490 – Philosophy in Fiction

The Mythcreant Podcast

Have you ever wondered what it was all about, maaaaaaan? A lot of writers have, and they love to put such philosophizing in their work. When it works, we get The Good Place. When it doesn’t, we get weird interlude chapters that exist for no purpose but to lecture us. This week, we’re talking about how to get closer to the former rather than the latter. That means a discussion of moral dilemmas, what certain philosophers said, and something called “gothstatic wronging.” Or maybe it was “dogtastic wronging.” The world may never know.

Show Notes

• The Good Place
• The Trolley Problem
• Sandwich Discourse
• Doxastic Wronging
• Death Wish
• The High Ground
• The Measure of a Man
• Past Tense
• Plato
• Aristotle
• John Stuart Mills
• Machiavelli
• Marx
• Paley’s Watchmaker Argument
• Kant
• Bobiverse
• The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
• American Born Chinese

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Ari. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Intro:  You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast. With your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.

[Music]

Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me is-

Oren: Oren.

Bunny: And-

Chris: Chris

Bunny: I’ve noticed that there’s been a lot of this, like, what’s the meaning of life stuff and blah, d’blah, and people just love going on about that. But me, I figured it out. Life is meaningless without podcasts. Easy. I don’t know what these philosophers are on about.

[laughter]

Oren: Podcasticism, we’ll call it.

Chris: It’s the answer to life, the universe and everything.

Bunny: Exactly. You thought it was 43? Oh no, child. It’s podcasts. If only all of those old philosophers had podcasts, they would understand it too. Actually, that’d be terrible.

Oren: Part of our philosophy is that when we make Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy references, we intentionally make them wrong so that everyone can quickly type comments about how it’s 42, not 43!

Bunny: Oh, well, excuse me.

Oren: We did that on purpose to make you think! Hmm.

Bunny: It’s comedic genius and also very smart.

Chris: Honestly, if you want a bunch of speculative fiction nerds to start spouting philosophy, just ask them what the meaning of different genres are.

Oren: Oh, no!

[laughter]

Bunny: Oh, I love genre discourse. I love ontology! It’s the stupidest thing ever!

Oren: It hurts. It hurts so much, every time! They’re like, ‘science fiction is what’s pushing boundaries, and fantasy is what’s exploring the past.’ Oh God. I can find like a bunch of stories that are pushing the boundaries and have wizards and dragons. Are you gonna call that science fiction? Anyway I’m done. Moving on.

[laughter]

Bunny: Ontology is, which is essentially like, what is it and what’s it like? Is definitely like the most obnoxious field of philosophy, and that’s why I love it.

Chris: You mean it’s like sandwich discourse?

Bunny: It’s like, sandwich discourse is ontology. That’s- how do we define a sandwich? That’s exactly what ontology is.

Chris: It’s been fun sometimes though, looking into that.

Bunny: Oh, it’s great fun! It’s obnoxious, but it’s so much fun. I love it!

Chris: We had a whole argument about what wizards are.

[laughter]

Oren: I may have had less fun with that than everyone else. I don’t know.

Bunny: My roommate once asked me as a brain teaser, ‘Do you think there are more doors or wheels in the world?’ And then I like turned it around on him and I was like, ‘all right, define a door.’ [laughter] And this went on for hours.

Oren: That explains why I heard someone shout ‘fatality!’ a while back. Oof.

Bunny: Today we’re gonna be talking about writing stories that explore philosophy without just writing either an essay or a manifesto. Both of which you could do, but they probably won’t be stories.

Oren: Probably not gonna sell great as fiction.

Chris: Yeah. I had somebody recently ask me about, can you blend fiction [and] non-fiction and make my story teach something? And there are stories that try to teach philosophy, but the trick is to use the mechanics of the story and not to get tempted into putting in lectures. And think people are really tempted to do lectures because they want to say more than they can fit if it’s actually embedded in the story. And so they’re just really tempted to have those interludes.

Oren: Look, I spent five hours googling this, and now I’m gonna make it your problem.

