Is Dune (as a series) really an endorsement of consequentialism?
Frank Herbert wrote a lot of books, and it was a long time ago that I read them. I don’t remember the consequences ever being particularly great for anyone.
Frank Herbert wrote a lot of books, and it was a long time ago that I read them. I don’t remember the consequences ever being particularly great for anyone.
God Emperor of Dune consists largely of a lengthy and emphatic in-universe endorsement of a kind of consequentialism by the eponymous character.
While I think that it is a naive view to do so, its pretty easy to see how a reader might take it as an endorsement of that view by the author.
(OTOH, I think prescience, as featured in the series, really also challenges the idea of deontology and consequentialism as even being different in substance rather than different framings of the same considerations; the idea of a polar divide is, even without it, pretty clearly somewhat artificial – real deontological frameworks tend to incorporate context including known, intended, and reasonably foreseeable consequences in their understanding of what is part of the nature of the act itself, while any real consequentialist framework most adopt some rules as to which a priori outcomes that are viewed as positive or negative, and so the two somewhat blend; when all, or nearly all, outcomes become foreseeable…)
LotR had them do a bunch of hero shit, then everyone either went home to hang out at the pub for a while, or took a boat out west.
Whether Herbert endorses consequentialism in the real world is not something you could guess just from the books. The cost of the good consequences is unfathomably high.
[Edit:] The internet archive has it: https://archive.org/details/the-maker-of-dune-insights-of-a-...
Mighty big asterisk on the “all” there.
As long as [unacceptable sacrifice] is objectively smaller than [benefit], it works as an analogy for real-world consequentialism like the develoment/use of the atom bomb. The book went to some lengths to tell you with certainty that the sacrifice was smaller than the benefit.
Hence they propose an asterisk next to “all”, because “all of humanity” means something more like “humanity as a whole (decided by someone?)” or “humanity (the ones who aren’t dead?)”
The point of Dune books, to some extent, is that the path laid out for humanity was terrible, but still the best possible outcome of all possible ones.
Of course we cannot verify it as a reader, but the trilogy alludes that genocide and despotic power consolidation and religious dogmatism were somehow necessary to prevent an otherwise even more terrible fate for humanity.
Whether that's actually true is left as an exercise for the thinking reader to ponder about.
> Of course we cannot verify it as a reader, but the trilogy alludes that genocide and despotic power consolidation and religious dogmatism were somehow necessary to prevent an otherwise even more terrible fate for humanity.
I agree that certain characters in the books believe this. I think it would be a massive oversimplification to suggest the series wants us to accept that uncritically.