#I also agree with how weird the morality is in the grand scope of the show

[corvikari]

you aren’t the weird one! I fully agree with your points on how the heroes have no consequences or trials they need to overcome, and anything bad that happens is just immediately resolved.

Take the characters in the Wicked Musical for example, or rather take Elphaba. She literally has a song about how every time she does good or tries to it blows up in her face and is twisted into something that is bad. In the book this is allegedly magnified tenfold (I haven’t read the book which is why I say allegedly), she is a tragic character.

Now I feel like this is two sides, on one hand should the characters suffer as much as Elphaba or the ending be as emotionally tragic for the characters in TDP? no. We aren’t asking for much, just that the show written by adults understands that this isn’t just a kids show. Heck kids deserve better than this (cough cough My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic cough cough)

Maturity in writing doesn’t always equate to more violence and swearing. It’s also about emotional and mental maturity, understanding pacing and characters.

Episode 9 & the season overall

MEEEEEH

Do I need to say more?

Like yes, fine, overall, it's not as bad as the previous two seasons. Overall, this was the best season since season 2.

But let's be honest, it's not some high benchmark to clear.

Structurally, this episode's problem is that it's the final episode yet it has the structure of an early-in-season episode. It solves a personal issue of Rayla and it deals out Aaravos's backstory, and it even recaps early seasons! If not for Aaravos's return in the end, this could've been the first episode of the last season. It still could've been, just move his return one episode earlier and the rest could stay the same. No reason Aaravos can't explain his backstory to Claudia after she lets him out. The whole "cast spell with love" was a bullshit excuse.

But the most prevalent issue of this whole series is its refusal to put its heroes through any meaningful trials or tribulations. Any time they have any meaningful choice to make, the story ultimately makes it so they don't have to pay the cost. Some examples:

Rayla decides to lose her hand instead of killing Ezran - Zym just breaks her hand-cutting bracelet.

Callum decides to use dark magic and regrets it - he just gets primal magic he can use with clear conscience. He arguably chooses wrong and then he's still given the good magic in reward.

That also entirely nullifies his initial choice of "use dark magic or have no magic." He just gets good magic.

Claudia kills a deer to heal Soren's legs and in the end... Nothing? She gets ugly I guess? Soren is perfectly fine, it doesn't matter that such a powerful dark magic was used on him, at most it's Claudia who bears the cost, and it's not clear what "looking ugly" really does, if anything at all.

The Dragon Mom ignores her injury and pretends she's fine - when she stops being fine she just stumbles across a healer by accident.

Or just this season:

Callum gets healed from using dark magic by a ritual. They say it's dangerous but eh, it seemed pretty easy, half an episode and done, and he's fine and has his primal magic. No cost.

Rayla thinks she'll have to choose who to save, but in the end her parents are at peace and happy to go. She doesn't really have to choose, she just goes with what the other people choose.

The Sun Queen strikes out at her brother's forces and in the end nothing happens to her lol. That whole Z plot line was ultimately a nothingburger. The big sun dragon wasn't even needed to release Aaravos. You could've entirely cut it out and just have Claudia sneak into the castle to get the egg!

And so on and so on. And it's just so tiring, because we're dangled nice stuff in front of us, like a possession arc, but then nothing happens.

Claudia just lets Aaravos out like she's intended for three full seasons. It's just dull. It's boring! It's, well, it's the definition of meh.

Guys tell me, seriously, am I the weird one? Is it weird for me that I expect the heroes to have to deal with complex issues and hard choices, and not the villains? Am I asking for too much?

Because it feels like the creators had some nice epic pictures in their heads, like Katolis burning or a big battle among the Sun Elves, but they just can't or won't commit to them. They don't write a meaningful story to accompany those pictures. All the heaviness is put on the antagonists, while the heroes, if they have any issues, typically resolve them within one episode - like the Sun Queen had a one episode long "arc," but she just had to listen to a story and she's perfect and flawless again! Callum's arc of struggling with dark magic and possession is the only such one, and it still came to an anticlimactic, easy end with the cleansing ritual.

Yes, the show can still do something with it. If I had more trust in this series and its writing, I'd say that sometime in the next season, Callum is going to use dark magic to save Rayla, breaking his promise, and then she'll be unable to kill him, breaking her promise, and they'll need to put themselves back together and come back from that.

But... I don't have any trust in this series at this point. They used false advertising in the trailer! There wasn't any scene with Callum having black eyes this season, yet they even used it as a thumbnail?