[laughter]

Bunny: Otherwise, the research will be for naught! I’d say that generally some people might have trouble coming up with philosophical conflicts. Like I’ve noticed that there are stories that treat something obvious as a philosophical conflict. Usually it’s anti utilitarianism, but we can get into that later. But generally, the good rule of thumb is it’s a philosophical conflict if someone could really disagree with it, like heartily, and have good reasons for that. Like make a sound case against whatever case you are making. This is why philosophers bicker.

Oren: I would say that to have a story that explores philosophy, it’s not like you necessarily need to be communing with the collected works of Plato. You can have philosophical arguments that are not from the great well known philosophers. It’s just a question of, is this something that actually has any interest in being argued or is there just one really obvious answer?

Bunny: That’s a good point. So when I’m talking about philosophy, I don’t mean putting Aristotle in your fantasy world.

Chris: Also, is this another trolley problem? Because can we stop with the trolley problems?

Bunny: No more trolley problems.

Chris: I’m sure we’ll talk more about “The Good Place” since its the ultimate example of this, but I do find it very funny that in “The Good Place”, when they talk about the trolley problem and they start doing a bunch of trolley problem simulations, it turns out that is just a trick by a demon to torture them using the trolley problem. [laughter] It’s not really for any value other than just making them feel bad.

Bunny: An accurate representation.

Oren: The reason why the good place works so well is that “The Good Place” has a lot of philosophy with the capital “PH”, I guess from the big ones from Aristotle and from Marx and from John Stewart Mill probably; there’s a bunch of them in there. But the actual message of “The Good Place” is very straightforward, which is that people can get better and they deserve a chance to get better. That’s the actual statement about humans that the show is trying to make, and the rest of it basically is to fulfill specific plot points.

Chris: I do think that it is important in “The Good Place” when it comes to… they want to actually teach philosophy to their viewer to some extent; that learning philosophy is the main character’s way of solving problems. And so she has a reason to sit down and learn philosophy, and the audience has a reason to watch that happen [laughter] because there are stakes where she has to become a, a good person or go to hell are the options. Betting it in the story using story mechanics is really important and you can do quite a lot. And I tell people, ‘Hey, if there’s specific kinds of scenes that you wanna have, make that your character’s way of solving a problem.’ And “The Good Place” does that with lots of learning ethical philosophy.

Bunny: That’s a very straightforward way to do it. Your character has to learn philosophy and thus you put philosophy [in] your story. I do think that some philosophical arguments would be easier or harder to convey in a context that would be relevant to a story. Like for example, there’s this concept of doxastic wronging, which basically means wronging someone without expressing a belief in any way. So if you have racist beliefs towards someone, the idea is that you are wronging them even if you never express those beliefs. And that’s really hard to convey in a story because by definition those beliefs are unexpressed. So like good luck telling a story about doxastic wronging where nobody ever acts on their beliefs and thus it’s very hard to have a story.

Oren: Someone who is subconsciously racist wouldn’t count, like someone who doesn’t think of themselves as racist but checks their wallet twice after having business dealings with a Jew. That doesn’t count as sarcastic racism.

[laughter]

Bunny: Doxastic!

Oren: Ducks-astic? I’m not gonna say that, right. I’m sorry.

[laughter]

Bunny: Uh, well, okay, so just. So ‘doxastic’ comes from ‘doxa’, which just means opinion. Doxastic wronging is like wronging someone with an opinion. It’s very you- what you’ll learn here is that philosophers love making up fancy terms for words that we already have terms for like, opinion. [laughter] According to the philosopher who’s currently like putting out essays and stuff on this, I know it’s a modern philosopher, it’s not Plato, is that any like racist belief, even the person who doesn’t think they’re racist, is still being racist. This theory doesn’t go so much into stuff like what is objectively racist or not. It presumes that there are these things and if there are then having a racist belief about someone directly wrongs them. And one of the problems with this belief not to get in, or this theory not to get into it too much, is that it doesn’t define what wronging is. So I guess you’re shooting like mental lasers that create magical wronging fields around someone.

Oren: (making sound effect) bweenh bweeh-bweeh bweenh

Bunny: Yeah, that’s what it sounds like.

