The virtue of not being a total asshole: the moral philosophy of The First Law
I’m not going to lie, I feel a little ridiculous talking about ethics in relation to The First Law series. Talking about evil was easy: Throw every character in a sack, give it a couple of shakes, and anyone you pull out is going to give you something to comment on. Talking about goodness, on the other hand, talking about virtue, feels a little like asking the desert for rain. Or Abercrombie himself some mercy. Less of a Herculean task and more of a Sisyphean one.
But, and I say this to myself as a form of encouragement, so is being a good person in the Circle of the World. At least it seems so.
So maybe it’s not that bad that it’s taken me so long to put into words the central idea of this essay, because I think the characters of The First Law struggle to answer the questions I keep asking myself too: What does it mean to be a good person in this world? Can you be a good person in those circumstances? Is it even worth trying?
The answers were not easy to find, neither for me nor for them, but I think I found enough clues to begin sketching out the edges of the moral philosophy of The First Law. I think.
Now, before we begin, words like ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are notoriously flexible, highly context-dependent. Sometimes doing good means lying, sometimes it means telling the truth. Sometimes it means sparing your enemy’s life, sometimes it means killing them before they can turn around to see just who exactly stabbed them in the back. Abercrombie says it best himself: ‘…we all want what’s best. The root o’ the world’s ills is that no one can agree on what it is.’ This essay is not, then, an attempt to define goodness.
Neither is it an attempt to seek a paragon of virtue or human excellence among the inhabitants of the Circle of the World, nor to apply the moral standards of our world or kinder ones to a series renowned for its rather varied palette of shades of gray. After all, Sisyphus’ punishment only works if he can, in fact, make it to the top. So from here on out when I say ‘good’ please keep in mind that I’m using a scale that goes from total asshole to maybe-sometimes-not-a-complete-asshole.
All this to say that the subject we intend to address is a bit like stepping into the Maker’s House: Bewildering, confusing, and so seemingly incoherent that, standing on the threshold, one has the sinking feeling that more than one person has gone in, and not come back out.
Anyways. What follows is my attempt to start rolling the boulder up the hill.
SPOILERS FOR THE NINE MAIN BOOKS AHEAD
- What does it mean to be a good person in this world?
There are two characters that I think can act as guides in our journey into the Maker’s House: Shivers and Temple. Their character arcs revolve more or less explicitly around their rather tragic attempts to better themselves as people and I believe that analyzing their respective paths and the obstacles they encounter is how we’ll come to answer the questions posed at the beginning of this essay.
Before analyzing their journey, though, we need to understand where they’re starting from. We need to dig into what exactly both of them understand as ‘being good’ to understand why they rejected these definitions in the first place.
1.1. Shivers and the simplification of goodness
Shiver’s conception of goodness at the beginning of the series is, simply put, simplistic. This is due, I believe, to how the Northerners have reduced the value of the word to one thing only: military skill. A good northern man is a good warrior, and his value as a person is inferred directly from his value on the battlefield, from his value as a soldier. The meaning of ‘goodness’ in this culture is entirely defined by their way of life. They’re always engulfed in conflicts, they live trapped in an eternal cycle of violence. It’s no surprise then that the great men who are held up as examples of good behavior are warriors and warriors only. The more violent the more notorious. Logen, Whirrun, these are the examples to follow.
Perceiving goodness as only one thing and one thing only and the right course of action always as the same regardless of particular context is a very effective way to make life easier for yourself (Nussbaum, 102-104). After all, our moral conflicts don’t arise when we have to decide between a bad action and a good one (at least I hope no one feels particularly conflicted in such situations). On the contrary, the situations that make us bite our nails are the ones that force us to decide between two good actions, to exercise our judgment, the ones that show us how goodness can mean different things in different contexts. Being loyal to your leader or defending the innocents he plans to conquer? Loyalty and protecting the defenseless are both generally considered good deeds, fundamental behaviors of the good man. Judging which of the two is the right one in a given situation requires not only having to deliberate, but also exposing yourself to doubt, remorse and criticism if it turns out you’ve chosen wrong.
When we reduce the meaning of goodness to just being a good warrior, these kinds of deliberations immediately lose much of the weight that made them so burdensome, something very useful in the North, where the situations the characters face tend to be life or death (either theirs or someone else’s). If you adopt the Northern philosophy that being a good man is being (only) a good warrior, moral deliberations immediately become easier, though not nonexistent.
For that we have to go a little further.
