Pop culture analysis - Why The Doctor is a terrible person and moral cop outs in general

[Spoilers ahead for Doctor Who and the Legend of Korra, but will try to minimise them.]

In the finale episode of the first season of the revived Doctor Who the doctor is faced with a dramatic moral dilemma. A vast unstoppable army of Daleks is attacking the earth, once they have conquered the earth they will spread out in an unstoppable horde and conquer the whole universe, resulting in untold death and destruction. The Doctor has a way to stop this with a magic technological gadget thingy, it will destroy all of the Daleks, but at the cost of killing everyone on the planet earth. So a standard trolley problem basically, should the doctor sacrifice the population of earth to save innumerable other worlds (including human colonies, in case you think there’s a moral distinction between sentient species).

The antagonist (the Dalek Emperor) dares him to do so saying he would therefore become like it, and show he’s not as moral as he thinks he is. He has to make the choice between “coward and killer.” The Doctor hesitates, and then says he would “be a coward any day.”

So the doctor refuses. Dies instantly. Humanity is exterminated, followed by the rest of the universe. But at least the doctor kept his hands clean.

My glowing eyes will resolve this plot!

Nah, not really. The Doctor’s companion saves him with a deus ex machina, destroys all the daleks, humanity and the rest of the universe are saved. Yay.

So the Doctor’s choice is made the right one retrospectively, because for reasons he couldn’t have predicted something else fixed the problem.

I don’t want to spoil any other episodes, but this basic pattern happens a lot (there’s a whole section in the relevant tvtropes page if you are interested). The Doctor is faced with a moral dilemma, stands by his principles in making the non-utilitarian choice, but then the bad consequences are averted by the magic deus ex machina/the writers. To be fair Doctor Who isn’t the only series that does this, but they are a particularly popular and prolific example so I have singled them out.

A variation of this that is particularly common is for the antagonist characters to have a serious point that the story shows to be legitimate. Its set up so the protagonist has to make a moral judgement, but then they do something unambiguously evil for no good reason, or are exposed as hypocrites, so its all fine and the protagonist can just beat them up and happily restore the status quo.

I’ll avoid spoilers, but the first season of the otherwise excellent Legend of Korra is bad for this. The main antagonist is shown to be an evil hypocrite, so the underlying moral issue (a thinly veiled allegory for real world oppression of the poor) is glossed over and resolved off screen without the protagonist having to make any difficult choices or come to terms with their own privileged position or the institutional problems that led to the problem. I can’t be alone in thinking that a version where both sides were consistent and well meaning, so a compromise had to be reached, would have been far more interesting.

This trope really annoys me and I’m going to try to articulate why

Firstly there’s the general reasons that deus ex machina plots are bad writing. Especially when you use them regularly, and the audience are robbed of any sense of suspense of consequences for the characters actions.

But they specifically annoy me when they are used to resolve moral dilemmas.

They allow the writers and characters to have their cake and eat it. You set up a big serious moral question, and score points with the audience and critics by doing so, but don’t have to pay the cost of having the character either take the family unfriendly option of sacrificing the few for the sake of the many, or have them suffer the consequences of their principles in the real world, where a lot of innocents die for no good reason.

Bentham's views on
Doctor Who are
sadly lost to history

Putting my cards on the table, philosophically I’m a fairly hardcore utilitarian, so I think the obvious moral answer in these cases is to sacrifice the few for the greater good. But I accept that there are good criticisms of utilitarianism and serious arguments for other moral positions.

However these only work if you are willing to accept the negative consequences. If you believe that murder is always wrong, even when it results in less overall death and suffering, that's fine, but you have to bear the costs. [Kant was willing to bite the bullet and say lying to a murderer to save a life was immoral, which is remarkably consistent, if bizarre.]

However in these cases the non-utilitarian option is right because when you choose it you always get the best outcome due to circumstances outside your control. The message being that you should always stand by your principles, even when its a terrible idea, because there are no consequences.

This is harmful internal to the work of fiction because you lose any opportunities for meaningful character development and angst from them living with their choices and consequences.

But I also think it has a real world harm.

For better or worse we absorb moral messages from our entertainment (indeed many people have argued this is the point of fiction), and this is especially true for children, who are the intended audiences for most of these shows. (I hate doing a “think of the children” argument but for once it’s true).

