Could be, Peerie. I am not in favor of executions; I do support the right to defend one's home though. If someone breaks into my house, I shouldn't have to give them the opportunity to demonstrate that they mean to harm me or my daughter (by which time it may be too late) before I can defend. Here, a killing in justifiable self-defense would be considered a homicide, but not a "murder" because it doesn't meet the elements of murder. I have a question for you (completely OT). What happens if Scots law conflicts with the law of the UK as a whole? For example, if the Parliament in London (Whitehall?) passes a law, but the governing body in Scotland has a different law, which has supremacy? Scotland has always been of a great deal of interest to me because my ancestors came to the U.S. from there.
Scots law is entirely separate from English law and always has been. The UK Parliament in London has no jurisdiction to legislate on Scots law (or matters devolved to the Scottish Parliament which was inaugurated in 1999). The UK parliament legislates on reserved matters such as the UK wide tax system, defence and nuclear power etc. The Scottish Parliament passes laws on housing, health, justice, agriculture and many more areas. If the Scottish Parliament has acted ultra vires (outwith its constitutional powers) then there are procedures to challenge the laws in the Courts. It's a bit of a minefield to be honest because there is European Community law, UK law and Scottish Laws, all competing.
Well, if you write stories for everyone you have to roll with the general opinion. If Cameron wrote Avatar about how the humans roll over the na'vi people would have buried him alive even if the complete story and its world are fictional. For some reason it looks like people always somehow look for symbolism in everything and the danger is that they'd get it wrong. It annoys me because it takes away the freedom of expression. Popular authors are afraid of not offending anyone so they wouldn't look bad and then their works look like it. The strong and principal minds only promote this idea instead of defying it. So where do we live? I'm not exactly sure how it works in the USA but in here in Sweden I'd pretty much say that. In other words, I'd like people to adopt this kind of mindset where if they watch Avatar (for example) they wouldn't think 'conquering undeveloped nations is bad' but rather 'if a civilized world tried to conquer the uncivilized world this is how it would look like'. I personally don't care about morality or reality because stories are always fictional works unless based on reality. It's always up to you to decide how you would like it. Some people will roll with you, some don't. You can't satisfy everyone. Was that what you were talking about? I'm sorry, I'm trying my best to understand.
I would say, be careful your story doesn't sound too contrived. I think it should be more about telling a good story than making a point. I think what makes this interesting are his motives for doing something that's against his own values. What's happened in his past that's made him do this? What is the point of the killings, is there a reason or is this something he can't control? Where is he headed? Jail, the grave, in hiding?
I am well aware of the legal & moral complexities, though my area of expertise is English law. I was not approaching it too simplistically, I was addressing your point. You said that while morality distinguishes between two forms of killing (murder & euthanasia) the law could not make such a distinction because the same principle was at the basis of both of them. That isn't true. If you want it in a little legalese it could be put as follows: while there is no difference in the actus reus of murder & euthanasia (since the practical end result is death in both cases), there is a clear difference in the mens rea (murder & euthanasia clearly have two different motivations). You go on to point out that someone could cloak a murder in the guise of a 'compassionate' act of euthanasia. That was exactly why I said the law was unwilling to make a distinction: the benefits of a law of euthanasia are outweighed by the increased risk of successful murders. A final point on what you say about state killing being murder - if that were true, then every state executioner would be on trial for murder! While a nation state sanctions executions of prisoners for crimes, legally it is not murder. Morally, you may disagree, but legally Albert Pierrepoint was not a murderer. In terms of morality, I absolutely agree with you that state execution is state murder, but legally there is a distinction. Oh, another thing, you state that This may be true in scots law (I don't know), but self-defence is a complete defence for murder in English law. The three partial defences are provocation, suicide pact and diminished responsibility. Going back to the OP, I just read Ender's Game a week or so ago and that had a lovely part towards the end. At the basis of the book is the war between humanity and aliens. The war had been started after aliens turned up and killed human settlers on a space station. Why is this relevant? Well, it turns out that the aliens acted like a swarm, only the queen of each colony was sentient. The individuals were not considered fully alive, so when they were killing human beings, it did not occur to them that they were killing sentient being. There was a great comparison: for the humans, it was a massacre, for the aliens it was like clipping toenails. It's a fun subject to play with.
