Game of Thrones and Philosophy

by Jacoby, Henry, Irwin, William

  Because Ned recognized the futility of an immoral life, he was reluctant to take Robert up on the offer to become the King’s Hand. Ned knew that his commitment to honor and justice made him particularly ill suited to compete with the den of vipers at King’s Landing. Finally forced into the game of thrones, Ned plays it as he lived, with honor and justice. But an honorable man pitted against the likes of Cersei, Littlefinger, and Varys “The Spider” is a dead man. Ned was doomed the second he accepted Robert’s offer. After a few short weeks at King’s Landing, he finds himself imprisoned for treason, victim to the political maneuverings of those unencumbered by moral constraints.

  After Cersei has Ned arrested, Varys pays Ned a visit to offer him a way to avoid execution. If Ned is willing to keep it secret that Joffrey is not really the son of the late king, Varys assures Ned that he’ll be able to convince Cersei to let Ned take the black and join the Night’s Watch. All Ned has to do is tell a little lie and keep Cersei’s secret.

  Ned responds “You think my life is some precious thing to me, as I would trade my honor for a few more years of, what? You grew up with actors, you learnt their craft and you learnt it well. But I grew up with soldiers. I learnt how to die a long time ago” (“Baelor”).

  The Spider tries one more tactic to persuade Ned to compromise his values. He asks, “What of your daughter’s life, my lord? Is that a precious thing to you?” (“Baelor”). This veiled threat in the form of a question finally motivates Ned to compromise. He trades his honor to save his daughters and stay his own execution. In the end, though, it’s futile. Ned sacrifices his honor, falsely claims that he conspired to steal the Iron Throne for himself, and proclaims Joffrey as the true and rightful heir. Joffrey dishes out his own warped sense of justice: Ned loses his head, and Sansa remains a prisoner with her life still in peril. Ned’s death is tragic because he sacrificed his morality, his honor, for naught.

  Despite his tragic end and his moment of weakness, Ned might actually be right about the value of morality. Perhaps Cersei and Joffrey are missing out on something that Ned’s honor allows him to experience. Ned’s answer to the “Why be moral?” question is similar to Plato’s. The reason to be moral isn’t to avoid punishment, scorn, disapproval, or being called to account for our misbehavior. Winter is inevitably coming, and we shouldn’t be motivated to renounce morality out of fear of bad things happening to us. We should stick to morality because being moral is the only way to have the best that life has to offer. When faced with Cersei and Joffrey, then, Ned and Plato do have an answer. You miss out on the good life by being immoral. There’s more to life than mere pleasure.6

  NOTES

  1. George R. R. Martin, A Clash of Kings (New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), p. 58.

  2. Authors@google: George R. R. Martin, Aug. 6, 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTTW8M_etko.

  3, Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1974).

  4. Ibid., pp. 31–34.

  5. Martin, A Clash of Kings, p. 489.

  6. Dedicated to Karen Haas, my mom, for raising me like a Stark and teaching me that there’s more to the good life than always getting what you want.

  Chapter 14

  THE MORAL LUCK OF TYRION LANNISTER

  Christopher Robichaud

  “If you’re going to be a cripple, it’s better to be a rich cripple.”

  —Tyrion Lannister (“Lord Snow”)

  The world of A Song of Ice and Fire isn’t pretty, but the ugliness isn’t found in the setting itself. Westeros is filled with stunning locations, like the peaceful beauty of the godswoods and the vast greatness of the Wall. Rather, the ugliness of George R. R. Martin’s world has to do with the society of the Seven Kingdoms. It’s a nation of brutal social arrangements mired in a bloody civil war. And a chasm exists between the haves and the have-nots. Some of the have-nots eke out a meager life as farmers, tradesmen, or barkeeps, doing their best not to be conscripted to fight for a noble house in one of their never-ending conflicts. Other have-nots must turn to prostitution or thievery to get by. Life as a noble, in turn, brings with it a different set of concerns. Although the haves of the Seven Kingdoms needn’t worry about food, shelter, companionship, or anything of the like, at least most of the time, they do have to constantly be on guard against their food being poisoned, their shelter being invaded, and their friends turning foes. After all, everything is fair play in the game of thrones.

