I think it’s fair to say that almost every fictional setting is populated by people who unilaterally share certain properties, most commonly philosophical views, because the author cannot or doesn’t want to conceive of people who are different.
Popular examples: there are zero non-evil consequentialists in the universe of Twilight. There are no utilitarians in the universe of Harry Potter except for Grindelwald (who I’d argue is a strawman and also evil). There are no moral realists in Luminosity (I don’t have Alicorn’s take on this claim, but I genuinely suspect she’d agree).
This naturally leads to a metric of evaluating stories, i.e. how fully does it capture the range of human views (and other properties). The most obvious example of a work that scores very highly is of course a Song of Ice and Fire. You can e.g. find clear, non-strawman examples of consequentialism (Varys) and Virtue Ethics (Brienne). Also notaeble is hpmor, even though no-one in that universe feels status-regulating emotions. (Eliezer said this himself.)
Rarely done but also possible (and imo underutilized): intentionally change characteristics of your universe. I think this is done in The Series of Unfortunate Events to great effect (everyone is autistic, no-one rationalizes anything).
Brandon Sanderson is also very good at this. As an example, he’s religious, but he’s very good at writing both other religions and characters that atheistic (Jasna from Stormlight Archive is an atheist and she’s written very well).
His most extreme consequentialist is also supposed to be a bad guy, but he does not strawman him, and you actually get to hear a lot of his reasoning and you can agree with him. My problem with him (in world, not a problem of writing, I think he’s a great character) was he didn’t sufficiently consider the possibility he was wrong. But there are other consequentialist that aren’t portrayed in a bad light (like Jasna from before), and many of the main characters struggle with these moral ideas.
Even the character he had the most excuses to write badly, a god called ruin who is almost more a force of nature than a god (from Mistborn), isn’t written as a dull, obviously evil and wrong character, but is “steelmaned”, if you will. And he shows the many flaws of his counterpart, preservation, that doesn’t let things grow to preserve them, which often ends up being counter productive.
I think it’s fair to say that almost every fictional setting is populated by people who unilaterally share certain properties, most commonly philosophical views, because the author cannot or doesn’t want to conceive of people who are different.
Popular examples: there are zero non-evil consequentialists in the universe of Twilight. There are no utilitarians in the universe of Harry Potter except for Grindelwald (who I’d argue is a strawman and also evil). There are no moral realists in Luminosity (I don’t have Alicorn’s take on this claim, but I genuinely suspect she’d agree).
This naturally leads to a metric of evaluating stories, i.e. how fully does it capture the range of human views (and other properties). The most obvious example of a work that scores very highly is of course a Song of Ice and Fire. You can e.g. find clear, non-strawman examples of consequentialism (Varys) and Virtue Ethics (Brienne). Also notaeble is hpmor, even though no-one in that universe feels status-regulating emotions. (Eliezer said this himself.)
Rarely done but also possible (and imo underutilized): intentionally change characteristics of your universe. I think this is done in The Series of Unfortunate Events to great effect (everyone is autistic, no-one rationalizes anything).
Brandon Sanderson is also very good at this. As an example, he’s religious, but he’s very good at writing both other religions and characters that atheistic (Jasna from Stormlight Archive is an atheist and she’s written very well).
His most extreme consequentialist is also supposed to be a bad guy, but he does not strawman him, and you actually get to hear a lot of his reasoning and you can agree with him. My problem with him (in world, not a problem of writing, I think he’s a great character) was he didn’t sufficiently consider the possibility he was wrong. But there are other consequentialist that aren’t portrayed in a bad light (like Jasna from before), and many of the main characters struggle with these moral ideas.
Even the character he had the most excuses to write badly, a god called ruin who is almost more a force of nature than a god (from Mistborn), isn’t written as a dull, obviously evil and wrong character, but is “steelmaned”, if you will. And he shows the many flaws of his counterpart, preservation, that doesn’t let things grow to preserve them, which often ends up being counter productive.