Chris: See, I would just say that theoretically somebody who harbors a lot of racist beliefs are going to express those in some way, shape, or form, right? And so that seems… [laughter]

Bunny: And so the impracticality of these- of certain philosophical theories like this one, because it requires these things being unexpressed, would make it hard to tell a story.

Chris: But I would say most philosophies have hypotheticals that they use in their arguments that you could just make them real, right? And put them in your story, which also could reveal how realistic they actually are, which is a hilarious thing about Atlas Shrugged. [I gotta] take some digs at Atlas Shrugged because it’s over a thousand pages long and I read the whole thing in high school. Uh, but it’s just very funny because it’s so weirdly unrealistic, because reality in that book follows what Ayn Rand thinks reality is. Uh, there’s a character that like, [runs] in terror because somebody loves them unconditionally.

Oren: Aaaah!

Bunny: Whenever I see my parents, I just like, bolt in the opposite direction.

[laughter]

Chris: And of course we’ve got Galt’s Gulch where somehow all of the rich people leave to create their science fiction paradise.

Oren: Rich people are great at farming. This is just a known fact.

Chris: Right? Without any labor.

Oren: Yeah. Bunch of subsistence farmer billionaires up there.

Chris: ‘Cause all of their employees were apparently just freeloaders, [in] Ayn Rand’s mind. Um, and that’s what it takes to try to show her philosophy is doing really odd things like that, that are just clearly not realistic.

Bunny: And it’s definitely a good indicator of whether a theory is reasonable or not is how far you have to stretch to come up with scenarios that seem to counter it. Like if you can come up with a normal everyday scenario that like, violates the premise of your argument, it’s probably not a good argument. But if you have to be like, imagine a universe of cows and these cows have teapots, and what if the cows all poured their teapots at once? You’re like, I think maybe that’s not a very good counter argument. Maybe that argument that you’re trying to counter argue is stronger than the point you’re making against it.

Oren: But my precious cow teapot world. [laughter] So I don’t know if I have anything as cool as that, like “dog-tastic” stuff you were talking about earlier, [laughter] but uh, I did do, my contribution to this episode is I talked to our patron, Kathy Ferguson, who I cite at the end of each episode as teaching political theory in Star Trek, and that includes some philosophy and, [in] Star Trek what that means is that she uses different Star Trek episodes as a way to illustrate the different philosophers and their ideas to her students. And I have a list! And I am fascinated by it. We don’t have to go through all of ’em necessarily, but I wanted to mention a few of them.

Chris?: Let’s hear it. Let’s-

Oren: Okay, so my favorite, the one that like, is really interesting to me, is when she uses the Voyager episode “Death Wish” to illustrate the ideas of Plato and Socrates.

Chris: Which one is “Death Wish”?

Oren: “Death Wish” is the episode where they meet a Q who wants to die.

Chris: Oh.

Oren: And the reason, and this is like I wouldn’t say that this is a good idea necessarily for most types of characters, but the Q are so weird and omniscient and they know everything. And so his point isn’t really so much about death as we would understand it, because the Q are so different and strange. To him, it’s more like, ‘I wanna see what happens next’, and the other Q are like, ‘nah, no, that’s dangerous. You have no idea what would happen. We can’t risk it.’ And so he takes on the role that would be called “the dissident citizen” who goes around and like, tries to bother everyone and make them question what they know and if he’s anything like Plato, tell them to be less democratic, I guess.

[laughter]

Bunny?: Don’t get me started on the Republic.

Oren: Yeah, so that’s, that is how that episode is used as [an] introduction to Plato and Socrates. It’s not like, it’s reading that episode is the equiv- or it’s not like watching that episode is the equivalent of reading “The Republic”, but it gives you like, an interesting, entertaining sci-fi version of it.

Bunny: Interesting. I tried to read the synopsis of that episode and was very confused by it. I think, because I don’t have the proper context, and I was like, ‘I guess it’s about euthanasia, but it sounds like it’s more nuanced than that.’ I was trying to figure out how euthanasia related to Plato.

Oren: The end does have a very obvious Socrates reference because at the end, Quinn is the name of the Q who wants to die. The other Q, the main character Q who was trying to stop him, is brought around to his way of thinking and Gives him some hemlock.