So with my zero faith in the writing of TDP, I'm presuming there will come a moment when it'll look like Callum might use dark magic again, but he'll then refuse and instead of suffering any consequences, he and others will be promptly rescued by someone, like maybe the Dragon Mom coming back during the final battle or something like that.

Because the heroes just got to choose right and they'll suffer no consequences for it. I guess the moral of the story is "just be good and things will work out on their own." In other words... "trust in God/Fate."

Amazing. That's exactly the message to teach kids, instead of "sometimes doing good is hard but it's still worthwhile" or "be smart and creative and you'll find a solution" or idk a hundred other messages this show could've had.

Like seriously, the setup where humans don't have inborn magic and elves do is such an amazing one. It could've been a story about humans outsmarting elves, about figuring out other ways to use magic, about not letting their lack of power put them down.

But nooo. Instead it's a story about those born powerful being always good and beautiful, and only a couple of them are bad apples - usually because they're deceived by one particularly bad apple. And if you're born without power (privilege, khy khy) you should just accept it and you'll be rewarded by fate/those with power.

This show is progressive?

[the-utmost-bound]

The Happiness Hypothesis: Chapter 8, “The Felicity of Virtue”

This chapter was about virtue, and the claim that leading a virtuous life will lead us to happiness.  Haidt points out that our idea of virtue has changed radically in the last few hundred years; he then evaluates this claim in light of both the old and new ideas of virtue.

Here’s the quotes he starts with:

Epicurus: It is impossible to live the pleasant life without also living sensibly, nobly and justly, and it is impossible to live sensibly, nobly and justly without living pleasantly.

Buddha: Set your heart on doing good.  Do it over and over again, and you will be filled with joy.  A fool is happy until his mischief turns against him.  And a good man may suffer until his goodness flowers.

Is this true, or is it just what authority figures want us to believe so that we’ll behave?  But virtue does not necessarily mean doing what we’re told; sometimes it means ignoring what our parents say, and running off on grand adventures, and building character in the process.

Haidt tells the story of Ben Franklin, who runs away from his apprenticeship with his brother (an unvirtuous act according to the “do what you’re told” model of virtue), but who actively works to cultivate virtue, and ends up very successful at life.  The story of Ben Franklin makes it sound like Haidt views virtue as an internal endeavor -- figuring out what’s important to you, and then cultivating your own virtues and living according to them -- rather than an external thing where you blindly follow whatever you’re told to do.

Haidt spends the beginning of the chapter explaining why our modern conception of virtue is weird.

In ancient Greece, people had a very different concept of virtue than we do today.

It was not all about selflessness, giving to charity, and repressing our sexuality.

Rather, Aristotle’s idea of virtue, called arete, was about excellence: about doing something well.  “The arete of a knife is to cut well; the arete of an eye is to see well[.]”

“He was saying that a good life is one where you develop your strengths, realize your potential, and become what it is in your nature to become.”

The Virtues of the Ancients

The ancients wrote about morality in a different way than we do today.

(1) They wrote about virtues (e.g. “honesty, justice, courage, benevolence, self-restraint, and respect for authority”), and “specified actions that were good and bad with respect to those virtues”.  The virtues were not just for helping others; they were supposed to “benefit the person who cultivates them.”

(2) They “rely heavily on maxims and role models rather than proofs and logic.”  This form of moral instruction inspires the elephant instead of reasoning with the rider.  This is good, because it’s ultimately the elephant that makes the decisions.

(3) The ancient texts “emphasize practice and habit rather than factual knowledge.”  You can know all the moral rules that you want, but it takes practice to become a virtuous person.  Practice is how you train the elephant.  So the ancient texts give exercises and activities that you can use to cultivate virtue.

How the West Was Lost

Two principles led Western thought (especially during the enlightenment) away from this conception of ethics.

(1) Parsimony: science teaches us to “search for the smallest set of laws that can explain the enormous variety of events in the world”.  People applied this thinking to morality, and started looking for a single moral principle from which all morality could be derived, instead of using these long lists of virtues.

(2) Rationality: reason was supposed to be the center of the human mind, the thing that separated us from animals, so naturally, reason should be in charge of morality as well.

Two enlightenment philosophers, Kant and Bentham, tried to propose a single moral principle from which all of ethics could be derived.

