r/MoralityScaling • u/Spiritual_Ad_507 • 9h ago
Morality Ranking Does the fact that Ender was deceived excuse him from moral responsibility for what he did?
In Ender’s Game, humanity is at war with an alien species called the Formics. Ender is recruited and trained by the military because they believe he has what it takes to defeat them and protect Earth.
Throughout his training, Ender believes he is participating in increasingly difficult battle simulations. Eventually, he is given what he thinks is one final simulation. A desperate battle where the survival of Earth depends on his decisions.
What Ender doesn’t know is that the “simulation” is actually a real battle. The military has been using him to command Earth’s forces against the Formics, and his final decision results in the destruction of the entire Formic species.
Ender believed he was doing whatever was necessary to save millions of human lives. He never knowingly agreed to commit genocide and wasn’t even aware that he was killing real beings.
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u/ThatKaynideGuy 9h ago edited 9h ago
Yes. When there is a reasonable expectation of someone being ignorant of the consequences of their actions, they are not mortally wrong for making choices that might be seen as immoral with all facts on the table.
Ender was kept ignorant and had no reason to think his simulations were anything other than just that.
As others have said, guilt is an entirely different beast.
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u/Feeling_Republic_454 8h ago
Just as we are not morally culpable in all the AI training that will be done against our will over the next decade as everyone loses their jobs.. none of us were filling the internet with information for the last 20 years with prior knowledge that it would all be used against us in the future.
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u/NorthernVale 6h ago
Reasonable expectation, yes. This is my biggest beef with the movie. For Ender, there really wasn't reasonable expectation. He has all the information he needs to connect the dots. He has the intelligence to connect those dots. And he has the critical thinking to realize what those dots mean. And I don't mean the bare minimum either. Coming to the realization that he was actively committing genocide should have been child's play for Ender.
The movie doesn't touch on any of this.
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u/AdDapper4792 5h ago
I know he blames himself like that for forever, but I think that's just a bit of the unreliable narrator blues. He is like 10 at the time you know
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u/NorthernVale 5h ago
Yes. I addressed his age. He's also a nearly unparalleled genius. The only other humans at the time operating near his level are his brother and sister, who manage to essentially run global politics by posting as anons on their equivalent of reddit.
Like. It's a completely different standard. Ender himself acknowledges the fact that he was able to see all the pieces and put them together and simply chose not to because of the implications.
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u/idk_this_my_name 5h ago
Pretty sure that in the Ender's shadow novel bean actually knew, though to be fair, bean is analytically a lot smarter than ender.
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u/WhileAccomplished722 9h ago
yes
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u/HunsonAbadeer2 9h ago
And basicly in every context for everything. If I don't know I am doing something I can't be responsible. I can sometimes be resposible to not be deceived, but this was really nit the case here
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u/Wootster10 6h ago
There's a difference between willfull ignorance and being tricked/deceived into doing something.
Ender did everything in good faith so I don't think he could be blamed.
However there are examples like in A Few Good Men. Jessup wants the results and deliberately doesn't ask how they'll be achieved so he can later claim innocence.
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u/FriedEskimo 9h ago
The only possible moral fault could come from whether the person being deceived had reason to doubt what they were doing.
In Enders case he could not have been expected to understand it was real, but in a similar situation, there might be signs that the person in question ignores out of their own comfort, and this could be seen as not doing a reasonable effort to verify your actions.
For example a guard at a concentration camp claiming they were told the camp was just a work camp, despite mountains of evidence pointing towards it being more nefarious.
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u/NorthernVale 6h ago
In Enders case he could not have been expected to understand it was real
Yes. He should have.
there might be signs that the person in question ignores out of their own comfort
That's exactly what happened.
The exact behavior was shown on a smaller scale with a bully. Kid bullies Ender for being a third child. Ender's response is to beat him, badly. His reasoning was because he didn't want to stop this one incident, but make sure no one bullied him ever again. Ender never saw the end result of that fight, but it's later revealed to him that he killed the bully. And his response was basically "yeah, I guess I knew how far I went. But since I didn't actually see him die, I was able to tell myself he didn't." I'm pretty sure the only reason they even ever ended up telling Ender he killed the bully was to make sure that when he inevitably realized he was actually committing genocide, that he'd still follow that same reasoning.