Couldn't agree more. But I'd say that whether the story is good or bad is also about what is says. Or at least that's what I'd expect people to think.
In Clockwork Orange, there is a quite bit of aesthetics to the main character, which is why the fact that he's guilty of hideous crimes does not fully register. This was, apparently, the intended effect. I'd say, this is a subtle way of affecting the reader. S/he is expected to consciously realize that s/he has been programmed to accept an ultra-violent lunatic and, hopefully, take a good, careful look in the mirror. BTW, the last, preachy, chapter of the book did not make it to the final edition.
If you're trying to write something immoral for the sake of being immoral and fiesty, I sincerely doubt it's gonna fly. If you're looking for a way to do it without having a very specific and personal point to make, I also doubt it's gonna fly. If you examine those stories that break western society's moral traditions, it's rarely the main point but rather a side-effect of honestly portraying an aspect of human nature. Lolita is a good example -- Humbert Humbert is not quite as much an immoral man as he is simply a human being with human needs and desires. "Human" is key here and what makes his character tolerable, because we as readers too are human and know what it's like to have immoral needs and desires. I think that in order to succeed with something like this, you'll have to have a very clear idea about what you want to tell us about the human condition and not focus on being immoral.
I agree with your idea in general, but you're reading of Lolita is way off. The reader is supposed to be conflicted by Humbert, not to entirely sympathise with him, and to constantly abhor his sexual behaviour. He is funny and intelligent, and for that reason the reader has a tendency to ally themselves with him, but because of his sexual character, we are always at a distance and always against him. The reader is not intended to (and, I would argue, should not) feel sympathetic towards his immoral desires.
I placed "tolerate" very carefully in my description -- I didn't claim we should truly sympathize with him. Rather, the reason why we tolerate him (opposed to throwing the book in the fire in contempt), is because his flaws are human flaws. I for one didn't feel any urge to see him executed at the end of the story.
At the risk of derailing this thread (although Lolita is a great case study for this kind of moral question), I still disagree. There can be no excusing his "flaws", as you so misleadingly call them--his crimes are the most obscene and inexcusable any person is capable of committing. The reason he is tolerated, indeed the reason the novel is so fascinating, is because of his personality. His monstrous nature is masked by wit, intelligence and charisma. He is morally irredeemable, his flaws are not excusable human flaws (pride, hubris, ambition--these are human flaws. The rape of a child is not), and the conflict in the novel is derived from this contradiction. It's not a question of whether we can sympathise with him morally, because I think for all but the most depraved readers, we cannot. It's a question of personality and character.
Had Lolita been published a couple of centuries ago, few would have raised an eyebrow at Humbert. There's been times and societies in which his behaviour was considered perfectly normal. That it conflicts so harshly with modern moral behaviour doesn't make it less a human flaw to feel desire for someone outside your own age range.
Not to mention you could get married at 12 in parts of the US until fairly recently all that was required was parental permission and consent from the courts. I remember reading articles about it in the 1980s
I haven't read Lolita, so I'm a little unclear about a few things, if someone has the inclination to explain. Who is taking the initiative in the novel? Does it seem like Humboldt is blackmailing the girl for sex, or just bribing her?
Humbert basically abducts and rapes a fourteen year old girl he finds attractive, dragging her across the country, staying in motels. Lolita does not consent (at least at first), and the relationship is anything but mutual. If you want to justify child rape by saying it is perfectly acceptable in other societies, a dubious claim to say the least, that's your prerogative. But Lolita neither invites nor encourages any such position from its readers.
He "abducts" her because her mother died, and he never actively rapes her. While he was planning a drug rape it never worked out and she then proceeded to offer him sex willingly. Later on the power shifts and she begins to actively bribe him sexually. Maybe Arron read a different version of the book, read more into it, or just gets offended much easier than I do. I merely thought it was a fascinating, honest and non-judgemental peek into the darker recesses of human nature. We're all beasts at some level and it's my personal experience that those who deny that fact turn out to be the worst in the end. On a side note, claiming that I'm trying to justify child rape is entirely over the top to the point of being ludicrous. I thought you were brighter than that.