1.2. Temple and the commensurability of goodness
In Temple’s case, the one who represents the type of goodness he’ll later reject is not a culture, but a much more personal demon: Nicomo Cosca.
While the North has simplified goodness down to only one correct mode of behavior, Cosca has also turned the uncountable countable, commensurable. After all, the definition of the North is still ambiguous and open enough to admit different perspectives. We see it in Calder, for example, who is a different type of warrior, one who prefers the manipulation of words and secret dealings to the direct brutality of swords. Not everyone accepts his definition of the good warrior, the good man, but the mere fact that there is a debate on the subject gives use a glimpse of the contingent flexibility of their general conception of goodness. Calder shows them (and us) that being a good warrior is not defined solely by how many bodies lie at your feet at the end of the battle.
Cosca has found a way to get rid of this problem. For him, goodness is simple and calculable. Good is gold. Whenever Cosca is faced with a situation that forces him to decide between two or more options, he knows the best course of action is always the one that leads to maximum profit. Every decision becomes rational, simple, easy. It is the application of a predetermined metric to any situation that may occur. Moral conflicts, if there were any, are transformed into mere exercises of mathematical reasoning (Nussbaum, 160-161).
It’s Cosca himself who puts it best: Glory is hard to count. ‘So are honor, virtue and all those other desirable intangibles’. If what you seek is to make your life easier (i.e. to set aside moral conflicts, guilt and remorse, indecision and doubt) the best thing you can do is to reduce goodness down to one thing and make that thing commensurable. This way, you know exactly what to do every time. If the particulars don’t matter, if the context is irrelevant, nothing will ever surprise you. Everything is always under control. And that’s a good way to live.
(At least until your conscience shows up).
2. Can you be a good person in those circumstances?
Shivers and Temple both reject the conception of goodness as a single and commensurable thing that reigns supreme in their respective environments. This opening towards a new conception of what it means to be good marks the beginning of a road full of obstacles, and I believe that if we analyze what these difficulties are we can decipher what the world of The First Law considers the necessary conditions of goodness. So:
2.1. A man of principle
It is very difficult to act well without an idea, however vague, of what goodness is. Especially if we live by a plural conception of goodness, the idea that what is most right depends on the concrete and particular of each situation. When Shivers and Temple get rid of their simplistic and commensurable version of goodness, they also get rid of the north of their moral compass. Deliberations about what the right action is become infinitely more complicated. Now they have to face the terrible, horrible, absolutely paralyzing questions of what should I do every time they have to make a decision. A real nightmare, that.
This is where the importance of the example comes into play. It’s an intrinsic idea of the Circle of the World. You only have to dig a little to realize that this notion underlies the behavior of the vast majority of the series’ characters. Northern wisdom, for example, is always based on small phrases laden with meaning that are passed down from father to son, from leader to leader. It’s Logen, always repeating his father’s advice to himself. It’s also present in the way Cosca and Monza quote respected military authors and use them as behavioral guides. And so on.
Now, clearly not everyone is a good example. Temple has a big advantage over Shivers in this regard. His role model, the person who acts as both his conscience and as an example in terms of behavior, is his former mentor, Kahdia, one of the few men in the series I would dare call honest, brave and good. His memory acts as Temple’s conscience: It’s the terrible taste that realizing he is letting Kahdia down leaves in his mouth that finally drives Temple to leave Cosca behind. It also acts as a moral compass: every time we see Temple face a moral conflict, he thinks about what his mentor would have done. What actions would make him prouder.
The first condition of goodness seems to be, then, to have at hand the example of a man of principle you can model your own behavior after. We only have to look at what happens to Shivers, who lacks one, to understand just how necessary this is.
When Shivers goes in search of his moral improvement, we quickly notice that he has no idea where to start. He more or less knows what not to do. He knows he doesn’t want to become Logen, for example, and that Black Dow is far from being a good example, as evidenced at the end of the first trilogy when he refuses to engage with their fight and declares that he is better than both of them. But that’s as far as his ethical reflections go.
Having no example to follow and having left behind a definition of goodness which, while not correct, at least provided him with some direction, Shivers has no way to correct his behavior. My favorite example of his empty perception of goodness is at the beginning of Best Served Cold, when a man accidentally knocks into him as he passes him by and Shivers congratulates himself when he lets him go instead of reacting violently. This, he tells himself, is clearly what being a good person is all about.
