#and then on the flipside it makes me feel inhuman for my first reaction being one of confusion instead of distress and empathy

[swimfuel]

having myself a little bit of a cryfest over the fact that characters are attached to media lol

[compartmentalisinghmpf]

On Morally Evaluating the Mass Murderers (shut up, Mycroft) of Terra Ignota

Jazzy’s “I’m not all that worked up about it *and* I’m horrified.” is kind of my reaction to the O.S. situation, too. This book is taking me to a lot of “I’m feeling this, but I’m also, simultaneously, feeling something sort of the opposite” places. This is a big part of why I’m so fascinated by it.

So, as so often when I'm fascinated, I ended up writing an essay about it.

Spoilers below:

This turned into an attempt to morally evaluate all the different models for “justifiable” mass murder we encounter in the Terra Ignota books. I'm starting with a number of second-order considerations, not the main, first-order problem, prompted by the observation that it's interesting how we don't feel “too worked up” at the O.S. murders.

1. Second-Order Considerations, or: How?

1.1. All About the Feels

On the purely emotional level, out of all our various oh-so-benevolently motivated potential or actual mass murderers and serial killers here, O.S. feel a lot easier to forgive than either Mycroft, or the Mardis and Apollo. Why is that?

For one thing, I think, it’s that they (mostly) don't display Super Creepy Emotions about what they've done/are doing. Unlike Mycroft (and with the possible exception of Thisbe) they don’t particularly seem to relish killing. Cato in fact feels suicidally bad about it; the rest mostly seem to have, at best/worst, a sort of “somebody's gotta do it” practical, professional pride about it. As for Ganymede, Ando and Perry, who are pulling the strings: they seem to have very little emotional involvement at all, they just dutifully perform a sort of studied, detached pantomime of regret – the attitude that people in command of a killing apparatus everywhere have cultivated to be able to live with themselves. This is very much an attitude that society normalises in these contexts, an attitude that we expect from military leaders and politicians. The detachment of everyone involved on the killing side here, and the fact that we don't get to meet any of the victims, enables us to feel detached ourselves. Isn't that nice.

And, unlike the Mardis (and obviously very much unlike Mycroft) O.S. mostly seem to go with methods that minimise the victims’ actual suffering – quick surgical strikes, as opposed to large-scale war with all the attendant atrocities, as per the Mardis, or individualised atrocity as per Mycroft. The people who make up O.S. are the most humane out of all the killers we encounter in these books.

1.2. Ethical Murder: the Personal Touch

But, you could argue, the flipside of O.S.' humane methods is actually a different sort of inhumanity: O.S. have killed hundreds of people – thousands, over generations - and they do it efficiently, cleanly, and at a distance, without any sort of personal contact – you could almost say, industrially. As a German, my mind immediately jumps to the industrial aspect of the Nazi’s death machine, here. (Jazzy pointed out to me that the people of O.S. at least were thinking they were making the world a better place; but so, I’m pretty sure, were a lot of people in Nazi Germany. They just had a catastrophically warped sense of what “a better world” should mean.)

Actually, the most accurate comparison here, though, is with present-day drone operators who kill supposed key figures remotely, in far-off conflict zones. How do we feel about those, morally? Is that A-OK? Or are we, at the very least, a little bit uneasy about it? How easy should killing be made, for the killer; how safe; how clean?

Mycroft – and I shudder as I type this – has a point when he insists on not being called a mass murderer because he faced all his victims himself, individually. Mycroft - bizarrely, perversely – is offered as the inhumane but human face of killing in this book. He even went one step further than just facing his victims and killing them in individualised ways: he tried to make their murders a participatory philosophical experience for the victims. For all the personal disdain he has for some of them (largely the ones who didn't take him up on that generous offer), in his twisted way he was being respectful of them, as individuals and as human beings.

(Please pass me the brain bleach.)

So, there is that. If killing really is necessary, is it morally better to do it in a sanitised and detached way? Or is Mycroft's way more honest and thus, perhaps, also more moral?

Note that I am not referring to the torture, rape and cannibalism aspect of what Mycroft did, here; I'm talking purely about the fact that he entered into a face-to-face relationship with his victims. (Though of course the atrocities he committed are an essential part of that relationship, and further complicate an already complicated picture.)