Bunny: Oh wow.

Oren: Some magical Q hemlock and it’s like, man, yeah. I wonder what that’s a reference to. We may never know. [laughter] And obviously it’s not the same, like, Socrates was executed. He was forced to take hemlock by the state. Whereas this is something that Quinn wants to do as an experiment so it’s not identical, but the parallel is obvious. Um, then there are some other ones like that are really easy, like the deep space nine episode “Past Tense” which is the one that’s supposed to take place in 2024, so that’s fun, which is an episode about extreme poverty and class warfare and alienation of the working class when their dignity is taken away. And can you guess which philosopher that is used for? [laughter] If you need more than one guess, then I’m taking marks (Marx) off your report.

Chris and Bunny: Oh. Whoa. Oh!

Oren laughs

Bunny: Does Kathy use that one?

Oren: She does! [laughter] She’s a fan of puns. So that one’s pretty self-explanatory, right? Because that’s the only other- you could also use the one where they, where they form a union and quote from the Communist Manifesto. [laughter] I think that “Past Tense” is actually a bit more direct in showing the deprivations that people face, you know, have under wealth inequality whereas the union episode is a little bit more comedic. The one that I don’t get, and Kathy explained this to me and I still don’t get it, was that she uses “The Measure of a Man” to illustrate the philosophy of John Stewart Mill, who is a philosopher I have no context for. I at least know something about Marx and Plato, uh, Mill I’m just like, I guess that was a guy, presumably. And Kathy explained it as like he had ideas about individuality and self-creation and, sorry, that went completely over my head. I’m just like, ‘yeah, that’s, that definitely makes sense. Mm-Hmm. I wanna get good grades.”

Chris?: Smile and nod.

[laughter]

Bunny: Well, embarrassingly John Stewart Mill is one of the philosophers I don’t really know. But just again, having looked at the plot synopsis, it does bring back our good old friend ontology and a bit of metaphysics in how we define intelligence and consciousness. And it seems to conclude that we can’t, or at least that there’s no satisfactory answer. Uh, in the case of Data, because this is the one about-

Oren: Whether Data’s a person.

Bunny: Yeah. Whether Data’s a person. So that’s what is a person and what are they like? And that’s ontology.

Oren: Yeah. And for storytelling purposes, they have to leave it open because they wanna maybe do this sort of episode again. [laughter] ‘We can’t say if Data is a person or not because that would limit the number of episodes we could do in the future.’

Bunny: Whoops.

Chris: That’s a good example of having two characters, again, get in conflict to bring out philosophy, right? And argue different viewpoints from each other.

Bunny: And I think conveying characters’ philosophical perspectives and using those to shape worldviews and create conflict between characters is a really good way to bring philosophy into your story, [perhaps] a way that’s not like story level per se, but certainly like relevant in creating your characters. So there’s a bunch of different things that your characters might have distinct philosophies on. One of the big obvious ones is like their religious outlook. So if there’s someone who takes, I think it’s like Paley, I’m pretty sure it’s Paley’s Watch in the watchmaker argument, which is essentially an intelligent design argument. The theory is you find a watch in a forest and you can presume that the watch was made and just did not appear there. And basically it makes the same argument about the universe. So someone who takes that viewpoint might find like, beauty and perfection in like even mundane things, and that could be an interesting viewpoint. Another big one, that’s something that varies a lot between cultures is like, how do we view the mind body problem? Which is; is the mind distinction in the body? If so, how? Like, how does that work? So dualism.

Oren: I have several problems with my mind and body. Can I consolidate them into one problem? Sometimes that’s easier to deal with.

Bunny: Oh, I wouldn’t be- I wouldn’t be so fast to, uh, make two problems into one bigger one.

Oren: Oh, I see. Is that a philosophy faux pa?

[laughter]

Bunny: Uh, no, that’s just advice.

[laughter]

Chris: So we have another patron who is a professor of philosophy, [laughter] apparently, just know a lot of these people [laughter].

Oren: Accruing philosophers, up in here. What is happening? What kind of vibes are we giving off? [laughter]

Bunny: By which you mean two, who both like to argue.

