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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steel_Wind" data-source="post: 5535258" data-attributes="member: 20741">I’d go one step further: by killing Aerys (and Aerys' Hand), Jaime sacrifices his personal honour to save the people of Kings Landing. Yet, none of them respect him for it and the Right Honourable Eddard Stark, in fact, reviles him for it.  Yet Jaime’s self-sacrifice of his own honour to become the Kingslayer was, in fact, the ethical thing to do and Eddard’s dogmatic approach to honour as an almost unswerving absolute is, in fact, the selfish and immoral choice. Moreover, the series demonstrates that Eddard’s so-called honour brings utter ruin upon his family, his realm and his smallfolk. Instead of Eddard making the necessary sacrifices of his own personal honour for the greater good, Eddard makes the whole realm bleed to “save” his own honour.   So who is the more selfish? Who is the more virtuous? Jaime or Eddard? I put it to you that answer is not at all clear. The ethical calculus that Eddard subscribes to looks only at the immediate results of right and wrong, true or false, black and white -- all without probing further. It is a philosophy which both Eddard and Robb conveniently and abruptly terminate before any real introspection or contemplation of the true consequences that their selfish "honourable" choices will have upon the realm, their families and their people.  That’s why Eddard and Robb Stark lose the Game of Thrones. Not because they are moral, but because they are not. They are very "decent" men, but their approach to statecraft is personal, naive, immature and therefore, ultimately, selfish.  Sorry. It’s not as cut and dried as you might prefer it to be. GRRM does not let the reader off that easy. His tale is deliberately gray; a story  where a dishonourable choice may lead to the greater good – and an honourable choice to a far greater evil. It is this duality, an examination of both motives and results; and a steadfast refusal to let characters of the hook for the real consequences of their choices which makes Song of Ice and Fire the best work of so-called fantasy ever written.</blockquote>

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