#and in the end whether they choose something for selfish or altruistic reasons doesn't really matter to the big picture does it

[antianakin]

Honestly when people call Cassian Andor morally gray, mostly from the movie, I kinda side-eye? Because he doesn't really fit that. He's, he's a spy but the two things I see called morally gray are:

Shooting the other spy in the beginning, which was a sad choice to make, but the man was injured and they were being chased. There's no way for him to carry the man to safety while fleeing the stormtroopers, and leaving him there would have been a fate worse that death, we know what the Empire does to suspected spies, along with not risking intel leaks.

And setting out to assassinate Jyn's father, who at that point, nobody had confirmation he was anything other than a man loyal to the Empire, building a weapon of mass destruction. Its reasonable to think getting rid of the head engineer behind that project would either delay it or cause issues. The Rebellion was operating with less information than we, the audience had.

Both hard decisions made during hard times, but to me, Cassian Andor at least is an average guy, trying to make the best decision he can in basically the worst times ever.

I mean, I think that a lot of this is what MAKES Cassian morally gray. Being morally gray doesn't have to mean he doesn't care, or that his ultimate goal isn't something generally good and altruistic, either. Cassian is fighting for the greater good, he's trying to take down a tyrannical fascist Empire, he's doing what he's doing because he firmly believes that it's what's best for the entire galaxy and because it will ultimately save a lot of lives in the long run.

Being morally gray just generally means that the character operates outside of the more strict dichotomies of "good" and "evil." Luke Skywalker is pretty unequivocally "good" and he would likely never do the things Cassian does even though they both are aiming for the same goal. Luke would never even AGREE to assassinate Jyn's father, especially if he has to use Jyn to find her father in the first place. This would be something that Luke would consider wrong and he'd refuse to do it, even though there are reasons to think Galen might be working for the Empire and that it could be better for everyone if he was dead. And on the other end of the spectrum you have someone like Palpatine, or even Anakin (specifically during the OT) who aren't out for the greater good at all and are always motivated solely by selfish greed and nothing else.

So someone like Cassian operates somewhere between these two extremes. Cassian is willing to kill an innocent man who is his ally because he cannot take the risk of either of them getting captured by the Empire. He can presumably trust that HE'D hold up under torture, but he cannot trust that this informant (who has been pretty anxious and flustered so far) would do the same. Cassian's options are to stay and get captured with him, escape without him, or give him a quick and painless death and then escape on his own. The honorable option that we'd probably see a character like Luke choose is the first one, staying with the informant and trying to find a way for both of them to escape even though it runs a VERY high risk of both of them being captured. Killing an innocent man is an objectively evil thing to do, but Cassian looks at all of his options and weighs the risks and ultimately chooses the option that is best for his cause even if it requires doing something objectively evil.

And you ARE supposed to recognize that. There's this whole moment immediately after Cassian kills the guy that Diego Luna makes this really devastating face where you can tell he HATES what he just did, he HATES that he felt like he had to make that choice at all, but then he lets it go and escapes. This is not something that he just brushes off like it's nothing, it's something that does weigh on him and that's part of his whole arc within this film. He has to decide how to live with the choices he has made and the reasons he has made them and whether those reasons are worth what it costs to him personally. He obviously ultimately decides NOT to kill Galen because he cares about Jyn and he knows that killing Galen will mean ruining the connection that's been beginning to build between himself and Jyn. For the moment, he chooses to care about Jyn and Jyn's happiness more than he cares about the cause of the Rebellion. And at the end, he and the other volunteers all choose to go to Scarif because they cannot just abandon this cause that they've all given up so much for, that they've all had to do objectively evil things for. It HAS to be worth something, killing that informant HAS to be worth it or what does that make him? Without the cause, he's just a murderer.

And all of this is part of what makes him such a compelling character. Often these days we see morally gray characters in the position of the villain, where they have perhaps a sympathetic motivation but they're going about it all wrong and they have to be stopped because they've let their desire for a better world be corrupted into simply a desire for power. Some of these stories get done better than others, obviously, but this can be a really powerful narrative. But Cassian sits slightly differently where he is unequivocally one of The Good Guys, but the narrative posits the idea that sometimes sacrifices are required to achieve "the greater good." When your enemy is pure evil and willing to use tricks and lies to beat you, sometimes you have to give up some of your own moral code in order to beat them at their own game and protect as many people as possible. Sometimes being selfless looks like setting yourself on fire so that everyone else can stay warm.

And like I mentioned in the Andor post that I assume this is probably in reaction to, what I love most about this is how it relates to the Prequels Jedi and the themes therein, the struggle they have with maintaining who they are and the morals they live by when there's a galactic civil war going on and the other side of it is willing to commit massive atrocities in order to win. By fighting in the war, the Jedi are having to compromise, but if they refused to fight at all, they would lose everything that made them who they are. The Council chooses to commit treason in order to save the Republic from its own elected Chancellor. It's objectively morally wrong to commit treason, but it lands morally gray because of the motivation and the circumstances of the choice they are making.

Often doing the right thing isn't the same as doing the easy thing. Being selfless usually comes with making sacrifices. We see the the bigger "cosmic" version of this with the Prequels Jedi during the Clone War, but Rogue One and Andor show us another version of it from the perspective of the little people, those whose names and stories will never be remembered by history, but whose sacrifices paved the way for people like Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa to step in and be the heroes who took down the Empire. Cassian and the Prequels Jedi fall into a very similar thematic category in their stories and it's honestly SUCH a compelling story and I love the way Rogue One and Andor chose to follow up on that theme.