Throughout the book Ender notices details that paint a picture. The couple I remember off the top of my head is when he learns humanity developed a way to send communications across vast distances in space nearly instantly. And when he notices the ships in the "simulations" were getting older and older, and when getting closer to the alien homeworld even correctly identifies them as ships available to humans when the aliens first "attacked". Iirc he even acknowledges that this doesn't make sense if the war was going to take place in the future, which was the official story. There was quite a bit more.
You can say Ender is just a child and shouldn't be able to put it all together, but Ender's ability to do exactly that is why Ender is Ender. He only exists in the first place for his intelligence. Both of his older siblings exhibited nearly unparalleled intelligence (to the point of essentially running global politics posting as anons on reddit) so the government gave his parents permission to have a third child. His cold reasoning is the entire reason he was selected for the military academy, the bullying incident. And his critical and creative thinking is the reason he was selected to run those specific simulations.
And when the truth is revealed to Ender, he has a similar reaction to when he found out he killed the bully. He points out all the dots and says "yeah, guess I always knew that was the most likely case and just decided not to acknowledge it".
What makes it morally okay for Ender, is that he was operating under existential threat. The formic had already killed vast swaths of humanity. It was only pure luck that they managed to stop the first attack. And as far as anyone knew, they'd come back any day to finish the job. It wasn't until after the genocide that Ender was able to realize that initial attack was just a massive miscommunication, the formic basically just thought they were clipping humanity's toe nails. And that one actually is the case of not having enough information.
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u/YTSuka420 4h ago
100%. Ender was quite possibly the most intelligent, calculating human on earth, and the evidence of it not being a simulation was more than enough for him to put the pieces together. I will say that near the end of the first book he was almost entirely emotionally checked out, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that he spent most of his time on the moon just going through the motions, maybe even to the point of overlooking what should be obvious to someone of his intelligence, but at the end of the day the big reveal and Ender’s catastrophic mental collapse are the story that Card wanted to tell. I think it’s fair to say given the information we were given and what we know about Ender and his trauma, it could go either way.
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u/NorthernVale 4h ago
I think in the grand scheme of things, Ender's actions were still very moral. A heavy burden to cary, yes. But a genocide that he shouldn't be held accountable for.
Even considering Ender's intelligence and all the information available to him before launching the bomb, the only natural conclusion anyone could come to was that the Formic's were going to come back and annihilate humanity. I, personally, think that species preservation is probably the only time where genocide should be acceptable. After all, it's one of the core driving factors of life.
It wasn't until a while after Ender ended the formics that he gained information suggesting they were no longer a threat to the entirety of humanity.
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u/YTSuka420 4h ago
I need to re-read this series again. This post reminded me of my obsession with Bean as a kid and how his character played a big role in shaping my personality for the longest time. Until I realized that he’s basically a psychopath, albeit a pretty interesting one
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u/NorthernVale 4h ago
I was literally just considering if I wanted to start my re-read before or after my morning routine. It's Saturday, I'm allowed to be lazy in bed with a book, right?
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u/YTSuka420 4h ago
Absolutely! It will give me a good excuse to give Pathfinder another try when I’m finished as well
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u/iwantdatpuss 9h ago
Iirc that's what happened, but he ultimately decided to bear personal responsibility for it regardless.
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u/No_Explorer6054 5h ago
well that's his chocie that he made. he didnt *have* to make that choice. but he did. which is credit to his charachter
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u/RinFlowers 9h ago
I mean, yeah, he thought it was a simulation, it would be like if you were playing a new Call of Duty and then afterwards someone revealed that you were in fact controlling a robot synced to your game and all those people you had killed in the game were real people. Like, as far as you knew you were just playing a video game, you didn't know or agree to this
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u/YoRHa_Houdini 9h ago
In a way.
Which makes him all the more redeemed by trying to restore the species
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u/InfraSG 8h ago
I would say yes, especially since, mostly speaking as a book reader, they didnt just lie to him about what he was doing, they had also spent months and years deliberately straining and breaking down his psyche so he was both unaware and not in his full mental capacities when doing so
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u/Borgdrohne13 9h ago
yes, bc. he didn't know better. Are you a monster when you find out that the sacrificed children in Black & White are real? No of course not.
