Ender's Game Moral Dilemma Essay

In Ender’s Game, there is a boy named Ender Wiggin that is a genius. The International Fleet wants to send Ender to battle school to train him to fight against the buggers, an alien species that will invade Earth. Ender defeats the buggers but was tricked into doing so. Ender deeply regretted killing all of the buggers as they were too living things. Then Ender finds a bugger queen egg and waits a long time to put it down and reviving the buggers with it. Along the way to the bugger war and even after the bugger war there are many moral dilemmas that multiple different people have, various of occupation. If you don’t know what a moral dilemma is, a moral dilemma is a situation that requires the person in the moral dilemma to pick a choice,

each choice would challenge the moral or values of the person making the choice. One such example in Ender’s Game is when Ender finds the bugger queen egg. He could either take it and revive the buggers or leave it there, forgetting about it and treating the bugger war story the same as everyone else on Earth. Ender chose to take the egg and keep it until he found the right area and right time to lay it down and start the bugger race again. The choice that Ender made was the morally right decision because it gave Ender the chance to make up for his guilt of killing so many living things during the bugger war. It also allowed both races, the humans and the buggers, to live separate from each other because everyone gets a chance to prove themselves to be good once again.

The first choice which Ender had was to take the bugger egg and to revive the bugger race. The consequences of this is that the humans may find out that the buggers were still alive and try everything to their extent of power to wipe them out again. Another consequence is that the human race will turn against Ender and make them their enemies and forget that he saved Earth and try to punish him instead. From all of this, we can conclude that this choice would challenge Ender whether or not to get rid of his guilty conscience to risk bringing back a hated race of things. The other choice that Ender could have made was to leave the egg alone and forget about it and treat the bugger war like everyone else did. That is celebrate the win and pass stories that share the bravery of the men fighting and the wonders of Ender Wiggin who controlled the fleet. The consequence of this is that even though it may be deep down buried where no one can find it, Ender would still have that guilty conscience that he cannot wipe clean as he killed so many, but did not care to bring them back through the bugger egg. From this, we can see that the moral/value that is being challenged is yet again to either have a clean conscience or to have the community together but have a guilty conscience at the bottom.

So again, Ender chose to take the bugger queen egg so he can repay his due bills towards the buggers for killing them all.

So how is this better than the other choice which is that Ender could have made which is to leave the egg there and forget about it? There are a few reasons. One of them is that without picking up the egg, Ender would still be grieving over the fact that he killed so many living creatures. Even if they were a hated species. This is shown clearly as Ender said “I didn’t want to kill them all. I didn’t want to kill anybody! I’m not a killer!” (Card 297). As we can see from this, Ender did not want to kill the buggers in the first place. Ender is shown to be living off of a guilty conscience that was created by killing so many. The text says that “always Ender carried with him a dry white cocoon, looking for the world where the hive-queen could awaken and thrive in peace. He looked a long time” (Card 324). From this, we can see how much Ender is willing to do to bring back the race that he had killed as he searched a very long time to try to find a perfect place to put the bugger queen egg and bring back the bugger race. So for Ender’s moral, the choice that Ender made was the right one as it allowed to make Ender believe that he had done something good rather than the other choice which would give Ender unlimited fame and popularity but would leave Ender with a feeling of despair for all of the lives he took for

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