[kyouka-supremacy]

Hey! I was summoned by the tags you put under my post bc I also very much enjoy discussing ethics. I might make this into its own post so I'll try to not elaborate too much...

I think that I can't just decide for everyone if the difference between doing good for the sake of goodness or in order to save oneself matters, but for me, in most cases, including Dazai's case, it doesn't.

I like to believe that morality is a choice one can decide to make, and I don't think it's fair to take that away from them, regardless on how they might feel on the inside. It's a wonderful thing to act morally because it's your "natural" tendency, but I think people also have the right to do so deliberately, for a reason that they choose, without their choice being minimised. They're two different processes for sure, but if the outcome is good, then the action is a good action, and, if being moral is a choice, then I don't think I have the right to decide that only one intention or emotion that will lead there is good enough.

Also, doing good for your own sake and for the sake of others are mutually exclusive at all. One feeds the other, and if we were to put every person's actions under such scrutiny, we would ultimately run in circles.

So, for people outside the story, I would say that the debate does matter, but for the sake of the people involved, it doesn't, because the outcome is the same, especially since Dazai is so opaque as a character, and what he really feels about the things he does is so hard to read, so at the end of the day all most of them experience is his actions.

[Post this is referring to] Thank you for your elaboration, I loved hearing your opinion on the matter!!! That's close to consequentialism, isn't it? The consequences of one's actions, how much good they produced, are telling of it being morally right or wrong. I don't necessarily agree, but that's definitely a valid way to see it!!! I personally believe one's intentions are the most relevant aspect to take into account when judging whether and action is ethically rightful or not. Note that that is judging the moral of the action itself, and not giving a judgement on the person; people can have a million reasons to act selfishly, and in my very “humans are always inherently good” worldview more often than not it's caused by society rather than an actual preference to not be altruistic. But that doesn't change the fact that even a good action, if it isn't moved by good intentions, won't ever be passable of being morally right to me. Besides, then, wouldn't the other way round work to? Someone well intentioned, who's however incompetent, and ends up with their actions putting more bad in the world– as long as they're acting with a true desire to help others for the sake of it, their actions can't be considered morally wrong for me.

To clarify, with reference to your ask; I don't think people who do something for selfish reasons, and end up doing good, are morally rightful; but if they decide to do good, well, isn't that a well-intentioned aim itself? Then I think they stop being selfish to the extension that they consciously decide they're going to do good. That's not morally reprinandable at all.

Now, regarding Dazai... Honestly, I don't think Dazai is a good person. Because he never meant to do good for the sake of it. But now, the thing is, I don't think anyone in bsd is meant to be interpreted as good or evil– nobody, not Atsushi, not Mori, no one. When it comes to bsd– I do think bsd expresses a more or less nihilist worldview. And I know pretty much everyone else disagrees with me on this, I know, I'm sorry. But I do think there lies an undergoing message that good and bad are ultimately the same, and equally meaningless– it's there in Oda saying “Neither good nor evil mean much to you”, it's there in the way it makes you root for mafiosi like they were the good guys, it's there in the way Dazai never even considered to make amends for the bad things he's done (because they were never bad to begin with, because good and bad mean nothing anyway), it's there in the way it constantly shows good people doing bad and bad people doing good in a way that basically equalises them. To me there's really no point in discussing whether Dazai is good, because he is most evidently not, but that's only because he was never meant to be interpreted as such to begin with. Please refer to this post for further details; it's not surprising at all that Dazai switching over to the “good side” didn't come with a radical change of heart, and that he basically stayed the same, because how could he become good when that's no different than being evil, and those both mean nothing anyway?

And I know most people see bsd's core theme as finding a reason to live, and maybe it is, but even then I think that wouldn't be by denying its nihilism, but rather accepting it and finding a reason to live in spite of it: to me all of bsd really sums up in “that, at least, is a little more beautiful”.

[sel-jpg]

[ pls don't rb; i am purposefully not putting this in the tag bc i know i currently just cannot do the "rb after rb with big paragraphs of text" kinda discussion. feel absolutely free to send a reply or an ask if u want to comment on this but i just want to put the disclaimer of "this is kind of a figuring out my own thoughts/rambling about a pet peeve kind of post rather than a proper invitation for discussion" on this ]

honestly i am kinda sick of seeing points like "melanie, georgie, basira and martin are robbing jon of his agency by not wanting to do what he wants to do" like. sorry but this is not a dilemma about jon's life alone. it's about all of them, all of the people in their world and people in other universes.

the people robbed of their agency in this dilemma are in fact the people currently suffering in domains and also the people in other universes bc they cannot even take part and argue their point in this discussion. they in fact do not even know it's happening.

yes, lack of agency is a central theme in jon's story and my heart breaks for him because truly no one deserves to go through even a fraction of what he went through but giving him back his agency means giving him control over his own life back, not letting him decide over countless lives in multiple universes (including! basira's , martin's, melanie's and georgie's. like, they are allowed to argue against their own death, right? RIGHT?)

yes jon's been wronged by the others before. yes he's honestly still owed a bit more of an apology by some of them. no that does not mean he gets to decide about this alone.