Game of Thrones and Philosophy

by Jacoby, Henry, Irwin, William

  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?

  The standard view regarding decisions made by parents on behalf of their children is that the only morally relevant consideration is the welfare of the child; all other considerations, including how burdened the parents may be by the child’s condition, must be put aside. But in practice, depending on the details of the particular family situation into which the child is born, the burden may seem a difficult thing to simply disregard. Beginning with Duff and Campbell’s “Moral and Ethical Dilemmas in the Special-Care Nursery” in 1973, some have argued that given the great variability in prognoses, the capacity of families to manage the care of handicapped children, and the availability of social support, we ought to acknowledge the moral importance of burdensomeness and allow it to factor into life-and-death decisions made by parents for their children.9 Critics of this view worry that there is a kind of slippery slope created by legitimizing this consideration. Once we allow children to be euthanized for being burdens on their parents, it becomes hard to avoid the fact that, in a certain sense, all children are burdens, and distinguishing among burdens is a perilous business.

  “When Will He Be as He Was?”10

  Throughout this discussion of the various moral issues surrounding Bran’s medical crisis, it has remained the case that his handicap, though serious, does not rise to the level of justifying a mercy killing. As readers, we are outraged by Jaime Lannister’s suggestion, and it serves to reinforce the early impression we have of the villainy of the Kingslayer. Later in A Game of Thrones, we witness a mercy killing, carried out by Daenerys Stormborn, the soon-to-be the Unburnt, Mother of Dragons, against her husband, Khal Drogo. Yet as readers, this act does not lead us to condemn Dany. If anything, we admire her for making the hard choice, and we accept it as a legitimate (and perhaps the morally best) course of action. Setting her act against the proposed mercy killing of Bran Stark may help us sort out our moral intuitions regarding hard life-and-death decisions, but it will also raise a new set of tricky moral issues for us to confront.

  Here’s what we know of Khal Drogo’s medical crisis: The once-fearsome Khal, whose hair has never been cut because he’s undefeated in battle, has taken a wound that has festered. The seriousness of his condition is illustrated in his fall from his horse, because a khal who cannot ride cannot lead. As he edges toward death, his wife, Dany, desperately seeks the help of the maegi Mirri Maz Duur over the warnings of Khal Drogo’s bloodriders. The maegi saves Drogo, but her dark magic costs Dany the life of her unborn son, Rhaego, the prophesied “Stallion Who Mounts the World.” Furthermore, the Drogo that survives Dany’s bargain with the maegi is utterly diminished. He is entirely uncommunicative, and his once-piercing stare is now blank. Yet we are left with this provocative observation from Ser Jorah Mormont as Drogo lies vacantly in the sun under buzzing bloodflies: “He seems to like the warmth.”11 Even in his severely compromised state, Drogo can seemingly still experience the pleasure of the sun, and he is in no apparent pain. Given the presumed permanence of Drogo’s condition, Dany kills him, smothering him with a cushion.

  Most readers are not horrified by Dany’s act, or even bothered by it in the slightest. Yet, at first glance, she has just engaged in the premeditated killing of a defenseless human being. This sounds a lot like the worst sort of murder, and we regard murder as among the worst of crimes. So how does Dany remain a hero of our story? Well, Drogo’s condition is not unlike a range of serious cases—from traumatic brain injuries to degenerative conditions that radically impair cognitive functioning—where someone is left utterly diminished from the person they once were. So our moral evaluation of Dany’s mercy killing is bound up with much more than just this story.

  One important feature of Drogo’s crisis becomes clear when compared with that of Bran Stark’s. When we are outraged by Jaime Lannister’s suggestion that Ned Stark kill his son out of mercy, at least a part of our outrage has to do with the life that we expect Bran to be able to lead once he recovers. No, he will never again climb the walls of Winterfell or run across its grounds. But there is still every reason to believe that he will engage in meaningful relationships, pursue sophisticated projects, and generally enjoy the range of goods that characterize lives that are, one might say, distinctively human. But this phrase is deceptive, for there are a range of beings who remain in all respects biologically human, yet can never again (and perhaps never could in the first place) enjoy those pursuits in the way that beings like you and I can.

  “This Is Not Life”12

  Consider the distinction between being a human and being a person. The former is a biological category, describing the biological makeup of a thing; the latter is a moral category, describing what kind of moral standing a thing has. In virtually all cases, those two categories overlap, but not always. We can, for instance, imagine beings who are not biologically human, but who are plausibly enough persons, given their cognitive sophistication and ability to engage in the kinds of projects and life plans that we recognize as distinctive in ourselves. Perhaps the race of giants beyond the Wall or the legendary Children of the Forest fall into this category. And following this reasoning one step further, we might imagine beings who are biologically human but not persons, unable to fulfill the criteria (whatever they are) for personhood. Drogo is drawn to the sun, but so are plants, reptiles, and a range of other nonpersons. If there is nothing more to say about the life he can lead, then perhaps he is not a person any longer, and Dany’s mercy killing is not an act of murder. Murder is the premeditated killing of an innocent person, and there is a great moral difference between intentionally killing my neighbor and intentionally killing the mosquito that has landed on my arm. Whatever else is true about my neighbor and the mosquito, one is a person, the other is not, and this distinction is of paramount moral importance.

