Game of Thrones and Philosophy (10 page)

“My sweet sister Cersei lusts for power with every waking breath.”
17
(Tyrion to Catelyn)

“She
forbade
him to fight, in front of his brother, his knights, and half the court. Tell me truly, do you know any surer way to force King Robert into the melee?”
18
(Varys to Eddard, insinuating that Cersei might have already planned the king’s death on an earlier occasion.)

“Cersei had the babes killed, and sold the mother to a passing slaver. Too much an affront to Lannister pride, that close to home.”
19
(Littlefinger to Eddard)

In these statements, two character traits are attributed to Cersei by Catelyn and Tyrion: pride and lust for power, respectively. Moreover, she is said to have plotted against her husband and arranged for the death of infants. Of course, we know as readers that it is risky to trust Varys and Littlefinger in their statements about Cersei, because they have strong interests of their own and thus want Eddard to believe certain “facts.” Like Eddard, we readers get a picture of Cersei shaped by various reports. We judge Cersei not only on the basis of her words and actions but also, and sometimes even primarily or exclusively, on the basis of accounts by third parties. For example, we learn from a third-party report that Cersei might have commissioned Jon Arryn’s death. In reading
A Storm of Swords
, however, we discover that this is not true.
20
So, obviously some important reports about her motives and actions are unreliable, which makes a well-justified moral judgment very difficult.

“How Are You Any Different from Robert, or Me, or Jaime?”
21

Indeed, the
most reliable
ways of confirming our moral judgments about other people involve observing their actions directly, and being informed by trustworthy third-party agents. This may be another problem for the applicability of virtue ethics, as we may not be able to attribute virtues to people by simply observing the actions they perform. Not even a sequence of morally good actions enables us to infer that the agent possesses a certain virtue. For example, if a merchant acts honestly all the time just because this is the most profitable strategy, he still would not have the virtue of honesty. Virtuous people do good actions, but sometimes nonvirtuous people do as well. However, if someone performs morally bad actions most of the time, that would provide a good reason to assume that she is not a virtuous person.

If it is true that Cersei tends to get rid of people “inconvenient” to her plans by having them killed, then she is obviously not a virtuous person. But we always have to take a closer look at the information on which we base our moral judgments. If the informants are not that trustworthy, or if the chain of communication is very long, then the reliability of information may suffer, and, therefore, our judgments might not be well confirmed. Both factors may influence our moral judgments of Cersei. For reasons already mentioned, many informants may either tell outright lies or they may present only part of the truth. Further, the chain of communication may be very long, involving mere speculations from people with “strong interests.” Imagine, for example, one of Varys’s “little birds” conveying some vital information to his master. Neither is aware that one of Littlefinger’s eavesdroppers is spying on them and in turn is reporting all this to Lord Baelish—who eventually reveals a “digested” version of the message to Lord Stark. Obviously, the message Stark receives may not be reliable.

Reasoning may be unreliable, too, as we are not logically infallible. That means we sometimes draw false conclusions by faulty reasoning—conclusions that are not backed up by our previous (maybe even true) assumptions. Additionally, our reasoning may involve false assumptions leading to false conclusions. We find instances of both types of unreliable reasoning in
A Game of Thrones
. Eddard draws the false conclusion that he will survive by confessing his alleged treason. He clearly underestimated Joffrey’s ruthlessness and independence. When Petyr Baelish tells Catelyn Stark that it is Tyrion Lannister’s dagger that was used in the attempted murder of her son Bran (false assumption), she concludes that it was Tyrion who hired the assassin. This leads to Catelyn arresting Tyrion and bringing him to the Eyrie (thus initiating a whole series of important events).

Does all this mean that Cersei is a
good
person after all? Well, no! It just means that a moral judgment about Cersei is not as easily established as it looks at first sight. Eddard, being a POV character, is easily judged as being the good and virtuous person who is, of course, not perfect, but tries to be. George R. R. Martin provides the information needed for a well-justified moral judgment about Eddard’s character. In the case of Cersei, we lack this kind of information, just as we do in our moral judgments in real life.

Even though intentions are highly relevant to our moral (as well as legal) judgments, we still have to base our judgments on observations and reports. The attributions of beliefs and intentions are educated guesses, based on our personal experience with the agents and on third-party accounts about them.

Martin’s novels keep us guessing about the real intentions of Cersei, though they give us direct access to the intentions of POV characters like Eddard. In real life, though, we have direct access to the intentions of only one person, ourselves. Everyone else’s intentions involve guesswork based on observations and reports.
22
So the characters in A Song of Ice and Fire can be puzzling, but characters in real life can be even more puzzling.