How difficult it is to face moral conflicts without guidance also becomes clear very quickly. At the beginning of Best Served Cold, Shivers has two main responsibilities: On the one hand, his responsibility to himself to improve as a person, which implies, at the very least and by choice, not going around killing people. On the other hand, his responsibility to Monza to do his job well, which implies, at the very least, stopping those who intend to kill her. Which is most efficiently done by, you guessed it, killing.
Here lies the problem: Two responsibilities constrain Shivers in different ways. What to do in the face of such a moral conflict? Well, in the absence of a good example, suppress it. Shivers, who has never been so beset by the terrible question of what should I do, soon adopts Monzza’s philosophy: ‘Mercy and cowardice are the same’. This phrase appears often in Best Served Cold and symbolizes very well how the semantic field of survival, war and revenge comes to apprehend Shiver’s ethical vocabulary. It always appears at moments when circumstances have forced Shivers to neglect one of his responsibilities. It’s what Monza tells him to assuage his guilt. It’s a way to simplify moral conflicts. Mercy and cowardice are indeed the same if the only meaning of behaving well that you admit into your worldview is one defined by violence. And so the meaning of goodness is tragically reduced. Again.
Shivers, who has not only not had the good luck of having a good example to follow but also the bad luck to have come across the personification of a simplistic view of goodness, re-adopts the conception of good that he tried so hard to leave behind. And so the moral decisions he had been forced to make disappear. Gone also is the cause of those uncomfortable feelings we all hate to feel: doubt, guilt, remorse.
So, The First Law implies that you have to have a good example to even try to be a good person. How does one go around finding one? Well, here comes the bad news…
2.2. Famed soldier of fortune
You may have noticed my repeated use of the word ‘luck’ in the section above, sometimes accompanied by the adjective ‘good’, sometimes by ‘bad’. This is intentional.
It’s hard to accept that your ability to be a good person depends on something as out of your control as luck, but this is definitely one of the strongest claims The First Law makes. Shivers, as we’ve seen, had the back luck never to have had an example of a man of principle to model his behavior after. He also had the really bad luck to meet Monza. He had no way of controlling either of these events, but they happened to him just the same. There are gratuitous events in life that affect us in fundamental ways, and there is nothing we can do either to foresee or to prevent them.
Now, I don’t mean to imply (and I don’t think The First Law does either) that whether you are a good person or not depends entirely on luck. To understand in what way and to what degree fortune affects our ability to be a good person we must delve into a characteristic of goodness that we’ve so far addressed only implicitly: goodness is an activity.
It’s one thing to have a good character, something that in The First Law world we might call the desire to not be such an asshole all the time, and it’s another thing to be good. After all, we call someone a good warrior by their actions in battle, not by their potential. Likewise, we call someone good by the actions they carry out, not by their intentions.
The problem with actions? They can be impeded. And we cannot always foresee all the consequences our actions will have. Sometimes, oftentimes, we have to act out of ignorance, and when more information about the situation is revealed to us, we realize, always too late, that we acted wrongly. And other people, who may have worse intentions than us, or simply less information, are also able to act, and impede our own actions… See the problem?
A clarifying example seems to me the beginning of Red Country. Temple and Sufeen have every intention of warning the villagers of the town Cosca wants to attack that they are in danger. Clearly, good intentions are not enough to prevent catastrophe. The people’s distrust and disbelief, Cosca’s own actions and Sufeen’s death all are factors beyond Temple’s control. Luck, whether we want to admit it or not, affects our ability to be good people in direct and indirect ways. Sometimes it affects our circumstances long before we have set foot in the world, sometimes it intercedes just when we are about to act. But it always acts, just as we do.
2.3. Three relationships, one lie
Although The First Law reiterates time and again that to improve as a person leaving behind society and its endless ways of corrupting good character is the best option (we see this clearly in Before They Are Hanged, for example, and also in the way the Far Country and its manifest lack of social institutions is symbolically framed as the fertile ground for new beginnings), it also argues that interpersonal relationships are key to the moral improvement of human beings. It’s our emotional bonds that motivate us to try and roll the very heavy rock of morality uphill. And it’s what we owe to each other that gives rise to our stubborn desire to attempt the climb again when the boulder inevitably ends up back at the bottom of the hill.
Goodness, in The First Law, is necessarily relational. There are three relationships that I think demonstrate this: Temple and Shy, Hildi and Orso, and Shivers and Rikke.
One thing that really struck me about these relationships is how they’re all understood though the framework and vocabulary of debt. In the case of Temple/Shy and Hildi&Orso, it’s a monetary debt. In Shivers&Rikke’s case, it’s an inherited debt for help previously rendered. Clearly, in none of the three cases is there any real expectation of remuneration, either of payment or through some other method.
I would argue that even at the beginning of the Temple/Shy relationship she didn’t really expect Temple to be able to repay what he owed to her. Framing the helped she had given Temple in terms of a debt was Shy’s way of rationalizing a seemingly irrational good deed, since her helping Temple, first by not dying in the river and then by securing his place in the caravan, had no clear, direct reward. On the contrary, both actions caused her only more trouble.
Something similar happens with Orso&Hildi. They both keep a mental account of how much money Orso owes Hildi for her help, which mostly includes her company and friendship, but the reminder actually works as a promise: as long as Orso owes her money, Hildi will stay by his side. Knowing that Orso is in debt is not only a way to ensure that their relationship has a somewhat stable future, but it also validates in both of their eyes the risks they take for the sake of the other. If Orso dies, then he can’t pay her back. Therefore, it’s alright, it’s good, that Hildi is concerned about him and his welfare.
It’s truly tragic (but understandable, given the aggressive and violent nature of the Circle of the World) that these characters feel the need to camouflage their emotional ties through the vocabulary of debt. Because being a good person in the Circle of the World is irrational. It is senseless. Illogical. It brings with it no reward, sometimes not even self-satisfaction. It makes you vulnerable. It puts you in danger. It’s no wonder, then, that the characters need a way to justify to themselves the danger that forming bonds and helping others implies.
In the case of Shivers&Rikke, the framework of debt is not so obvious. It’s sometimes brought up that Shivers (and Isern too) helps Rikke because the Dogman helped him before. It’s a way of balancing a supposed debt of favors, but I think the fact that Shivers has known Rikke since she was a baby and the intimacy this implies makes the debt language less necessary. In any case, to me Shivers and Rikke symbolize how emotional ties give direction to good deeds. It’s something that is explicitly said in the text: Shivers was lost before he cultivated a relationship with her. And it’s his relationship with her that now motivates and directs his actions.
In the end, what these relationships make clear is that emotional bonds are so valuable and fundamental to a good and worthwhile life that the characters in The First Law are willing to disguise their apparent irrationality in terms more reconcilable with their understanding of the world in order to justify their existence to themselves. You protect what matters, and the mental effort they make to protect these relationships from themselves and their ‘good reasoning’ is telling. The most sensible, the most logical and cautious thing to do, if what you seek is an easy and ‘happy’ life, would be to get rid of these relationships altogether, because their existence, more than opening the door of your house to luck, knocks down an entire wall and exposes you to the violent winds that bring with them everything you do not control. If you’re already the latent involuntary victim of luck, tying your virtue to the existence of other people only multiplies the risk.
So, with all this in mind, the big question:
3. Is it even worth trying?
If we want to talk about goodness in The First Law, we have to talk about the Dogman. Rather, we have to talk about his garden.
Human-virtue-as-a-plant is an image that goes back to Ancient Greece and its great ethical thinkers (Nussbaum, 1986). I am not surprised to find it here as well. I don’t know if Abercrombie is an avid reader of Pindar’s odes or (and personally I find this option more magical, by which I mean better) if this image spills forth from the pens of two authors separated by millennia, not by chance but because it is inevitable, to make bloom in our minds again the beautiful and terrifying comprehension of the fragility of goodness (Nussbaum, 9).
All this to say: Surprise! The Dogman’s garden is a metaphor (it’s hard to find a literary garden that isn’t). What does it symbolize?
3.1. The vulnerability of goodness
If there’s one thing The First Law affirms over and over again, not only explicitly through dialogue and the characters’ inner narration, but also implicitly through its plot and structure, is that being a good person, especially in a world as cruel as this one, requires an almost superhuman effort. It involves cultivating an unusual perseverance to cope with the frightening realization of the sheer power of chance and the fearsome contingency of luck, a perseverance that, seen from the outside, seems not a strength of spirit but madness. It also implies understanding that this strength may never bear fruit. (It implies, always, to keep on planting anyways).
The image of the garden succinctly symbolizes the seemingly paradoxical nature of the virtue-of-not-being-a-total-asshole in the Circle of the World. Like plants, we are simultaneously active and passive beings, we grow because it’s in our essence to do so, but we require many things beyond our control to do so well: good weather, good soil (Nussbaum, 27-29). Likewise, there are infinite things that can thwart our attempts to even break through the soil, let alone flourish fully: a drought, a storm. Someone eager to see fire burn.