  The question of what it is to be a person has been pursued, perhaps most deeply, in the literature on abortion. Insofar as fetuses are, without question, biologically human, some philosophers have defended the moral permissibility of abortion by attempting to show that fetuses are not persons, and so the killing of a fetus fails to take on the moral importance of the killing of a person. Michael Tooley, for example, identifies self-consciousness—having a conception of oneself as a continuing subject of experiences—as the fundamental criterion of personhood.13 Similarly, Mary Anne Warren identifies a list of five criteria (consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, the capacity to communicate, and the presence of self-concepts), and argues that some unspecified number of these amounts to personhood. Importantly, whatever entity lacks all five is not a person.14 Critics of the moral permissibility of abortion have responded with different accounts of our moral specialness. Don Marquis, for example, has argued that the serious wrongness of killing beings like you, me, and fetuses has to do with the way it deprives something of a “Future like ours,” a deliberately vague concept meant to broadly capture the range of projects, pursuits, and
relationships that make our lives distinctive.15

  Without presently taking a stand on the moral status of abortion, it is interesting to note that on all of these accounts, both defending and rejecting the permissibility of abortion, Dany’s killing of Khal Drogo is certainly not the killing of a person, and so, not murder. On the flip side, if Ned Stark had heard and taken Jaime Lannister’s advice to kill Bran, that would have been the killing of a person. So this distinction regarding the nature of personhood is helpful in making sense of the different moral responses we have to the prospect of a mercy killing in the medical crises of Khal Drogo and Bran Stark. But where does this reasoning take us?

  Contemporary philosopher Peter Singer has famously and controversially argued that the killing of a significantly disabled infant is not the killing of a person. While these infants are clearly biologically human, they lack the qualities that make something count as a person.16 For Singer, such killings would clearly fail to count as murders, and in many cases, these killings would not be wrong at all. If the disability in question is one that leads to a life of significant pain and discomfort, then as radical as Singer’s claim might seem, the case he describes is actually less controversial than Drogo’s killing, assuming that the mental states of Drogo and the infant are roughly equivalent. Drogo is in no pain, and while Drogo may not now be a person, he has the possible advantage of having been one once (though whether and how much of an advantage this might be is also controversial).

  If we still recoil at Singer’s position, what are we to make of our response? Is it, in the end, the residue of an irrational taboo that we ought to bring to light and reject? Or should we look further into the moral features of these cases—questions of quality of life, of burdensomeness, of personhood—and perhaps beyond them, into other morally important considerations? In philosophy, as in these profound and life-altering decisions that we sometimes face, answers are rarely easy. But cases like the medical crises of Bran Stark and Khal Drogo allow us to plumb the depths of these difficult matters.

  NOTES

  1. George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), p. 91.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, American Medical Association, “Decisions Near the End of Life,” Journal of the American Medical Association 276 (1992), pp. 2229–2233.

  4. James Rachels, “Active and Passive Euthanasia,” New England Journal of Medicine 292 (Jan. 1975), pp. 78–80.

  5. Dan Brock, “Voluntary Active Euthanasia,” Hastings Center Report 22 (Mar./Apr. 1992), pp. 10–22.

  6. Martin, A Game of Thrones, p. 486.

  7. J. M. Gustafson, “Mongolism, Parental Desires, and the Right to Life,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 16 (Summer 1973), pp. 529–533.

  8. Helga Kuhse, “A Modern Myth: That Letting Die Is Not the Intentional Causation of Death,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 1, no. 1 (1984), pp. 21–38.

  9. Raymond S. Duff and A. G. M. Campbell, “Moral and Ethical Dilemmas in the Special-Care Nursery,” New England Journal of Medicine 289 (Oct. 1973), pp. 890–894.

  10. Martin, A Game of Thrones, p. 759.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Michael Tooley, “Abortion and Infanticide,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (Autumn 1972), pp. 37–65.

  14. Mary Anne Warren, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,” The Monist 57 (Jan. 1973), pp. 43–61.

  15. Don Marquis, “Why Abortion Is Immoral,” Journal of Philosophy 86 (April 1989), pp. 183–202.

  16. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 175–217.

