Game of Thrones & ethical misjudgments

Is Daenerys the real villain of Game of Thrones? asks Matt Miller.

Logically, he has a point; there was more than a grain of truth in Cersei’s denunciation of her. Her claim to the throne is founded on no more than her descent from a mad tyrant; she’s murdered hundreds of her opponents in cold blood; the Dothraki army is no respecter of human rights; her acquisition of titles betokens a dangerous narcissism; and she’s acquired weapons of mass destruction.

And yet I instinctively recoiled from Matt’s claim: noooo, not her. There are, I suspect, two reasons for this, which are in fact widespread.

One is the belief that our enemy’s enemy must be a goodie.

It might well be this sort of mistake that led many lefties to support the Venezuelan government: it’s antipathy to western neoliberalism was sufficient to win it support.

Not that the left is unique in this error. During the Cold War, the right supported (or at least tolerated) obnoxious regimes such as Pinochet and apartheid because these were anti-communist.

The underlying problem here is that we want the world to be divided between good (us, of course) and bad – and the wish is the father to the belief. We don’t want to acknowledge the truth that we are all more or less flawed and that we must all sometimes do bad things; it’s this reluctance that lies behind the hostility to Northumbria police’s no doubt difficult decision to pay a child rapist for information. 

The second reason for not seeing Daenerys’ flaws is a halo effect.We want to believe that good qualities go together, so somebody that good-looking can’t be bad, surely? The New York Times has asked viewers to rate GoT characters along ugly-beautiful and good-evil axes – and most characters lie in the good-beautiful and ugly-evil quadrants*: Cersei is an outlier**.

Again, this is a common error. Cishet men’s reluctance to doubt Daenerys’ character is the same thing as women’s shock when Poldark raped Elizabeth.

Millions of people have been materially and emotionally damaged by over-estimating the correlation between looks and character. And it’s not just wishful thinking (“she’s the one”) that causes this. Juries seem to be softer upon attractive defendants than ugly ones. The magistrate who recently let off a model guilty of shoplifting perhaps wasn’t so atypical.

My point here should be a trivial one. Our ethical judgments, just like our judgments in politics and in investing, are clouded by countless possible cognitive biases. And yet people are so damned confident about them.

The link here cuts both ways. It could be that we don’t want to believe that evil people are good-looking; if Ramsey Bolton weren’t so horrible, he’d probably be rated as attractive.

** Maybe my sympathy for Matt's thesis is based in part upon Cersei's milfiness. 

Comments

[Steven Clarke]

Can Cersei still be a MILF now her children are dead?

[Simon C]

Does Daenerys’ modilfness not sway you? Why are you discriminating against certain types of mother?

[ADifferentChris]

Too many question Dany, not enough question Jon.

He hanged Olly - who watched his parents killed and possibly eaten in front of him. His direwolf doesn't acknowledge him after his "resurrection". He threw away lives after rashly breaking formation at the Battle of the Bastards.

The Dany-bashing is as tiresome as the Jon fellating. I don't understand why fans treat them differently. Perhaps because one is the traditional white male saviour; the other an uppity female?

[Peter K.]

You have a point about looks, but overlook many things. For a while it was Joffrey verus Stannis versus Daenerys who was busy freeing the slaves in Essos.

I was a Stannis man for a bit. A good man named Davos followed him.

Daenerys has dragons and magic. As Jon Snow pointed out, Danerys was hesistant to massacre King's Landing, so that makes her better than Cersei.

When it was pointed out to Cersei that they didn't have enough grain for the coming Long Winter, she commanded the Gold Cloaks to push the excess peasants out beyond the city walls.

Daenerys freed the slaves of Slavers' Bay/Dragon's Bay.

She was reluctant to reopen the fighting pits.

She took on Missendei, Grey Worm, Jorah, Varys, and Tyrion as advisers - all good people with mostly good intentions.

In the books Tyrion is very ugly.

[Andrew S]

Here's a homework assignment, Chris. Please rewrite this blog post using examples from Corrie...

[Mietzsche]

Well it's pretty obvious that individuals in this "saga" are irrelevant and as such it's irrelevant whether they are good or evil. A multitude of characters with different backgrounds (well, different privileged backgrounds) consistently fail to produce a single individual thought and are brutally devoured by the stagnant cesspool of the society at the end of history that they live in. No one can imagine Westeros without a king. No alternative is coming, ever. The Champion of light 1 thought he had to be a king, Champion of light 2 is expected to become the king, Daenerys has a starting bonus, but she's persisently being pushed towards building a dynasty. It didn't work the first time, or the second time, but by god, at some point the king will return to sit on a mountain of corpses.