Also I want to do a completely separate post in response to one of your short comments:
”What’s wrong with the speaker’s super-harsh utilitarianism?”
My immediate response, just automatic on reflex without engaging my brain’s slow mode, is “planning fallacy / arrogance / sin of pride.” What’s wrong is that he assumes he’s in a sufficiently strong level of knowledge, self-discipline, and self-control that he actually can pull off his ubermensch act, instead of it all going horribly wrong and blowing up in his face. That’s always what’s wrong with characters doing that. That’s why so much EA thought focuses on the question of how to ‘first, do no harm’. That’s why EA takes the High Modernists so seriously as an object lesson, that’s why rationalist circles are the only ones I’ve ever been in where you can just say “Chesterton’s Fence!” and the burden of proving an argument automatically switches over to the party arguing for a reform.
Writers have been asking that question and giving basically that answer for, what, a hundred and fifty years? Since “Crime and Punishment,” I think, which is apparently from 1866. The most recent modern artwork that I found memorable that said it was Fate/zero, back in, IIRC, 2012. I’m not going to say you can’t update timeless and eternal themes for a modern audience, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but I didn’t actually find that the story started interesting EA-type conversations (though, again, I thought it was very well-written—your voice and prose style are excellent), and the specific reason for that is because I didn’t really see that it was doing anything new or exciting, philosophically speaking. Insofar as you intended it to have a different moral answer, that… didn’t really come across? It was just asking the same question that had been answered so many times before.
Also I want to do a completely separate post in response to one of your short comments:
”What’s wrong with the speaker’s super-harsh utilitarianism?”
My immediate response, just automatic on reflex without engaging my brain’s slow mode, is “planning fallacy / arrogance / sin of pride.” What’s wrong is that he assumes he’s in a sufficiently strong level of knowledge, self-discipline, and self-control that he actually can pull off his ubermensch act, instead of it all going horribly wrong and blowing up in his face. That’s always what’s wrong with characters doing that. That’s why so much EA thought focuses on the question of how to ‘first, do no harm’. That’s why EA takes the High Modernists so seriously as an object lesson, that’s why rationalist circles are the only ones I’ve ever been in where you can just say “Chesterton’s Fence!” and the burden of proving an argument automatically switches over to the party arguing for a reform.
Writers have been asking that question and giving basically that answer for, what, a hundred and fifty years? Since “Crime and Punishment,” I think, which is apparently from 1866. The most recent modern artwork that I found memorable that said it was Fate/zero, back in, IIRC, 2012. I’m not going to say you can’t update timeless and eternal themes for a modern audience, that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but I didn’t actually find that the story started interesting EA-type conversations (though, again, I thought it was very well-written—your voice and prose style are excellent), and the specific reason for that is because I didn’t really see that it was doing anything new or exciting, philosophically speaking. Insofar as you intended it to have a different moral answer, that… didn’t really come across? It was just asking the same question that had been answered so many times before.