Toward True Moral Complexity

by Joshua Fagan

Disposing of the idea that protagonists must be virtuous and good is far easier and simpler than contemplating what they should be instead. Discussing what genuine moral complexity in fiction even is resembles the old Buddhist tale of the blind men and the elephant, wherein the men each touch different parts of the creature and thus come to different conclusions about what the whole creature is. The idea that morally perfect behavior does not make for thoughtful fiction is true. The idea that morally atrocious behavior does not necessarily make for any better fiction is also true. Neither idea brings one any closer to a vision of true moral complexity. The true opposite of uncomplicated virtue is not vice, but the difficult journeys of yearning, desperate people who try their best but are inevitably flawed and limited in both their thinking and their actions.

The idea of moral complexity in fiction has garnered substantial visibility without garnering substantial understanding. Armies of proponents demand more of what they believe moral complexity to be, while equally enthusiastic detractors view that idea of moral complexity as needlessly cynical or even misleading. Instead of a clear definition, moral complexity conjures a series of images: dark and muted colors, characters succumbing to temptation, a general attitude of cynicism. The protagonist is an anti-hero, and the work views simple-hearted idealism as naïve at best and counterproductive at worst. Far from being a caring and good place, the world rewards cruelty and callous behavior. By this standard, Game of Thrones is morally complicated while The Lord of the Rings is not.

Admittedly, the prevalence of this worldview is overstated by those that oppose it, whether for ideological reasons or simply because they find it tiring. Those who want stories where good triumphs can find it at the multiplex or bookstore without much difficulty. In America, at least, the number of ebulliently optimistic works significantly surpasses the number of stories that are cynical or even mildly pessimistic. The profusion of Marvel movies serve as monumental reminders of how dominant the ethos of absolute reassurance is. For every Succession, there are a number of new Star Wars shows. Still, the backlash against shows that wave the banner of moral complexity has perhaps less to do with their prevalence than with the insistence behind these shows that they have discovered the truth about the world. They know that cynicism and cruelty reign, and that little can be done in opposition. This worldview, as limited as the Pollyanna-ish optimism it critiques, can instead be stifling.

The solution is not to retreat into sweet but inert stories about daring heroes that make their moral stakes obvious and clear. This temptation has become rather common. The logic proceeds as follows: there are in today’s world immense differences between good and evil in the world, democracy itself may fall, and thus stories should be clear and resolute instead of creating a false perception of neutrality. Those who follow this point of view decry what they see as “bothsides-ism,” the idea that neutrality is baleful, and that true morality dictates partisan support for one side. This idea appears often in media circles, such as an article in The Nation that warned, “‘Bothsidesism’ is Poisoning America.” Yet it also appears in debates about fiction, such as in discussions about Mockingjay, the final book of the Hunger Games, which had the audacity to assert that corrupt rebellion leaders can be as selfish and graspingly manipulative as authoritarian tyrants and as such generated intense backlash. Nor is such discussion confined to mainstream blockbusters. The Wind Rises, Hayao Miyazaki’s elegantly nuanced film about the difficulty of balancing artistic passions with ghastly practical realities, attracted a rush of controversy for daring to actually tell a nuanced and conflicted story instead of offering blunt condemnations of Japanese militarism. Village Voice critic Inkoo Kang called the film “morally repugnant,” and even Brooke Barnes at the New York Times tepidly discusses that some consider the film “a celebration of Japan’s wartime aggression.”

There is nothing innately wrong with criticizing the ethos or ideology of an artwork, but there is something pernicious about demanding that art be un-objectionable, that it offer complete moral clarity. Dictating unquestioning, unreflecting allegiance to one set of principles is needlessly dogmatic from a political perspective but outright absurd from an artistic one. All good art relates, however obliquely, to the world of the living. It deepens the faculty of understanding by depicting, with a heightened intensity rarely found in the muddle of everyday life, sensations and tensions that are, in essence, ultimately familiar even if they are in external appearance fundamentally strange and bizarre. Fiction, in not being bound to utilitarian demands of literalism or facticity, has the freedom to reflect inner, hidden truths that have relevance beyond the bounds of specific, transient situations, truths that do not decay or erode with time. Art that attempts to detach itself entirely from passions and tensions and desires, like some of the more precious Aestheticist work, feels cold and trite because it lacks that connection.

The philosopher David Hume eloquently discusses the differences between the strange and bizarre, which art often depicts, and the psychologically preposterous, which it should not. “Should a traveler,” he argues, “returning from a far country, bring us an account” of people who “knew no pleasure but friendship, generosity, and public spirit; we should immediately, from these circumstances, detect the falsehood, and prove him a liar.” The observer knows this truth not because they have been to the land, but because they know from experience certain immutable truths about how people tend to behave. Regular interaction and experience reveal that the world is complicated. No moral conviction can make it completely cohere. Not all fiction has to portray these complexities, but to disdain the portrayal of them is disingenuous.

