Game of Thrones and Philosophy (11 page)

The standard view regarding decisions made by parents on behalf of their children is that the only morally relevant consideration is the welfare of the child; all other considerations, including how burdened the parents may be by the child’s condition, must be put aside. But in practice, depending on the details of the particular family situation into which the child is born, the burden may seem a difficult thing to simply disregard. Beginning with Duff and Campbell’s “Moral and Ethical Dilemmas in the Special-Care Nursery” in 1973, some have argued that given the great variability in prognoses, the capacity of families to manage the care of handicapped children, and the availability of social support, we ought to acknowledge the moral importance of burdensomeness and allow it to factor into life-and-death decisions made by parents for their children.
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Critics of this view worry that there is a kind of slippery slope created by legitimizing this consideration. Once we allow children to be euthanized for being burdens on their parents, it becomes hard to avoid the fact that, in a certain sense,
all
children are burdens, and distinguishing among burdens is a perilous business.

“When Will He Be as He Was?”
10

Throughout this discussion of the various moral issues surrounding Bran’s medical crisis, it has remained the case that his handicap, though serious, does not rise to the level of justifying a mercy killing. As readers, we are outraged by Jaime Lannister’s suggestion, and it serves to reinforce the early impression we have of the villainy of the Kingslayer. Later in
A Game of Thrones
, we witness a mercy killing, carried out by Daenerys Stormborn, the soon-to-be the Unburnt, Mother of Dragons, against her husband, Khal Drogo. Yet as readers, this act does not lead us to condemn Dany. If anything, we admire her for making the hard choice, and we accept it as a legitimate (and perhaps the morally best) course of action. Setting her act against the proposed mercy killing of Bran Stark may help us sort out our moral intuitions regarding hard life-and-death decisions, but it will also raise a new set of tricky moral issues for us to confront.

Here’s what we know of Khal Drogo’s medical crisis: The once-fearsome Khal, whose hair has never been cut because he’s undefeated in battle, has taken a wound that has festered. The seriousness of his condition is illustrated in his fall from his horse, because a khal who cannot ride cannot lead. As he edges toward death, his wife, Dany, desperately seeks the help of the maegi Mirri Maz Duur over the warnings of Khal Drogo’s bloodriders. The maegi saves Drogo, but her dark magic costs Dany the life of her unborn son, Rhaego, the prophesied “Stallion Who Mounts the World.” Furthermore, the Drogo that survives Dany’s bargain with the maegi is utterly diminished. He is entirely uncommunicative, and his once-piercing stare is now blank. Yet we are left with this provocative observation from Ser Jorah Mormont as Drogo lies vacantly in the sun under buzzing bloodflies: “He seems to like the warmth.”
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Even in his severely compromised state, Drogo can seemingly still experience the pleasure of the sun, and he is in no apparent pain. Given the presumed permanence of Drogo’s condition, Dany kills him, smothering him with a cushion.

Most readers are not horrified by Dany’s act, or even bothered by it in the slightest. Yet, at first glance, she has just engaged in the premeditated killing of a defenseless human being. This sounds a lot like the worst sort of murder, and we regard murder as among the worst of crimes. So how does Dany remain a hero of our story? Well, Drogo’s condition is not unlike a range of serious cases—from traumatic brain injuries to degenerative conditions that radically impair cognitive functioning—where someone is left utterly diminished from the person they once were. So our moral evaluation of Dany’s mercy killing is bound up with much more than just this story.

One important feature of Drogo’s crisis becomes clear when compared with that of Bran Stark’s. When we are outraged by Jaime Lannister’s suggestion that Ned Stark kill his son out of mercy, at least a part of our outrage has to do with the life that we expect Bran to be able to lead once he recovers. No, he will never again climb the walls of Winterfell or run across its grounds. But there is still every reason to believe that he will engage in meaningful relationships, pursue sophisticated projects, and generally enjoy the range of goods that characterize lives that are, one might say, distinctively
human
. But this phrase is deceptive, for there are a range of beings who remain in all respects biologically human, yet can never again (and perhaps never could in the first place) enjoy those pursuits in the way that beings like you and I can.

“This Is Not Life”
12

Consider the distinction between being a
human
and being a
person
. The former is a biological category, describing the biological makeup of a thing; the latter is a moral category, describing what kind of moral standing a thing has. In virtually all cases, those two categories overlap, but not always. We can, for instance, imagine beings who are not biologically human, but who are plausibly enough persons, given their cognitive sophistication and ability to engage in the kinds of projects and life plans that we recognize as distinctive in ourselves. Perhaps the race of giants beyond the Wall or the legendary Children of the Forest fall into this category. And following this reasoning one step further, we might imagine beings who are biologically human but not persons, unable to fulfill the criteria (whatever they are) for personhood. Drogo is drawn to the sun, but so are plants, reptiles, and a range of other nonpersons. If there is nothing more to say about the life he can lead, then perhaps he is not a person any longer, and Dany’s mercy killing is not an act of murder. Murder is the premeditated killing of an innocent person, and there is a great moral difference between intentionally killing my neighbor and intentionally killing the mosquito that has landed on my arm. Whatever else is true about my neighbor and the mosquito, one is a person, the other is not, and this distinction is of paramount moral importance.

The question of what it is to be a person has been pursued, perhaps most deeply, in the literature on abortion. Insofar as fetuses are, without question, biologically human, some philosophers have defended the moral permissibility of abortion by attempting to show that fetuses are not persons, and so the killing of a fetus fails to take on the moral importance of the killing of a person. Michael Tooley, for example, identifies self-consciousness—having a conception of oneself as a continuing subject of experiences—as the fundamental criterion of personhood.
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Similarly, Mary Anne Warren identifies a list of five criteria (consciousness, reasoning, self-motivated activity, the capacity to communicate, and the presence of self-concepts), and argues that some unspecified number of these amounts to personhood. Importantly, whatever entity lacks all five is not a person.
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Critics of the moral permissibility of abortion have responded with different accounts of our moral specialness. Don Marquis, for example, has argued that the serious wrongness of killing beings like you, me, and fetuses has to do with the way it deprives something of a “Future like ours,” a deliberately vague concept meant to broadly capture the range of projects, pursuits, and relationships that make our lives distinctive.
15

Without presently taking a stand on the moral status of abortion, it is interesting to note that on all of these accounts, both defending and rejecting the permissibility of abortion, Dany’s killing of Khal Drogo is certainly
not
the killing of a person, and so, not murder. On the flip side, if Ned Stark had heard and taken Jaime Lannister’s advice to kill Bran, that would have been the killing of a person. So this distinction regarding the nature of personhood is helpful in making sense of the different moral responses we have to the prospect of a mercy killing in the medical crises of Khal Drogo and Bran Stark. But where does this reasoning take us?

Contemporary philosopher Peter Singer has famously and controversially argued that the killing of a significantly disabled infant is not the killing of a person. While these infants are clearly biologically human, they lack the qualities that make something count as a person.
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For Singer, such killings would clearly fail to count as murders, and in many cases, these killings would not be wrong at all. If the disability in question is one that leads to a life of significant pain and discomfort, then as radical as Singer’s claim might seem, the case he describes is actually less controversial than Drogo’s killing, assuming that the mental states of Drogo and the infant are roughly equivalent. Drogo is in no pain, and while Drogo may not now be a person, he has the possible advantage of having been one once (though whether and how much of an advantage this might be is also controversial).

If we still recoil at Singer’s position, what are we to make of our response? Is it, in the end, the residue of an irrational taboo that we ought to bring to light and reject? Or should we look further into the moral features of these cases—questions of quality of life, of burdensomeness, of personhood—and perhaps beyond them, into other morally important considerations? In philosophy, as in these profound and life-altering decisions that we sometimes face, answers are rarely easy. But cases like the medical crises of Bran Stark and Khal Drogo allow us to plumb the depths of these difficult matters.

NOTES

1
. George R. R. Martin,
A Game of Thrones
(New York: Bantam Dell, 2005), p. 91.

2
. Ibid.

3
. Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, American Medical Association, “Decisions Near the End of Life,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
276 (1992), pp. 2229–2233.

4
. James Rachels, “Active and Passive Euthanasia,”
New England Journal of Medicine
292 (Jan. 1975), pp. 78–80.