NOTES

1
. George R. R. Martin,
A Game of Thrones
(New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), p. 511. This novel was originally published in 1996.

2
. Ibid., p. 156.

3
. Ibid., p. 310.

4
. Ibid., p. 634.

5
. For this thesis, see Rosalind Hurtshouse, “Virtue Ethics,” in
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
, ed. Edward N. Zalta,
plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/ethics-virtue/
; Philippa Foot,
Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1978). In Western philosophy, virtue ethics goes all the way back to Aristotle (384–322 BCE). His
Nicomachean Ethics
(Aristotle,
The Nicomachean Ethics
[Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998]) is widely considered to have laid the foundations of this field. In the aftermath of the Age of Enlightenment, virtue ethics was largely neglected. It was only in the 1950s that it had its big comeback, with a paper by G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” in
Philosophy
33 (1958), pp. 1–19. In the last fifty-odd years, a few classic papers have been published; some of them have been reprinted in Roger Crisp and Michael Slote, eds.,
Virtue Ethics
(Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997); Stephen Darwall, ed.,
Virtue Ethics
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003).

6
. Hurtshouse, “Virtue Ethics,” section 2.

7
. For a more rigorous account of this principle, see Rosalind Hurtshouse, “Virtue Theory and Abortion,” in
Philosophy and Public Affairs
20 (1991), pp. 223–246. For some problems with this thesis, see Robert B. Louden, “On Some Vices of Virtue Ethics,” in
American Philosophical Quarterly
21 (1984), pp. 227–236.

8
. Martin,
A Game of Thrones
, pp. 636–637.

9
. Hurtshouse, “Virtue Ethics,” section 2.

10
. Martin,
A Game of Thrones
, p. 307.

11
. Ibid., p. 488.

12
. Among the most prominent proponents of consequentialism (in its most common form, utilitarianism) are Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873). See, for example, Jeremy Bentham,
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
(Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2009) (originally published in 1789); John Stuart Mill,
Utilitarianism
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998) (originally published in 1861). For further reading, see Stephen Darwall, ed.,
Consequentialism
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003).

13
. For the culture dependency of virtues, see Martha Nussbaum, “Non-relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach,” in
Midwest Studies in Philosophy Vol. 13, Ethical Theory: Character and Virtue
, Peter A. French, Theodore Uehling, Jr., and Howard Wettstein, eds. (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1988), pp. 32–53.

14
. Martin,
A Game of Thrones
, p. 202.

15
. Ibid., pp. 504–505.

16
. Ibid., p. 27.

17
. Ibid., p. 368.

18
. Ibid., p. 320.

19
. Ibid., p. 381.

20
. George R. R. Martin,
A Storm of Swords
(New York: Bantam Dell, 2005). This novel was originally published in 2000.

21
. Martin,
A Game of Thrones
, p. 487.

22
. This part of our chapter has to do with an old problem in philosophy, the problem of
evidence
. See Thomas Kelly, “Evidence,” in
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
, ed. Edward N. Zalta,
plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/evidence/
, for further reading and relevant references.

Chapter 8

IT WOULD BE A MERCY: CHOOSING LIFE OR DEATH IN WESTEROS AND BEYOND THE NARROW SEA

Matthew Tedesco

On each side of the Narrow Sea, a character pivotal to events in
A Game of Thrones
faces a medical crisis. At Winterfell, young Bran Stark is climbing the walls of the great castle when he peers through a high window and witnesses the Lannister twins Jaime and Cersei engaged in a secret act of incest. To protect this secret, Jaime shoves Bran from the window, leaving Bran crippled, comatose, and fighting for his life. Later in the same book, on the vast grasslands of the Dothraki Sea, the mighty and undefeated Khal Drogo takes a wound in battle that initially seems inconsequential, but soon festers. Drogo rapidly weakens and falls from his horse. Like Bran Stark, his life sits precariously on the edge of an arakh. Befitting genuine medical crises, both Bran and Drogo are placed in the care of people with expertise in treating the injured and sick. Bran is treated by Maester Luwin, a Citadel-trained learned man long in the service of House Stark. In contrast, Drogo’s wife Daenerys Targaryen seeks out the more controversial dark magic of the maegi Mirri Maz Duur in order to save her beloved sun and stars.

The best works of fantasy use places, persons, and powers sprung from the imagination in order to connect with the parts of us and our lives that are most real. These two medical crises in
A Game of Thrones
are gripping and philosophically interesting, not for the medical details themselves, but rather for the hard moral issues that surround the decisions made both during and after the treatment of both Bran and Drogo. These issues are of special interest to philosophers working in biomedical ethics—the area of philosophy that concerns moral issues and problems surrounding biological research, medical research, and the practice of medicine. These are no esoteric, armchair exercises. Rather, they are the issues we face when we are forced to make the most profound and difficult choices for ourselves, our families, and our loved ones. At the core of biomedical ethics are matters of life and death, of mortality and personhood, of the choices we may make, and the choices we must not. The medical crises of Bran and Drogo are windows into some of these important philosophical matters.

