Ender, when he contemplates violence against Stilson, Bonzo etc never for a moment thinks of the damage he may do to them. In both cases the violence is so excessive that it ends up killing them. But we are reminded again and again that Ender is good. Clean to the heart. The book seems to pronounce these actions to be moral. Of course Ender wallows in guilt afterwards (not because he killed them without meaning to, he didn’t know that. For hurting them) but one could wonder why, as his violence was completely calculated. He hurt exactly as much as he wanted.
I am not saying Ender should have allowed himself to be beaten to the pulp. I am questioning the need to pass moral judgment on this act, to approve of it. In Bonzo’s case, intense violence wasn’t needed. Ender could have told Bonzo ‘look, if I win you are not to bother me again.’ Bonzo, with his sense of honor and overconfidence would have bought that. ‘Hurting him so much that his fear would be greater than his hatred’ or ideas to that effect weren’t necessary.
But for Card, I suspect it was necessary, as were Stilson’s and Bonzo’s deaths. He is leading us towards a moral philosophy. This philosophy, imlicit in Ender’s Game is pronounced by Ender in the sequel ‘Speaker for the Dead’ :
“Speakers for the Dead held as their only doctrine that good or evil exist entirely in human motive, and not at all in the act”
We are quite cleverly lead to this bit of wisdom: When Ender kills Stilson or Bonzo we are not told that they are dead. The facts are kept from the reader. Should we have known them then we’d have probably passed a different judgment on Ender’s actions. However the circumstances of his action make us likely to sympathize with Ender : It wasn’t his fault, did what he had to do, not a bad boy even he can deliberately unleash intense violence etc. And so when it is later revealed that he actually killed the other two boys, the reader’s are unlikely to revise their judgments. From there we are almost inevitably lead to the above philosophy : Ender didn’t mean no harm, so he is entirely innocent.
Now if I was prepared to accept the moral absolutism (which I am not, who is to decide what is good or evil etc.) I have to object to the judgment based on motives alone. That would in fact make Hitler a good man – by all accounts the man didn’t want anything other than the good of the race. Is that an evil motive now? You could object and say Hitler also intended to kill people, which is bad in itself. However, so did Ender. He agreed to go and attack the Buggers when they weren’t bothering the humans at all. He didn’t say ‘Umm, why don’t we try some more communication?’ Mazer Rackham had a pretty good idea how the bugger hive-mind worked, so why not try to build on that? Ender may have been innocent of the actual killing (he thought he was playing a game) but he did agree to the attack. He agreed to kill innocent intelligent creatures in a pre-emptive strike and in the second book he would be absolved of this on the ground that he didn’t know the buggers were human. Similar arguments would work for Hitler, right?
So, yeah, I don’t much like the morality Ender’s Game tries to sell.
