The problem with ethics in Game of Thrones: Honor, bullet-biters, and intuition-chasers

Yi Li is a London student studying public policy. She previously wrote on teenagers in Game of Thrones, and is a member of our Small Council.

Game of Thrones is so rife with ethical dilemmas and dueling political philosophies that it’s awfully tempting to see its characters as stand-ins for a particular point of view. Being someone who’s studied a good deal of political and ethical philosophy, I’ve often tried, as Jake Emen did in his piece earlier this month, to find in the musings, decisions, and declarations of Ned and Dany and Jon and all the rest, a consistent worldview that I could find mirrored in philosophical texts.

But here’s the trouble: Well-drawn characters, like most real people, are not armchair philosophers. They’ve not developed their own systems of ideas about the nature of the good and right. They don’t devote time thinking about the underlying principle that underlies their beliefs. When presented with a moral decision, they just do what seems right to them in that particular situation— even if sometimes, they don’t exactly know why it seems right.

In fact, there’s really only one well-developed moral theory in Westeros’ cultural milieu: The idea that what’s right is what’s honorable….

We can think of the quasi-medieval conception of honor as a moral theory, and more specifically, a deontological moral theory— that is to say, a moral theory based on rules. For reference, the most well known form of deontological ethics is Kantian deontology, where the rule is roughly that you should treat humans not as means to an end but as an ends in themselves. (There’s another formulation, too but that one’s a little complicated. See here for more details.) What Kantian deontology and honor share is that the rightness of an action is in the act itself, and not in its consequences as in (you guessed it— consequentialism), or in the person doing the act, as in virtue ethics.

That’s why I think if you’re interested in the ethical perspectives of Game of Thrones characters, it’s more productive to examine how they grapple with the only conception of morality available to them than to pigeonhole as a consequentialist or a deontologist or a virtue ethicist.

Pretty much every character in Game of Thrones, and certainly all the Westerosi characters have this idea somewhere in their mind (though in some cases tucked in a very, very dark cranny) that what’s right is what’s honorable. But its cultural dominance doesn’t mean that honor is a very good moral theory, and as with consequentialism, much of Game of Thrones plays out like an argument against the elevation of honor to an exceptionless moral code. Characters face situations all the time where doing the honorable thing doesn’t feel right at all. Our dear, venerable Ser Barristan, perhaps the die-hard adherent of capital-H Honor, ends up wracked with doubt that he, and all the rest who swore to serve the realm, could have stood by and let King Aerys kill innocents because of a vow. And even if we think the honorable thing is always the right thing to do, honor as a moral theory has little to tell us about what to do when our oaths conflict, as they so often do. Serve your liege or protect the realm? Be true to your oath or to your family? The human heart in conflict with itself, as it were. As Jaime eloquently points out, moral actors in the world of Game of Thrones are positively drowning in oaths that are sure to conflict.

Herein lies what I think is the biggest schism in moral thinking among Game of Thrones characters. Characters are often pulled in opposite directions by the demands of honor and their moral intuition, and they deal with these conflicts in one of two ways: by doing what’s honorable anyways, nagging feeling be damned, or by tossing honor by the wayside and following their conscience.

Bullet-biters will do what honor dictates, even when it feels wrong. They’re people like Ned, who, had Varys not intervened, would have refused to falsely confess to treason, even though he knew his actions would put his family in danger. They’re people like Barristan, who stayed loyal to bad kings though he hated every minute, and Stannis whose god is one particular type of honor— the law. They’re people who think that our moral intuitions about what’s right in particular cases are just plain wrong when they conflict with what The Theory™ tells us to do. If the honorable thing doesn’t feel right, it’s just because you lack the discipline to swallow your conscience and do what has to be done.

The intuition-chasers disagree: They act on their conscience, even when they don’t have clearly articulated reasons for why their conscience is right. They’re people like Jaime, who couldn’t abide one more moment of service to a man he thought morally depraved and was willing to violate the code of honor in the most egregious way possible. They’re people like Dany whose moral code is built not on an abstract concept like honor but on the experiences she’s had and the empathy she feels for the people around her. They’re people like Arya, who cares little for the rules of decorum she’s supposed to follow but who has a strong sense of justice when it comes to specific circumstances, like Mycah’s murder. They’re people who are more willing to change their moral theory to fit their intuitions than the other way around— for them, if the honorable thing doesn’t feel right, then maybe, we shouldn’t put so much stock in honor after all.

The schism I’ve outlined is a major one in philosophy, and it applies not just to honor but to real-life moral theories. (I credit my use of the terms “bullet-biters” and “intuition chaser” to my professor Jonathan Birch, but I’m sure he’s not the first to use it.) These days, the bullet-biters tend to be consequentialists, who stick to their guns even when consequentialist calculations bring us to some uneasy conclusions (an example, in comic form!), and the intuition-chasers tend to be deontologists who make their living analyzing why we think it’s alright to direct the trolley but not to push the fat man.

Bullet-biters allege that when intuition-chasers do attempt to articulate reasons for their intuitions, they arrive at increasingly bizarre rationalizations— and indeed, the intuition-chasing characters can seem quite hypocritical, as if they following the rules of honor only when it suits them. Intuition-chasers allege that bullet-biters have gotten their priorities all mixed up— we do the right thing not because it is honorable, but because it’s good for people. Sometimes, honor is good for people, but when it’s not, how can we countenance choosing an abstract concept over living, breathing human beings?

And indeed, as Ned climbs the steps to the Sept of Baelor and as Barristan reflects on his life amidst the moral quandary of Meereen, they find they cannot. Honor is a poor approximation for morality, but in a world bereft of other options, characters who strike out into the moral landscape alone struggle to find anything better.

• Published on 01/29/2015 at 8:00 AM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 1:06 PM CDT