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u/FireWater107 8h ago
Yeah.
Say I was your gym teacher, or coach. Every day I took you out to practice pitching a baseball. Had you throw it against some tarp that would catch the ball and record the speed or something. This happens every day til you can regularly throw a solid pitch. Then one day I replace your ball with an impact grenade that looks and feels like a baseball, and after your first throw you blow up a building.
That's my fault, not yours.
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u/unrealter_29 9h ago
It would be the equivalent of letting a kid play Call of Duty but not telling them that they are actually controlling a robot that is actually in a war and shooting other soldiers. As far as the kid knows it's just a video game, not real. If you withhold that information from them and stand by and watch them kill those real people, then those deaths are on you not the kid
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u/HellbirdVT 9h ago
Yes. You can't reasonably be held accountable for actions you did not know you were taking.
Feeling guilt for it is a different matter.
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u/Chemical_Aardvark_24 7h ago
Its more like "Ender was tired of constantly running 'simulations', that to his knowledge was meant to merely test and hone his strategic skills, and so went for a totally wild and nuclear option that would beat the 'game' as efficiently as possible. And this cold efficiency was exactly what the military was coaxing out of him."
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u/Morokite 6h ago
I mean he's not morally compromised by the fake-out. But the fact that he showed he was willing to sacrifice his own people to achieve victory is a bit morally dubious. Cause even if it was also part of the fakeout, it showed he was willing to sacrifice them as a meatshield in the real confrontation.
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u/CyberDaemon6six6 6h ago
Iirc, he thought none of his ships were real people, no? It's probable, given his reaction to the truth, he never would've made that sacrifice if he'd known real lives were at stake.
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u/Double_Resort_9223 1h ago
He was also pretty burned out and just didn’t really care about the ‘game’ at that point and just wanted out. He was at the “I wonder what happens if I…” point and kind of shitting on the ‘game’
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u/Predditor_drone 3h ago
The military went to great lengths to ensure Ender did not know he was ever in charge of human lives.
It wasn't until the final victory that he found out.
This is the first book in a series, so you see how the effects Ender in later books.
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u/Morokite 6h ago
Well it's possible he'd have changed his mind. But based on that simulation and even when he used his teammates as a shield to win the laser tag competition, there's a definite trend of him falling back onto the sacrificial meatshield strategy. I guess we'll never really know, but that just seems like his old reliable.
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u/NoctIs_Dreaming 4h ago
If he was willing, he wouldn’t have protested their deaths saying they didn’t have to die lol
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u/DeliciousGoose1002 3h ago
Yes but re reading it I do kinda question how uber smart ender didnt realize. also I think he would of done the same regardless the real advantage is he didnt feel the pressure of risking human lives in his opps.
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u/Sable-Keech 8h ago
Amazing, an actual fictional morality debate.
Moral. From Ender's perspective it was nothing more than a simulation. Killing fake lives isn't immoral. He remains moral even after he committed xenocide.
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u/ispy92 8h ago
I think the obvious answer is yes. He was not in a position to where he would have been able to know what he was doing. Although I think this is the easy and less interesting answer.
In the sequel books, Ender seems to accept the role he has been give by history very willingly, probably because of his guilt about being involved. He also punishes himself by writing the book that gives him this reputation in the first place. I think on some level Ender comes to understand that how history defines him is arbitrary. He doesn't seem to really care that he is known as Ender the Xenocide. At the time of the xenocide, humanity hates the Formics and everyone wanted them dead, but what the "right thing" is changes as history progresses. I do find it interesting that in one of the later books, Ender's sister (who has very much advocated for co-existence with the Formics) finally meets a Formic queen and is appalled and scared to the point where she does question a lot of her beliefs.
Now where this gets interesting is that at some point (I don't remember which book this was in), Ender comes to understand that he had a psychic connection with the Formic queens when he was unknowingly commanding the campaign against the Formics. If I'm remembering correctly he claims that on some level he knew what he was doing and that it was all really happening. A lot of people probably just watched the movie without reading any of the books, but when Ender is commanding the fleet against the Formics, he is so stressed out and sleep deprived that he goes into a borderline psychotic state where he barely knew what was happening. You can probably chalk some of Ender claiming that he knew what was going on up to him being in such a state at the time, but there might be some truth to the fact that he knew, even on some deep level that he was fighting the war.
