Thank you for informing us that these girls might not be gay. Without this caveat, I would've forgotten that while a guy and girl together can be assumed to be a couple, two girls "hanging off one another" are probably just good friends. Gal pals. Maybe even roommates, but certainly not lesbians. Thank you for helping us all avoid this blunder.
Did you do Mia Claw. Please please please did you do Mia Claw. I think you did Mia Claw I wanna see it again. Anyways if you did do mia claw uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh fucking. Those implied guys who were implied to have disappeared in the demon factory in Pact.
SEND ME A WILDBOW CHARACTER YOU LOVE. I WILL TELL YOU WHICH PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT EXPERIMENT YOU SHOULD GET REALLY OPINIONATED ABOUT.
Alright, I'm gonna say that fans of Mia Hurst should be interested in the character Thrasymachus from Plato's Republic, specifically Jonathan Lear's interpretation of him. Its gonna take a bit to explain myself, buckle in.
Note: the following is a long post that goes over Claw's ending. It also includes brief discussion of zoophilia and incest—these are not discussed in an erotic context, or as directly relating to Claw, but only as special cases to test one's normative ethics against.
I continue to maintain that Claw really should have focused its ending on what happens to Ripley rather than what happens to Mia, especially given the unsatisfying leaps in characterization needed to get us to Mia's conclusion. That said, the ending being Mia essentially submitting herself to judgment does fit in with some earlier characterization, such as her distress at the anarchists judging her when all the facts of what she'd done were on the table. I've already talked about how I interpret the last conversation between Mia and Gio:
But the big idea that Gio eventually gets drawn to—her role as the “little shadow,” the person who finds themselves echoing whoever their around and picking up their ways of thinking reflexively—allows her to be both a character that Mia has helped immensely and gotten close to, as well as a character who when removed from Mia quickly picks up the “common morality” that would brand her an uncomplicated monster.
I maintain that the best reading of the last chapter is not that Mia is finally getting a “fair trial,” that wildbow is telling the audience that we should see Mia as objectively a horrible person. Instead, its an expression of Mia needing to be seen as non-monstrous by the world when her actions are laid bare, and the world refusing her. She’s pushed away by Gio because she’s a strange and cold person who’s hard for normal people to really see as a person, and because its easier to go about your life if you just shake your head, call her a monster, and remove her from your life.
What we have, at the end, is a inability to cross two moral outlooks, and Mia's distress at being unable to reach across it to convince the "normal" world. As I said above, this disconnect is due more than anything to what's easy for the normal world to believe—many of Gio's specific arguments against of Mia are flimsy, or demonstrably inconsistent with her other beliefs. All the same, much of the disconnect could be summed up as a real, potentially unresolvable ethical disagreement. Most people see parental rights as brute moral facts. Mia doesn't.
Now, its all well and good to say "you can't argue against an axiom," but people do it all the time in ethics. Many of the people reading this probably believed at one point that disgust was a good indicator that something was immoral, and then your mind was changed. Maybe because you were confronted with how culturally relative disgust reactions tend to be. Maybe because you took utilitarians seriously, and decided that an act could only be immoral if it was harmful.
All the same, if someone is absolutely convinced that there are acts that are immoral despite not involving harm (eg Haidt's cases of consensual sex between siblings, or masturbating with a chicken carcass), then its unclear how someone who believes such acts are morally neutral could argue their case. The person who see it as a brute fact that such acts are immoral would consider anyone who doesn't agree to that a moral cretin. The person who denies such brute facts would see the person who affirms them as falling victim to moral hallucinations. Can they say anything to convince each other, or do they just have to consider each other unreachable fools?
This is a pervasive problem in meta-ethics. Humean constructivists claim we should adopt the set of moral beliefs that is maximally self-consistent. But if there's more than one possible set of consistent moral beliefs, how could two people with different sets of beliefs settle their disagreements? Scanlon, meanwhile, claims we should hold ourselves to the moral principles that no reasonable agent interested in forming a set of normative beliefs would reject. What counts as a reasonable agent? Would denying parental rights automatically mark one as unreasonable? If two rational parties (whatever that means) were unable to convince each other on the basis of one holding parental rights as axiomatic, how would one proceed?