The problem is that if we are absorbing our moral intuitions from shows where there are literally no consequences for standing by abstract principles and making moral choices this leads to terrible real life decision making. The real world isn’t fair, there are no magic plot devices that save the day or writers to reward you for making the “right” moral choice. If you choose not to sacrifice the few for the needs of the many, the many die.

A huge number of real world political and moral issues take this form. Governments have to make difficult tradeoffs about how they spend money and who they save. E.g. doing everything you can to save a single human life is a very moral principle in the abstract, but applied in reality it means spending huge amounts of money on rare cancer treatments for charismatic middle class white people, when that same money could have saved far more lives spent on boring things like more nurses and hygiene, and not even counting the costs of spending the money on the well being of people in our own country, or the society for the treatment of cute puppies, rather than donating it to treat malaria in the third world.

My hypothetical interlocutor might say: “Well that's true for the decisions of government’s, but most people aren’t governments, their moral choices just impact them and people they know personally. So they should just stick to principles in most cases and not do bad things even when they want to.” There’s a kernel of truth to this, most of the time killing is bad, and you can maybe make an epistemic argument that you need very good proof of good long term consequences before you do a bad thing for the greater good. But people do make real choices where this applies, they choose who to vote for, they choose what charities to donate to, they make tradeoffs between their personal desires, or the good of those close to them, and the greater good every day. When people have been taught all their lives that standing by your principles is always the right thing to do regardless of the consequences, because things will somehow always work out, they will consistently make bad choices.

I understand this seems mean of me. The idea that the good empathic people are rewarded and the cold calculators punished is very intuitively appealing. Our brains literally give us happy chemicals when we see people happy, and sad chemicals when we see people sad, and nothing when we give money to save the lives of far away people we've never met. but we should be trying to counter this tendency not indulging it, and pretending the world is just.

Screw moral complexity,
I'm a giant glowing eye! 

I’m not saying every piece of fiction has to be a deep examination of ethics (I’d like that because I’m a massive philosophy nerd, but I know I’m in a minority there). There are extremely good works of fiction where the bad guys are unambiguously evil (e.g. in the Lord of the rings trilogy, Sauron is literally the personification of evil). But in those cases the central driving conflicts and plots come from different areas, Tolkein never pretends there is a ‘deep ethical question’ about whether we should let Sauron win, the plot is about how the protagonists beat him.

The problem is that writers try to have the benefits of moral complexity and drive a plot based on the dilemmas, but then cop out at the last minute. We get better fiction, and a better society when we are willing to live with the consequences of our moral choices.

This post was written in one go, then posted as part of my attempt at NaNoWriMo, where I’ve set myself a target of doing a certain number of words a day. So may not be as dazzlingly perfect as it would be if I spent longer on it. Its also in a more informal and conversational style than I normally use when I’m writing about debating or whatever. Thanks to everyone who commented on the drafts.

Comments on the content or style are very welcome. Feel free to be critical, I'm trying to get better at this whole writing thing.

Mental Health - Ways I've gotten better

Every once in a while its useful to pause and take a look back. It's been about 5 years since I was officially diagnosed, though an objective observer would probably have noticed before then I was for a long time in a state of terrified denial and not wanting to ask for help. I'm still not doing as well as I'd like to be but in many was things are a hell of a lot better than they were.

I can sleep normally 

For a long time I could only fall asleep at night by hours of conscious effort. By which I mean I would lie awake in bed in the dark for hours desperately trying to sleep but being unable to. Then I would sleep in until mid afternoon. This obviously wasn't good, as I'd often sleep through lectures, and living in the frozen north of Scotland I'd often sleep through most of the sunlight in the winter, which really didn't help. I also was able to get p and turn off multiple alarms entirely without engaging my higher brain functions.

The problem with bad sleep patterns is they're self perpetuating. If you wake up at 3pm you aren't going to be able to go to sleep at a decent time however hard you try (and my occasional attempts to 'reset' by staying up all night didn't help).