“Give Me a Good Clean Death”
1

“It would be a mercy.”
2

—
Jaime

Jaime Lannister utters these words to his brother Tyrion as Bran lies in his coma. Ever the knight and most at home with a sword in his hands, Jaime opines that it would be better to end the boy’s life cleanly and quickly than allow him to go on living as a “cripple” and a “grotesque.” As readers, we are privy to Jaime’s private motives: his crime against Bran has not been discovered, nor has his incestuous relationship with his sister that has spawned three children, including Prince Joffrey. Presumably Jaime would prefer to keep it that way, so Bran’s death would be a very convenient thing.

We as readers may be outraged by more than Jaime’s private agenda here. Even if someone else, someone entirely disinterested in Bran’s life or death, had made the comment, we would still reject the suggestion that a quick death for Bran would be a mercy. Should Bran awaken, he will have a serious handicap, as he will no longer have the use of his legs. But this would not prohibit Bran from leading a good life, filled with interesting pursuits and meaningful relationships, even if some of those pursuits (like his love of climbing) have now been foreclosed. In light of this, we as readers believe it would certainly
not
be a mercy to end Bran’s life. On the contrary, it would be a seriously immoral thing to do to him.

Even if he is wrong (and with sinister motives to boot) regarding Bran, Jaime’s suggestion is worth considering more generally. It is certainly true that the concept of mercy—understood as acting with compassion and care for someone else’s well-being—is important when we are faced with life-and-death decisions, and in the end it may be morally decisive. On the grounds of appealing to mercy, there certainly seem to be dire medical decisions where Jaime’s reasoning here—the choice of death—is morally defensible. In the late stages of a terminal illness, with death certain and every conscious moment filled with unmanageable pain, many choose to end whatever course of treatment is prolonging life in order to hasten death. We choose this course of action for ourselves, we choose it for our loved ones, and in the most tragic of situations, we choose it on behalf of our newborn children when their afflictions are hopeless. In all of these cases, our concern is for the well-being of the seriously ill person, and it is this concern for well-being that is at the heart of mercy.

Jaime Lannister’s notion of mercy, however, is a bit different. When Jaime suggests that Bran’s father “end his torment,” and when he speaks of a preference for “a good clean death” over life as a cripple, he is probably not imagining Lord Eddard Stark asking Maester Luwin to stop caring for Bran so that his son may die gradually. Jaime is instead recommending something much quicker—a decisive stroke of Valyrian steel, delivered by House Stark’s greatsword Ice, to bring an immediate end to Bran’s life. This distinction among different acts of mercy maps closely onto an important conceptual distinction in biomedical ethics: the distinction between passive and active euthanasia. When needed life-sustaining treatment is withdrawn from a terminally ill patient, this constitutes passive euthanasia. In virtually every case we can imagine, passive euthanasia is a slower act of mercy than actively providing the patient with “a good clean death” by taking some definite action to end the patient’s life (such as, for example, administering a lethal dose of a drug). When I remove some needed life-sustaining intervention from you—such as your ventilator or feeding tube—your death will occur only when you suffocate or starve to death. From the standpoint of mercy, once the decision has been made that death is preferable to life, avoiding the suffering that accompanies a slow, painful death certainly seems like the merciful thing to do. In this respect, perhaps we ought to follow Jaime’s lead, and allow terminally ill patients to choose active euthanasia over passive euthanasia. This is, after all, the choice we make for our pets when they are deathly ill and we seek the most humane, merciful end.

Yet, while passive euthanasia is widely practiced and widely considered to be a morally permissible (and often morally praiseworthy) act, active euthanasia is far more controversial. The American Medical Association has consistently drawn a sharp distinction between the two practices. Its policy statement “Decisions Near the End of Life,”
3
initially adopted in 1991, affirms this distinction, explicitly permitting the withdrawal and withholding of life-sustaining treatment in respecting the autonomous choices of patients, while forbidding both active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. This prohibition is sometimes justified on the grounds that there is an important moral distinction between killing and letting die. The idea is that while there can be cases where it is permissible to let someone die, killing is a morally different category.

