Final Fantasy and Philosophy: The Ultimate Walkthrough (7 page)

The Gaia hypothesis does more than merely dethrone humanity, reducing us to one species on an even footing with all of the others. Ozone depletion, soil and water degradation, increased levels of greenhouse gasses, loss of biodiversity—all fueled by an expanding population with ever increasing dreams of living in material affluence—have transformed humanity from being merely one species among many into a cancer that is slowly eating away at the regenerative processes of the planet.
⁷

This view of humanity fits well with the portrayal of people in
The Spirits Within.
Lovelock argued that if humanity keeps on behaving the way it presently is, within a few decades we will (and may already) have inflicted sufficient damage on Gaia’s ability to self-regulate that her “revenge” (a misleading term, because even if alive, Gaia is completely indifferent to all species, humanity included) will be felt as her regenerative processes fail. Global warming will play havoc with weather systems, loss of ozone will kill off massive amounts of animal and plant life that don’t have time to adapt to radically increased ultraviolet radiation, and fresh drinkable water, already in short supply throughout much of the world, will become increasingly scarce. The result, according to Lovelock, is that humanity will likely be reduced from its present state of grandeur to one of huddled groups of survivors, mostly located in polar regions, violently clashing over the few remaining food sources available, waiting and hoping that some day in the distant future Gaia will recover so that the Earth’s environment will become amenable to human society again.

Who Cares?

You’ve been trying to tell me that death isn’t the end.

—Captain Gray

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), an English political economist most famous for his
Essay on the Principle of Population
, postulated a self-regulating correlation between food supply and population levels. From a Malthusian perspective we’ve pushed the envelope as far as it can go, and a mighty “Malthus check” lies in wait for us. Billions will die of all sorts of plagues, diseases, and wars over resources, until the human population’s size is in an appropriate relationship to the food supply. Malthus was speaking strictly about discrepancies between food supply and population, but he can be adapted to the Gaia hypothesis quite easily. The Earth has an immense but limited ability to act as the source of all of our activities and as a sink for all of the wastes and by-products of these activities. But once the human population’s size becomes large enough that its activities overwhelm this ability of the Earth to act as a source and a sink, the system will begin to break down. Gaia will, temporarily at least, be unable to self-regulate. The consequences will be massive loss of life forms, which means less food and, if not human extinction, at least a culling of the human population. The only really important question, from a Gaia hypothesis standpoint, is, will Gaia survive? Will humanity go into remission, or are we a terminal cancer that will permanently destroy Gaia’s functioning?

But why should we care? Admittedly, the loss of human civilization is disappointing to most humans, but two things need to be considered before we get all weepy about our bleak future. First, we are not necessary to Gaia. Furthermore, if Lovelock is right, our behavior is sufficiently harmful to Gaia and our willingness to change so minimal that Gaia would be better off without us. Second, in the long run Gaia is doomed anyway. Gaia and all of life that she makes possible will die in about five billion years when the sun dies, and that’s assuming her ability to self-regulate is not destroyed first by a gamma ray burst from a nearby star going supernova or maimed by a massive meteor impact.

A Cancerous Tumor Inside Gaia

So if the Gaia hypothesis or
The Spirits Within
teaches us anything, it’s how interconnected the natural world is and how unnecessary we are. Far from being the lords and masters of nature, human societies have become, at best, tyrants—and at worst, cancerous. If we want our role to continue, whether for anthropocentric or nonanthropocentric reasons, we need to ensure that our interactions with nature become less damaging. There are only two ways to do that: either control our lifestyles so that we do not overwhelm the Earth’s ability to act as a source and a sink, or control our population to the same effect. Either way, humanity is little more than a cancerous tumor inside Gaia, and the fate of the species depends on whether we choose to be a benign or a malignant tumor.

NOTES

1
For more on the Gaia hypothesis, see chapter 4 in this volume: “The Lifestream, Mako and Gaia,” by Jay Foster.

2
The Gaia hypothesis has gone through a number of articulations over the years. I will refer to Lovelock’s most recent version of it,
The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity
(New York: Basic Books, 2006).

3
Ibid., p. 15.

4
Ibid., p. 16.

5
See Carolyn Merchant,
The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution
(New York: HarperCollins, 1989) for a detailed account of the enlightenment approach to nature, as well as the response of some feminist scholars.

6
The idea that alien Gaias exist is not all that far-fetched, if Gaia is merely a conceptual image to express the complexities of an integrated, self-regulating system conducive to certain forms of life (not unlike a human body). Some scientists have estimated that there are as many as half a million such planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone. See Siegfried Franck, Werner von Bloh, Christine Bounama, and Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, “Extraterrestrial Gaias,” in Stephen H. Schneider, James R. Miller, Eileen Crist, and Penelope J. Boston, eds.,
Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), pp. 309-319.

