it, and given the chance, you should try to make that impact positive.
Some of my favorite stories are ones where the main character’s judgment is obviously questionable. The Eisenhorn trilogy (from Warhammer 40k) is set in a world whose morality is completely orthogonal to mine. There is so much wrong with the Imperium of Man I don’t know where to begin. (Basically imagine a medieval catholic church managing an entire galaxy). But the main character is not a 20th-century American reacting to his crazy world, he is a product of that crazy world. He does things I’d consider completely immoral in 20th century America, but I certainly wouldn’t blame him for given his upbringing. In the face of a bizarre world, he makes choices, whose rightness and wrongness correspond to my notions in about the same way that pebble-sorters’ choices would.
And by the end of the story, he might or might not have become incredibly deluded, so anything he ‘learned’ should not be taken as an Aesop.
Still, it’s a story that deals DIRECTLY with morality, by completely ignoring what is actually right and focusing on the way humans make decisions in response to their environment. My reaction to the characters is an interesting sort of Rorschach test. I think a SF-loving conservative christian who read it would come away with completely different reactions to many key choices, but still enjoy it, feel like her “political/moral” neurons had been satisfyingly tickled, and not feel like the author was presenting an Argument To Attack/Agree-with.
This all makes it “moral,” in my opinion.
So does the fact that it features a variety of characters of various skin colors, genders, and levels of disability. Most of them are powerful, flawed, and interesting. None of them draw attention to their non-white-male-able-bodied-status as a political thing you should care about. But I believe this has a (subtle) effect on people of helping to normalizing a wider spectrum of humanity (including, I should note, the idea of living for hundreds of years thanks to advanced science). Multiplied over multiple authors who bother to do this, and potentially millions of readers, I think this adds up to positive effect worth noting. (I don’t know whether the author intentionally did this or not. I didn’t even think about the disability angle until just now).
On an unrelated note, it’s also a really fun, well crafted adventure story about a guy who hunts demons across the galaxy.
Moral and artistic value are mostly unrelated to each other. In general, it’s more important to be a fun story to read than to be a moral story, because no one will read a moral story that isn’t fun. But there is no reason you can’t try for both. Most fun-but-not-moral stories could probably be improved morally in some way without harming the work.
It might require some skill on the author’s part, and practicing to get better at it (without hamfisted metaphors) will probably result in a few bad stories while they get better. I think that’s okay.
MoR happens to be a moral story in almost the opposite way that the Eisenhorn trilogy is. (That’s fine—sometimes you want your message proudly displayed). The SPHEW section was a bit where I think Eliezer was stretching a bit, and it shows, but I’m confident there will be a net-benefit to Eliezer and the world at large due to that growth.
What’s wrong with completely shutting up about morals? Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo is also about an alien crapsack world where the only character who disagrees with common morals is even worse than everyone else, and it’s wonderful. Except the parts where the book cuts itself off during a description of mass murder, torture, human sacrifice, or male-male couples, to remind the reader that they are wrong and abnormal. Yes, Gus, that’s nice, but will you be quiet and let the grown-ups read?
I guess you could make the argument that it teaches you that the typical mind fallacy is false, or to question your own society, or something, but that looks dubious. It’s just a pretty thing, and it doesn’t have to meet moral standards any more than gastronomic ones.
You’re still conflate “be a moral work” with “shove morals down your throat in a hamfisted way” which is exactly what I was saying you DIDN’T have to do. If Salammbo does this in a clumsy way, well, then yeah, maybe that book could be written better. (If it says male-male coupling is bad, I disagree with it on a moral level anyway, although that’s different than disagreeing about how that morality was dealt with).
When I say “works should be moral” I mean that, all else being equal, I prefer art works to produce a positive effect on the world. Sometimes by directly inspiring people, sometimes by subtly shaping them.
Even so, it wasn’t Eliezer’s decision that the fated hero be male and the well-meaning-but-over-her-head companion be female.
Actually, insofar as he decided not to gender-flip everybody or change the prediction, he did decide to make the fated hero male and the companion female.
Not that I think he should have done otherwise, all things considered, but this kind of argument annoys me in general.
Huh. My first thought was simply to argue that a work of fiction is rarely improved by attempting to make it meet certain moral standards; The Kreutzer Sonata isn’t any less great for espousing despicable beliefs, and plenty of terrible novels inspire laudable ideas of human society. So, if artistic quality and moral quality are unrelated, better that an author write what comes from their heart rather than attempt to teach what they haven’t yet interiorised themselves, and risk coming off as insincere or overzealous.
