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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7763076" data-attributes="member: 42582">You'll have to explain what you mean by this ethics/morality contrast.I'm mostly used to seeing "ethics" and "morality" used interchangeably. To the extent that they're differentiated among contemporary moral philosophers, I would see ethics as an account of what it is to live well, and morality as an account of what duty to others requires.Minority Report clearly takes free will as a theme; but so does Conan! (Conan's "barbaric" drive, in virtue of which he rejects the trappings of "civilised" tradition, is a manifestation of free will - as an example, consider the opening of Queen of the Black Coast, where he explains why he killed the guard and the judge.) For that matter, so does LotR, although it approaches it as an issue of conformity of human will to providence rather than right choice or free choice.But 2001 clearly has moral elements: it's about violence and warfare; about lying, and Cold War political morality; about hope. And Minority Report has even clearer moral elements, about both the interpersonal and the institutional consequences of lying; as well as broader libertarian criticism (consonant with the reflections on free will) of overweening government programs.No. In themeatic terms, they're about the vitality of a barbarian contrasted with the degeneracy of civilisation. (And hence about what it means to be human, insofar as human being are social creatures, who hence have "tradition" and "civilisation" as an unavoidable aspect of their heritage.)I mean, I could say that 2001 is just about a mad computer; or that Minority Report is just about an evil public official - but clearly that would miss some of the point. Treating REH's Conan as having no more thematic sophistication than a Justice League cartoon makes the same mistake.Because they're just devices. Like the existence of Minas Tirith in LotR is just a device.But the fact that Gollum destroys the ring is not just a device. The fact that Conan, a barbarian, restores Aquilonia to glory is not just a device. You seem to me to be coming very close to defining "fantasy" as shallow and "sci fi" as sophisticated. I think this is obviously wrong of LotR, wrong of REH's Conan, and even you must agree is wrong about the Earthsea stories. How does Tomb of Atuan (for instance) not ask questions about what it means to be part of a tradition (of religion, of gender, of government)? About freedom, both negative (freedom from constraint) and positive (enabling conditions that make one free to act in certain ways)? Etc.But obviously it's fantasy and not sci-fi.(You might think that the Tomb of Atuan's resolution of these questions is a bit weak or pat (and evidently so did Ursula Le Guin, given she went on to write Tehanu) but no more so than Minority Report in respect of its questions.)</blockquote>

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