7
Lovelock disagreed, claiming, “Humans are not merely a disease; we are, through our intelligence and communication, the nervous system of the planet,” p. xiv. He never provides any substantive argument, however, as to why the human species is at all valuable from a perspective other than that of the human species.

6

OBJECTIFICATION OF CONSCIOUS LIFE FORMS IN
FINAL FANTASY

Robert Arp and Sarah Fisk

Use Me, Even in Your Fantasies . . .

The
Final Fantasy
franchise is rife with examples of immorality. For example, in the most recent
Final Fantasy
movie,
Advent Children
, a trio of maliciously minded brothers kidnaps children afflicted with a disease known as
Geostigma
, in an attempt to use them to revive Jenova. As you know, Jenova is an evil extraterrestrial life form, first introduced in the game
Final Fantasy VII
, which is capable of being used for mass destruction whenever its cells are brought out of dormancy and spread. The cells can carry out Jenova’s will using its power even when they are separated from the whole being. The trio of brothers intends to use the children to aid in bringing Jenova back to life. In the story the children are objectified, treated as if they were objects—treated simply as a means to an end, nothing more. Although we are clearly meant to interpret the brothers’ actions as immoral, can ethical theory support this interpretation?

Three Reasons
Not to Use
Life Forms . . . and Three Reasons
to Use
Life Forms

Throughout the history of Western philosophy, we find three prominent moral theories, each of which can help us understand the ethics of objectification. First, there is the view originated by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) that persons, by virtue of their conscious rational capacities, are free and autonomous beings, possessing inalienable worth and dignity. Because of this intrinsic worth, a person should
never
be treated as a mere object. Consider
Final Fantasy IX.
In this game, the arms dealer Kuja blatantly uses Queen Brahne as a puppet to accomplish his own goals of achieving a kind of ultimate power. Queen Brahne behaves erratically throughout the game until it is revealed that Kuja is manipulating her. When she tries to rebel, Kuja kills her and destroys her army.

A second moral theory is the utilitarian view of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), which asserts that actions are morally good insofar as they maximize the aggregate happiness of all people. That is, an action is good insofar as it brings about the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Specifically, Mill is concerned with pleasure as being of ultimate importance and thus with maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. In this view, rampant objectification is immoral because suffering and unhappiness typically thrive where people are worried that they will be exploited in their social interactions.

Final Fantasy IX
features much manipulation and exploitation. As previously mentioned, it is discovered that Kuja, the arms dealer, has been manipulating Queen Brahne of Alexandria in the hopes of gaining ultimate power. Toward the end of the game, it is further revealed that the events in this world have been planned and executed to further the goal of transforming the dying world, Terra, into another world, Gaia. All of the events and the characters in the game have been carefully manipulated to bring about this transformation. To assist in the transformation, the people of Terra created Garland, a powerful old man. All of the people of Gaia were created by the powerful Garland to house the souls of the people of Terra once the transformation of worlds was complete. All parties are angry with this, including Kuja, who discovers that he is merely a defective precursor to another, more important, character. Kuja responds to this by destroying Terra.

A third moral theory is the virtue ethics view, held by Aristotle (384-322 BCE). Virtue ethics sees morally right actions as stemming from virtuous characters. Here, objectification can be considered immoral because it originates from, as well as reinforces, a nonvirtuous (vicious) character. Professor Hojo, a character in
Final Fantasy VII
, fits Aristotle’s conception of a vicious character. In his experimentation on sentient beings in an attempt to combine them with extraterrestrial life forms, Hojo is responsible for the creation of Sephiroth, another destructive character. Clearly, Hojo acts without regard for ethical considerations, such as the effect of his actions or the nature of those actions. Such despicable behavior is exactly what a virtue ethicist would expect from someone having a weak or wicked character.

There
are
times, however, when each of these three theories can be interpreted broadly to suggest that someone actually has done the right thing in objectifying another person. First, a Kantian might argue that it’s morally acceptable for a person—by virtue of being a rational, autonomous agent—to give permission to be used by others. In
Final Fantasy VIII
, the main character, Squall, learns that a girl named Ellone is sending him back in time. She does all of this in order to attempt to change the events of the past. Squall willingly allows this to happen—knowing full well that he might get hurt or die—and the important point is that Squall is a rational agent who takes charge of his own destiny in allowing this to take place.

