I think its trickier than that—the adults are portrayed as being incapable of the “necessary” brilliance and/or ruthlessness. They put Ender in the hotseat because they hope he’ll do “something to win” without really visualizing what that something might entail. He’s simultaneously their “more powerful optimizing process” and (using LW terminology that makes me a little uncomfortable) their shabbos goy.
Its possible that the first two books were written specifically to explore the structure of moral reasoning in situations like this. How do people morally process a genocide that no specific person directly and obviously intended, especially if their theory of moral reasoning hinges primarily on intent?
I don’t mean to pull a Godwin, but there may (intentionally?) be a strong set of correspondences between Ender and Hitler, with a literary goal of getting people to “identify and forgive Hitler”—that is, the whole book may be a literary “Godwin prank”. I should note that this is not my original analysis, in part because I know almost nothing about “Hitler scholarship”. The original insight came from Elaine Radford, I heard about it via a K5 post by a friend of hers telling the story of how Orson Scott Card freaked out and tried to bully her into not publishing the analysis after book two but before book three (which was massively delayed, possibly because of the review if you buy the K5 story). The analysis was later cited in Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention, and Morality.
For reference, I read Ender’s Game and really liked it when I was about 12. After my brother and I read it we tried to get our mom to read it and she stopped like 20 pages in because the horrific child abuse turned her stomach.
I stopped reading Card in my 40s or thereabouts because, while I was fascinated by the character torture, I became uncomfortable with my fascination. I’d earlier realized that there’s something really creepy about a lot of the older male characters in Card—they do horrific things which are justified in the text.
Discovering that you can no longer stand a book you used to love is sometimes called “the book was visited by the suck fairy”.
More recently, (on the strong recommendation of a friend) I read Empire, and amazingly, it has a positive father/son relationship.
I think its trickier than that—the adults are portrayed as being incapable of the “necessary” brilliance and/or ruthlessness. They put Ender in the hotseat because they hope he’ll do “something to win” without really visualizing what that something might entail. He’s simultaneously their “more powerful optimizing process” and (using LW terminology that makes me a little uncomfortable) their shabbos goy.
Its possible that the first two books were written specifically to explore the structure of moral reasoning in situations like this. How do people morally process a genocide that no specific person directly and obviously intended, especially if their theory of moral reasoning hinges primarily on intent?
I don’t mean to pull a Godwin, but there may (intentionally?) be a strong set of correspondences between Ender and Hitler, with a literary goal of getting people to “identify and forgive Hitler”—that is, the whole book may be a literary “Godwin prank”. I should note that this is not my original analysis, in part because I know almost nothing about “Hitler scholarship”. The original insight came from Elaine Radford, I heard about it via a K5 post by a friend of hers telling the story of how Orson Scott Card freaked out and tried to bully her into not publishing the analysis after book two but before book three (which was massively delayed, possibly because of the review if you buy the K5 story). The analysis was later cited in Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention, and Morality.
For reference, I read Ender’s Game and really liked it when I was about 12. After my brother and I read it we tried to get our mom to read it and she stopped like 20 pages in because the horrific child abuse turned her stomach.
I stopped reading Card in my 40s or thereabouts because, while I was fascinated by the character torture, I became uncomfortable with my fascination. I’d earlier realized that there’s something really creepy about a lot of the older male characters in Card—they do horrific things which are justified in the text.
Discovering that you can no longer stand a book you used to love is sometimes called “the book was visited by the suck fairy”.
More recently, (on the strong recommendation of a friend) I read Empire, and amazingly, it has a positive father/son relationship.