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-->-- 'True Moral Conflict', 'Creator/Eliezer Yudkowsky' "Optimize Literally Everything" '
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-->-- 'True Moral Conflict', 'Creator/Eliezer Yudkowsky' '''Creator/EliezerYudkowsky''' "Optimize Literally Everything" '
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The natural modality for genuinely sophisticated literary exploration of morality is a conflict of Good vs. Good, played straight. A conflict between high ideals that the story doesn’t try to taint, to cast down, to use to showcase the author’s superior worldly cynicism—-for this does nothing but weaken the conflict.
A true and untainted ideal is not necessarily an ideal whose advocates are all pure, or an ideal whose policies have no downsides. A true ideal is a goal that is worth optimizing for despite it all, that is still a warm bright feeling even in a complicated world. If you cannot let yourself feel that warm bright feeling and talk about it in public, you will not be able to put it into your story, and you will not be able to have your readers sympathize with your ideals. Look within yourself for the morals, ethics, aesthetics, virtues, the features of reality that you still treasure. You have created a true moral conflict when you bring two such high ideals into opposition, balanced so that you’re not sure of the right side yourself; or when you find a moral question within the high ideal whose answer you are not sure of, and around which you can construct a story.
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->A true and untainted ideal is not necessarily an ideal whose advocates are all pure, or an ideal whose policies have no downsides. A true ideal is a goal that is worth optimizing for despite it all, that is still a warm bright feeling even in a complicated world. If you cannot let yourself feel that warm bright feeling and talk about it in public, you will not be able to put it into your story, and you will not be able to have your readers sympathize with your ideals. Look within yourself for the morals, ethics, aesthetics, virtues, the features of reality that you still treasure. You have created a true moral conflict when you bring two such high ideals into opposition, balanced so that you’re not sure of the right side yourself; or when you find a moral question within the high ideal whose answer you are not sure of, and around which you can construct a story.
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Added in Eliezer Yudkowsky's entry
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-->-- '''Troilus''', ''Theatre/TroilusAndCressida''
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-->-- '''Troilus''', ''Theatre/TroilusAndCressida''''Theatre/TroilusAndCressida''
-> The wrong way to try to create (story-telling) balance is to write a ‘morally ambiguous’ Evil vs. Evil story where both sides receive a heaping serving of taintedness and corruption. This is exactly the wrong move from a literary standpoint. Evil vs. Evil stories do not create sympathy-with-moral-questions because nobody in these stories is trying to optimize ethics, to do the right thing. You can’t have characters agonizing over an open question about the best thing to do, if nobody in the story is considering answers that are remotely plausible. Weakening a strong Good vs. Good conflict to Gray vs. Grey, let alone Evil vs. Evil, is the literary equivalent of taking away your characters’ guns and black leather battlesuits, and making them have a playground slap-fight instead. There is nothing sophisticated about Evil vs. Evil, because there is no intellectual intricacy without questioning, and a question requires lengthy consideration exactly when both sides seem at first to have strong arguments.
...
The natural modality for genuinely sophisticated literary exploration of morality is a conflict of Good vs. Good, played straight. A conflict between high ideals that the story doesn’t try to taint, to cast down, to use to showcase the author’s superior worldly cynicism—-for this does nothing but weaken the conflict.
A true and untainted ideal is not necessarily an ideal whose advocates are all pure, or an ideal whose policies have no downsides. A true ideal is a goal that is worth optimizing for despite it all, that is still a warm bright feeling even in a complicated world. If you cannot let yourself feel that warm bright feeling and talk about it in public, you will not be able to put it into your story, and you will not be able to have your readers sympathize with your ideals. Look within yourself for the morals, ethics, aesthetics, virtues, the features of reality that you still treasure. You have created a true moral conflict when you bring two such high ideals into opposition, balanced so that you’re not sure of the right side yourself; or when you find a moral question within the high ideal whose answer you are not sure of, and around which you can construct a story.
-->-- 'True Moral Conflict', 'Creator/Eliezer Yudkowsky' "Optimize Literally Everything" '
-> The wrong way to try to create (story-telling) balance is to write a ‘morally ambiguous’ Evil vs. Evil story where both sides receive a heaping serving of taintedness and corruption. This is exactly the wrong move from a literary standpoint. Evil vs. Evil stories do not create sympathy-with-moral-questions because nobody in these stories is trying to optimize ethics, to do the right thing. You can’t have characters agonizing over an open question about the best thing to do, if nobody in the story is considering answers that are remotely plausible. Weakening a strong Good vs. Good conflict to Gray vs. Grey, let alone Evil vs. Evil, is the literary equivalent of taking away your characters’ guns and black leather battlesuits, and making them have a playground slap-fight instead. There is nothing sophisticated about Evil vs. Evil, because there is no intellectual intricacy without questioning, and a question requires lengthy consideration exactly when both sides seem at first to have strong arguments.
...
The natural modality for genuinely sophisticated literary exploration of morality is a conflict of Good vs. Good, played straight. A conflict between high ideals that the story doesn’t try to taint, to cast down, to use to showcase the author’s superior worldly cynicism—-for this does nothing but weaken the conflict.
A true and untainted ideal is not necessarily an ideal whose advocates are all pure, or an ideal whose policies have no downsides. A true ideal is a goal that is worth optimizing for despite it all, that is still a warm bright feeling even in a complicated world. If you cannot let yourself feel that warm bright feeling and talk about it in public, you will not be able to put it into your story, and you will not be able to have your readers sympathize with your ideals. Look within yourself for the morals, ethics, aesthetics, virtues, the features of reality that you still treasure. You have created a true moral conflict when you bring two such high ideals into opposition, balanced so that you’re not sure of the right side yourself; or when you find a moral question within the high ideal whose answer you are not sure of, and around which you can construct a story.
-->-- 'True Moral Conflict', 'Creator/Eliezer Yudkowsky' "Optimize Literally Everything" '
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-->''"O virtuous fight, when right with right wars who shall be most right!"''
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-->''"O virtuous fight, when right with right wars who shall be most right!"''
-->-- '''Troilus''', ''Theatre/TroilusAndCressida''
-->-- '''Troilus''', ''Theatre/TroilusAndCressida''
