Ethics in World-Building: Prisoners
When heroes consider taking their enemies captive, it opens up a whole new set of ethical problems
In sci-fi and fantasy fiction, we tend to make allowances for the high amounts of body-counts heroes and protagonists accrue along their epic journey. When you’re being attacked and in the middle of a dangerous situation, you are forced to defend yourself and things happen. It’s not so easy to hand-waive that away when conscious choices are made, and the heroes’ lives are no longer in immediate danger.
Let’s take CW’s The Flash as an example, the superhero show where the protagonist and his allies hold a secret underground prison facility where badguys are indefinitely imprisoned without due process. The Flash is not a legally-recognized authority figure, but a lawless vigilante. Any person he kills or imprisons is done so extra-judicially.
I’ve previously written about superhero narratives and vigilantes who wind up being propaganda for authoritarian policies, and justifications for police brutality. So let’s talk about what happens when the heroes of your story move to carceral punishment for the evil-doers they come across. In the case of the Flash, he is taking people in without any hope of trial, detaining them with no hope of release or parole. In the world of the Flash, if you have superpowers and break the law, a vigilante who answers to no one will imprison you underground for the rest of your life. No sunshine, no fresh air, simply a claustrophobic container where no one will ever hear from you ever again.
The fiction doesn’t so much as attempt to justify these brutal authoritarian tactics, as it ignores them completely. They’re never once-addressed. We never see the Flash grapple with his own immorality, his complete breach of ethics. The questions of whether or not he has the moral authority to condemn others to life imprisonment is never raised. We are not to question it, merely to blindly accept.
We’re already traipsing through ethical land-mines when it comes to the discussion of modern vigilantism, so for the sake of this piece, we’re going to move into more typical fantasy scenarios for our examples, a wandering band of D&D adventurers and sell-swords.
Recently, in my D&D guild, there was a big ethical debate regarding the taking of prisoners. Upon being attacked by sky-pirates, the adventuring party for this session captured sixteen of their number with the intention of utilizing them as labor for some of the businesses back in the guild. The player responsible later tried to justify this as being part of their redemption from piracy.
There is a thing about redemption however, you cannot simply force it onto someone. Even in tabletop rpgs where spells like Atonement exist, the spell has to be accepted by the intended target. As it stands, even with this intention, there is never a justification for stripping someone of their rights and will and exploiting them for their labor. In the words of Rick and Morty, “That’s just slavery with extra steps.”
There are real world analogies to this. Missionaries exploiting and brutalizing native peoples the world over, enslaving them and destroying their cultures and religions, all in the name of “saving their souls.” Merely because you’ve found an excuse to help you sleep at night, does not make you any less of an oppressor. Good intentions do not make you a hero.
On the flip-side, heroes who tend to kill absolutely without mercy, never accepting surrender are hard to consider good either. This leads to the ethical question, what is done with those who are violent threats to society at large and cannot be allowed to be let loose. Is it simply best to allow the legitimate authorities deal with the situation? In many cases, this may be yet another breach of ethics, such as when dealing with countries and municipalities with unjust legal systems.
So, how do we write about good people in situations like this? What does a good person do? They have to consider the situation, weigh the balance, and in many cases, this cannot be a decision they make on their own. The decision whether to strip someone of their freedom, even if that person is a legitimate threat to others around them, must be treated with the utmost of seriousness. Even then, under no circumstances, should that person be exploited for labor.
From the perspective of the storyteller, it’s very important to consider real-world abuses of prison inmates, and the exploitation they suffer. In California, prison inmates who fight fires and paid less than minimum wage, are not even allowed licenses to become legitimate firefighters. Whether you intend to or not, by approaching these sorts of stories, you are dealing with the subject of incarceration, and the specter of its real-world effect of inmate abuse.
Who has the right to strip someone of their freedoms, regardless of what they have done? The answer to this question will be answered by your story. It is a weighty subject and should be handled with plenty of thought and care. Even so much as hand-waiving the subject away because it’s too controversial for your tastes communicates that you don’t think it’s enough of an issue to even comment on, and that is where things get dangerous.
When we begin to excuse away the actions of heroic protagonists that are unethical or difficult because we don’t want to deal with the idea that maybe these people are not perfect, or have done something possibly immoral, we risk making excuses for real-world atrocities.
Dorian Dawes is the author of Harbinger Island and Mercs. Their non-fiction work has appeared on Bitch Media, Harlot Media, GayPopBuzz, Your Tango, and the Huffington Post. You can read more of their work and support them at patreon.com/doriandawes
