Star Wars and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy Series) - Kevin Decker [27]
As a child, Anakin is clearly on the side of good. He reaches out to Padmé and Qui-Gon on Tatooine, offering them shelter from a sandstorm. Hearing their troubles, he immediately seeks to help them, risking his own life in the Boonta Eve Podrace to win the prize money that Qui-Gon needs to buy the spare parts for their damaged starship. In The Phantom Menace, Anakin is nothing but innocence and goodness. No moral ambiguities here. As a young man, however, Anakin becomes Darth Vader; by A New Hope, he is, as Obi-Wan puts it, “more machine now than man, twisted and evil.” No moral ambiguities there either.
We might then expect to see some signs of ambiguity in the interim. But in Attack of the Clones, we never see the kind boy we met on Tatooine. Not once during the entire movie does he show basic compassion. He’s rude, arrogant, and ungrateful. While he talks about the respect he has for Obi-Wan’s wisdom, he never acts as if he believes that Obi-Wan has anything to teach him. He ignores Obi-Wan’s explicit instructions at every opportunity, he picks a fight with Obi-Wan in front of Padmé to prove his loyalty to her over his teacher, he refuses to listen to Obi-Wan while chasing Zam Wesell, and he abandons his mission to Naboo to look after his own personal affairs. His smarmy resistance to Obi-Wan’s teachings turns his otherwise patient and kind master into a hectoring nag. His pursuit of his love for Padmé, while understandable, jeopardizes not only their careers, but also their lives—not to mention the lives of those who find themselves in the path of their recklessness.
The only step he takes that seems selfless is his attempt to save Obi-Wan on Geonosis, but his actions are ill-conceived and rash, an ill-advised attempt to make up for abandoning his post earlier. His duty was clearly to protect his charge, yet he allows Padmé to convince him to do what he himself wants to do. Once there, he has to be reminded to keep to his mission when Padmé falls out of their gunship, and he rushes into combat with Count Dooku so carelessly that he ends up causing unnecessary injuries both to Obi-Wan and to himself. Most of these actions are thoughtless rather than intentionally immoral, so we may be inclined to see them as well-intentioned, if mistaken. Even so, their sheer stupidity makes them morally defective.
The problem is not that he acts on his emotions. Emotions play an important role in our moral evaluations. The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume even argues, “Morality . . . is more properly felt than judg’d of.”45 Yet even Hume thinks that reason plays an important role in morality. We need to use our reason to assess the facts properly and to keep our priorities straight. To act coherently, much less morally, we can’t lose our heads; we have to be able to reflect on what we are doing. When people disregard the moral judgments that emerge from reflection, we rightly view them as morally flawed. And when they willfully refuse to engage in reflection at all, when they rush to action without any use of their reason, we should judge them similarly. So when Anakin tells Padmé, “You are asking me to be rational. That is something I know I cannot do,” he is admitting to a great moral failing. If we willfully ignore what reason tells us, we become controlled by every whim of our emotions, and we lose our capacity to make moral decisions. Anakin’s recklessness is, then, a vice.
Yet all Anakin’s reckless actions pale in comparison to what he does to the Sand People who’ve captured his mother. Even from Naboo, Anakin feels his mother’s pain, and he rushes to Tattooine to help her. But when she dies in his arms, he destroys an entire village, the innocent and the guilty alike, out of revenge. It’s an act of unspeakable cruelty.
Oddly, the horror of this act is downplayed in the movie. Padmé only seems to feel sorry for Anakin, reacting little to the depths of the horror. She consoles him