Second, a utilitarian would argue that it’s morally acceptable to sacrifice a member of a group in order to save the rest of its members. Each of the three playable characters of
Final Fantasy X-2
can acquire the ability to sacrifice his or her life to damage an enemy severely during active battle. This means that this character dies and does not collect any experience, but if the battle is successfully completed, the character may be able to damage the enemy sufficiently to allow other characters to defeat the enemy and then bring the fallen character back to life.

Third, a virtue ethicist (though not Aristotle) might argue that self-preservation and power are the highest virtues and might justify retaining them by
any
means. Seifer, one of the antagonists of
Final Fantasy VIII
, embodies this very notion. He becomes dissatisfied with doing his assigned duty of carrying out the Garden’s orders and figures that it is better to have autonomy over his own actions and decide for himself who he will work for.
¹
Seifer believes that he should be the leader of the groups with whom he works, and he determines that leaving the group on his own will lead to both self-preservation and power. Seifer’s character clearly values his own existence as extremely important and also values the accumulation of power as valuable in itself.

Kant vs. Shinra

The
Final Fantasy
series is rich in illustrations of moral “stalemates” or inconsistencies for the Kantian and utilitarian systems, similar to the ones already mentioned. These stalemates call the legitimacy of the two approaches into question concerning their attitudes toward objectification. This leaves an Aristotelian version of virtue ethics as the most viable of the three major moral perspectives, if for the primary reason that it does not clearly generate such stalemates.

Kant grounded morality in the fact that persons are rational beings. Since it is only by reason that we determine and perform our moral obligations, rational will is the only thing that is unconditionally good.
²
By virtue of the fact that all people possess rationality, they are worthy of dignity and respect and are the only things that are “ends in themselves.” Given that people are entirely precious in this way, they always have
intrinsic
value (as ends) and must never be treated as having merely
instrumental
value (as a means to an end), like some instrument. So, it would be immoral for one person to use another exclusively as a means to further some end, goal, or purpose because, by doing so, the used person would be reduced to the status of a lowly tool.
³

This intrinsic value could be extended to other rationally conscious beings from other worlds, even though they are made up of different substances such as alternate brain mass (elves), plasma (aliens), or silicon and metal (robotic mechanisms). For example, in
Final Fantasy VII
, an evil corporation, known as Shinra, is draining the life force of the very planet itself. The planet is viewed as a sentient being, whose energy comes from what is known as the Lifestream. The Lifestream is composed of the essences that power the physical bodies of the inhabitants of the planet for each inhabitant’s life span. When the planet’s inhabitants die, their essences are returned to the Lifestream.

Given that persons are conscious, rational beings, capable of making their own free and informed decisions, Kant demanded that they must also be respected in virtue of being
autonomous
(“self-ruling”) beings. Now, because a person’s innate dignity and worth are tied to rational autonomy, some post-Kantian thinkers have argued that what is most significant in making a moral decision has to do with whether a person’s
freedom in rationally informed decision-making
has been respected.
⁴
The idea here is that if a fully rational person chooses to engage in some action—as long as the action doesn’t harm anyone else—then that person is fully justified in doing it, even if it puts him or her in the position of being used like an object. Think of rational adults joining the military knowing that they may die protecting their country. Similarly, as long as the various henchmen of villains know full well the risks that they are assuming by aiding and abetting criminals, then there is nothing immoral in the villains treating the henchmen as if they are dispensable (but this is not to say that any of the other actions of the villains or the henchmen are morally acceptable). In other words, as long as these rational agents all freely agree to engage in such behaviors, then there is nothing morally wrong in objectifying them.

The experience of summoning Guardian Forces (GFs) in
Final Fantasy VIII
can help illustrate this point. Members of the players’ party can summon various Guardian Forces that overtake their bodies and transform them, all for the purpose of defeating the enemy with a greater show of power. These Guardian Forces must be discovered within the game, and often a player must defeat them in battle before the GFs will agree to assist the player.

But how can we decide whether we should ever use people as mere instruments? Don’t fully rational persons have the freedom to make their own well-informed decisions? There is one camp of “moral sanctity” Kantians who would argue that it’s immoral to objectify a person, no matter what.
⁵
But there is another group of “moral autonomy” Kantians who would contend that as long as all parties are fully aware of the risks of the situation, nothing immoral occurs in consensual objectification. As long as the party members are well aware that they can be killed when they are transformed by a GF and that they lose the ability to control their bodies, then nothing immoral is taking place. In fact, “moral autonomy” Kantians often argue that to deny a person the freedom to so choose would itself be immoral because such a denial violates a person’s autonomy as a rational, free decision maker. In other words, refusing to allow people to make their own choices is to reduce them to objects, because, after all, mere objects lack choices.
⁶
Based on Kant’s philosophy, however, neither can be more important than the other—both are indispensable.