True Moral Conflicts
Three Worlds Collide, my most popular work prior to HPMOR, was clearly never meant to be taken seriously as literature. There is a “ship’s 4chan”, for example.
It took me by surprise when professional SF authors like David Brin and Peter Watts reviewed it, let alone praised it. I was sitting there asking myself, “What the hell did I just do right?”
The central moral conflict of Three Worlds Collide (henceforth 3WC) is the open question of how much pain, or sorrow, we would want to exist in a eudaimonia, a world that is as good as physically achievable. I’d previously addressed this question in a series of nonfiction essays, the Fun Theory Sequence. I’d tentatively leaned toward the answer “It’s okay to have some pain and some sorrow, just a lot less pointlessly than in the current state of affairs”; but I was well aware that this could just be the perspective of the 21st-century human Eliezer Yudkowsky, and that when most pain was eliminated the children’s children might simply shrug and dispose of the rest.
There is a rationalist tradition locally known as ‘steelmanning’; it means you try to make the other side sound as persuasive as possible. This practice has its own pitfalls, and I went into some of them in my essay Against Devil’s Advocacy. But in general you can think of the principle of attacking the strongest opposing arguments as an intellectual version of the disgust for Mary Sues. If you have legitimately strong opposition, then you should make it appear strong. To make it appear weaker, so that you can more easily triumph over it, is contemptible; it shows your own weakness.
I knew my own sympathies were with Fun. So my instinct automatically said to make the Superhappies, the anti-pain side in 3WC, sound as persuasive as possible. I wanted the reader to feel the force of the Superhappy position, to sympathize with the human characters as the humans wondered if they were really right. Certainly I didn’t try to weaken the Superhappy position to show how right the humans were. There would have been a sick feeling to that, an Atlas Shrugged feeling, a sense that I was being unfair to the legitimate opposition from thinkers like David Pearce.
In one of his essays, I unfortunately can’t recall which one, Orson Scott Card remarks that although a conflict between Good and Evil can drive a good story, it’s not half as riveting as a conflict between Good and Good.
The question of the total elimination of pain versus merely extreme improvement, Superhappiness versus Fun, was a central moral conflict of Three Worlds Collide. Operative word, ‘conflict’. I later realized that the reason I was getting so much critical attention for a story with a ship’s 4chan, was that I had accidentally done exactly the right thing from a literary standpoint: I had picked a strong conflict to make the centerpiece of the story, a dilemma I wasn’t sure about, where I strongly felt the force of the arguments on both sides. My steelmanning instincts had led me to heighten this conflict, to make the Superhappies appear as persuasive as possible, which maps onto the literary equivalent of making your villains stronger. (No professional editor has ever sent back a story submission with the note, “This villain is too strong and needs to be weakened.”)
True moral conflict is a rare-enough vitamin in literature that Three Worlds Collide received serious critical attention despite having a Ship’s 4chan. You’ve read many stories in which Side A and Side B seem to profess different morals, but this is not the same literary feature as a moral conflict. It is almost always clear that the author thinks you should be on Side A. Lord of the Rings does not ask whether Saruman might have a point about that whole industrial machinery business. Atlas Shrugged does not invite you to wonder along with the author whether capitalism is a good idea, or whether John Galt’s path toward it is really the right one; instead everyone who advocates against capitalism is depicted as being weak, bandit-like, contemptible.
The wrong way to try to create balance is to write a ‘morally ambiguous’ Evil vs. Evil story where both sides receive a heaping serving of taintedness and corruption. This is exactly the wrong move from a literary standpoint. Evil vs. Evil stories do not create sympathy-with-moral-questions because nobody in these stories is trying to optimize ethics, to do the right thing. You can’t have characters agonizing over an open question about the best thing to do, if nobody in the story is considering answers that are remotely plausible. Weakening a strong Good vs. Good conflict to Gray vs. Grey, let alone Evil vs. Evil, is the literary equivalent of taking away your characters’ guns and black leather battlesuits, and making them have a playground slap-fight instead. There is nothing sophisticated about Evil vs. Evil, because there is no intellectual intricacy without questioning, and a question requires lengthy consideration exactly when both sides seem at first to have strong arguments.
(And as long as I’m on the subject: ‘literary’ stories about broken people becoming even more broken are not fun to read on grounds of pure hedonics. If you try to countersignal that your story must be very hip and contrarian because it offers so little merely pleasurable reward for reading it, don’t expect to sucker anyone self-aware enough to have moved on past meta-contrarianism.)
Also on the subject of how not to do moral ambiguity, there is nothing new in the tired old revelation that life is complicated. Yes, people who pursue only deontological rules will end up doing acts with bad consequences. Yes, pursuing consequentialism alone may cause you to violate a deontological rule. Yes, people who proclaim that X will have good consequences may be foolishly ignoring some bad consequences. People who claim to be virtuous may be lying about that, etcetera etcetera. The actual good people of the world know this, they are already on their guard, a Level 1 Intelligent character will be aware of it also.
A literary author who tries to tarnish every ideal with these shocking revelations, unknown to any idealistic character in the story but of course well-known to the author, is failing at Level 1 Intelligence - the characters are all missing the obvious, just so that the author can put them in their place (comfortably below the author). Conversely, if you’re not sure yourself about which drawbacks are acceptable and when we should go ahead anyway, even knowing the risks, then it is reasonable for an idealistic Level 1 Intelligent character to be unsure just like you are.
The natural modality for genuinely sophisticated literary exploration of morality is a conflict of Good vs. Good, played straight. A conflict between high ideals that the story doesn’t try to taint, to cast down, to use to showcase the author’s superior worldly cynicism—-for this does nothing but weaken the conflict.
A true and untainted ideal is not necessarily an ideal whose advocates are all pure, or an ideal whose policies have no downsides. A true ideal is a goal that is worth optimizing for despite it all, that is still a warm bright feeling even in a complicated world. If you cannot let yourself feel that warm bright feeling and talk about it in public, you will not be able to put it into your story, and you will not be able to have your readers sympathize with your ideals. Look within yourself for the morals, ethics, aesthetics, virtues, the features of reality that you still treasure. You have created a true moral conflict when you bring two such high ideals into opposition, balanced so that you’re not sure of the right side yourself; or when you find a moral question within the high ideal whose answer you are not sure of, and around which you can construct a story.
(Discussion.)