However, MoR is ostensibly meant to be an educational and inspirational story as much as an entertaining one, so in that particular light the suggestion carries more weight. Even so, it wasn’t Eliezer’s decision that the fated hero be male and the well-meaning-but-over-her-head companion be female. Perhaps more importantly, had Ron kept his canon role instead of being replaced by Draco, there would have been a second, male WMBOHH companion, Hermione’s frustration would not have been framed in terms of perceived sexism in the first place, and there probably would not have been a S.P.H.E.W..
I mostly agree with this. But with an extremely lengthy qualifier:
My take, as a storyteller, is that your collective work should meet your moral standards. (I mean, they’re YOUR standards, your work should be meeting them, whatever they are). That doesn’t mean jamming morals down people’s throat, it doesn’t mean making sure each work conveys every single positive thing you believe in. But I think it does mean that you should consider what impact your story might have on the people who read it, and given the chance, you should try to make that impact positive.
Some of my favorite stories are ones where the main character’s judgment is obviously questionable. The Eisenhorn trilogy (from Warhammer 40k) is set in a world whose morality is completely orthogonal to mine. There is so much wrong with the Imperium of Man I don’t know where to begin. (Basically imagine a medieval catholic church managing an entire galaxy). But the main character is not a 20th-century American reacting to his crazy world, he is a product of that crazy world. He does things I’d consider completely immoral in 20th century America, but I certainly wouldn’t blame him for given his upbringing. In the face of a bizarre world, he makes choices, whose rightness and wrongness correspond to my notions in about the same way that pebble-sorters’ choices would.
And by the end of the story, he might or might not have become incredibly deluded, so anything he ‘learned’ should not be taken as an Aesop.
Still, it’s a story that deals DIRECTLY with morality, by completely ignoring what is actually right and focusing on the way humans make decisions in response to their environment. My reaction to the characters is an interesting sort of Rorschach test. I think a SF-loving conservative christian who read it would come away with completely different reactions to many key choices, but still enjoy it, feel like her “political/moral” neurons had been satisfyingly tickled, and not feel like the author was presenting an Argument To Attack/Agree-with.
This all makes it “moral,” in my opinion.
So does the fact that it features a variety of characters of various skin colors, genders, and levels of disability. Most of them are powerful, flawed, and interesting. None of them draw attention to their non-white-male-able-bodied-status as a political thing you should care about. But I believe this has a (subtle) effect on people of helping to normalizing a wider spectrum of humanity (including, I should note, the idea of living for hundreds of years thanks to advanced science). Multiplied over multiple authors who bother to do this, and potentially millions of readers, I think this adds up to positive effect worth noting. (I don’t know whether the author intentionally did this or not. I didn’t even think about the disability angle until just now).
On an unrelated note, it’s also a really fun, well crafted adventure story about a guy who hunts demons across the galaxy.
Moral and artistic value are mostly unrelated to each other. In general, it’s more important to be a fun story to read than to be a moral story, because no one will read a moral story that isn’t fun. But there is no reason you can’t try for both. Most fun-but-not-moral stories could probably be improved morally in some way without harming the work.
It might require some skill on the author’s part, and practicing to get better at it (without hamfisted metaphors) will probably result in a few bad stories while they get better. I think that’s okay.
MoR happens to be a moral story in almost the opposite way that the Eisenhorn trilogy is. (That’s fine—sometimes you want your message proudly displayed). The SPHEW section was a bit where I think Eliezer was stretching a bit, and it shows, but I’m confident there will be a net-benefit to Eliezer and the world at large due to that growth.
What’s wrong with completely shutting up about morals? Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbo is also about an alien crapsack world where the only character who disagrees with common morals is even worse than everyone else, and it’s wonderful. Except the parts where the book cuts itself off during a description of mass murder, torture, human sacrifice, or male-male couples, to remind the reader that they are wrong and abnormal. Yes, Gus, that’s nice, but will you be quiet and let the grown-ups read?
I guess you could make the argument that it teaches you that the typical mind fallacy is false, or to question your own society, or something, but that looks dubious. It’s just a pretty thing, and it doesn’t have to meet moral standards any more than gastronomic ones.
You’re still conflate “be a moral work” with “shove morals down your throat in a hamfisted way” which is exactly what I was saying you DIDN’T have to do. If Salammbo does this in a clumsy way, well, then yeah, maybe that book could be written better. (If it says male-male coupling is bad, I disagree with it on a moral level anyway, although that’s different than disagreeing about how that morality was dealt with).
When I say “works should be moral” I mean that, all else being equal, I prefer art works to produce a positive effect on the world. Sometimes by directly inspiring people, sometimes by subtly shaping them.
Actually, insofar as he decided not to gender-flip everybody or change the prediction, he did decide to make the fated hero male and the companion female.
Not that I think he should have done otherwise, all things considered, but this kind of argument annoys me in general.