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and only incidentally of individuals, even if the individuals in question are personal friends of the leader—indeed, especially if the individuals are personal friends. We expect governmental officers to go out of their way to avoid charges that they are acting out of their own interests or those of their friends rather than out of those of the nation as a whole. Imagine how we would judge the President of the United States if he were willing to give in to terrorist demands to save the life of an old hunting buddy from Mexico. Lando’s actions would be exactly the same: he would be turning over the colony to the tyranny of the Empire just to save a gambling buddy who does not even belong to the colony. Seen in this light, Lando’s decision is not only reasonable, it’s also what we would expect from someone in his position.

Moreover, whatever Han thinks, Lando’s choice is not between giving up Han and saving his colony. No matter what Lando does, Han will be captured by Darth Vader: either Lando will surrender Han to Vader or the stormtroopers will capture him in their assault on the planet. So Lando’s real choice is only whether he’s going to try to save the mining colony or not. The choice he actually faces is much like one discussed by the moral philosopher Bernard Williams: an evil commandant offers to save nineteen of his twenty innocent captives slated for execution if you personally will shoot one of them, despite your own pacifist convictions. The captive you kill will die no matter what you do, so the question is whether you should act to save the other nineteen.43 Williams argues that a utilitarian morality—indeed, any abstract morality—requires too much if it expects you to give up your own convictions to kill the one. Such a moral demand would violate your personal integrity, he claims. While Williams’s position is appealing, it is ultimately based on a kind of moral selfishness: I will never get my hands dirty, though the heavens may fall. Undoubtedly, both you and Lando give up something important if you act as morality requires: you each give up a sense of moral purity. But ultimately, that sense is a kind of moral vanity: it is the view that my moral sensibilities are worth more than the lives of the others. Even if Lando and you don’t entirely trust either Darth Vader or the commandant to keep his word, the decision to try to help the many is not one of moral cowardice. Indeed, valuing the actual lives of others over your own moral scruples is an act of moral courage. Yet even if we think that this reasoning is faulty and that in the final analysis Lando is wrong, we shouldn’t judge him a coward. He’s not acting in a clearly unreasonable or selfish manner. He simply weighs the moral options differently.

In fact, Lando never really has any choice whatsoever. No matter what he does, the Empire is going to take over his colony and Han is going to be captured. So his plaintive refrain, “I had no choice,” is really true. But Lando doesn’t act immorally for trying to produce a different outcome. To his credit, when he realizes that his goals are hopeless, he does what he can both to evacuate as much of the colony as possible and to save Leia, Chewie, and Threepio from Vader. After losing his colony, he doesn’t think of himself at all. He immediately joins Luke and Leia’s plans to rescue Han, and we see him at the end of The Empire Strikes Back setting off to find Han on Tatooine. He thus immediately tries to make right the harm that was done to Han through his actions, even if that harm was caused by no fault of his own. And, once he has rescued Han, he doesn’t hesitate to join the Rebel forces in what looks like a suicide mission to attack the second Death Star. Far from being a narrow egoist, Lando is in fact one of the most morally courageous figures in the Star Wars saga.

“Together . . . We Can Destroy the Sith”

Count Dooku is first introduced in Attack of the Clones as a “political idealist, not a murderer.” Dooku is a former Jedi who leads a separatist rebellion against the Republic. The case for