  Enter Tyrion Lannister, one of the most complicated and compelling characters ever to appear in a fantasy series. Tyrion was born a dwarf,1 offering reason enough for him to have been drowned at birth. A dwarf in the Seven Kings would normally be guaranteed a miserable existence, but luckily Tyrion was also born a Lannister. House Lannister is the richest in the Seven Kingdoms, and its political influence is vast. The patriarch of the family, Tywin Lannister, is a military mastermind. His daughter Cersei sits as the queen at the beginning of the story, and later she’s the de facto ruler of the Seven Kingdoms while her eldest son, Joffrey, matures to an appropriate age to inherit the crown. Her beautiful twin brother, Jaime, a member of the Kingsguard, is an extremely skilled and deadly knight.

  And then there’s Tyrion. Grotesquely ugly (at least in the novels). Abnormally small. His birth killed his mother, a fact for which his father despises him. His mind is sharp, calculating, and exceedingly clever, which means his sister distrusts him, seeming to go so far as to order an attempt on his life. Yet Tyrion often shows compassion worthy of House Stark and displays heroism on the battlefield worthy of Jaime the Kingslayer himself. He reveals exceptional leadership qualities in running the Seven Kingdoms from behind the scenes, as the Hand of King Joffrey. And while he drinks and whores excessively, he nonetheless harbors a genuine love for the prostitute Shae.

  What, then, do we make of Tyrion Lannister? Tyrion is both one of the luckiest and the unluckiest men alive. He came out of the womb with everything stacked against him physically, including killing his own mother in the process. And yet he was born with an intellect to be envied and into a noble house that guaranteed him wealth and political influence. What do these facts have to do with the moral character of Tyrion? How should they affect our assessment of his actions as morally praiseworthy or blameworthy?

  The Virtues and Vices of Tyrion Lannister

  Let’s begin by focusing first on Tyrion’s moral character and the role that luck played in forming it. Is Tyrion a good guy or a bad guy? This question doesn’t have a straightforward answer. But there’s something worth noting about the question itself. When we think about whether a person is good or bad, we consider not only what the person has done, but what kind of person he or she is; that’s how we put it, anyway. And what’s behind that way of putting it is a concern about a person’s moral character.

  As with so much else in philosophy, there’s a lot of disagreement over what we should understand a person’s moral character to be. Most philosophers, though, agree that someone’s moral character doesn’t consist only in what that person does. Actions might reveal a person’s character, but they don’t constitute it. Here’s an example: In A Clash of Kings, it becomes clear that Tyrion is quite a brave person on the battlefield, in addition to being a decent strategist.2 He talks a good talk about not wanting to get into the bloody business of combat, but when push comes to shove—when Sandor “The Hound” Clegane flees due to fires on the battlefield—Tyrion leads a small number of men against a much larger number of Stannis Baratheon’s army as they’re rushing through the gates of King’s Landing. What this reveals about Tyrion is that he is in fact brave. But it doesn’t seem to make much sense to say that he suddenly became brave at that moment. Rather, the more appealing way to describe things is to say that he was brave going into the battle, but we learned that about him—and maybe he learned that about himself—only when an opportunity arose for him to act in a certain way. His actions revealed a certain virtue of his moral character—bravery. But he had that virtu
e regardless of whether the opportunity arose for him to demonstrate it.

  In this way of seeing things, a person’s moral character amounts to a set of dispositions that he has, dispositions to act in various ways under various circumstances. Those circumstances might never arise, and so we might never learn about certain virtues and vices—moral dispositions—that a person in fact has. That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have those traits, though. In light of this, when we ask whether a person is good or bad, what we seem most interested in is what his moral dispositions are. Is he cruel? Compassionate? Generous? Stingy? And so forth. We usually base our answers to those questions on actions, because actions reveal character, even though actions alone don’t make up a person’s moral character.