A form of moral complexity is necessary, and it should be a better one than the reductive paradigm that currently exists, where moral complexity can only mean anti-heroes and vice, the gangsters of The Sopranos and the corrupt business executives of Succession. The question of whether stories should be morally complicated is simple in concept and difficult in practice. Without moral complexity, stories have no tension or conflict. They are a morass of tedious moralism, emptied of introspection or difficult choices. Still, demonstrating moral complexity in a way that feels organic and sincere, contending with the ultimate inadequacy of absolutist moral convictions without retreating into cheap equivocation or tawdry depictions of immorality, is more difficult. Doing it properly requires the passion of a poet and the skill of a philosopher. As the writer Matthew Arnold argued, it necessitates contemplating “the whole play of the universal order” and being “apprehensive of missing any part of it, of sacrificing one part to another” and so achieve, through careful thought and reflection, an “unclouded clearness of mind.” No matter how true one might believe their convictions to be, they will never be true enough. There will always be experiences that transcend one’s worldview. Accepting moral complexity does not mean succumbing to nihilism, believing that no choice is better than any other. It does not mean a story cannot have ideological convictions, or that it must assert that the world cannot improve.

As the contemporary New York Times writer Kwame Anthony Appiah states, neutrality may be an illusion, but it is a useful one, preventing thinking from becoming “a ride-or-die embrace of a comprehensive set of ideals and values that identified what was good and what was evil.” As he argues, the stance of the disciplined, unbiased observer may only be a role, but “the social roles we choose—including those that distance us from overt partisanship—matter.” Moral complexity does not mean a story must be unbiased, or even that being unbiased is possible, but it does mean that a story should rigorously scrutinize the belief systems of its characters. A morally complex story can demonstrate that some behaviors create more satisfaction than others, but it refuses to endorse the idea that a single belief system will make life lucid and obvious. It acknowledges the frailty and limitations of even the most steadfast and heroic heart. The gap between ideals and actions, and between actions and their unintended consequences, always exists. Not all characters are equally flawed, but all characters are flawed, and a story should not refrain from examining the limitations of a certain ideology or value system simply because those values happen to be those of the story’s creator.

Certainly, grim stories can be morally ambiguous, as demonstrated by the revelatory ambiguity of noir masterpieces like Double Indemnity and Out of the Past, but some do not. Works like 24 or Joker, for instance, confuse cynicism with moral complexity, but in reality, their moral perspectives are quite straightforward and dogmatic. Even the idea that Game of Thrones fits the criterion of moral complexity, while The Lord of the Rings does not, demonstrates the narrowness of the contemporary conception of moral complexity. Game of Thrones, whatever its merits as a depiction of medieval realpolitik, portrays certain characters, most notably Cersei Lannister, as overtly villainous. They generate boos and hisses as they pursue their plots.

The Lord of the Rings, conversely, takes as its hero Frodo, a generous hobbit who nonetheless succumbs to the influences of the One Ring and refuses to destroy it when the opportunity arises. After his journey ends, he travels as a broken and uncertain person. He can only lament his alienation and then leave Middle-Earth forever. The sorrowful last journeys of Frodo have little to do with stereotypical notions of what “morally complex” narratives are, but that fact does not diminish the uncertainty they evoke. J.R.R. Tolkien, more astute than his critics, understood that identifying what Evil is does not equal right judgements and right actions. Being good for Tolkien did not mean ignoring moral complexity. It did not mean exuding such pristine purity as to be untouched by flaws and immune from temptation. Rather, it meant understanding how frail and vain even the most heroic ambitions often are. The great writers of morally nuanced fiction, from Shakespeare to Tolstoy, would agree with such a view.

Arnold correctly knew that moral complexity is not a luxury. It is not cool or avant-garde, and it does not necessarily mean depicting dark and nefarious actions. Instead, as he wrote, nothing matters more than maintaining “a current of true and fresh ideas,” as well as “inflexible honesty,” exposing treasured and golden notions as secretly “narrowing and baneful.” Only an analytical, reflective spirit, one that refuses to believe any singular conviction or belief system can provide all desired answers, can see clearly when life becomes fragmented and emotionally fraught. Moral complexity should not immediately evoke stories about anti-heroes, and the excessive focus on a specific set of grim tales has distorted the cultural vision of what moral complexity means. In actuality, it necessitates understanding the murkiness of ordinary life and trying to temper it with thoughtfulness, empathy, and curiosity.

Joshua Fagan is a writer and critic currently residing in Scotland. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Star*Line. He is the author of the Amazon bestseller The Philosophy of Avatar, an extended study of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the context of the Western philosophical tradition. As an academic, his work focuses on the intersection of literature, myth, and technology in the aftermath of Darwin, and he has published a variety of articles on writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as William Morris, H.G. Wells, and Robert Frost. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt.