"The Moral Landscape of the STAR WARS Saga" - Luke Skywalker

[rpowell]

Comments

[fatpie42]

Not sure why letting go of attachments should automatically be seen as a good thing. When Luke's family are killed Obi-Wan is offering him the opportunity for revenge. Obi-Wan's knowledge of Luke's father meant that he was pretty much the closes thing to family that Luke had left. When Obi-Wan died, it must have seemed like an end to Luke's last lifeline and like the truth about his father would be buried forever. No wonder he reacted emotionally.

Yeah, Luke has emotional attachments in the first Star Wars movie. It's perfectly healthy and human to have emotional attachments. He's not a robot. And his decision to focus on the mission to find the rebels rather than moping doesn't mean he didn't care for his aunt and uncle. That makes him sound enormously callous - and I don't think we should presume that the movie needed to show us his sadness about their deaths overtly outside of that initial moment when he finds their bodies (having rushed home in the hope of defending them).

Personally I'm not sure that Luke made a mistake in going to help his friends in "Empire Strikes Back". He discovered truths which were being hidden from him. Truths which he vitally needed to know. What you call impatience also represents a high motivation to act.

I'm a little lost by all the mind games towards the end of "Return of the Jedi". Luke is face to face with two figures responsible for terrible hardship, many deaths and hideous oppression across the galaxy. And yet apparently his only option is to remain passive if he doesn't want to become corrupt and evil? I just cannot buy into that. Fighting injustice sometimes involved taking the fight to those responsible.

There's no way that soldiers in the rebellion were able to fight against the Imperial forces without ever killing anyone. That's absurd. And there's no doubting that the Emperor and Darth Vader have killed many people and delivered orders which caused the deaths of many more. They are far from non-combatants and so fighting them, even killing them, is far from immoral. Heck, it's practically a moral imperative to kill them since their deaths would mark the end of much suffering. (And heck, at the end of the movie they are both dead and the galaxy is saved. Doesn't that prove this point?)

Thanks for the article. It was interesting. But I feel like the moral are, if anything, even more ambiguous than you are letting on.

[rpowell]

Not sure why letting go of attachments should automatically be seen as a good thing. When Luke's family are killed Obi-Wan is offering him the opportunity for revenge.

Revenge? Luke didn't seem concerned with revenge to me. And that's a good thing?

I'm a little lost by all the mind games towards the end of "Return of the Jedi". Luke is face to face with two figures responsible for terrible hardship, many deaths and hideous oppression across the galaxy. And yet apparently his only option is to remain passive if he doesn't want to become corrupt and evil? I just cannot buy into that.

I could. And I understood why it was important for Luke to toss away that lightsaber. It seems to me that one the continuing problems with humanity seemed to be its inability to let go of its reliance upon violence and aggression.

Even if Luke had killed Vader and tried to kill Palpatine, he would have lost. Because his anger and fear of losing Leia triggered his aggressive actions in the first place. And there was a good chance he would have followed in his father's footsteps.

But I understand if you don't want to accept this. Many people don't. They see nothing wrong in using evil to destroy evil. They don't see the consequences of such an action.

[fatpie42]

Revenge? Luke didn't seem concerned with revenge to me. And that's a good thing?

Isn't the big motivation for killing Vader because Vader killed his father? Isn't the big motivation for helping the rebels because they killed his Aunt and Uncle? He seems reluctant to leave initially and then things get personal.

Why is this not revenge? I'm not saying it's the only motivation, but it's definitely part of it.

I could. And I understood why it was important for Luke to toss away that lightsaber. It seems to me that one the continuing problems with humanity seemed to be its inability to let go of its reliance upon violence and aggression.

So Vader loses at the end then? Because he uses violence and aggression to kill the Emperor, right? So that means he's still corrupt and still controlled by the Dark Side?

You can't have it both ways. Either violence is always bad or it's not always bad. If it's not always bad, Vader and the Emperor would seem like much more legitimate targets for aggression than anyone else they've killed during the trilogy.

And when Vader and the Emperor are trying to kill or manipulate Luke, I'm not entirely sure why killing them would doom him. Killing the leader of a literally evil Empire doesn't obviously mean someone is going to turn evil themselves. That's weird fantasy-logic and it has no relation to real-life psychology.

Luke says to Jabba "free us or die". In the prequel trilogy Jedis kill tons of aliens and droids. It doesn't seem clear that killing turns you evil in the Star Wars universe - EXCEPT in the third act of ROTJ. I'd be less upset with the fantasy-logic if it was consistent.