It sounds like you want to write a morally gray set of characters. People with good intentions who do things which are harsh at times, or brutal, or "evil," but who have reasoning and logic behind their actions. Maybe based on a different values system, or maybe based on incomplete information, or maybe the characters are just arseholes but their actions have good results. What I'd Like to See Done with This 1. Characters whose society breaks down, and they react. Maybe electricity is blown out by an EMP and a character who would normally be pacifistic finds him using a shotgun to rob a store so he can get enough food for his family to survive a disaster. Maybe a character has actually done research on this situation, and knows how to help people repair equipment, and ends up in a brutal feud between himself and some other would-be leaders. Maybe a war has happened, and law and order have broken down, and the only job the character can get is as a recruiter for child soldiers, or as a mercenary and looter. 2. Culture clash stories. Different values systems are hotbeds of conflict. Nor is the conflict limited to the "modern" stuff like being legally allowed to rape and beat your wife in some cultures, or arguments over whether people have the right to arm themselves against abuse by government, or whether or not it's legal or honorable to kill an enemy in a mutuall-agreed-upon duel. I mean stuff like how women and men live and think differently in a patriarchy, or how minority and majority groups are affected differently by weird customs (like Afro-Americans having random strangers come up and fondle their "exotic" hair), or whether it is right and proper to own housepets (Islam considers dog ownership unclean, and I knew someone years ago with a pig for a pet who would be even more offensive). 3. Clashing worldviews. It doesn't have to be culture-wide. Look in the earlier comments in this very thread -- we have two people who disagree because they define "murder" differently. One guy seems to call murder "intentionally killing another human." Another seems to define it as "killing another human in such a way that it is not permitted by custom or by law." The former is much more likely to call euthanasia, abortion, soldiering, deadly delf-defense, and unfortunate pranks (Boo! Scared ya! Oh crap, he's having a heart attack!) "murder" than the latter person, because they are not in agreement over the words itself. And as words define how we think about a situation, this means that even if both of the above arguers are reasonable people with many examples and corner cases to study, they won't agree. They will probably become frustrated as hell, and may end up doubting the other one's sanity. 4. Clashing expectations. Many people have view X, which differs considerably from reality Y. If the X believer encounters Y, they can have all kinds of problems -- inability to cope with a paradigm shift, outward anger because they feel their ego has been threatened, anger at people who live Y and don't conform to their expectations, a sense of entitlement, violence, rudeness. You've seen it in the queue at the grocer's when an idiot yells at a cashier because the idiot failed to read a huge and obvious sign. But bigger examples abound -- anyone who has an idealistic picture of court politics may be shocked at the backstabbing that goes on there. A time traveler from our modern day might expect the ancient Greeks to be "perfectly okay" with homosexuality, when in fact the Greeks didn't even have the same concept of sexuality, and looked down on any adult male who allowed himself to be penetrated. It was fine for a kid to be penetrated, because he wasn't an adult or grown citizen, and it was fine to penetrate slaves and early-castrates because they weren't really people in the Greek view. Plus, since sexual restraint was tied to manliness, castrated priest eunuchs were considered sex-obsessed girly-men and unmanly, since they couldn't have sexual restraint, and must therefore not have sexual restraint. A gay time traveler who went to ancient Greece in order to be "accepted" would quickly find himself in a world of hurt. You can see how quickly differing worldviews, changing circumstances and misunderstood history can result in conflict. It can also create a rich and morally-gray world. What I Would Hate to See 1. Any story in which a morally-gray character never doubts himself, and is never checked by someone else who calls him out on his actions. I discovered this about my reading preferences when I read One Second After, about a smug mysogynistic jackass surviving an EMP attack on the United States. Since no one ever pointed out his idiotic behavior -- antagonizing local police, introducing bacteria into his main water supply, getting the mayor re-addicted to cigarettes, refusing to give the mayor and the city council his not-actually-that-valuable advice until they broke rules to satisfy his whims -- I began to wonder whether the author actually thought the jackass protagonist was acting correctly. And that scares me; it's like reading a pamphlet you think is a parody and then realizing the guy was actually serious about the crap he was peddling. 