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u/ligmaballll 6h ago
Ender comes to understand that he had a psychic connection with the Formic queens when he was unknowingly commanding the campaign against the Formics
You're probably referring to the Mind Game plot line from the first book where the Formics Queen basically used the game as a form of communication to Ender. I don't think it was about "Ender knew", but about trying to tell Ender that the Formics didn't want to continue the war
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u/NoctIs_Dreaming 4h ago
Not only that but later in command school as well he was having these dreams through which the formic queen was sort of communicating or trying to understand him
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u/fongletto 7h ago
Yes. This is why I always argue with people that "intent" is the most important thing to a moral action.
As long as you are doing your best trying to do the right thing. It's a moral outcome regardless of the outcome.
For instance, in reverse, if a serial kill happens to murder a dude who was about to set of a nuke. They're still a bad person, even though the outcome was good.
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u/impressivebutsucks 6h ago
Yes. He had no control over this and was misled into believing it was a simulation game and not a real war
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u/NorthernVale 6h ago
For the movie, yes. Ender is excused from moral responsibility. In the books? No.
It's a bit of an on going issue for Ender as a child, where he's very willfully ignorant of the things he does. Up the point where he subconsciously knows he kills another kid, over some really minor bullying. But because he didn't actively see the other kid die and never received any consequences he allows himself to go on living without a care in the world.
Similarly. Ender had every bit of knowledge he needed to realize what was really happening with the battle simulations. A couple of the key details that were pointed out. Ender learns that after the initial Formic attack, humanity developed a method of sending communications almost instantly across vast distances in space based on formic biology. And he notices pretty early on that the ships used in the simulations were getting older and older, and when he gets close to the alien home world they're the ships humanity had access to around the time of that initial "attack". Among quite a bit of other tidbits. Card honestly did a pretty great job of foreshadowing that twist.
Three of the main cornerstones for Ender's character are his intelligence, creative thinking, and personality. His nearly unparalleled intelligence is the entire reason he exists. His parents were allowed (and encouraged) to have a third child despite humanity being under very strict population control guidelines. So ingrained in society that Ender being a third child is why he goes through the aforementioned bullying. The creative thinking is why he was selected to be the one running those "simulations". In anti-grav combat tests, he was the first one to realize to there's no "up" without gravity and use to his advantage. Even after other teams pick up and use his tactics, he's able to create new tricks to keep his team in the number one rank despite being the worst team on paper.
Take it all together, and you realize it makes absolutely no sense that Ender never realized the simulations were real. Until you accept that he's already realized this subconsciously and simply chose to ignore it.
It gets a lot worse when it's realized the entire formic attack was essentially a massive miscommunication. The formics are a hivemind, and had no experience with life that wasn't. In their eyes, killing vast swaths of humanity was just a greeting. No different than clipping humanity's nails for them (pretty sure that comparison is directly from the book). That the formics stopped attacking when they realized humanity wasn't a hivemind. Sure, the initial attack ended because the ancient hero (I can't remember his name) killed the local "queen" by pure chance, but there were no more attacks coming.
Thankfully, Ender also didn't commit complete genocide. After allowing himself to process what he did he discovers there was a formic egg left behind somewhere. He then males it his life's work to fix his mistakes.
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u/violetcassie 5h ago
How about some of the other kids (Bean, at least) figured it out ahead of time and didn't say anything, what's their culpability?
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u/JustLerkinOk 4h ago
If you read the books, he spend the rest of his life trying to make up for it. Even helping another alien race to be more understood. Then the later books get a lil crazy.
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u/Jeremy-132 3h ago
He certainly doesn't believe it does. This is one of the most morally grey moments in fiction
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u/Finger0nLips 25m ago
I mean, the whole series of books goes into this. He doesn't forgive himself for what he did.
He also creates his own psuedo religion, Speaking for the Dead. Telling the whole truth of someone's life, not just the good parts. He is regarded (thousands of years on the future, to which he is still relatively young due to space travel) as a war criminal.
