A Better World’s Victims
So yeah, I for one strongly believe that the world you and I live in is the better world, in spite of some of the people who share this world with us having sympathetic reasons for finding hope in the existence of Juliana’s alternative reality.
We still have to acknowledge the people whose suffering is written in stone as historical fact—as an inevitable part of our better world coming into being. The victims of our better world. If these people need any additional evidence beyond the numbers game that the world of the Grasshopper films is better, despite what it’s done to them, then perhaps it’s our duty to provide this evidence through the way we act towards them. Through the ways in which we empathize with what our world has done to them and commemorate the events they wish had never happened. Through the ways in which we work to ensure those events don’t happen again.
In May 2016, President Obama, on a visit to Japan, refused to apologize for the US bombing of Hiroshima. But he did embrace survivors, place flowers at the foot of a cenotaph dedicated to the dead and call for countries to work together to forge a world without nuclear weapons. I can’t see the most powerful person in Juliana’s world making a similar overture towards the victims and survivors of the Heisenberg’s detonation in Washington DC. This isn’t to mitigate the suffering of Hiroshima. But if the equivalent event happens in both worlds, and one recognizes it as a tragedy, expresses sympathy for its victims and puts effort into minimising it happening again, while the other one does none of these things, then I think we can agree with Juliana’s evaluation that the first is better than the second, however distasteful it might be to point this out to those whose emotional and physical scars will never heal.
What’d be even better than a better world is a perfect world. A world that never experienced either the bad stuff that followed the Allied victory, or the bad stuff that we learn happened in the show. Neither Juliana’s reality nor the reality of the Grasshopper newsreels is that world. Perhaps Juliana already knows this and that’s why she chooses the particular word “better” when she writes to Frank from the Neutral Zone, rather than one that’s even stronger. I wonder if there’s a set of film reels out there that shows this perfect world. Perhaps not. Perhaps a world whose history is entirely innocent is too much to hope for. If so, then even though better can’t mean perfect, better might be the very best there is.
14
Reel Lucky
ELIZABETH RARD
We typically assess the moral character of people largely based on their actions. If a person gives their time and money to a charity, abandoning personal goals in an honest attempt to make the lives of others better, we deem them of high moral character, and we say that their actions are morally good actions. Likewise, if a person engages in actions that cause harm to others, such as stealing from those in need, or ending innocent lives, we say that the person is perhaps of a lower moral character, and that their actions are morally bad.
Yet we do not always blame a person simply because their actions cause harm, or praise a person whose actions are beneficial. The intentions behind an action matter, sometimes even more than the outcome of the action. Hence if I bump into you unintentionally, causing you to fall and scuff your knee, we would not want to say that I was a bad sort of person in that instance, although perhaps we would want to say that I had been thoughtless, maybe even negligently so. If my actions had unintended beneficial consequences (perhaps I borrowed your car without asking, not knowing you planned to use it in a bank robbery that same day) we would not praise me based on the good outcome of my actions.
Now here’s the rub. There are many, many events that are beyond my control that contribute to each and every one of my actions. We are all constantly being judged because of actions that only come about because of the way the world is.
In the TV show The Man in the High Castle people live in a world that’s very different from the one we’re familiar with. The events of World War II unfolded in such a way that Germany and Japan were able to seize joint control of the United States. The characters in this world face choices and pressures that are very different from those faced by people in our United States. Nazi soldiers are a constant threat. An underground Resistance has sprung up in order to fight against the Nazi regime. A tenuous alliance between Germany and Japan is seemingly all that stands between the country and total Nazi domination.
Along with these extreme circumstances come opportunities to act in ways that show either moral strength or moral deficiency. Juliana is swept up in the Resistance and engages in many actions that we would consider heroic. We feel we should praise her for her efforts to fight against the Nazis, at great risk to her own personal safety. Yet she becomes involved in the Resistance, and seems to be pushed forward at almost every turn, by situations that are entirely beyond her control.
Joe is a duplicitous agent working undercover for the SS in an attempt to infiltrate the Resistance. We would judge both his actions and his character to be morally bad, yet Joe has been placed in extreme circumstances. He becomes a Nazi agent largely due to situational pressures, even a desire to protect his girlfriend and her child. And Joe’s luck is not all bad. After meeting Juliana—a chance meeting to be sure—he begins to question his own actions and starts to move towards redemption. It seems that Juliana has been morally lucky, whereas Joe has been, at least initially, morally unlucky.
In our world we evaluate people based on what they actually do. We can reason about what they might have done had situations been different, but we’re always making an inference from their actual actions when we do this. In the universe of The Man in the High Castle there is another avenue of investigation. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy newsreels make it possible for us as outside observers, and even for the characters within the fictional universe, to gain knowledge of the way various people would have acted had situations been different. Joe may have acted poorly, engaged in actions we would evaluate as bad, but we can now compare his actual actions with the way he acted in other situations by looking at his actions on various film reels. In this way we can construct a moral evaluation of Joe, which is largely immune to luck, because we can potentially access information about his actions across a wide variety of circumstances.
