Game of Thrones and Philosophy

by Jacoby, Henry, Irwin, William

  A Trip to King’s Landing

  I don’t know about you, but for me it was quite a shock when I found out that Littlefinger and Lysa Arryn conspired to kill Jon Arryn and intentionally misled Catelyn Stark.9 Ned Stark’s motivation to go to King’s Landing was predicated upon a lie. Informed by the note that Lysa sent Catelyn, Ned believed that the Lannisters killed Jon Arryn, and so would try to kill Robert Baratheon. Why do I bring this up? Because it points to a prickly problem for JTB: what counts as justification? Ned and Catelyn appear to have a good reason for believing the Lannisters had killed Jon Arryn—the word of Lysa Arryn. And yet, this justification leads directly to a false belief. So what should count as justification?

  Everyone who has taken an introductory philosophy class has likely encountered the most stringent of justification requirements: absolute certainty. René Descartes (1596–1650) poured the acid of doubt on everything to see what remained. It turns out not much can withstand the acid of doubt. I mean, what can’t you doubt? The only thing Descartes was left with (at least at first) was the certainty of his own existence (otherwise how could he do the doubting?). Descartes extrapolates from this single piece of knowledge to add all sorts of other knowledge claims. Without delving into the details of his justifications or their problems, we may still recognize the implications of adopting his standards for justification. The advantage of this view is that if we know something, we really know it. If we wait until we have absolute certainty, we’ll never claim to have justification for a belief that doesn’t turn out to be true. The disadvantage, however, is that we would have very few beliefs for which we could claim justification.

  There is an alternative that’s worth a brief mention: reliabilism. Consider an epistemological refrain from the Seven Kingdoms: “dark wings, dark words.” The reasons for this saying, often repeated as news is brought by raven, are never explained. Nonetheless, as a process for predicting the kind of news that has arrived, this little mantra is quite accurate. That is, the vast majority of the time that messages are brought by raven, they carry bad news. This process (did the news come by raven?) for determining the kind of news that has come is fairly reliable. A reliabilist epistemology aims to identify reliable processes for producing beliefs. The more reliable the process, the more valuable (in epistemic terms) it is. Take, for example, the difference between a belief based on rigorous scientific inquiry and a belief based on astrology. Scientific inquiry has a much stronger track record for producing true beliefs, though one could possibly get a true belief from astrology. So reliabilism would favor the rigorous inquiry.

  Reliabilism, though, is not a panacea. Just because a process is reliable doesn’t make it infallible—dark wings could, after all, bring bright words. Using absolute certainty, we would be justified in believing very little, but those things we were justified in believing would always turn out to be true. Reliabilism allows for a larger set of justified beliefs, but some of our justified beliefs may turn out to be false.

  Getting back to Lysa Arryn’s deception, let’s ask again, should Catelyn and Ned take Lysa’s word as justification? Should the word of other people ever count as justification? Given how easy it is to be misled by others, it may be tempting to say no and to claim that the only good justifications can come from an individual’s personal experiences and thoughts. If we adopted absolute certainty as our criterion for justification, we would obviously have to conclude that the testimony of others cannot justify our beliefs. If, however, we adopted something close to reliabilism, it’s at least possible for testimony to justify belief.

  One reason to allow testimony is that exclusively relying on personal experiences or reasoning would define most of what we believe as unjustified. For example, think of Ned Stark’s ultimate demise on the steps of Baelor’s Sept.10 If testimony cannot count as justification, who, among Ned Stark’s family, could claim to know that Ned’s head was separated from his shoulders by Ser Ilyn Payne? Only Sansa. Yoren kept Arya from looking, and no one else from the Stark clan was at King’s Landing. If we restrict justification to personal observations or thoughts, we must conclude that Rob, Catelyn, Jon, Bran, Rickon, and Arya could never know that Ned Stark was beheaded by Ser Ilyn Payne, even if every member of the crowd in front of Baelor’s Sept told them.

