Moral Justification In The Ender Series By Orson Scott Card

The Ender series by Orson Scott Card is a collection of literary masterpieces that explore various parts of human society and culture through a science fiction world. One key aspect of human society, definitely a controversial theory, is whether or not the end justifies the means. One extreme is that no matter what crimes or abominations are committed, they are all justified if the reason behind those acts was for the greater good, or morally justified. The other extreme is that no matter the reason behind one’s actions, if the act by itself is morally wrong, it cannot be justified. Neither of these two extremes are generally accepted, whether or not an act is justified usually depends on how “bad” the act is and how “good” is the reason

behind it.

This creates a scale of justification, a spectrum that Orson Scott Card explores using the Ender series. Card uses the first three books of the series (excluding books from the Shadow series), Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Xenocide to explore this concept of the moral justification. Through portrayals of alien species, the government and figures of authority, and his main character Ender, Card reveals various takes on the philosophy of moral justification. At the beginning of the series, Card’s main window into the subject shows that the end does justify the means. As the story keeps developing into the middle of the series, Card starts to change his ideology as portrayals of aliens, authority, and Ender start to side with the other extreme. By the end, Card seems to have flipped his philosophy as his portrayals of aliens, authority, and Ender prove that the end does not always justify

the means.
One of the main ways that Card examines the concept of the greater good is through his main character, Ender. In Ender’s Game, Ender justifies many parts of his life with his logic behind his actions. Ender’s Game begins with Ender at the age of six, and even though he is young, he is incredibly smart, a gene that runs in the family. In this futuristic world, people are only allowed to have two children. Ender’s parents had already had two children, Peter and Valentine. However, they both were rejected from going to battle school because Peter was too violent and Valentine was too mild. So, the leaders of the International Fleet (I.F.), which is basically the international government in place on Earth, allowed Ender’s parents to have a Third, hoping that he would be between Peter and Valentine’s psychological conditions. As it turns out, they were right, and Ender goes on to battle school and command school and ends up “saving the world,” as it seemed to the world at the time, although Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide prove otherwise. As Ender grew up, he was influenced both by Peter’s endless threats of violence as well as Valentine’s constant love and compassion, as her name suggests. Ender is constantly haunted by the possibility that he is the same as Peter, a person that takes pleasure in others’ pain. As Eric James Stone states in his essay on how Ender’s Game should have ended, Ender’s central conflict is the fear that he is like Peter (Stone 6). However, although he loves Valentine, he knows he cannot be the same as her because he does what needs to be done, no matter the consequences. This makes Ender perfect for the job the I.F. needs someone to do, a commander to defeat the Formics. Ender’s life has many examples where the end does justify the means. At the beginning of Ender’s game, Ender beats an older bully named Stilson at a game and Stilson and his gang challenge Ender. Ender, with no other alternative, hits Stilson. But instead of leaving right then and there, he continues to beat Stilson while defenseless on the ground, continuously kicking him in the stomach. Unlike Peter, Ender took no pleasure in Stilson’s pain, but instead did it so that Stilson and his bullies wouldn’t come after him again. When Graff questions him at his house, Ender says, “Knocking him down won the first fight. I wanted to win all the next ones, too, right then, so they'd leave me alone.” (Ender 15). This reasoning, in both Ender and Graff’s minds, justifies Ender’s actions in that it is one of the reasons that Ender gets into Battle School. In Ender’s mind specifically, the end justified the means because even though he did something that mean and cruel that was also against social norms, it was to ensure that he would not be attacked again. Ender’s viewpoint starts to change when his old commander, Bonzo, attacks him in the shower. In defense, Ender attacks back, and ends up killing Bonzo. The I.F. hides Bonzo’s death from Ender, so Ender thinks he put Bonzo in a coma, but it makes him think that he is becoming just like Peter. Jennifer Swanson examines this situation through the thirteenth-century Catholic priest Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas thought of the principle of double effect, which evaluates the moral justification of an action that results in another action that is considered morally wrong (Swanson 12). Ender is forced both with Stilson and Bonzo to do something before the other person acted. Although he was acting in defense, the fact remains that he killed Bonzo. Some say that Ender was justified because he was acting in defense, while others believe that no matter what the situation, if the act isolated is wrong, then the act as a whole must be wrong. After this incident, Ender starts wonder about the purpose of what he is doing and whether there is any point in following what the I.F. is putting him through in battle school. This is when Graff pulls Valentine, the only person Ender loves, back into the picture to get Ender back on track. Speaker for the Dead takes place 3,081 years after Ender’s Game. Ender is still alive because he is traveling in space, attempting to help the Hive Queen repopulate his species, and time passes differently for him in space than it does for Earth. At the end of Ender’s Game, Card starts to change his philosophy in that when Ender realizes that he killed the entire Formic race, he draws the line in justification for actions because of his actions and the actions of the senior I.F. officers. This plays off of Ender’s fear of being like Peter. After he wins the final battle, Ender says to Mazer Rackam, “I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! You didn't want me, you bastards, you wanted Peter, but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!" (Ender 229). This breakdown is the point in which Ender makes the exception to his rule that the purpose for an act justifies the act, causing him to write the books The Hive Queen and Hegemon. Even though the killing of the buggers technically wasn’t Ender’s fault since he was manipulated by the I.F., he feels responsible for their deaths because he was the one in command and allowed himself to go through battle school and command school obeying the very people who were manipulating him when, at the very beginning, he had the choice not to go at all. Card, in an interview by GraceAnne DeCandido and Keith DeCandido, commented on his use of moral choices as a “fulcrum” in his books. “You can't tell a story that has more than one thing happen in it without somebody having made, at some point or other, some evaluation, some decision to proceed, which will always involve in some way or other a moral choice, an affirmation or negation of an existing community,” Card says (DeCandido web).