Shaped by Our World
The world we live in, the circumstances we are faced with, go a long way towards shaping our character and our actions. There are many characters in The Man in the High Castle whose lives, character, and actions are shaped by the circumstances they find themselves in. When Juliana witnesses the death of her half-sister Trudy at the hands of the Japanese military police she comes into possession of a film reel and learns of her sister’s involvement in the Resistance. She’s placed in extraordinary circumstances and has an opportunity to act bravely by finishing her sister’s mission. In a certain sense Juliana is morally lucky. Events have transpired around her in just the right way to afford her the opportunity and motivation to act in a morally exemplary way. Had her sister merely disappeared, rather than being killed in front of her, it is doubtful that Juliana would have begun down such a heroic path. She engages in actions that warrant our assessment of her as a good person, an exceptional person even, but the events leading to her actions are largely beyond her control.
Joe is both morally unlucky and morally lucky over the course of Season One. He grows up in a Nazi German–occupied portion of the United States, a situation that in itself is unlucky, morally speaking. Joe is in a situation where there is danger to himself and his loved ones if he does not work for the current regime, and opportunity for advancement and success if he does. These circumstances lead him to become an undercover agent for the SS, working to infiltrate and undermine the Resistance, leading us to evaluate Joe as a morally bad character at the beginning of the story. But Joe is also morally lucky. Early on he meets Juliana. He seems to be immediately emotionally attached to Juliana, which causes Joe to repeatedly engage in actions that are contrary to hi
s superiors’ commands. Often Joe directly intervenes in order to help save Juliana’s life.
Poor Frank also gets a bit of both good and bad luck, morally speaking. Early on he and his family are taken into custody and imprisoned while Frank is interrogated about the whereabouts of Juliana. Frank is released but unfortunately his family has already been executed. In addition to being a horrific outcome for Frank and his family, it is also morally unlucky for Frank as it directly motivates him to seek revenge. Frank decides to assassinate the crown Prince, an individual who is painted in the show as being at the very least the lesser of two evils, an important figurehead in the struggling Japanese government, which may be all that is preventing total domination of the former United States by Nazi Germany.
Had Frank assassinated the crown prince he would have engaged in an action that would be considered morally wrong by most measures, and he would have done so primarily due to a situation that was both extreme and beyond his control. Frank seems to fully intend to assassinate the Prince. He acquires an illegal gun and ammunition, which he brings to a public appearance by the Prince. He then removes the gun from his coat and appears to prepare to fire at the Prince. At this point Frank’s moral luck takes a turn for the better. A small Japanese child, attending the appearance with his father, makes eye contact with Frank. Something in that child’s eye, some look of hope, and perhaps confusion or fear at the visible gun, causes Frank to hesitate. Whether or not Frank would have gone through with his plan we cannot know, for during his hesitation someone else fired a shot, killing the Crown Prince. Had Frank fired he would have done something very wrong. He was lucky that someone else killed the Prince first, because it prevented him from engaging in a morally bad action.
John also lives a life that is influenced by moral luck. He is born a German in a world where a Nazi German regime wins the Second World War and takes control of a large chunk of the United States. He’s raised to believe that the way you succeed and demonstrate your loyalty to the country is to enforce the Nazi regime, often times through violence and intimidation. John is old enough that he would actually have been in the military during World War II, and so even had he grown up in a world where the Allies had won the war, he would have most likely been morally blameworthy for actions committed during the war. Yet it seems that simply being born in Germany some twenty years before World War II is very morally unlucky. Had John been born in Canada he may well have lived, at the very least, a morally neutral life, never having had the opportunity to become a Nazi agent, nor the same pressures to live a life where he harmed and killed so many other people.
The more we look at the specific circumstances of each character, the more it becomes clear that to a large extent their actions, good or bad, are caused, or at least strongly influenced, by events that are entirely beyond their control. We want to be able to give a moral assessment of the characters, not just of their actions, but at the same time we hesitate to judge people for actions that are largely outside their control.
The Problem of Luck
To understand the problem clearly let’s look at what happens when we try to compare our various characters. Assessing the moral status of actions is a complex business, and at the very least it seems that not all bad actions are equally bad. Joe lying to Juliana does not seem as bad as Joe executing Juliana and Frank. Likewise not all good actions are equally good. Juliana bringing a flower to Tagomi might be considered a good action, but not as good as Juliana rescuing Joe from the Resistance.
But to keep it simple let’s limit ourselves to three possible moral ways of evaluating actions: good, bad, and neutral. Intuitively a good action will be one that we would praise the acting person for, an action that makes the world a better place in some way. A bad action is one that we would blame the acting person for committing, and a neutral action would be one that is neither morally positive nor negative.