Kant suggested the “categorical imperative”: moral laws should apply universally to everyone at all times, so if you are trying to decide whether an action is moral, you need to ask whether it could be proposed as a universal law.  For instance, Haidt says “If you are planning to break a promise that has become inconvenient, can you really propose a universal rule that states people ought to break promises that have become inconvenient?”

Bentham proposed utilitarianism: the principle of creating the most good for the most people.  An action was moral if it increased global utility.

The followers of Kant (”deontologists”) still argue with the followers of Bentham (”consequentialists”).

But they agree on many important things:

(1) “Decisions should be based ultimately on one principle only, be it the categorical imperative or the maximization of utility.”

(2) “They both insist that only the rider can make such decisions because moral decision making requires logical reasoning and sometimes even mathematical calculation.”

(3) “They both distrust intuitions and gut feelings, which they see as obstacles to good reasoning.”

(4) “And they both shun the particular in favor of the abstract: You don’t need a rich, thick description of the people involved, or of their beliefs and cultural traditions.  You just need a few facts and a ranked list of their likes and dislikes (if you are a utilitarian).  It doesn’t matter what country of historical era you are in; it doesn’t matter whether the people involved are your friends, your enemies, or complete strangers.  The moral law, like a law of physics, works the same for all people at all times.”

These two philosophies have changed the way western society thinks about morality.

“The philosopher Edmund Pincoffs has argued that consequentialists and deontologists worked together to convince Westerners in the twentieth century that morality is the study of moral quandaries and dilemmas.  Where the Greeks focused on the character of a person and asked what kind of person we should each aim to become, modern ethics focuses on actions, asking when a particular action is right or wrong.”

“This turn from character ethics to quandary ethics has turned moral education away from virtues and toward moral reasoning.  If morality is about dilemmas, then moral education is training in problem solving.”

Instead of teaching children specific moral facts, we teach them how to solve moral problems on their own.

Haidt has two problems with this.

(1) “It weakens morality and limits its scope.”  Ideas of virtue used to infuse everything a person would do.  Now we only think about morality when confronting specific moral dilemmas, which are usually “tradeoffs between self-interest and the interests of others”.  Morality applies when we’re wondering whether to cheat on a partner, or whether to give to charity.  We no longer use morality to think about things like working hard for our own long-term gain, or developing a skill.

(2) “[I]t relies on bad psychology.”  We teach children moral principles, and show them examples of other people reasoning their way through moral quandaries.  And children are supposed to take away from this the ability to reason morally.  Which they do; when they sit down and think about it, people are able to apply the principles and come to a moral conclusion.  But this doesn’t translate into action; it takes more than reason to persuade the elephant.  Haidt gives an example of how he believed, rationally, in the virtue of vegetarianism, but never actually acted on that principle until he saw a slaughterhouse video that viscerally disgusted him.

The Virtues of Positive Psychology

There has been pushback against the modern idea of morality.

Some of it is from conservative Christians.

Some of it is from a philosopher named Alasdair MacIntyre who argues that “creating a universal, context-free morality was doomed from the beginning” and that we need specific virtues, grounded in a specific cultural tradition, in order to find meaning and purpose in life.

And some of it is from positive psychology.

Positive psychology was founded by Martin Seligman, who noticed that psychology was only focusing on the problems and pathologies we experience.  We have a whole book (the DSM) designed for classifying problems, but no equivalent diagnostic manual for recognizing the specific ways that people can live a good life.

So Seligman and another psychologist named Peterson tried creating a diagnostic manual of strengths and virtues.  Their goal was to make the list applicable to any human culture.  So they looked through every list of virtues they could find, and wrote down six very broad classes of virtues that every culture considers important.  Those virtues are: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.  Cultures may disagree on how to weight these virtues, but they all agree that they are, indeed, virtues.

For each one, Peterson and Seligman also made a list of “strengths of character”, which are specific ways of achieving each virtue.  For wisdom, for instance, the list is curiosity, love of learning, judgment, ingenuity, emotional intelligence, and perspective.

One piece of research that’s come out of this list is: focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses.

It’s easier and more rewarding to cultivate strengths rather than weaknesses.

And sufficient strength in one virtue can compensate for weakness in another.

People who try to fix weaknesses will often find themselves giving up in despair.

But people who work on their strengths will often find themselves improving as a human being.

Haidt spends the end of the chapter trying to answer the “virtue hypothesis”, the claim that living virtuously will make us happy.

Hard Questions, Easy Answers

For the ancient idea of virtue, it’s easy to answer the virtue hypothesis.  If virtue just means cultivating personal excellence, and you focus on your strengths (things you find intrinsically rewarding), then of course living virtuously can bring you happiness.

