My opinion is that Merle didn’t get all rapey with Maggie because they’re saving him for some kind of redemptive act, and raping Maggie puts him beyond redemption. I could see Merle dying to save Darryl, maybe taking out the Governor in the process.
I disagree. Both the Otis killing and what we saw with the hermit indicates that groups of walkers will focus utterly on the victim at hand, and cease further pursuit until that body is devoured. Plus, you can’t shut the door behind him?
I’ll have to re-rewatch the scene, but wasn’t the back door plainly visible?
When it’s a situation I created, and dragged a third-party into against his will? Then yes, I should face the danger. And the fact that he’s a stranger is only revelant if you’ve descended into tribalism.
He’s entitled to point a gun at them, they broke into his shelter and are heavily armed themselves. Rick and Daryl held weapons on Michonne after carrying her inside the prison and disarming her! And Rick is the one who escalated from words to force.
That’s where we disagree then. As Dale put it, “At least I can say when the world goes to shit, I didn’t let it take me down with it.” Right and wrong don’t change with the enviornment, they are a constant.
I already answered this in post 58:
Talk or leave.
Civility is made possible by millions of individual choices made every day.
Yes, but not in the instance depicted.
Debatable, but the full-on tribalism is new. It was clearly spelled out by Glenn and Maggie in recent episodes: Glenn speaking to Rick about the prisoners and giving up anyone to get one of “their” people back, and Maggie’s distrust for strangers/new people when discussing whether to murder the surviving prisoners. And Rick’s treatment of Michonne and the hermit scene have escalated it from words to deeds.
In this case, yes. Because opening the door and being devoured was a free choice. We all get to face the consequences of our free choices. Being stabbed in the heart for trying to leave your own home is not a free choice.
Not sure how applicable this statement is here, but it’s a matter of free choice vs. coercive force. Are you arguing that the moral duty for Michonne was to kill the man with the sword?
That’s completely ridiculous reasoning, plus you’re infringing upon Michonne’s free choice to stab people in the heart.
How is it ridiculous?
Stabbing people in the heart is wrong, Reverse.
Absolute moral stands are wonderful in the comfort of your living room.
What if they had wandered into the crazy guy’s submarine (say) and he was about to open the hatch and flood the sub? Assuming he could not be subdued in time (as was shown) and the action would kill everyone inside, including him (as they believed at the time it would), would killing him still be wrong? The harm of breaking in has already been done – and really they had no idea the cabin contained any living inhabitants, particularly after seeing the dog.
Regrets, sure, but it can certainly be argued that, having failed to restrain the man, or get him to listen to reason (his sanity apparently prevented that), or even to get him to recognize the imminent danger he was putting himself and the intruders in, they had very few other options. You can say it would be better for them to have died nobly, their souls untainted by the reluctant murder of a madman, but I’d say that would be the greater of two evils, not the lesser.
Human Action, let me begin by saying that I believe you are correct about the core group becoming more tribal, and that we, the audience, are mean to perceive that as a bad thing. Glen’s remark to Herschel that he’d trade a dozen outsiders for any one of their group was meant to be disturbing, and it was – including to Glenn and Herschel. I think the major theme of the show is the loss of civilized behavior in primal, survivalist situations. If I thought any humans would be alive in the Walking Dead Universe a century hence (which I don’t), I’d say they’ll be utterly savage and entirely lacking in morals or ethics.
That said, my argument is with your assessment of the ethics of the cabin scene. I don’t think it’s fair, just, or wise. You write as if you expect Rick & his cohorts to be characters from Star Trek: The Next Generation, with functionally limitless resources and restrained mostly by their own cleverness. But that’s not TWD’s world. TWD’s world is a place of dwindling resources, an Earth in which almost every choice is inevitably bad and the best a man can do is make the least bad choice.
Rick and his cohorts did not set out to evict and/or murder the crazy hermit. They were running from the walkers because it was a tactically untenable situation. There was no time to make sure there was no one with a prior claim on the cabin and no time to ask for permission. Once in the cabin, they had to deal with the situation as it was, not as it should have been in an ideal world. And events wer moving very quickly. They were panicky because of an undefeatable mass of walkers outside; it’s not surprising that they missed the back door. They were dealing with a clearly delusional person, one who threatened to call the police to remove them, who clearly no longer is capable of rational behavior. Disarming the hermit had to be done for the safety of the group. And once he moved to the door with the clear intent of opening it, the hermit became a danger to himself and everyone else. Again, events were moving too quickly for a reasoned or clever response. Michonne’s impaling him was, I think, not only the best thing for Rick & company, but for the hermit. He was bound on an action that would result in his tortorous death, and it was extremely unlikely that they’d be unable to stop him without killing him. At least the katana killed him quickly.
Feeding the hermit’s corpse to the walkers is not a moral issue, only a practical one. A dead body is an object, not a person, not entitled to moral consideration.
You place a lot of emphasis on coercive versus non-coercive choices. That’s unsupportable, I think, at least in this situation. If Rick & Company had had more resources, more time, more options available to them, killing the hermit would have been wrong. But they didn’t, and it wasn’t.
No, it isn’t. No action has any moral value outside of a context. If I stab a man in the heart so that I can steal his wallet, I am sinning. If a woman stabs me in the heart to stop me from raping her, she is *not *sinning.
I agree, which is why the moral choices in question were discussed in the context in which they happened. That said, what’s the point of a moral code if you abandon it in difficult circumstances? Those are the precise moments for which you have a moral code, when the decision is a difficult one.
We’re talking about fictional characters here. My point is that while the hermit scene was probably meant to show Michonne’s decisiveness and casual lethality, it had a side effect, intended or not by the writers, of painting the “good” group of survivors as being immoral to a degree that makes it hard to be invested in their success vs. Woodbury, an idea I laid out in post 33.
Increasing the overall chances for everyone in the cabin to avoid being killed by walkers by preventing the hermit from opening the door by any means necessary, including stabbing through the heart, was the moral choice.
The fact that they broke into the hermit’s house uninvited is completely mitigated by the fact that they were being pursued by a herd of walkers. The niceties of real property ownership really don’t override the interest in self-preservation. And that’s speaking morally.
I think the fault here lies within yourself, thinking that there is a “good” and “bad” group of survivors.
This.
I didn’t see anything immoral about the behavior of our plucky band of survivors in the cabin. I have the opposite opinion in that I think the writers demonstrated the difference between the good group of survivors and others. First, nobody’s first reaction was to kill the hermit. Not Rick, not Daryl, and not even Michonne. Their first reaction was to talk to the guy and get him to calm down. Not until it became clear that the hermit was completely detached from reality did Rick take the shotgun from him. Again, nobody tried to kill him at this point. It wasn’t until he reached the door and threatened to let the zombies in that Michonne killed him.
Contrast this with the behavior of the two other groups of survivors we know about. From season 2 we have the group from the bar who attempted to kill Rick when they couldn’t get the information they wanted out of him. According to the wounded member of that group they saved (at great risk to themselves I might add), this bad group found three survivors, a father and two daughters, and raped the daughters. And then we have the nice folks at Woodbury who sought out a bunch of National Guardsman and murdered them for their supplies.
Despite some of their behavior (Rick grabbing Michonne’s wound) I still think of our plucky group of survivors as the good guys.
Seriously, can someone tell me if they discussed the mechanics of herds on the show? I THOUGHT they had when the farm went down, but I’m not 100% and I don’t want to be accused of spoilering by bringing that information in from the comic.
The mechanics of herds are why anyone who makes noise and refuses to shut the fuck up MUST be silenced ASAP. And that includes dogs and babies, frankly, unless you never want to go outside again.
They haven’t really had any in depth discussions about it, but they did show us the herding mechanism in the cold open of season 2 finale: zombies see something interesting, start moving towards it, more zombies join up because they figure the other zombies are heading towards food, and then they just keep on moving and growing bigger and bigger.
Of course, some geniuses thought that the point of that cold open was that helicopter people are playing mind games with the survivors just like they do in popular television mystery show, The Lost Files.
Right, it’s like a snowball. Zombies hear a distant noise, and they head toward it. Other zombies see the movement of those around them, and “flock” with them.
There are some “herd” moments in the comics which are just insane - and that overhead shot of all the zombies heading toward the farm is a taste of that.
Basically, anytime you fire a gun, you’re attracting zombies for miles and miles - even those who never heard the shot. Someone standing there screaming when you’ve got ONE clear opening has to be shut up NOW, period, end of story.
There’s morals and tribalism, and then there’s survival. If someone is going to commit suicide by noise, you are within your rights not to let them take you with them, IMO.
This is something that should be addressed first: Was the hermit insane, meaning irrational, or not? If he was, what are the implications for moral action in the scenario under discussion? Our disagreement likely begins here.
My take is that the hermit was, to some degree, unbalanced. The evidence for this is that he retained the rotting corpse of his dog.
But was he irrational? The police thing is debatable without more information. It took the prisoners some time to come around to the idea of the end of society as they knew it (asking to make a phone call in that case, as well). The prisoners were isolated and cut off from information, the hermit may have been as well. Or, the threat of calling police may have been the first thing that popped into his head in a stressful situation. We know that the hermit’s shack was well boarded up, and he lay in bed with a shotgun, possibly hiding from the intruders, which implies that is fully aware of the dangers outside his cabin. When Rick told him that he was a policeman, following up on that (by asking to see a badge) isn’t irrational, if one presumes that a policeman, even in an apocalypse scenario, would be more trustworthy or honest than an average citizen. His demand, that the intruders leave, is a reasonable one. His running for the outside, away from the man who’d disarmed him and may well mean him harm, is fairly rational.
Was he rational? I think so, and he can thus be treated as a moral agent.
Now then, moving on.
If, in the submarine analogy, they had the option to leave when asked, and the flooding was provoked by disarming the sub resident, then yes, that would be wrong as well.
Does the show, thematically, portray this loss of civilized behavior as a tragic inevitability, or the result of individual moral weakness? That is what I am eager to see, so far the jury’s out, as there is evidence for both. I’m hoping for the latter, as a huge Breaking Bad fan, I enjoy stories in which characters’ moral choices are always in their own hands, more so than those in which characters are victims of circumstances.
But must the least bad choice always be rooted in personal survival above all else? The same theme, that almost every choice is inevitably bad and the best a man can do is make the least bad choice, could have been conveyed had Rick agreed to leave the cabin when the hermit demanded it, and this resulted in one of his party being killed or injured. That is, doing the right thing still has costs, and death will usually be the outcome no matter what.
If the characters only ever act in their selfish best interest, to the detriment of all outsiders, it could well challenge the audience’s investment in the characters. Creating and sustaining such investment is a key element of writing fiction.
Agreed, this was not particularly objectionable to me.
You’re correct; I was responding to Reverse in the specific sense of Michonne’s stabbing the hermit, not all stabbings, but I was too vague.
That is one theory of morality, the utilitarian view. I subscribe to a Deontological view.
I agree; the moral wrongs were subsequent to, though informed by, the break-in.
I think there’s a “bad” group and a “worse” group, and the gap keeps narrowing.
Interesting. This is a digression, being a topic from last season, but under utilitarian morality, didn’t Rick have an obligation to TRY to help the two bar guys? Not share the location of the farm, necessarily, but share some kind of intelligence or supplies? Maybe a cow, or just info about Atlanta and the surrounding area?They were scouts for a group of 30, IIRC, clearly desperate, and Rick flat stonewalling them is what led them to get menacing. Under a Deontological view, I have no problem with him refusing to share any information…what about the utilitarian folks?
Or the vote to execute Randall, after torturing said information out of him? Or Rick’s decision to override that vote?
My thoughts are above, it’s bad vs. worse. Plenty of show left for that to change, one way or the other, though.
HUman Action, I think it’s been so long since the collapse of society that it has to be obvious to any rational person that threatening to call the police on intruders is akin to threatening to sic your pet velociraptor on them. Everything about his demeanor indicates that he’d lost it, and it seems perverse to insist that a man behaving in a demonstrably irrational fashion for the circumstances is not irrational (or at least profoundly ignorant).
But let’s not talk about the hermit’s mental state. Let us instead assume that, rather than being delusional, he instead was just an asshole.
Had I been in the hermit’s place, I would have been obligated by my ethics to grant Rick et al shelter from such an immediate, exigent threat as a herd of walkers. Their right to life outweighs my right to my private property. The zombies are approaching; forcing them go outside is killing them. At most I can force them to go out the back door, but the crazy fellow didn’t tell them that such existed, and in their frenzied state they didn’t notice it. Sending Rick & the others outside where a zombie horde has gathered is murder no less than shooting them in the neck would be.
This isn’t absolute of course. I don’t have to give a starving person my last bit of food (unless that starving person is my wife or our daughter, in which case I do). But in this circumstance,with an immediate and obvious mortal peril lurking outside, a person intending to act morally must grant shelter. I do not understand why you elevate the hermit’s property rights over the group’s right to life.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen the episode but they did talk about their plan to go to Ft. Benning. I don’t remember the specifics of what they were talking about just that Slim and Fatboy were pumping Rick & company pretty hard for the location of the farm and one of them had a keen interest in meeting the women (Fatboy?).
The menacing behavior built up. Fatboy’s hostility was only kept in check by his partner Slim. Once Slim realized he wasn’t going to get the information he wanted he drew on Rick. Too bad Rick was quicker on the draw.