  To avoid such a preposterous conclusion, it is generally accepted that the testimony of others can provide justification. In technical terms, we call this “epistemic trust.” As a justification, epistemic trust grows stronger as the number of individuals who provide independent verification increases.

  Back to the Wall

  As we find out when Jon Snow says his vows, the men of the Night’s Watch are an ecumenical bunch. They do not demand that any member of the Night’s Watch say his vows before any particular gods—just the gods of that man’s choosing. In this way, the men of the Night’s Watch avoid (at least in the area of to whom one swears their vows) a particularly poor epistemic perspective—dogma.

  In adhering to dogma, the reliability of knowledge resides in its ability to match up with a set of precepts or principles that are swallowed whole. These principles or precepts, often handed down from an authority, are not to be questioned. There are a number of dogmatic characters in A Song of Ice and Fire, from Aeron Damphair to His High Holiness, the High Septon. At the Wall, we see this in Melisandre’s beliefs about Stannis Baratheon as the messianic figure of Azor Ahai come to battle the Others, as well as the comet indicating the rightness of her cause. Despite the fact that Stannis’s sword fails to give off heat (as Aemon Targaryen notes), Melisandre does not consider the possibility that she is mistaken about Stannis’s role.11 And I doubt that telling Melisandre that not everyone takes the comet as proof of the rightness of her cause would dissuade her. She has reached a conclusion she is no longer willing to reconsider—her beliefs, like all dogmatic beliefs, suffer from a problem of circularity. Dogma claims that certain beliefs are true and justified. How do we know that these beliefs are true and justified? Because the dogma informs us. And why does the dogma tell us to believe these things? Because they are true and justified. And it goes on like that. As you may have inferred, dogma is an enemy to epistemic humility. It knows, just because.

  A perspective that, in a moderate form, is key for epistemic humility is skepticism. In its most extreme form, skepticism doubts everything. Everything. As skeptics, then, we could never know anything. An intellectually provocative perspective, skepticism unfortunately lacks tractable application. It would literally keep us from claiming to know anything. In a sense, extreme skepticism is at the opposite extreme from dogma. While dogma just knows, skepticism never knows.

  That said, a moderate version of skepticism is far better than dogma. This form of skepticism casts doubt on particular conclusions rather than knowledge in general. An easy example of this moderate skepticism is the way that Harma Dogshead and Rattleshirt view Jon Snow after his “betrayal” of Qhorin Halfhand.12 Despite the evidence (killing Qhorin Halfhand, wearing a different cloak, sleeping with Ygritte, providing information about the Night’s Watch garrisons and movements), they doubt that he has really turned his cloak. As you know, their skepticism turns out to lead to the true belief.

  And yet, skepticism about particular conclusions doesn’t always help us. When Janos Slynt and Alliser Thorne claim that Jon is a traitor, they are skeptical of his claim that he was only pretending to join the wildlings. When Jon doubts that he saw the wildlings on the Milkwater through Ghost’s eyes, he is being skeptical of that fact.13 In both of these cases, though, it turns out that the skepticism keeps them from the true belief. Jon was looking through Ghost’s eyes and Jon was not a traitor, or at least not the kind of traitor that Slynt and Thorne paint him to be. And so skepticism about particular conclusions will not always help us avoid false beliefs or keep us from epistemic arrogance.

  The Horn of Winter

  One of Jon’s false beliefs is that Mance never found the Horn of Winter. One blow from the
Horn of Winter was said to bring down the Wall. He, the Old Bear, Stannis, and, it seems, everyone south of the Wall, “knew” that the wildlings’ goal was to bring down the Wall. They “knew” that if the wildlings had the Horn of Winter, they would blow it. Only when Jon sees the horn in Mance’s tent14 does he learn of yet another failure to be epistemically humble. As it turns out, the wildlings goal was not to bring down the Wall, but to leave the Wall intact and get south of it. If only the people of the Seven Kingdoms had been humble enough to see this possibility, they might have been able to work with the wildlings to discuss their common enemy—the Others. Because, after all, winter is coming.15