One way people have tried to deal with this is by taking rationality to be the fundamental basis of morality. Kant tries to do this by arguing that any action we take commits ourselves to certain normative beliefs, and that many other moral beliefs thus must be assented to by us on pain of being inconsistent. This basic strategy has been adopted by the likes of Parfit, Nagel, Hare, and Korsgaard (as I covered here), among others. But it's often unclear whether every moral claim you want justified can be derived from such a strategy. Anscombe in particular takes issue with this for the same reasons she takes issue with contractualism: the "pure" Kantian method just results in empty formalism, and the "consequentialist" method (the original old usage of the term, referring to both utilitarianism and threshold deontology) allows for things she takes to be self-evidently unjust, like punishing the innocent. Or sodomy.*
Is there a way to argue with someone who thinks the fact that you even consider such things as demonstrative of a corrupt mind? Is there a way to know whether or not you're a moral cretin, for not seeing a moral claim's brute force?
What if all the facts were put on the table, and everyone knew how that monster left the baby in the car for twenty minutes, and they still said that you were wrong? Still took you as the aberration, as the immoralist, as the monster who could not be reached?
...
In the first book of Plato's Republic, the characters of Socrates and Thrasymachus argue about justice. Thrasymachus holds that what we call justice is just the advantage of the powerful, and that the wise person is the unjust person, who acts to secure their own advantage. He's one of the first famous formulations of what an ideological immoralist would look like in fiction, and one of the most coherent. Socrates is able to force him into contradiction, but many Plato interpreters have found the arguments against Thrasymachus' egoism to be curiously unconvincing. Indeed, even the character of Socrates appears unsatisfied with his own arguments, which ends up launching the next nine books of describing and defending justice's role in the good life.
While many scholars have spilled ink on why the argument against Thrasymachus is so unconvincing, Jonathan Lear's claim is that Thrasymachus represents the ultimate problem of poor moral education: "Thrasymachus already has an outlook on the world, and he will tend to recognize good and bad arguments in terms of that outlook." In other words, due to his currently existing moral beliefs, there are no reasons he's capable of recognizing for changing his moral outlook. According to Lear It takes the "godlike" characters of Glaucon and Adamantius, Socrates main interlocutors for the rest of the book, to appreciate despite their poor moral upbringing that there's something desirable about the just life.
If Lear is right, and Thrasymachus is now constituted such that he can't ever appreciate true moral facts—how could he deal with that? How do you deal with the pitying glances he'd get, the condescending replies that he'd never be able to appreciate the real standards of goodness? When you're staring someone in the face and asking them to explain why you're wrong,** and they tell you the fact that you have to ask just means you'd never understand, what could you do but rage?
Curse them as fools. Curse yourself as a monster. Argument can't help us, so all we're left with is curses.
___
*In the Modern Moral Philosophy article I'm referencing, Anscombe (1958) doesn't use an inability to censure sodomy as a problem for the utilitarians, but as a problem for contractualists. But given that she sees this as a problem for contractualists, I take her to see sodomy as a wrong, and would see the fact that most utilitarian theories permit it as a reductio against them.
**Of course, Plato does attempt to explain why Thrasymachus is wrong, in great detail. The question is whether he's even attempting to explain it in a way Thrasymachus and his like could appreciate. There are various parts of the Republic that make me doubt whether Lear's completely right in diagnosing Thrasymachus' purpose, not the least of which is his continued attendance for the rest of the book. Socrates claim in Book V that one could at least get those who don't have knowledge of the Good to appreciate that they don't have knowledge of the Good also seems to undercut Lear. But its contested whether or not Plato was engaging in some "Socratic irony" with how that passage was framed.
I never finished Claw. Didn't even read a majority of Claw. Or a plurality of Claw. But I will say that Wildbow is one of very few authors from whom the basic setting conceit of Claw- a genre-world in the vein of Worm where instead of superheroes, every early-oughts war-on-terror-influenced Jack-Bauerlike airport novel primetime technothriller is happening at once, one-after-the-other, forever- sounds even remotely tolerable. In a vacuum that kind of thing sounds like an insufferable right-wing jackoff session, and a huge portion of what made Claw's implementation of that idea so great is the frog-boil reveal that that's what's going on- the dawning realization over the first arc and change that these characters are living at the margins of a society as cartoonishly dysfunctional and tumultuous as that whole fictional space implies. It was great.
