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Yet his friendships with Leia and Luke allow him to see the importance of the cause that they so easily embrace. His love for them eventually leads him to commit himself to a greater good and to express a moral regard for oppressed people everywhere. Following their moral examples, he becomes a full member of the Rebel Alliance and one of its most important leaders. By committing himself to a genuinely moral cause, he escapes his egoism. Or perhaps, he does not so much escape his egoism as much as his self-interest becomes so broad that it encompasses all of morality. In any case, Han has been transformed from an arrogant and self-centered smuggler into a moral leader.

“This Deal Is Getting Worse All the Time”

At first glance, Lando Calrissian seems to be just like Han. Indeed, he and Han ran in the same circles earlier in their lives, and he lost the Millennium Falcon to Han in a card game. Like Han, Lando was a scoundrel. For that reason, we may be tempted to see his decisions as egoistic as well. Yet, when we meet Lando in The Empire Strikes Back, he is the administrator of Bespin, an independent mining colony. He has become, as Han puts it, “a businessman, a responsible leader.” Dealing with supply problems, labor difficulties, and the complexities of running a large enterprise, Lando understands, is “the price you pay for being successful.” Yet even before we actually meet him, he has been confronted with a nasty moral dilemma: he can either betray his old friend Han and turn him over to Darth Vader, or he can allow Bespin to be overrun by Imperial stormtroopers. We might view Lando’s decision as egoistic: he betrays Han to save his own neck. But Lando’s decision is not so self-serving. The lives of everyone on Bespin will be made substantially worse if the Empire controls it, so Lando make a fairly straightforward utilitarian decision.

Utilitarianism is the view that, as the nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill puts it, “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness; wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”39 While the egoist promotes only her own happiness, the utilitarian promotes the happiness of everyone. The correct moral action is the one that creates the most happiness for the world: “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” to use the Jeremy Bentham’s famous phrase.40 To determine the right act, we look at each of the options that are available to us and calculate the likely consequences of choosing that option. We then add up the happiness that would be created for every person affected if we choose that option and subtract the unhappiness. We then compare this result with those of the other options, and then pick the one with the highest total. Every person’s happiness or unhappiness is weighed equally in the calculation, so from a utilitarian point of view, the increased happiness of a large number of people usually outweighs the pain suffered by one. So when Lando gives up Han to prevent the great harms that his people would suffer if the Empire commands his colony, he is simply weighing the good of the many against the harm to one.

In the context of The Empire Strikes Back, this decision looks like moral cowardice. We want Lando to stand up to the Empire, to try to save his friends, no matter what the cost. With E.M. Forster, we think that “if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”41 We empathize so much with Han and Leia that we simply ignore the thousands of other people who are affected by Lando’s decision. But to put it in these terms shows how narrow-minded such a judgment is. In fact, we expect the government to look after the welfare of the whole society rather than the needs of a single individual. Within some limits (which can often be justified on utilitarian grounds),42 we expect government officials to act as utilitarians, maximizing the good for the whole community. Officials should think of the nation