This proves that Card is intentionally using moral choices as a continuous theme in his books. One of those themes is Ender’s confusion on whether the end justifies the means. At this point, as Ender draws the line and decides that the end does not always justify the means, Card reaches the turning point in his gradual progression from one extreme of moral justification to the other, leading right into Speaker for the Dead. In Speaker for the Dead, Card explores how society changes over time. Throughout Ender’s Game, the buggers are viewed as evil aliens who were attacking them and the human race needed to defeat them at all costs. This perspective is flipped in Speaker for the Dead, which takes place 3,081 years later, after Ender publishes his two books, Hegemon, which is more about the life of Peter, and The Hive Queen, which exposes Ender as “The Xenocide,” or killer of another species. No one knows that Ender is the author of these books, however, or that Ender is the original Speaker for the Dead, a “minister” in a sort of religion that birthed from Ender’s writings. Thus, Ender goes by his birth name, Andrew

Wiggin, and no one realizes who he really is. In Speaker for the Dead, the belief that the end, if morally right, always justifies the means is virtually nonexistent because everyone recognizes the killing of the buggers as a “xenocide,” or intentional killing off another species because of how Ender described it in his book The Hive Queen. For example, when Ender is in Reykjavik, under his birth name of Andrew Wiggin, and working as a Speaker for the Dead, he finds out that the piggies killed Pipo and leads his class in a discussion about the topic. When the discussion is over, Ender reflects on what happened and comments that “they had no idea how deeply the question of Ender's ancient guilt burned within him, and how he had answered it in a thousand different unsatisfactory ways.” (Speaker 31). This shows how guilty Ender feels for the death of the Formic species. It proves that in Speaker for the Dead, Ender feels responsible for the buggers’ deaths and feels that the end does not justify the means because he thinks it was wrong no matter his or the commanders’ reasoning behind it. Earlier in the same discussion, Ender gets frustrated with a student named Stryka, who believes that the end never justifies the means. When pondering Stryka and this philosophy, Ender thinks, “Acts are good and evil in themselves, they said; and because Speakers for the Dead held as their only doctrine that good or evil exist entirely in human motive, and not at all in the act, it made students like Stryka quite hostile to Andrew,” (Speaker 29). This strikes a chord in Ender’s heart because Ender justifies his killing of the buggers with the fact that he didn’t know what he was doing. However, when asking Stryka about this