2. Poorly researched foreign cultures. I brought up the Greek sexuality thing because the grad student whose work I read on the subject mentioned how wrong most people picture Greek society and sexual taboos. Please, please, please, if you're going to write a character who is acting evil by some standards and good by others, make sure you get that culture's standards right. Tips and Warnings 1. Worldbuilding will matter. A lot. The characters shown to be morally gray in Song of Ice and Fire, in Shogun, in Berg's Transformation, in Dies the Fire, in the Dresden Files, in the Lies of Locke Lamora, are only wonderful because of the context the author provides. 2. Make the characters round. Flaws and talents, fears and hopes, love and hate all together mixed. Jaime Lannister and Locke Lamora may be killers, liars, thieves, but they also have goals and hopes, dreams that were smashed to pieces, reputations they did not fully earn. This is why the smug misogynistic jackass from One Second After failed: he was always right, he was never corrected, he never suffered from his own flaws. Not a round character, a Author Favorite with the depth of cardboard. 3. Don't have just one conflict, but several, of varying degres of clarity. It can actually be really good for a story to have one conflict that is actually black-and-white, while all the others are gray. Ned Stark roots out lies and corruption. Locke Lamora risks his neck to avoid innocents being ... well, something worse than death. Prince Aleksander is a cruel and unyielding man when he first comes on stage in Transformation, a real black-hearted monster. 4. Show how "evil" beliefs work in the real world. I mean, if you have a society where slavery is common, show that there are some benefits -- you can show mercy to prisoners of war instead of killing them off, or maybe the slaves are skilled with new technology and so the country is gradually growing richer at all levels of society as the slaves' knowledge helps everyone. In other words, don't make something evil just to be different; show how it could plausibly come about, and show that it works well enough to be maintained. 5. Show how people change as they encounter new views, new cultures. It could be as harsh as a noble man being not ransomed, for some reason, and becoming a galley slave. It could be a Muslim woman from Saudi Arabia, feeling angry and hurt that her American granddaughter laughs at her "Halloween costume." It could be a pacifist changing his mind really, really quickly when someone tries to rape his wife; it could be a violent man resigning himself to his new society's limits, and putting away his weapons forever like in at least one Clint Eastwood movie. 6. This is sort of a Special Bonus and HeinleinFan will Love You Forever, but if you can show how people's characteristics and beliefs are different, I will buy twenty copies of your book and foist them on friends. Because some traits don't change. If someone is a fanatic when he fights for the Side of Good, he will likely be just as much a fanatic when he fights on the Side of Evil. If someone is harsh, cruel, abusive and narcissistic when they society tells them they can beat their family, they will probably remain harsh and cruel when their society tells them not to. If someone is a wishy-washy procrastinator, he will likely not become decisive and bold just because his views have changed. And yes, some of this is obvious, but it is sometimes really really easy for authors to forget that characters are more than just beliefs -- they're composed of habits, illusions, good intentions, selfishness, and skills. Some of which will remain, even if the world around them is shattered and reforged.
HeinleinFan: I absolutely agree with you on loads of points, [ rant] except that I personally just read Jim Butcher fail writing a good culture clash in Codec Alera, and many culture clashes tend to be obvious and deep as a half finished can of coke. Unless written in some multi culture fiction by someone with load of personal experience. So that's is something i wont put into focus before I have some real in depth experience.[ /rant] One word I would like to add that I find interesting in the context of this fiction is price. Conviction to any path isn't interested if it isn't tried, and unless there is a price to tell it a tale for young children or a romantic comedy. And when it comes to price is really fun to torment the characters, in my humble opinion.
I agree wholeheartedly with Heinleinfan, but I'd just like to add to this point: There has been a lot of focus in this thread about making good characters do bad (or brutal) things to make them morally grey. Just as important, in my eyes, is to make 'bad' characters do good & positive things. It's the typical hyperbole, but Traudl Junge's portrayal of Hitler in 'Untill the final hour' was touching because she potrayed a man who was at the same time a maniac, a murderer and a megalomaniac, but at the same time, someone who was also kind to animals, friendly and considerate to his secretaries and capable of kindness and warmth. If anything, this sort of portrayal is all the more terrifying as shows how terrible a human can be. It's easy to see how a caricature of evil can act horrifically. It is harder to accept how a recognisable human being can act in such a way. (which is precisely why I think you are trying to do this - good job)