In addition we will also simplify our discussion of moral luck. Moral luck comes in several different forms. The luck someone has when they grow up in a home where their parents teach them never to murder people is a different type of luck than the luck someone has when their gun jams, preventing them from committing murder. Moral philosopher Thomas Nagel has actually identified four distinct types of moral luck, but here I’m just going to assume that luck exists, and I will disregard the different types.
Moral luck is not all or nothing. At different points in a person’s life, to different degrees, they might be morally lucky or morally unlucky. Again, I’ll simplify this and simply consider what the situation might be if people overall were either morally lucky, morally unlucky, or neutral with regard to moral luck. We can think of neutrality with regard to moral luck as a situation where circumstances place little to no pressure on the acting person to act in either a morally good or morally bad way. Growing up in the suburbs of a relatively just and affluent society might be considered neutral, depending on the status of the rest of the world. We would not be pressured into harming others, but at the same time there would be few opportunities to act in a truly heroic manor.
Juliana is an individual who acts largely in a morally good way, whereas John can be considered someone who acts in a morally bad way. Both Joe and Frank can be considered morally neutral because at times they act in better or worse ways. We can assign each value judgment a numerical judgment for easy comparison:
Good = 3
Neutral = 2
Bad = 1
This assignment allows us to rank our acting persons from best to worst, where an acting person with a higher score will be ranked morally better than an acting person with a lower score:
Juliana (3)
Joe/Frank (2)
John (1)
The problem with the above ranking is that it does not take moral luck into account. I’m ignoring the differences in situation between our acting persons. Juliana is rewarded in our assessment because she’s lucky, and John is punished because he’s morally unlucky. Let’s say that Juliana is lucky, John is unlucky, and Frank and Joe are neutral with regard to luck. We can represent the data we have so far as follows.
We can here see the issue represented visually. Across the top we have the three different types of luck an acting person might have. We then fill in the assessment of their actions under the appropriate column for each person’s circumstances. While we know how the persons actually acted in the circumstances they found themselves in, we don’t know how they would have acted if things had been different.
We feel that people should not be blamed for actions that are beyond their control, and we think that sometimes people can be morally lucky or unlucky, engaging in good or bad actions because of situations beyond their control. Therefore we can’t fairly compare the moral quality of persons based on actions engaged in, where moral luck played a part in the actions. As it stands we cannot compare these persons, other than to say that Frank and Joe seem to get the same moral assessment, since they have the same action assessment in comparable circumstances.
Finding the Reel Answer
In our actual world this would be the end of the story. We can only infer to how people might have acted in other circumstances, based on how they act in the circumstances they actually find themselves in.
But in the universe of our fiction there is another source of information, one that promises to fill in some of the missing information for our moral assessments. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy newsreels are films that show up throughout the series, and seem to depict alternate histories. The first reel that we see shows a timeline in which the Allies won the Second World War. This timeline might be similar to, or even identical to, the one that we the viewers take to be the way things actually happened.
In another film shown much later in the story we see a timeline in which Germany seems to have conquered all of the U.S., including the west coast (which is occupied by Japan in the main timeline of the series). In this timeline Joe is seen executing Juliana and Frank. It’s revealed nea
r the end of the series that Hitler is in possession of a large number of these newsreels. He has in fact become obsessed with them. The final reveal of Season One is that Tagomi can apparently move between these timelines. The final scene shows him sitting on a park bench in a United States that looks much more like the history we as the viewers remember, as opposed to the alternate history of the show. The up-shot is that we can take the film reels to depict actual alternate timelines that we (and some of the characters) now have access to.
This opens up the possibility that we can learn how various characters actually acted in different situations, rather than simply inferring what their actions might have been. We learn that in another timeline, one in which Joe was truly morally unlucky, he was a Nazi soldier who executed Frank and Juliana. Returning to our above simplified assessments we can say that in unlucky circumstances Joe acted in a way that was morally bad. In addition we see that in these circumstances Frank and Juliana both acted in a way that was largely neutral, although we may not have enough information from the film reel to determine if Juliana and Frank were placed in morally lucky or unlucky circumstances.
For the sake of seeing how our assessments can benefit from the information made available in these reels let’s fill in some possible information that could be found on the newsreels, beginning with John. Imagine we pore over hours of footage and find that, in addition to acting badly when he’s unlucky, John also acts badly when he is in morally neutral circumstances. For example we find that in all the histories in which John grows up in a boring suburb he decides to embezzle money from a local charity. When we look at John in timelines where he is afforded an opportunity to act truly heroically we find him acting in a way that is mostly neutral, neither helping nor harming those around him.
We already have values for Joe when he has bad and neutral luck. Let’s imagine that in all the realities where he is given the opportunity to be heroic he actually rises to the occasion. Joe’s not really a bad guy; he’s just very susceptible to moral luck. Frank, on the other hand, let’s assume, is slightly less susceptible to moral luck. In the universes where he is unlucky he engages in bad actions.
The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy Page 15