  PART THREE

  “WINTER IS COMING”

  Chapter 9

  WARGS, WIGHTS, AND WOLVES THAT ARE DIRE: MIND AND METAPHYSICS, WESTEROS STYLE

  Henry Jacoby

  Long, elegant hands brushed his cheek, then tightened around his throat. They were gloved in the finest moleskin and sticky with blood, yet the touch was icy cold.1

  Wary, he circled the smooth white trunk until he came to the face. Red eyes looked at him. Fierce eyes they were, yet glad to see him. The weirwood had his brother’s face. Had his brother always had three eyes?2

  In A Song of Ice and Fire, as George R. R. Martin’s wonderful characters play their game of thrones, we can wonder about the value of Machiavellian virtues, the rights of kings and who shall rule, as well as moral issues about virtue and honor, incest and betrayal. But though they are often in the background, we should not forget about the strange creatures and supernatural happenings in Westeros either. These afford us the opportunity to wax philosophical about mind and metaphysics, as you will see.

  What Is It Like to Be a Direwolf?

  She could outrun horses and outfight lions. When she bared her teeth even men would run from her, her belly was never empty long, and her fur kept her warm even when the wind was blowing cold.3

  Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that investigates the ultimate nature of reality. What is real? What is the fundamental nature of the universe? These sorts of questions take on a different meaning when asked about the world of Westeros and beyond. Whereas we might ask whether God exists, the maesters and other thinkers surely speculate about the existence of their gods—the old gods, the seven-faced god, the god of light, and the drowned god. Whereas we wonder about space, time, and the laws of nature, it gets a lot more complicated when you have seasons that can last for years—not to mention all the other supernatural violations of the natural order that occur.

  What is the nature and place of persons in the universe? The main metaphysical question about persons no doubt concerns the mind. Persons have physical bodies—some tall and strong like Jaime the Kingslayer’s, even outrageously huge like Ser Gregor, the Mountain That Rides; others not so much, like Tyrion the Imp or skinny little Arya Stark. No matter what size, our bodies, like other physical things, take up space, have mass and energy, and obey the laws of nature. But unlike swords and cups of wine, we can think and reason, experience and feel. These activities are the province of the mind. But what are minds? Are they just functioning brains? The view known as materialism (or physicalism) indeed claims that this is true, and that persons are nothing more than extremely complex physical objects. Is this view correct, or does it leave something out?

  In addressing this question, the contemporary American philosopher Thomas Nagel said that there wouldn’t be much of a problem to this so-called mind-body problem if it weren’t for one very big obstacle: consciousness.4 The problem, he said, is this. Physical things are objective, which basically means that they can be described completely in third-person terms. So, for example, I could describe to you my hardcover copy of A Dance with Dragons, and nothing would be left out. But consciousness has a subjective element to it; indeed, consciousness seems to be essentially subjective. As Nagel put it, there is something it is like to be conscious. And this “what it’s like” can’t be described in objective, third-person terms. If this is true, then it’s hard to see how consciousness could be a physical process, hard to see how the mind could just be the functioning brain.

  Sometimes when we talk about what something is like, we use phrases such as “This tastes like cardboard” or “I felt like a kid again.” When Nagel, however, says it’s “like” something to have a conscious experience, he isn’t making a comparative statement at all. He’s saying that experiences feel a certain way to the experiencer; and how that experience feels—“what it’s like”—can be known only by one who has had the experience in question. For example, unlike Daenerys, we can’t truly imagine what raw horse heart tastes like. At least not unless we ate one ourselves!

  Take a more familiar example: pain. When Arya stabbed and killed the stable boy in order to facilitate her escape from King’s Landing after Lord Eddard’s beheading, the boy felt a pain sensation. There was something it was like for him to have that experience, and someone who had never experienced that sort o
f sensation couldn’t know what it’s like. In fact, we can’t even know that the pain sensations, colors, sounds, and so on that we experience are the same as what these experiences are like for others. To make this point more vividly, Nagel asked us to think about creatures that experience the world in a way that’s very different from the way we do. Using bats as his example, Nagel claimed that we could never know what it’s like to be a bat. Looking to Westeros, let’s forget about bats, and ask instead, “What is it like to be a direwolf?”

  If direwolves are conscious—and maybe they’re not, more on this in a minute—they embody a point of view. The world seems a certain way to a direwolf. When we try to imagine how that would be, how it would feel, we end up at best imagining ourselves in the beast’s body, which is not at all what it is to actually be a direwolf. So while one could come to know what a raw horse’s heart tastes like—though I never will—we can never know what it’s like to be another creature. We can never embody that creature’s point of view; only our own.

  Wargs and Consciousness

  I am him, and he is me. He feels what I feel.5

  This may sound pretty convincing, but just like who’s betraying whom, and the crooked paths where our favorite characters find themselves, things are always more complicated in Westeros. The extra complication is that in this world, certain individuals known as wargs can actually transfer their consciousness into the bodies of direwolves and other animals. Orell, one of the wildlings, transferred his consciousness into an eagle, and this eagle went on to try to rip out one of Jon Snow’s eyes after the wildling was dead. Well, at least his body was dead. And Bran can put his consciousness not only into his direwolf Summer, but into Hodor as well. Hodor!