  So what of Tyrion’s moral character? Well, from what we’ve learned of it, it runs the gamut of good and bad dispositions. In certain circumstances, he’s prone to condescension, arrogance, and licentiousness. He also tends toward being a bit of a glutton and a drunk. Still, other situations reveal that he’s understanding, compassionate, just, and brave. This makes for a complicated moral character. But how much of Tyrion’s character is up to him? Is he mostly responsible for the kind of person he’s developed into, or is luck—involving circumstances beyond his control—mostly responsible?

  It’s Out of the King’s Hand’s Hands

  Despite what we might ordinarily think, Tyrion’s moral character may be largely beyond his control. Consider his compassion and his empathy, two distinct but related moral virtues. Why do we think Tyrion is compassionate and empathetic? Tyrion’s compassion toward those who are maligned and outcast—toward Sansa, kidnapped by Cersei and a victim of Joffrey’s physical abuses, or toward Jon Snow, Ned Stark’s bastard son—plausibly stems not from any formal training in good behavior that Tyrion devoted himself to, but simply from his own life circumstances. “What the hell do you know about being a bastard?” Jon Snow asks Tyrion. “All dwarves are bastards in their father’s eyes,” replies Tyrion (“Winter Is Coming”). Would Tyrion even attend to the plight of Jon as he is shipped off to the Wall, let alone care enough to give him some good advice on navigating his station in life, had Tyrion not been born into a similar position of being an outcast? Quite unlikely. Nor would he be clever and calculating were he not part of a family where a man of his physical limitations had to develop those traits to survive the machinations of his sister Cersei and the disdain of his father, Tywin. Nor would he necessarily be brave were his brother’s exploits not held up to him as an ongoing example of knightly virtue.

  Does this mean that no aspect of Tyrion’s moral character is in his control? Of course not. But it does show that a lot more of it is beyond his control than we might have thought before reflecting on the matter. We like to think that we are the architects of our moral characters, but as Tyrion reveals, pure circumstance can play a substantial role in molding our moral characters.

  The Many Faces of Moral Luck

  At this point we might start to get a little worried about what these observations mean for moral responsibility. If so much of Tyrion’s character is beyond his control, and yet his actions issue from his character, can we really praise him or blame him for what he does? Is he morally responsible for anything, if he’s not causally responsible to a great extent for the moral character that gives rise to those actions?

  It turns out that worries along these lines go beyond what we’ve explored so far. In his groundbreaking article “Moral Luck,” philosopher Thomas Nagel calls the kind of luck we’ve been considering with regard to Tyrion’s character “constitutive luck.”3 Nagel also explores areas where there seems to be a conflict in our way of assessing moral responsibility. One such area, which he calls “resultant luck,” involves cases like the part in A Clash of Kings where Tyrion orders the massive production of “wildfire,” a kind of combustible liquid, to be used to stave off Stannis’s fleet. Tyrion takes great pains to ensure that this dangerous substance is produced with care and that those who will use it are properly trained. As it turns out, it is produced with great care, it is used properly, and much of Stannis’s fleet is burned at sea because of it. But suppose instead that even though it was produced with care and used properly, a terrible accident happens in the course of battle, and instead of the wildfire destroying Stannis’s fleet, much of King’s Landing is set afire instead. Rather than triumphing, the Lannisters would have been defeated.

  In the first case, we are prone to praise Tyrion for his role in the use of wildfire. (At least if we’re Lannisters. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that we have good reason to believe that the Lannisters are fighting a just war.) In the second case, we are prone to blame Tyrion for the very same actions. And that’s the rub. In both cases, the part of the story that is in Tyrion’s control is the same. He does the very same thing. Whether we judge him as praiseworthy or blameworthy depends, it seems, on results that are entirely beyond his control. Yet, and this is the crucial point, we think that we should praise or blame people only for things over which they exercise control. So here Nagel has alerted us to a deep tension in our moral thinking. There is a strong tendency to praise Tyrion in the first case and to condemn him in the second, all the while recognizing that we’re praising him or blaming him for reasons outside his control. And that seems an incorrect thing to do, given that we think that having moral responsibility necessarily involves being in control of what happens.

