SPN meta: Dean and His Deal

[patita_fea]

Dean and His Deal

Why he made it, what it's done to him, and whether he'd do it again

We're coming up on the end of Dean's year, and we've had fifteen episodes to find out how he handles living under a death sentence.  Before Our Darling Show closes the book on this chapter, I'd like to throw in my summary of what this arc has meant for Dean's

Comments

[starbright73]

You do not have free choice in war - that is romanticizing it too much. You don't even have the rules, those rules have to be written because of the chaos that is war. A war is about life and death, for you. for your family and there are no blurred lines when you're in it. It's black and white, life or death.

Dean lives according to these rules in a para-society of hunter:

Kohlberg's stage 4
[i]In Stage four (authority and social order obedience driven), it is important to obey laws, dictums and social conventions because of their importance in maintaining a functioning society. Moral reasoning in stage four is thus beyond the need for individual approval exhibited in stage three; society must learn to transcend individual needs. A central ideal or ideals often prescribe what is right and wrong, such as in the case of fundamentalism. If one person violates a law, perhaps everyone would - thus there is an obligation and a duty to uphold laws and rules. When someone does violate a law, it is morally wrong; culpability is thus a significant factor in this stage as it separates the bad domains from the good ones.
The rules were set by John and Dean never questioned them until 2.03 - Bloodlust. He was ready to kill even if the vampires sacrificed only animals. Thus he was a fundamentalist in his view of the 'monsters'. He's the same reguarding Ruby, where Sam is much more villing to see diferent sides of said monsters.

Sam lives in
Stage six (universal ethical principles driven), moral reasoning is based on abstract reasoning using universal ethical principles. Laws are valid only insofar as they are grounded in justice, and that a commitment to justice carries with it an obligation to disobey unjust laws. Rights are unnecessary as social contracts are not essential for deontic moral action. Decisions are not met hypothetically in a conditional way but rather categorically in an absolute way (see Immanuel Kant's 'categorical imperative'[13]). This can be done by imagining what one would do being in anyone's shoes, who imagined what anyone would do thinking the same (see John Rawls's 'veil of ignorance'[14]). The resulting consensus is the action taken. In this way action is never a means but always an end in itself; one acts because it is right, and not because it is instrumental, expected, legal or previously agreed upon. While Kohlberg insisted that stage six exists, he had difficulty finding participants who consistently used it.

Sam was willing to sacrifice himself, he asked sam to kill him. He killed a vamprie because she asked for it. If she hadn't I doubts he would have because he was already making plans how to let her live, despite being one of the monsters. Nobody is constantly in stage 6, but Sam's reasoning is much more close to these principle that absolute rights and wrongs. If not adhering to societal norms he finds wrong, like killing in the two mentioned eppys, it's because he finds the norms and law unjust. He sees beyond Dean's black and white world, and that is because he sees beyond his father's rules.

Is it bastardly? Not in my eyes.

Insertions from Wikipedia