Chris: We have another blog post on the site from her and hopefully we will get another on this one from Sophia Jeppsson and she talks about using deontology for like having a principled hero and what that would actually mean. And I found that kind of interesting because boiling down, and this is like philosophers like Kant, hopefully it was notorious for having this idea that if a murderer asks you where your friend is so that the murderer can murder your friend you’re supposed to not lie. But no, in a more practical sense this is about, basically respect and holding everybody to the same standards.

Bunny: Uh-huh, it’s basically the golden rule. It’s ‘treat others the way you want to be treated’. Don’t treat others as, like, ‘a mere means’ is the way he puts it. Stuff like that.

Chris: But also just not being paternalistic when it comes to things like withholding information Because you shouldn’t be making choices for other people because you’re putting yourself above them, for instance.

Oren: I read a book recently that all I could think of was, ‘y’all need Kant.’ ‘Cause it was a second book in the Bobiverse series and the protagonists, who are a bunch of sentient spaceships by this point, find like an alien planet with some industrial age ferret aliens on it. And the big bads are gonna come and kill everything on the planet and they can’t be stopped. So the good guys are like, ‘all right, we need to evacuate as many of the ferret aliens as we can. But obviously we can’t take more than a small number of them.’ And instead of being like, ‘Hey, alien ferrets, here’s the situation. Help us figure out who we should take with us.’ They just kidnap a bunch of them in the night and then leave.

[laughter]

Bunny: What?

Oren: And I was like, ‘no!’ And they justify it by being like ‘if we told them there’d be mass chaos’, and it’s like, well maybe. But you don’t have the right to decide that! For all you know, They might have an answer and be like, ‘please take as many of our children as you can.’ Or maybe they’d be like, ‘here, take these ones. These are the ones who know all of our important cultural stories. Take them!’ We don’t know what they would’ve done and we’ll never find out ’cause you didn’t give them the chance. Y’all need Kant!

[laughter]

Chris: Get some deontology in that story.

Bunny: Have you let Kant into your heart?

Oren: Can I speak to you about our Lord and Savior, Kant?

[laughter]

Bunny: Ethical outlooks, obviously, I feel like people do philosophy in their stories without meaning to because often a big source of conflict is ethical conflicts. And usually that’s the conflict between the hero and the villain, but you can also have conflict between protagonists who have different ethical outlooks on the world. Certainly, we just talked about the trolley problem. One of the ones that comes up a lot because it’s really basic is utilitarianism. It’s easy to explain; maximize pleasure, minimize pain. That’s basically the guiding principle and maybe the most obvious story that does this is “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”.

Oren: Oh yeah, that’s a story for sure.

Bunny: That is, of all the stories, that is one of them.

Oren: God, they’re calling us about that damn kid again, aren’t they?

Bunny: It’s a kid. It’s always a kid. [laughter] It’s basically, so a city believes it’s only happy so long as it tortures this young child. Not tortures it, but like neglects it. And then The Ones Who Walk Away are the ones who object to this philosophy. And so this is basically a critique of utilitarianism because utilitarianism would justify the position that you torture and neglect this kid so long as the happiness produced is greater than the kids suffering, blah blah.

Oren: See, this is why I always thwart all attempts at utilitarianism by becoming a utility monster. My favorite concept is like if you can mess up utilitarianism by enjoying things more than everyone else. And so if you enjoy a cookie a thousand times more than other people, you should get all the cookies, [laughter] because you’ll be generating the most enjoyment. [laughter] I have no idea how that could possibly work in a real world scenario, but I want to be it. That’s my goal now.

Bunny: This is your aspiration. It’s good to have dreams.

[laughter]

Oren: To be clear, I’m generally a utilitarian. Everyone has a certain amount of all of these things, and it’s when the answer becomes unclear that we have to search our feelings.

Bunny: I mean, my hottest take about philosophy is just that it’s feelings all the way down.

Chris: So somebody did a study looking at the way people solve ethical questions by looking at the Reddit Am I The Asshole? subreddit. And what was interesting there is they found the biggest number of questions that needed [to be addressed] were about relationships and obligations. Which again, is something that when we talk about a lot of philosophical questions, is we’re assuming everything the same in people’s relationships to each other is the same, whereas a lot of those real life quandaries were very much like, okay, what do I owe my boss, my spouse, my kid? And what is fair given that interpersonal relationship? Which I found very interesting.