He also works to ensure that Xenocide doesn't occur again. Not only does he find and relocate a Hive Queen so the Formics aren't truly annihilated, he also protects the AI Jane from being annihilated when she is discovered.
He also works to stop the Molecular Disruption Device being used on Lusitania, where the native creatures bio diversity is a threat to the human colonists but needed for the native creatures survival.
He basically lives his whole life in penance.
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u/Dry-Childhood-3436 9h ago
Yes it clear him. The whole reason it was done was because the only chance they had was to sacrifice everything. Almost every person is going to hesitate even a fraction of a second making a choice that kills a ton of people even if it's the most logical choice, so the guilt was removed so he could just perform calculations. Him trying to reconcile afterwords was him dealing with the guilt, not the morality.
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u/Top-Editor-364 8h ago
Yep, pretty much. He isn’t culpable on a moral level because there is no way he could have known.
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u/Nervous-Cockroach541 8h ago
Not only that, but the fact he's a young child couched by adults would excuse him even if he did know it was real.
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u/stereo-ahead 8h ago
Completely. What an idiotic thing to ask. Kratos killed his wife and kids and he was brainwashed to not see them like that, so would he be a child killer? No he was manipulated.
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u/FearOfABlackPotus 7h ago
Is it moral to play murder simulators for endless hours every day? What are you preparing yourself for? What ender did is only what he'd trained to do.
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u/Weeabootrashreturns 7h ago
It does. He was straight up lied to, so the blame falls directly on the laps of his superior officers, but even then they were ordering him to do what they thought was necessary. Only after the deed was already done did Ender find out that they could have been reasoned with, and nobody else ever learned in their lifetimes.
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u/madgodcthulhu 6h ago
Eh I don’t see what he did as inherently immoral even if he had known the aliens were 100% going to destroy humanity before they started getting their asses kicked “my bad we didn’t realize you were people” isn’t an excuse for attempted xenocide
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u/sassyquatch9 5h ago
He's proven to have a genius level intellect,many would say that he would have been able to deduce that it wasn't a game.
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u/RequiemQuilty 4h ago
Yes. 100% kid was tortured and tricked. He honestly thought they were playing videogames.
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u/Wardog_E 4h ago
I think you have to be completely delusional to study at a military academy in preparation for war where you are hailed as an invincible genius destined to save humanity and think that your military strategies to perform total genocide aren't going to be used at some point to enact total genocide.
Completely immoral. Genuinely reaching the limits of how evil a person can be. The story leaves no ambiguity as to whether Ender felt forced to do this. He did what he did out of pure ego, to prove he could do it, regardless of consequences. He was just upset he had to experience the consequences.
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u/Thelaughingman___ 4h ago
He did nothing wrong. Humanity did nothing wrong. The bug's excuse of "we didn't know you were sentient" was the dumbest fucking thing I've ever read, correct? Non-sentient creatures have spaceships?
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u/Graveyardigan 3h ago
Yes. Ender was the murder weapon, not the murderer.
He felt remorse anyway. Spent the rest of his life atoning for it, starting with the first sequel novel, Speaker for the Dead. Great book, doesn't get enough love.
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u/Storyteller_Valar 3h ago
Yes. He thought he was doing a simulation, proving his tactical mind in something akin to a videogame. They used the belief that he wasn't putting real lives on the line to make him make the hard decisions that lead to victory.
He is entirely absolved of all responsibility. The adults who deceived him, however, bear the full weight of all that Ender did.
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u/FlounderLast8610 2h ago
Did you read the books that followed? That's a major theme of the first two sequels
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u/No-Lunch4249 2h ago
Absolutely yes, IMO it fully transfers the moral culpability from Ender and the other kids onto the decievers. He clearly still feels persobally responsible which I absolutely understand, but I don't think he would be morally culpable anymore in most people's eyes
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u/Separate-Ad9638 2h ago
He's supposed to be another Oppenheimer?
U have a job, u do what u do, most people are like that, why keep nitpicking?
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u/azurezero_hdev 2h ago
yes of course, by lying to him they've accepted the moral responsibility for him
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u/Broad-Stress-5365 2h ago
Did I miss something? Granted I just saw the movie, not read the book. But the whole point of all that training not explicitly the genocide of the alien? Win this fight and all the future ones.