  It gets worse. Nagel also discusses what he calls “circumstantial luck,” which is the kind of luck involved when we are put into certain situations where our virtues or vices have an opportunity to reveal themselves. Suppose Tyrion is disposed to being a very physically abusive person whenever he is put into a position where he is physically imposing. Luckily for him, his own features limit such situations from ever arising. As a result, we would not blame him for this vice, even though it’s just happenstance that he never reveals it. Were he put into a situation where his vice were displayed through actions, we would blame him. Notice that this is not just a matter of us not knowing about the vice. It seems correct that even if we did know, somehow, that Tyrion is physically belligerent, we would be less prone to blame him for his belligerency if circumstances never, or rarely, cooperated in letting his vice act up; on the other hand, we would be more prone to blame him if they did cooperate in revealing his vice. But more often than not, it’s purely a matter of luck whether those circumstances do or do not arise.

  Circumstantial luck is a particularly powerful way to demonstrate the conflict that arises in our moral thinking. Many citizens of Nazi Germany found themselves in situations that led them to do horrible things. We blame them, rightfully, it surely seems, for their crimes. There’s no comfort in this, though, for as we’ve learned from such episodes as the now-famous Milgram experiment, the disposition to blindly follow the orders of those in power, even when doing so induces us to do terrible things, is a vice that many, many of us have.4 We just got lucky—and continue to be lucky—in not being thrown into circumstances where this vice comes to the fore. Yet even recognizing this, it still seems correct to hold certain Germans more blameworthy for the vice than those of us who also share it, but have never been put in circumstances where it’s revealed. That’s the tension that moral luck forces us to confront.

  If chance pervades the circumstances of our moral choices, the consequences of them, and the very character that gives rise to them, it seems as though we shouldn’t be praised or blamed for anything we do. But that would be absurd. We would have to abandon any notion of being morally responsible for what we do; we would be like cats, dogs, bears, and other animals that aren’t considered appropriate subjects for moral evaluation. It would be encouraging at this point to turn to Nagel’s article and find a resolution of this difficulty. But, alas, he offers none. Indeed, he observes, famously, that “[t]he area of genuine agency, and therefore of legitimate moral judgment, seems to shrink under this scrutiny to an extensionless po
int.”5 Not the most uplifting of observations, to be sure.

  Kant to the Rescue?

  Is there any way to salvage moral responsibility in light of these considerations? The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) offered one line of thought that divorces morality from luck. (Nagel, in his article, acknowledges Kant’s attempts at this, but finds them largely unacceptable, for reasons we’ll see in a moment.) Kant thinks that moral praise and blame should be determined by one and only one thing, namely, how well we exercise our will. Good willing, according to Kant, is the only thing that ultimately has moral worth, and it is the only appropriate subject of moral responsibility. Significantly, as Kant takes pains to emphasize, a good will is not held hostage to the consequences it brings about.

  There’s some intuitive force to Kant’s position. When we evaluate individuals morally, we are often interested in why they acted as they did—what reasons they had for acting. And in certain circumstances, that’s all we care about. For instance, Tyrion goes to great lengths in A Clash of Kings to keep Shae protected and out of the reach of Cersei. At some point it seems as though he fails at this, but it turns out that Cersei made a mistake in the prostitute she captured to hold sway over Tyrion—it’s not Shae. Suppose, though, that it was Shae who’s now in Cersei’s clutches, virtually guaranteeing that bad things will befall her. Is Tyrion blameworthy for this situation? Not, according to Kant, if he acted for the right reasons, even if, in doing so, circumstances conspired against him. Those right reasons, according to Kant, have to do with following the categorical imperative, one formulation of which states that we have an obligation to treat persons as ends in themselves and not as mere means. Tyrion’s actions conform to this imperative, since, let us presume, he acted not only for personal reasons—keeping Shae safe certainly benefits him—but for Shae’s well-being also. Tyrion shows his respect for her by recognizing that she doesn’t deserve to be used by Cersei as a means in her campaign against him.