But what about for “our restricted modern understanding of morality as altruism”?  Does acting against our own self-interest make us happy, or benefit us in some way?

Religious leaders say yes: if you act virtuously, you will go to heaven, or be reincarnated in a better form during your next lifetime.

But this belief in divine punishment / reward can be traced to various psychological principles (whether or not god is real).

(1) Immanent justice: this is the belief that, if you do something bad, then something bad will happen to you in return.  It’s very common among children at a certain stage of development but we see it in adults too, as people try to make sense of terrible things happening in their (or others’) lives.  It’s part of the human instinct for reciprocity.

(2) The myth of pure evil (discussed in Chapter 4): we think people are purely good or purely evil, but really, they aren’t.  “Moral motivations (justice, honor, loyalty, patriotism) enter into most acts of violence, including terrorism and war.  Most people believe their actions are morally justified.”  So Haidt’s argument is that, if heaven and hell existed, few people would qualify for either.

Science also gives us an easy answer: the virtues evolved because they are good for us, and help us to propagate our genes.  Kindness and cooperation help us either through kin altruism (helping others who bear the same genes) or reciprocal altruism (you’re kind, so someone else is kind to you in return).

But just because something is evolutionarily beneficial doesn’t mean it makes us happy.  Our genes also motivate us to seek status instead of happiness, and that definitely makes us less happy.

Also, what about practicing the virtues when they don’t lead to reciprocal altruism?  What about performing acts of kindness that you know will never be repaid?  Does that still make us happy?

So neither religion nor science’s easy answer is satisfying.

Hard Questions, Hard Answers

So does helping people really make us happy?

Studies have shown that altruism correlates with happiness, but this could just be because happier people are more likely to be altruistic.  Indeed, when you make people happier, they are more likely to behave altruistically.

Is there any evidence that altruism makes people happy?  Yes, but it depends on the life stage.  For teenagers, studies have found that volunteering increases prosocial behavior but doesn’t increase happiness; for adults volunteering does increase happiness; and this is especially pronounced for the elderly.

This could partially be because of the social benefits -- teenagers already have good social lives and don’t need to find a community through volunteering, but as people get older (and especially once they’re elderly), volunteering provides a valuable source of community.

It could also be because of life narratives.  Volunteering helps you build a good life narrative, so it matters more for adults who already have a solid life narrative to build on.  Also, “in old age, generativity, relationship, and spiritual strivings come to matter more, but achievement strivings seem out of place,” so volunteer work is especially fitting for an elderly person’s life story.

The Future of Virtue

"Scientific research supports the virtue hypothesis, even when it is reduced to the claim that altruism is good for you.”

“When it is evaluated in the way that Ben Franklin meant it, as a claim about virtue more broadly, it becomes so profoundly true that it raises the question of whether cultural conservatives are correct in their critique of modern life and its restricted, permissive morality.”

As a society, we’ve lost a strong sense of shared cultural values, and this has led us into anomie.

We’ve gone from a society of producers, with values such as self-restraint, to a society of consumers, where people are encouraged to seek personal fulfillment.

Also, our society is increasingly diverse, and values inclusivity.  This leads people to seek out a least common denominator of virtue, thereby ignoring some of the specific ones that give each culture its flavor and give people a strong grounding in their values.

So, as a society, we have undergone tradeoffs: we’ve chosen inclusivity, which makes life much better for immigrants, women, African Americans, gay people, etc., even if it erases our strong foundation of virtues.

Even if you don’t think the tradeoffs were worth it, there’s no way to go back to the 1950s, or to an ethnically homogeneous pre-consumer society.

“Diversity” has become a positive buzzword in liberal culture, but there are two kinds of diversity, demographic and moral.  Demographic is good; it helps us include groups that were previously mistreated.  But moral diversity is what causes anomie and conflict.

“Liberals are right to work for a society that is open to people of every demographic group, but conservatives might be right in believing that at the same time we should work much harder to create a common, shared identity.”

Haidt thinks there’s something to the conservative view that we ought to teach children morals and values, instead of leaving them to figure it out themselves.

It may be too late for this now, given the current state of the culture war.  If this is going to happen, it will need to come from some sort of grassroots movement where a community joins together to educate children according to a particular set of virtues.

Maybe we won’t have as solid or cohesive of a culture as we would if we abandoned our commitment to diversity, but we will be a more just culture.