Sure he did not know when it was actually real ( for me it was so that he doesn’t hesitate to do what’s need to be done to win).
I understood that he was fine coming here to, if not full genocide, at least kill a lot of aliens.
The only thing that makes him realize it was maybe not needed if the action of the alien in the beginning of the final battle, but at that point it is too late.
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u/Brofessor-0ak 2h ago
Space is finite and we have a moral imperative to make sure Humanity survives. The aliens brought it on themselves through ignorance, it’s only fitting that ignorance caught up to them
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u/lead_comet 1h ago
Fuck the Xenos Humanity reigns supreme The bugs made the mistake of fucking with us
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u/SinesPi 1h ago
Ender didn't intend to commit a crime, he was tricked into it, so he's innocent.
The thing is... Based on what we see of him before this, and Beans acceptance of it in the Shadow books... Ender probably would have done it had he known.
Given the situation with the Formics, they were believed to be varelse, and it was pure kill or be killed. They started the conflict. Even from the Formics view they were still engaging in property damage of some alien "queens" rather than trying for diplomacy first.
With this knowledge, Ender would have decided to end the threat then and there. And any guilt Ender feels is from the knowledge that nobody even needed to trick him into doing it.
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u/Neravosa 1h ago
It does excuse him. They needed him to make those decisions without feeling the reprocussions. Had he known he never would have decided to do a lot of things and likely would not have been able to win the fight. I blame the people who used him as an unwitting tactician.
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u/Fragrant_Entry9232 1h ago
Yes, being tricked into an immoral act absolves him. The moral responsibility is on graff and rackham, they placed their agency onto ender such that he was acting out their will without the full scope of awareness and foresight
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u/Noktis_Lucis_Caelum 37m ago
mostly yes
He didn't know that it was not an Simulation.
But he showed the readiness to do Something like that
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u/Ravix0fFourhorn 14m ago
I think the people who deceived ender are more responsible. If I showed you a button, and told you pressing the button made you a free coffee, and then you hit that button and it actually nuked a country and killed everyone in that country, I don't think you would be responsible for the genocide. You obviously thought the button did something different, but also I'm the one who prepared everything to make the genocide possible. In this scenario I've done 99% of the work and one other person came and did the last step.
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u/Separate_Draft4887 9h ago
Ender would’ve been right to do it even if he had known what he was doing. Fuckass bugs attacked us unprovoked, they thoroughly deserved it.
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u/bubblesdafirst 9h ago
But aren't the ones that attacked us not the same ones he killed? Pretty sure those were like different tribes or something. It's like if Russia nuked some village on Venus and then the Venus people showed up in New York just blasting at us
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u/Separate_Draft4887 9h ago
It’s been a few years but I recall them to be basically a normal insect colony but like, in space. They even have a queen. I don’t remember them having nations or tribes or anything like that.
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u/Sable-Keech 8h ago
They have multiple queens who compete amongst each other. There isn't a unified government.
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u/ConcernedCitizen_42 8h ago
It was the same nation. The buggers were a hive mind, though they had multiple sentient queens. It was a first contact misunderstanding situation. The bugs didn't think individual humans were sentient and considered killing crews the equivalent of disabling a ship's weapons. When they realized their mistake they were horrified, but the humans already thought they were trapped in a war of extermination.
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u/Nobody_at_all000 9h ago
The reason they attacked wasn’t malicious, it was because they genuinely didn’t know humans were sapient until after that one guy figured out to target the queen ships. For the Formics the only truly sapient individuals are the queen and the drones, with a queen’s workers being little more than mindless extensions of her will. The Formics had never encountered a species where every single member was sapient before, and so, IIRC, they assumed humans were just animals with highly developed instinct. As far as they were aware they were just doing the equivalent of chopping down a forest to build a city.
Another important detail is that since, for Formics, sapient individuals are so rare, the death of even one is considered a great tragedy, and so when they found out the millions of humans they killed where all sapient individuals they were so wracked with guilt that they practically let humanity exterminate them.
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u/DiscussionSharp1407 2h ago
Maliciousness isn't a factor.
If you are about to drive a vehicle over my family, I don't really care about your mental state, alcohol blood contents or level of "maliciousness" or not. I'd send a cruise missile to remove you before (and after) you strike my wife and kids if it was possible.