  NOTES

  1. George R. R. Martin, A Storm of Swords (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), pp. 1057–1059.

  2. Ibid., pp. 558–559.

  3. Ibid., p. 645.

  4. Ibid., p. 581.

  5. Ibid., pp. 644–646.

  6. George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), pp. 520–522.

  7. Martin, A Storm of Swords, p. 252.

  8. Martin, A Game of Thrones, p. 552.

  9. Martin, A Storm of Swords, pp. 1114–1115.

  10. Martin, A Game of Thrones, pp. 725–727.

  11. George R. R. Martin, A Clash of Kings (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), p. 149.

  12. Ibid., pp. 952–954.

  13. Ibid., pp. 766–767.

  14. Martin, A Storm of Swords, p. 1018.

  15. Thanks to Darin McGinnis for his insights and help with the chapter.

  Chapter 12

  “WHY IS THE WORLD SO FULL OF INJUSTICE?”: GODS AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

  Jaron Daniël Schoone

  The grief on Lady Catelyn Stark’s face was clearly visible when she hit Ser Jaime Lannister with a large rock in the final episode of Game of Thrones’ season one. She had just received word that her husband, Lord Eddard Stark, had been beheaded by order of King Joffrey. Catelyn tells Jaime Lannister that he will be “going to the deepest of the seven hells if the gods are just.” Jaime, still recovering from the head trauma, replies with a question: “If the gods are real and they are just, then why is the world so full of injustice?” (“Fire and Blood”).

  This question is the essence of what philosophers call the problem of evil. The problem centers around the apparent contradiction between the existence of a good and just God on the one hand, and the evil that is clearly visible in the world on the other hand. For why would a good being with the power to stop evil allow it to exist? Many philosophers and theologians have attempted to answer this question. We know the world that George R. R. Martin has created in A Song of Ice and Fire contains many different gods and beliefs. Does the problem of evil challenge belief in these gods as well?

  Is the Problem of Evil Really a Problem?

  The Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BCE) was one of the first to state the problem. His version, quoted by the eighteenth-century British philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, asks: “Is he [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”1

  In other words, according to Hume and Epicurus, the existences of God and evil are logically incompatible. Suppose one believes in the existence of a god who is:

  1. Omniscient, meaning that this god knows everything, including exactly when and where evil will happen;

  2. Omnipotent, meaning that this god has the power to prevent evil (or anything else, for that matter) from happening;

  3. Perfectly good, meaning that this god wants to prevent evil from happening.

  If such a god exists, then there should be no evil at all in the world. However:

  4. There is evil in the world.

  Therefore, the conclusion must be that such a god does not exist.

  Omniscience, omnipotence, and perfect goodness are three important attributes of the God of the major Western religions. For those religions the problem of evil presents a real danger; if left unsolved it would make belief in such a God irrational. Jaime makes a similar point when he presents the problem of evil to Catelyn: because of evil, believing in the gods of Westeros is irrational as well. And Jaime is certainly not the only one who draws that conclusion. Consider the Hound, Sandor Clegane, who is confronted by Sansa Stark in A Clash of Kings with all his evil deeds:

  “Aren’t you afraid? The gods might send you down to some terrible hell for all the evil you’ve done.”

  “What evil?” He laughed. “What gods?”

  “The gods who made us all.”

  “All?” he mocked. “Tell me, little bird, what kind of god makes a monster like the Imp, or a halfwit like Lady Tanda’s daughter? If there are gods, they made sheep so wolves could eat mutton, and they made the weak for the strong to play with.”

  “True knights protect the weak.”

  He snorted. “There are no true knights, no more than there are gods. If you can’t protect yourself, die and get out of the way of those who can. Sharp steel and strong arms rule this world, don’t ever believe any different.”

  Sansa backed away from him. “You’re awful.”