These days I can fall asleep fairly easily within 15 minutes of going to bed, and I seem to get sleepy naturally at the appropriate times without much effort. I still sleep in more than I'd like to, but if I have a specific reason to wake up and do something I can. The problem is more when I have nothing scheduled goign back to bed to 'use my laptop' then falling asleep again.

Less anxiety 

I still have fairly bad anxiety, my left leg is twitching compulsively as I write this, and I get a tension in my chest when I try to do something stressful, but its nowhere near as bad as it used to be. There have been times when the mere thought of leaving my room would paralyse me, the little choices of whether to shower, or what to wear, suddenly become terrifying. Its hard to explain to someone who doesn't have it, but imagine the fight/flight response you get at really really scary situations (being attacked by a tiger say) at moments that really don't deserve it. Its still an issue, and it tends to vary day to day, but I can normally consciously work myself through the stress and do the things I need to do.

No suicidal thoughts 

This is not a very cheerful one. Psychologists make a distinction between "active" and "passive" suicidal thoughts. An active thought is when you consciously plan or daydream about a way to kill yourself, luckily I've never done that. But I have had "passive" suicidal thoughts. That's when you don't really care if you live or die, and you think that if you just died in your sleep, or a bus hit you, you wouldn't really care. I have had those times, where being alive and suffering seems a bit pointless. [Here's a good podcast on the subject.]

But these days I really really don't want to die, which is definitely an improvement.

Generally less deep depression. 

Still have occasional days of complete apathy and lack of energy, but I don't hate myself when I'm in those states and spiral deeper. I think this is linked to training myself out of compulsive negative thinking, when you're depressed you automatically generate negative thoughts (Oh I did this terrible thing...)  and  think circularly on that. I've learned some good CBT techniques for stopping myself when I realise I'm doing that, and stop it.

How? 

The problem is I don't really know why and how these things improved, I never had any big moments of revelation but I've done a bunch of things which seem to have slowly accumulated:

• I'm on medication which has definitely helped, though more at removing the deep dark bits and cutting background anxiety and increasing energy than making me feel actively happy. (For the record I'm taking 75mg of Venlafaxine, an SNRI, twice a day); 
• I've also had therapy of different types, general counselling and also Cognitive Behavioral Therapy focused on learning helpful ways of thinking and unlearning bad ones; 
• A nice thing about CBT is you can do some of it on your own from books (I recommend Introducing Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT): A Practical Guide and Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy); 
• Lifestyle is also a factor, I exercise far more regularly now, it doesn't make me immediately happy afterwards, though some people say they get an endorphin rush, but it seems to impact my general mood and lower anxiety, and I definitely notice when I haven't done it for a while I get stir crazy (I'm doing a mix of weightlifting and low level cardio);
• Other lifestyle factors might include getting out of some of the negative things of student life, e.g. variable hours and big deadlines that stressed me out, but I've also been depressed when I've been working normal 9-5 days so its hard to tell. 

The takeaway for anyone with similar issues is, to paraphrase Dan Savage, it gets better, it really does. Often when you're depressed it feels hopeless and like you can never get out of it into the sunlight and feel normal again, but you can. Its not sudden, and its not easy but you can get there.

The things they don't tell you about death

You've seen death a thousand times on television, they can't  get enough of it. They show you the screams, a frozen moment of blinding grief and pain. Then it fades to black.

They don't show you the waiting. Waiting in the hospital to know if this is the time it ends. Long moments of tense boredom, unable to help, watching someone suffer.

Waiting for a piece of paper to certify it happened. Why does it take them days? What fact could be more simple to prove than death.

They don't show you sifting through paperwork. Banks and charities and bills and all these supposedly vital elements of life. Finding ways to discover passwords for websites, wondering what will happen to your shadow on the internet when your time comes.

They don't show you smiling politely and saying thank you, when people say they're sorry, again and again. The awkward pause and lying and saying its all okay.

Funerals should be moments of high drama, they don't tell you about the logistics, the tiresome exercise of planning, standing waiting for it to start so it can be over.

The don't tell you how tired you will be.

They don't tell you about the strange little pangs you get when you find a half finished book.

Throwing out or donating the possessions accumulated over a lifetime. Bagging and sorting and lifting and trips to the dump.

The don't tell you how the great truth of human life is made neither sacred or horrible, but crushingly mundane.