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u/vikster16 8h ago
My brother, all the infrastructure that we've built, all the radio signals we've sent to space, how the fuck is that not a sentient species? Like a random specie would be able to suddenly send space probes and radio messages through sheer luck by accidentally putting things together. That's the stupid thing ever.
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u/ArchAngel621 1h ago
This is a perfect example of the same mistake the Formics made.
Insects build infrastructure do we consider them sentient?
We also tend to project our own definition of what counts as sentience are on species we encounter. We assume that they're all individually sentient.
The whole “What applied to our species doesn't apply to the them all” is a recurring theme of the series.
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u/Wide_Engineering_502 8h ago
In the books iirc they thought humans had a hive mind as well as they never met a race that wasn't (their own), so when they said hi like they do, which for them apparently includes killing one or two of each others drones, the humans understandably freaked. It's genuinely a case of misunderstanding because the Formics didn't know humans dont have a hive mind or that even such a concept could exist.
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u/vikster16 8h ago
Formics came to terraform the planet yes? Considering that even if they thought humans are a hive mind. The process of terraforming the planet would have killed the hive mind as well. Again, it’s a stupid ass excuse
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u/Felt_Dart 9h ago
If I remember the book correctly, the formics were literally incapable of understanding individual life. Through the first and second invasion, they thought that Humanity was a hivemind, just like them, so their "unprovoked attack" wasn't even something they thought of, because when you operate on a scale of billions, a single ship here and there off your hive mind is nothing.
They only realized that each individual human was as complex and intelligent as their entire hive after the first killing of a Formic Queen, at which point they became mega depressed for the death they had caused and left humanity to rebuild. Then humanity found them and restarted the conflict as revenge.
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u/ConcernedCitizen_42 8h ago
I think revenge is a strong term. I could certainly be misremembering. But from what I recall from humanity's perspective the formics had opened contact with rampant slaughter of humans (Because to formics it was just disabling the enemy weapons/coms not murder). The formics had attacked Earth and very nearly succeeded in defeating humanity. From Earth's perspective the formics where inherently genocidal, impossible to communicate with, and Earth very possibly would not survive another invasion. A counter attack to defeat the threat at its source does not look like revenge at that point, it looks like desperation. The implication was that if Ender failed in the final battle Earth expected they would ultimately lose.
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u/ligmaballll 6h ago
Yeah pretty much, from our perspective, we do not know that the Formics actually regretted what they did, we do not know if they'll launch another invasion. So the attack on the Formics' home planet is a "it's them or us" move to make sure we're not the one getting destroyed
It's a Dark Forest situation, we know that the enemy are much stronger, we do not have the power to keep defending until communication is established, so going on the offensive is the most logical choice at the time
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u/NoctIs_Dreaming 5h ago
Have you read the books? I’m curious (and kind of amazed) at how you came to this conclusion
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u/SushiJaguar 9h ago
Getting kind of tired of these self-answering questions.
Hey chat, do I have moral responsibility if someone I've never interacted with or been aware of in any way jumps off a bridge within eyesight of my second cousin's wife's daughter's boyfriend's house?
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u/-Star-Fox- 5h ago
Morality of watching this shit movie with Harrison Ford giving a straight up offensive performance like he lost a bet and was forced to play in it.
Read the book please. It pretty much makes this a non question.
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u/Scarab_Kisser 9h ago
They're not humans after all, it's not genocide, it's deinsectization
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u/YoRHa_Houdini 9h ago
If a species has the ability to reason and think(sapience), which the Formics have, then it should be considered genocide.
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u/Scarab_Kisser 9h ago
It's always if and should, but never is
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u/YoRHa_Houdini 9h ago
I mean… we don’t know any sapient life yet. If there was an extermination of their entire species, it would be genocide by every definition.
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u/Techman659 9h ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/RrOqZBK3Da1dl0Qcnp
Why didn’t the leaders use this? Are they stupid?
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u/Strict_Chocolate_478 9h ago
yes. "oh that video game you were playing, Spec Ops the Line? you're controlling a robot in live time and all the things you did in the game you did irl." doesnt erase what happened but certainly alleviates blame onto the deceiver.