5
. Dan Brock, “Voluntary Active Euthanasia,”
Hastings Center Report
22 (Mar./Apr. 1992), pp. 10–22.

6
. Martin,
A Game of Thrones
, p. 486.

7
. J. M. Gustafson, “Mongolism, Parental Desires, and the Right to Life,”
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine
16 (Summer 1973), pp. 529–533.

8
. Helga Kuhse, “A Modern Myth: That Letting Die Is Not the Intentional Causation of Death,”
Journal of Applied Philosophy
1, no. 1 (1984), pp. 21–38.

9
. Raymond S. Duff and A. G. M. Campbell, “Moral and Ethical Dilemmas in the Special-Care Nursery,”
New England Journal of Medicine
289 (Oct. 1973), pp. 890–894.

10
. Martin,
A Game of Thrones
, p. 759.

11
. Ibid.

12
. Ibid.

13
. Michael Tooley, “Abortion and Infanticide,”
Philosophy and Public Affairs
2 (Autumn 1972), pp. 37–65.

14
. Mary Anne Warren, “On the Moral and Legal Status of Abortion,”
The Monist
57 (Jan. 1973), pp. 43–61.

15
. Don Marquis, “Why Abortion Is Immoral,”
Journal of Philosophy
86 (April 1989), pp. 183–202.

16
. Peter Singer,
Practical Ethics
, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 175–217.

PART THREE

“WINTER IS COMING”

Chapter 9

WARGS, WIGHTS, AND WOLVES THAT ARE DIRE: MIND AND METAPHYSICS, WESTEROS STYLE

Henry Jacoby

Long, elegant hands brushed his cheek, then tightened around his throat. They were gloved in the finest moleskin and sticky with blood, yet the touch was icy cold.
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Wary, he circled the smooth white trunk until he came to the face. Red eyes looked at him. Fierce eyes they were, yet glad to see him. The weirwood had his brother’s face. Had his brother always had three eyes?
2

In A Song of Ice and Fire, as George R. R. Martin’s wonderful characters play their game of thrones, we can wonder about the value of Machiavellian virtues, the rights of kings and who shall rule, as well as moral issues about virtue and honor, incest and betrayal. But though they are often in the background, we should not forget about the strange creatures and supernatural happenings in Westeros either. These afford us the opportunity to wax philosophical about mind and metaphysics, as you will see.

What Is It Like to Be a Direwolf?

She could outrun horses and outfight lions. When she bared her teeth even men would run from her, her belly was never empty long, and her fur kept her warm even when the wind was blowing cold.
3

Metaphysics
is the branch of philosophy that investigates the ultimate nature of reality. What is real? What is the fundamental nature of the universe? These sorts of questions take on a different meaning when asked about the world of Westeros and beyond. Whereas we might ask whether God exists, the maesters and other thinkers surely speculate about the existence of
their
gods—the old gods, the seven-faced god, the god of light, and the drowned god. Whereas we wonder about space, time, and the laws of nature, it gets a lot more complicated when you have seasons that can last for years—not to mention all the other supernatural violations of the natural order that occur.

What is the nature and place of persons in the universe? The main metaphysical question about
persons
no doubt concerns the mind. Persons have physical bodies—some tall and strong like Jaime the Kingslayer’s, even outrageously huge like Ser Gregor, the Mountain That Rides; others not so much, like Tyrion the Imp or skinny little Arya Stark. No matter what size, our bodies, like other physical things, take up space, have mass and energy, and obey the laws of nature. But unlike swords and cups of wine, we can think and reason, experience and feel. These activities are the province of the mind. But what are minds? Are they just functioning brains? The view known as
materialism
(or
physicalism
) indeed claims that this is true, and that persons are nothing more than extremely complex physical objects. Is this view correct, or does it leave something out?

In addressing this question, the contemporary American philosopher Thomas Nagel said that there wouldn’t be much of a problem to this so-called
mind-body problem
if it weren’t for one very big obstacle:
consciousness
.
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The problem, he said, is this. Physical things are
objective
, which basically means that they can be described completely in third-person terms. So, for example, I could describe to you my hardcover copy of
A Dance with Dragons
, and nothing would be left out. But consciousness has a
subjective
element to it; indeed, consciousness seems to be essentially subjective. As Nagel put it,
there is something it is like to be conscious
. And this “what it’s like” can’t be described in objective, third-person terms. If this is true, then it’s hard to see how consciousness could be a physical process, hard to see how the mind could just be the functioning brain.

Sometimes when we talk about what something is like, we use phrases such as “This tastes like cardboard” or “I felt like a kid again.” When Nagel, however, says it’s “like” something to have a conscious experience, he isn’t making a comparative statement at all. He’s saying that experiences feel a certain way to the experiencer; and how that experience feels—“what it’s like”—can be known only by one who has had the experience in question. For example, unlike Daenerys, we can’t truly imagine what raw horse heart tastes like. At least not unless we ate one ourselves!

Take a more familiar example: pain. When Arya stabbed and killed the stable boy in order to facilitate her escape from King’s Landing after Lord Eddard’s beheading, the boy felt a pain sensation. There was something it was like for him to have that experience, and someone who had never experienced that sort of sensation couldn’t know what it’s like. In fact, we can’t even know that the pain sensations, colors, sounds, and so on that we experience are the same as what these experiences are like for others. To make this point more vividly, Nagel asked us to think about creatures that experience the world in a way that’s very different from the way we do. Using bats as his example, Nagel claimed that we could
never
know what it’s like to be a bat. Looking to Westeros, let’s forget about bats, and ask instead, “What is it like to be a direwolf?”

If direwolves are conscious—and maybe they’re not, more on this in a minute—they embody a point of view. The world seems a certain way to a direwolf. When we try to imagine how that would be, how it would feel, we end up at best imagining
ourselves
in the beast’s body, which is not at all what it is to actually
be
a direwolf. So while one could come to know what a raw horse’s heart tastes like—though I never will—we can never know what it’s like to be another creature. We can never embody that creature’s point of view; only our own.

Wargs and Consciousness

I am him, and he is me. He feels what I feel.
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This may sound pretty convincing, but just like who’s betraying whom, and the crooked paths where our favorite characters find themselves, things are always more complicated in Westeros. The extra complication is that in this world, certain individuals known as
wargs
can actually transfer their consciousness into the bodies of direwolves and other animals. Orell, one of the wildlings, transferred his consciousness into an eagle, and this eagle went on to try to rip out one of Jon Snow’s eyes after the wildling was dead. Well, at least his body was dead. And Bran can put his consciousness not only into his direwolf Summer, but into Hodor as well. Hodor!

So does Bran know what it’s like to be a direwolf? Or does he know only what it’s like for him (Bran) to be “inside” of the animal with access to its sense organs? It’s hard to come up with a definitive answer here. Sometimes it seems like Bran and Summer share their consciousness. Other times, either Bran is just
there
, silently noting what his direwolf is sensing, or Bran’s consciousness alone is operating “inside” of Summer’s body. The first option
could
be the case, so it looks as though in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire, it
is
possible to embody more than one point of view, and therefore to be able to know what it is like to be something as strange as a direwolf. Does this tell us anything about the nature of consciousness?

Descartes and Direwolves

. . . if they thought as we do, they would have an immortal soul like us. This is unlikely, because there is no reason to believe it of some animals without believing it of all, and many of them such as oysters and sponges are too imperfect for this to be credible.
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The great French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650) would have dismissed all of this “what it’s like” talk when it comes to direwolves, or any other animal for that matter, because he believed that animals were not conscious at all. He thought they were more like complex machines. Descartes thought this was true for two main reasons. First, he believed that consciousness required the existence of a soul—a nonphysical substance—and only persons had souls. Actually, saying that persons “have” souls is not quite correct; Descartes thought persons
were
souls. In other words, for Descartes, you are not your body, but rather you are an immaterial substance that is causally connected to your body. So when Sansa looks at Sandor Clegane and sees this very large dangerous man with half of his face burned off, she is seeing the Hound’s body only, and not the Hound himself. What makes this
his
body is the fact that when he, the Sandor Clegane soul, if you will, decided to slash Mycah, the butcher’s boy, with a sword, the Hound’s body is the one that did the slashing. And the same is true in the other direction. When Gregor held his brother’s face to the burning coals when they were children, it was the soul that was Sandor that felt the pain, and not some other soul.

So persons have souls, and consciousness takes place only in souls. Since animals don’t have souls, they’re not conscious. The second reason Descartes denied the existence of animal consciousness was that he thought that animal behavior could be completely explained in physical terms. This points to a difference between us and the other animals, because our behavior, Descartes thought, could not be explained in purely physical terms.

To illustrate this difference, Descartes focused on language. When Lord Commander Mormont’s raven says “Corn!” or “Snow!” Descartes would have said that this was a mechanical happening without any understanding on the bird’s part. But when the commander himself makes those same sounds, they have meaning
for the commander
. Further, the process by which we take our thoughts, which have meaning, and turn them into words that convey those meanings could not be explained in any mechanistic way. At least that’s what Descartes claimed.

Whether or not Descartes was right about this, the strategy of his argument was instructive. To argue for the existence of something that can’t be perceived, like the soul or the gods of Westeros, you might argue that without it, something is left unexplained. When it came to animals, Descartes thought the physical explanations were enough, so there was no need to postulate anything further. With persons, the physical explanations were not sufficient to account for language, meaning, and thought. So something further was needed. And according to Descartes, that something must be a nonphysical conscious thing: a soul.

There are many difficulties with Descartes’ position. First, many animals have sophisticated languages—the higher primates as well as dolphins and whales come to mind—so do they have souls as well? Perhaps their language has no meaning for them and is not being used to convey thought. If so, Descartes could accept the fact that these animals have a form of language, while maintaining that the important difference between them and us still holds. But there are still major problems with his view.

The cognitive and neurosciences have proposed various accounts of language and its relation to thought. Descartes was right that no simple mechanistic model could explain language. But the physical explanations available to us are much more complex than what was available in the first half of the seventeenth century, when Descartes was writing. So if physical explanations fail to fully explain human behavior, it’s probably not because of the relationship between thought and language. We would need another reason to divide persons from other animals, to deny the latter consciousness based on this type of argument.

A second, and much worse, problem for Descartes is that, given what we know about animals (the primates and higher mammals at least, which in Westeros would certainly include direwolves) in terms of anatomy, physiology, and biological origin, denying animal consciousness seems dubious at best. In fact, the reasons we have for thinking that other people are conscious are pretty much the same reasons applied to animals. To illustrate, think of Jon Snow and Ghost. Jon knows that he is conscious, as each individual similarly does. He assumes that his friends and not-so-friends on the Night’s Watch are also conscious, but this is something he infers and does not know directly as he does in his own case. Why does he make this inference? Why do each of us make similar inferences every day?

Well, first, there is the behavioral evidence, both verbal and nonverbal. The brothers of the Night’s Watch behave pretty much just as Jon does. You talk to them, they seem to understand, and they respond accordingly. They say they are cold, and move toward the fire. When stabbed, they cry out in pain. Ghost behaves in similar fashion, responding to Jon’s commands, trying to stay warm, and so forth. When attacked by Orell’s eagle, Ghost exhibited pain behavior similar to Jon’s as well. So if the behavioral evidence convinces us that other persons are conscious, the same sort of evidence ought to be convincing when applied to animals.

Second, animal physiology is quite similar to our own. It would be absurd to think that brains and nervous systems, designed (either by the gods or in a biologically natural way) to register pain, would do so in us but not in biologically similar creatures.
7
Imagine thinking this of a fellow human: “Well, I know her brain and nervous system are like mine, and I know she shares a biological history with me in terms of evolution and human reproduction, but I bet she has no conscious experiences.” Why is this any less absurd when considering a seemingly aware, perceptive animal, like a direwolf?

Direwolves and animals in general can perceive their surrounding environment. They can smell food and hear predators; they can utilize their other senses as well. How is any of this possible without consciousness? Descartes (I know, I’m piling on here; were he alive, next I’d be asking to cut off some of his fingers) did have an answer to this. He thought that perception had three levels. The first, and lowest level, was a purely mechanical affair in which the information in the environment physically pressed upon the sense organs. At the next level, there was conscious awareness of the experience. And at the highest level, there was the ability to reason and make judgments about the experience. Descartes thought that animals functioned entirely at the first level, devoid of consciousness. The two higher levels were missing entirely in them since they lacked souls.