Where have all the heroes gone?

Featureless Protagonist, I guess? That's kind of mandatory for that to work. The moment you start establishing details about the character, the moment the character becomes limited in behavior and beliefs by those details.

Thing is, at its basest, ethics is what tells you what's right or wrong. With absolutely zero ethics, you'd be terminally apathetic. Though I suppose a blank slate could start with pain = bad, pleasure = good and work his way up from there.

It'd make an interesting multiple choice based, open sandbox RPG, at least. You get dropped into a situation with only a few options based on your immediate needs. The plot moves in a certain direction and gives you new chioces. Your character gains more information and slowly builds ther way up from apathy as you explore and discover the black, white, and grey world around you, building opinions and possibly taking sides.

edited 17th Oct '13 7:47:16 PM by ScorpioRat

x4 That's exactly why I'm questioning whether or not it's possible.

I can't see it. The only way to be entirely lacking in ethics is to be incapable of ethical understanding. An animal may be motivated by an instinctual desire for things like food and safety and territory, but in a human, the exact same motives are still an ethical framework.

Writing no ethics is harder than it sounds. I recall reading a book called The Lost Years of Merlin where this hag character was said to be "neither good nor evil, she simply is." Yet the writing didn't show that to be true, as the hag showed demands for payment in exchange for favors, held grudges when she lost a bet, and viewed herself as superior to others. The closest she came to not having morality was not caring about the conflict outside her cave, but apathy isn't the same thing as lack of morality. It can be a form of selfishness and laziness. I don't know if it's truly possible to write a character with no sense of morality at all, but I've yet to see a successful example.

edited 18th Oct '13 4:13:08 PM by Tuckerscreator

It reminds me a lot of this trope. It's hard to write a character without ethics because we all have ethics.

Thinking about this more, the only character I can think of who is claimed to have no morals and really acts it is The Joker. And yet he's still evil, he just doesn't think evil or good matter. He just does things because they're fun. So perhaps a character without any ethics wouldn't be a blank slate. Instead they'd be utterly crazy.

edited 18th Oct '13 4:17:40 PM by Tuckerscreator

(I'm going with the definition of "ethics" as being "the rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of human actions or a particular group, culture, etc.")

Since ethics are one's rules of conduct, it seems to me that a character without ethics would simply be inconsistent, or base decisions of conduct purely on practical matters and expected outcomes as they stand at the moment. As soon as they start producing any sort of principles, even just guidelines to streamline their decisions — prefer to give people what they pay you for, or shoot anyone who disagrees, or whatever — the character arguably starts developing a set of ethics.

I know it's usually the go-to quote for ambiguous morals in games and open-ended gaming, but what about Planescape: Torment? The Nameless One has forgotten most of who he was and the progression of the game involves the player deciding how he reacts, which in turn nudges him towards his alignment. Unfortunately, as with most such systems, you kind of have to nudge him towards one extreme or the other because only the extremes get the really cool stuff.

In Metroid Prime 2, Samus saves Aether instead of just letting U-Mos fix her spaceship and leaving.

She has no personal stake in the conflict beyond collecting all her lost armor components (Which she does well before facing Emperor Ing. She really just saves Aether because the Luminoth need her help and will die otherwise.

I guess Samus is close to a blank slate protagonist, though. She has personality traits visible in her actions, but she emotes about as much as a character like Toon Link.

edited 20th Oct '13 2:08:22 PM by Scardoll

I'm not sure about that last part, actually. Consider just how much you see of Link's (giant) face during Wind Waker, and the heightened nature of his expressions. Even in gameplay, he emotes to a considerable extent more than any version of Samus. Though I do agree that Samus usually falls under this thread's definition of a heroic protagonist.

Regarding characters without ethics - various 'emotionless girl' characters seem like they could be developed in this direction instead of the rather more common one, but I haven't really seen an example of the character type without the baggage required to have a pre-existing system of ethics. Terra comes close, but she does appear to consider Kefka evil from the beginning due to backstory elements, even though her judgments on nearly everything else develop later. But that hatred can also be seen as a reaction to instinctive aversion to pain, not the more moral views she later develops.

edited 20th Oct '13 10:22:58 PM by Null

I'd say that Toon Link is the most emotive of all the Links simply because his art style demands exaggerated body language as well as facial expressions. Just look at his DS incarnations.

Regarding a character without ethics, can we say a character whose reactions are entirely instinctive are without ethics? How would we as rational beings empathize with such a character and how could that character develop without leaving his or her original path?

edited 20th Oct '13 10:24:50 PM by Recon5

Instinct still requires ethics, since acting in favor of anything requires a value judgment, even if it is immediate and not done with any pondering beforehand.

An ethics-less character would be an inanimate objective — even total apathy and inaction is borne out of some ethical framework (and, since the norm calls for one to care and to do stuff, it would unethical anyway).

edited 24th Oct '13 9:58:14 AM by CrimsonZephyr

Ethics are generally defined (roughly) as "rules of social or moral conduct", I believe, which means that judgements along the lines of "eat things that taste good" would seem to not classify as "ethics"; hence instinctive action, could easily operate without ethics.

As to apathy, it could arise from an ethical framework ("it's better to do nothing", for example), but it needn't: it could arise from a lack of a guiding principle to motivate action, in which case it could arise in a lack of ethics.

In short, as I understand it, "ethics" doesn't cover "all rules that govern any behaviour"; a robot programmed to pick up only blue blocks, with no other rules, arguably has no ethics, and very likely lacks the capacity for ethics, despite being able to act.

edited 24th Oct '13 10:10:50 AM by ArsThaumaturgis