  “I’m honest. It’s the world that’s awful. Now fly away, little bird. I’m sick of you peeping at me.”2

  But What Is Evil?

  In order to deal with the problem of evil, we must first be clear on what counts as evil. There appear to be two very distinct types of evil in the world: moral evil and natural evil. Moral evil is the kind of evil that humankind causes by its free decisions. Ordering the beheading of Eddard Stark, or the Hound’s murder of Mycah, the butcher’s boy, would be examples of this type of evil. Natural evil, on the other hand, refers to pain and suffering caused by the occurrences of nature and not by human beings; shipwrecks in a storm would be an example here.

  Unfortunately, not everyone believes the same things to be morally good or evil. The Dothraki Horse God, for instance, appears to have no moral issue with raping and killing. And according to Theon Greyjoy, describing the Drowned God of the Ironmen living on the Iron Islands: “The Drowned God had made them to reave and rape, to carve out kingdoms and write their names in fire and blood and song.”3 Thus, what some might count as evil, others might count as normal or even appropriate behavior. If morality is relative, then objective evil doesn’t exist. And if there’s no objective evil—if nothing is really evil—then the logical contradiction alluded to earlier might be avoided.

  This then is the first solution that we will encounter: the problem of evil doesn’t appear to affect those who believe that there is no real evil in the world, only subjective judgments on our part. On second glance, however, it seems that most of the inhabitants of the Seven Kingdoms and beyond do believe many things to be really evil, and not just subjectively so. Even someone like Theon Greyjoy would agree that injustice has been done to him when he is taken as a hostage by Eddard Stark. Thus, although one possible solution is to refuse to believe that there actually exists any evil, this appears to be a very weak position. Even in a relativist view, why the gods allow what the inhabitants consider to be evil must still be addressed.

  Augustine and Catelyn Defend the Faith of the Seven

  The most widespread faith in the Seven Kingdoms is the so-called Faith of the Seven, which has similarities to Roman Catholicism. These include the sudden and fast conversion of Westeros to the Faith, and the hierarchical structure of the religion, with the High Septon as head of the church. Most important, the Faith has only one god, which has seven faces. This is similar to the Christian dogma of the Trinity: one God but three persons. It appears that this god of the Faith has the necessary attributes that give rise to the problem of evil: it is a potent (perhaps even omnipotent) and just god. Thus the god of the Faith should be able and willing to prevent evil from happening. Yet, as we know, there is evil in Westeros.

  The philosopher and church father Augustine of Hippo (354–430) pre
sented two important arguments for why God is not responsible for the existence of evil. First, Augustine submits that evil is not something that exists of its own right. Evil is merely the deprivation of goodness. This is similar to blindness being the deprivation of eyesight. Blindness is not a positive or definite entity. It is simply the lack of a definite entity, sight. We call someone blind when his eyes are not working. Similarly, according to Augustine, evil is what we call something that is not good. Therefore, God has never created evil, for evil is not something that can be created at all.4

  Augustine’s second argument concerns the cause of evil, namely our own free will: our ability to choose our own actions. God has deemed it a moral virtue that man has free will and is not simply a puppet that acts only by means of preprogrammed instincts. Thus, although God has created a world that is good and just, human beings can choose to ignore the rules set out by God, and that, according to Augustine, is the cause of evil. Put these two arguments together, and it becomes clear, says Augustine, that God is not the cause of evil; nor can God prevent this type of evil, for preventing evil would mean that individuals would have no free will.5

  This is called the free will defense. So in Westeros, the cause of evil does not lie with the seven-faced god, but with people who act according to their own free will. Remember that Jaime Lannister asked Catelyn Stark: “If the gods are real and they are just, then why is the world so full of injustice?” To this question, Catelyn replied: “Because of men like you.” Even when Jaime told her to “blame those precious gods of yours, who brought the boy to our window and gave him a glimpse of something he was never meant to see,” Catelyn simply answered: “Blame the gods?” she said, incredulous. “Yours was the hand that threw him. You meant for him to die.”6