Many philosophers have challenged this alleged moral distinction between killing and letting die. In his paper “Active and Passive Euthanasia,” James Rachels (1941–2003) argues, like Jaime Lannister, that active euthanasia can be a merciful choice, and forbidding active euthanasia while permitting passive euthanasia is endorsing the course of action that causes more suffering once the choice of death has already been made.
4
And to those who recoil at the notion of allowing killing, Rachels argues that killing and letting die are in themselves morally equivalent acts. We fail to see this because killing is so often accompanied by other morally troubling factors (such as bad intentions, or a viciousness of character). But when we hold all of those other factors fixed, we find no moral distinction between killing and letting die; both are actions subject to moral evaluation given the details of the particular circumstances in question. Other contemporary philosophers, such as Dan Brock, have argued that the mistake is found in categorizing withdrawing medical treatment as merely letting die.
5
According to Brock, to kill is to intentionally cause death, however it may occur. Because passive euthanasia is intentional, and because it causes death, it is an act of killing, no more or no less than active euthanasia.

“You Love Your Children, Do You Not?”
6

Beyond this controversial distinction between active and passive euthanasia, other facts surrounding Bran’s medical crisis also highlight important issues for biomedical ethicists. One complicating feature of Bran’s crisis is that he is, as we meet him in the first book, just seven years old. Imagine for a moment that Bran’s medical condition were very different: instead of being crippled from a fall, imagine instead that Bran is afflicted with an aggressive metastatic cancer. His death is certain and soon, but some recurring treatment is prolonging his pain-filled life. When an adult is in such a state and chooses to terminate treatment, the moral justification for affirming that wish is respect for the patient’s autonomy. Young children, though, are almost certainly not autonomous, or at least are not fully autonomous if we imagine autonomy as something that is attained gradually over time. So if respect for autonomy is paramount in justifying passive euthanasia, but children lack the capacity for autonomy, it might seem like the option of passive euthanasia is foreclosed for children.

This, though, is not the case. On the contrary, the choice of passive euthanasia is sometimes made on behalf of children by their parents. On reflection, this is not very surprising. After all, parents choose for their children in important matters, including medical decisions, all the time. Parents generally are charged with shepherding their children into adulthood, and prior to their children being regarded as autonomous decision makers, parents are responsible for safeguarding the well-being of their children. When children cannot decide for themselves, parents are empowered to decide for them, under the presumption that the decision is made with only the child’s well-being in mind. In the tragic cases of deciding on death for their children, however, some of those choices are bound to be controversial. Consider the following two real-world cases of parents choosing death for their children:

It’s not surprising that many have been upset by these cases. In all three cases—Bran Stark, John Pearson, and the Johns Hopkins case—a child is afflicted with a serious handicap, where the handicap forecloses a range of possibilities in life and makes a range of other actions and choices more difficult. But unlike, for example, the most severe forms of spina bifida, the handicaps in question are not so brutal and all-encompassing that they make life not worth living. There are handicaps that are so severe that they make any sort of decent life simply impossible; crippled legs and Down’s Syndrome do not fall into that category.

Yet something else is true about these handicaps, something morally important that makes these kinds of life-and-death decisions far more controversial. In all three cases, the handicap in question places a significant burden on those charged with the care of the child, ordinarily the child’s parents. (Bran’s situation is a little bit more complicated.) Generally speaking, the act of burdening someone is not morally irrelevant, particularly when the burden is not desired. If I decorate my yard in a way that causes you to regularly have to clear debris from your yard, I have burdened you, and this is a morally important fact. You have a legitimate complaint against me, and if I fail to help relieve that burden, I have wronged you. Bran now lacks the use of his legs, and this imposes a burden on others, a burden vividly illustrated by the way in which he is borne on Hodor’s back in a kind of saddle devised by Maester Luwin. (The fact that a mentally handicapped servant is conscripted in order to be a kind of human beast of burden raises a range of interesting moral questions too!) While children with Down’s Syndrome can certainly live a good long life, there is no question that caring for such a child is difficult, and so a burden on the child’s parents.

The mere fact that these handicaps impose special burdens is not itself controversial, nor is the general fact that burdens matter morally. What
is
controversial, however, is the question of whether or not this fact of burdensomeness, particularly in the case of newborn children with serious handicaps, can ever legitimately be factored into the life-and-death decisions that parents make regarding their children. Bran has the good fortune of being born into a powerful family, descendants of the Kings of the North prior to the rise of the Targaryens. But we are reminded at various points in A Song of Ice and Fire that the game of thrones played by the powerful is a remote consideration for the average citizens of Westeros, who may live their entire lives without ever setting foot in a great city or laying eyes on royalty. What if Bran had been born into such a family? What if there were no maester to rig a riding device, no simple servant descended from giants for Bran to ride? What if the burden of his ruined legs on his parents was very high? Would the choice of “a good clean death” be morally permissible, even if it would, strictly speaking,
not
be a mercy?