The Dogman’s garden, like human goodness, is vulnerable. Requiring something outside yourself, whether it be rain or the example of a man of principle, sunlight or loved ones, inevitably opens us to dependence. Especially because we are not dependent on others just to grow strong and healthy and good, but also to enjoy that goodness. We need others not only for moral compasses and motivation, but also to share our happiness with. Goodness is intrinsically relational. Rikke, after all, sits in her father’s garden in company. And when you assign value to something that is not yourself, when you sow the seeds of your virtue not in your own body and mind, but in the open, shared field of the world, there is no fence, no tarp that can weather fortune.
The First Law flatly denies that you can be a good man without also having some good luck. It’s also a testament to how difficult it is to tend the garden even when luck is on your side. What flowers to plant, when to water it: moral conflicts are inevitable and our guides of good behavior are not rules applicable to every situation, but rather a compass that points you in a general direction but does not warn or prepare you for the particular details of the journey.
It’s easy to understand why so many characters succumb to the temptation to reduce these conflicts, to get rid of the eternal responsibility of being the gardener of your own good character, to throw their hands up in the air and let fortune alone dictate whether the flowers wither or bloom. It’s also easy to understand why so many characters adopt a cynical attitude towards the world, and why they refuse to engage with others sincerely. If I don’t care about anyone or anything, when fortune bursts into my life, as it inevitably will, it won’t really affect me, will it?
What, then, made Temple and Shivers want to change?
3.2. The Seed of Goodness
We tend to think about impulses as something solely negative, as an almost involuntary action that without prior planning prompts us to act, uncaring of the consequences. But it was an impulse, as unpredictable and uncontrollable as a cough or a sneeze, that led Temple to leave Cosca behind. It was a decision without prior planning that made Shivers leave the North behind. It was a spur of the moment decision, even, that made Glokta spare Carlot’s life, back in the time immemorial of the first trilogy.
Abercrombie is very detailed when it comes to narrating the reasons and justifications that push his characters to act badly. The logical gymnastics practiced by the characters of The First Law to reconcile themselves to the harm they cause deserves its own Olympic category. I find it very curious, then, that when it comes to the characters’ good deeds, well. The vast majority lack logical, rational explanations. They don’t quite know how to explain them, either to themselves or to others. They ask themselves what made them behave in such an unwise way. Why, Glokta asks himself constantly, long after the act has been committed. If we compare the paragraphs and paragraphs devoted to justifying the characters’ bad actions with the almost reflexive way in which the good ones come to be, the lack of reasoning behind the latter is all that much more conspicuous. This, I think, is neither a technical error on Abercrombie’s part nor pure chance.
The First Law is often spoken of as if it confirmed that human beings are, by nature, evil. Come and see: the irrefutable proof of humanity’s rotten heart in only nine volumes! I believe that if you dig a little deeper, if you don’t allow yourself to be intimidated by the miasma of nihilism that covers the garden like morning mist, you’ll soon realize that goodness is the true natural current that nourishes the rivers of the actions of these characters. What The First Law says is that the world is cruel. It shows us how the world creates dams that prevent the execution of our good nature. How it can stagnate the waters of our spirit so that our natural wellsprings rot (Nussbaum, 412). And perhaps this is obvious or self-evident to some, but it is not the same thing to say that the world can affect us so deeply it changes us as it is to say that we are irredeemable by birth.
I do not mean to imply that we are all good, deep down and if you search with a flashlight. There are Bad People in The First Law who deserve both capital letters. No plant can grow on a field that has been salted, after all, but I do mean to say that the ground does not salt itself. That, in spite of everything, good nature always insists on becoming action without worrying that it may not be the most sensible thing to do because it knows it is the right thing to do.
Is it not revealing that it takes so many pages to justify evil but goodness is seemingly inexplicable, that it springs forth unannounced as soon as it sees the opportunity, like a hidden spring bursting from the depths of the earth? The First Law shows us that evil has to be justified before it can be done, that we have to convince ourselves to do it. Goodness, on the other hand, has to be justified after the act. At least in the Circle of the World, where it is clearly, and justly, seen as unwise.
So perhaps what we need to do to understand goodness in The First Law series is to change the parameters of the investigation: the question is not whether you can be a good person, the question is why you aren’t.
And The First Law’s response is long list of all the reasons why, each crueler than the last, but that’s alright. You go and explain to the oak tree why it shouldn’t try to reach the sky just because it storms.
References
Martha Nussbaum. The Fragility of Goodness. 1986.
traspapelada; 
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