Oren: Now I wanna know if there’s any way to judge how many of those stories are real. I don’t know. It feels like most of ’em are made up, but I don’t have a statistic there.

Chris: Yeah actually relating to that, one dilemma that I found interesting was in “American Born Chinese”, because it has the same argument and what it does is it has it pop up in parallel in several different times in several different storylines in different ways, but it’s still the same argument. And it’s between the Chinese characters who are dealing with systemic oppression. And you have one character that just wants to go with the flow and fit in, and the other character that insists on taking big risks and sometimes pushes the character that wants to go with the flow into kind of upsetting the system and taking big risks and that being a big disagreement. So I found that one really interesting in the fact that it… the same argument was used in several different places in the story.

Bunny: And that’s a good sign that it’s being approached in different scenarios that could put it in [a] new light. And perhaps, I don’t know, I haven’t seen “American Born Chinese”, but perhaps providing a perspective that’s like, here’s another scenario that might challenge the way you think about this dilemma that keeps reappearing.

Oren: Oh, I know another way. That is a very easy way to work philosophy into your story, which is just to pick a philosopher who was also like a statesman, because they often have really specific scenarios. So like you do Machiavelli and everyone knows Machiavelli’s famous, like, uh, “better to be feared than loved”, but you can get way more weird and specific with it. Like he also has opinions about locally raised soldiers versus mercenaries. So if you have a story about a character who is trying to get their city to switch from mercenary companies to using locally trained soldiers. Congratulations, that’s philosophy now.

Bunny: Homegrown organic, grass fed soldiers.

Oren: It’s like, look, Machiavelli, I get it. Everyone in theory agrees that home raised soldiers are better, but you don’t always have a population. If you’re a small Italian city state with lots of money and very few people, where do you think those homegrown soldiers are gonna come from, Nicolo? I have questions.

[laughter]

Bunny: If you listen to Plato, they spring from the earth with a certain amount of metal in their souls that determines what class they are.

Oren: Okay. Can we like, separate that from ’em when they die? ‘Cause that seems like leaving money on the table otherwise.

Bunny: Yeah, you can smelt the soldiers I guess.

Chris: Speaking of which, I can’t believe we got through a philosophy podcast episode without talking about Plato’s Cave.

[laughter]

Bunny: Oh yes, the allegory of the cave.

Oren: I’ve seen the matrix. I’m familiar.

[laughter]

Chris: Go into the cave and get a bunch of soldiers. Then do you have soldiers or not?

Bunny: See, the funny part is that the cave is part of “The Republic”. Like the allegory of the cave is an extension of “The Republic” that’s meant to illustrate things. In the logic of “The Republic”, the commoners, the toilers, the workers are the people stuck in the cave. And the guardians, the philosopher kings, are the ones who have made it out of the cave. But then the auxiliaries, the like, soldiers who are above the working class but below the guardians are like kind of partway out of the cave? They’re sort of in the mouth of the cave? [laughter] Kind of starts breaking down there.

Chris: Yeah, it sounds like an analogy that’s being stretched way too far.

Oren: What’s important is that it just so happens that the people who are best qualified to be in charge are the same group of people who are writing this book. That was a really happy coincidence.

Bunny: The least likely part of Plato’s “Republic” is thinking that philosopher kings would stop bickering long enough to run a republic.

Oren: If we had philosopher kings, we wouldn’t have all those problems we have under boring, normal kings. We’d have different, much more exciting problems!

Bunny?: It’s true.

Chris: Speaking of which, if you would like to make us your philosopher kings-

Bunny: 10 out of 10 a plus pivot.

Chris: Go to patreon dot com slash Mythcreants and it will happen eventually.

[laughter]

Oren: I do think we’re gonna have to call this episode to a close, but before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber, who’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson who contributed some material for this episode. So thank you, Kathy. We will talk to you all next week.

[Music]

This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening, closing theme, The Princess who saved herself by Jonathan Colton.