“We need to get clear before the Coalition decides to freeze traffic.” Van slipped into the command couch.
Eri laughed. “We should hurry, but they will wait until we’re clear.”
“Because they know IIS.”
“Because they know Trystin,” she replied.
Chapter 68
From the beginning of written human history, there has always been a debate over the ethics of ends and the ethics of means. Can a good and ethical solution result from the use of unethical or immoral means? Does the end justify the means? Virtually all ethicists would agree that, of course, it does not, because, first, actions should be ethical in and of themselves, and, second, because corrupt means almost invariably result in corrupting the ends.
One difficulty with this position has been discussed in some detail, and that is the problem of war. War is evil, yet wars have been fought to combat and correct greater evils. If one accepts the premise of the ethicists, then greater evil will always triumph because the ethical soul will not stoop to an unethical action, even if it precludes a greater evil. The necessary evil of war against a greater evil has become accepted as the necessary compromise, in practical terms, and nation after nation, political system after political system, has gone to extreme lengths to “prove” that each was only acting to prevent a greater evil when it has gone to war.
This conflict between practice and theory obscures a more fundamental question that both ethicists and politicians have avoided whenever possible: Are there societies and cultures that are so evil that they do not deserve to survive? Certainly, at times in human history, scholars and politicians have judged that certain societies fit that criterion, but almost always comfortably in academic retrospect or in grandiose political statements that lead nowhere except to public office.
Unfortunately, that is all too often where the public discussion ends.
What of the other problem—the case where unethical ends lead to ethical results or where truly ethical means lead to an unethical result? We see few discussions about either possibility, particularly about the idea that ethical and moral people or principles can in fact create unethical ends. Yet how much suffering has been created by truly good men pursuing ends they thought ethical and moral? Is it not possible that such pursuit could lead to true evil?
Values, Ethics, and Society
Exton Land
New Oisin, Tara
1117 S.E.
Chapter 69
The trip outbound from Perdya to the outer Belt had been quiet, although Van had noted several Coalition warships also traveling outbound. Mason Jynko had had both a dozen armed torps, a half dozen message torps, and ten large smooth-finished crate-boxes—each roughly two meters long and a meter in height and width—waiting for the Joyau at the Aerolis complex.
Two short hours had been all that it took them to load the Joyau, although the mass of the unmarked boxes was significant.
“What’s in them?” Van had asked.
“I don’t know,” Jynko had replied. “These are the last ones. He brought them in sealed. The mass calculations are on each, but I don’t know what they are.”
So Van was carrying ten crate-boxes, each one massing close to two hundred kilos, plus ten spare torps, in the cargo bay.
As they cleared the Belt complex, outbound, Van scanned the EDI screens. There were more warships gathered, a fleet in each outer quadrant, than Van had ever seen before in one system, and all were Coalition ships.
“The Coalition isn’t exactly happy,” he observed, looking across at Eri, strapped in the second seat.
“That is an understatement. The last conflict with the Revenants almost destroyed the Coalition. Now…with the Taran Republic as an ally…”
“I can’t believe the Republic stooped that low…”
“Stooping low is easy,” Eri commented dryly. “Rising above baseness is rarer.”
“You’re right about that. But…” He checked the outbound course again, easing the Joyau another ten degrees to port, just to make certain they would reach a jump point well away from any of the gathering Coalition warships. He still had trouble understanding either how he had been so blind or how things had changed so much and so quickly in the Republic.
Before they had even reached Aerolis, Van had checked the rendezvous coordinates and verified them. The Joyau’s destination was a system without even planoformable planets, but a system high in the Arm, well “above” most of the human systems.
“We all want to believe better of where we were raised, I guess,” Van continued. “At least, I do.”
“Like…Director Desoll, you are an idealist,” Eri said evenly.
“Is that bad?” asked Van, half-wondering why Eri was suddenly so talkative, even as he checked systems and screens again. They still had another two hours before they would reach a position far enough from the gravitational fluxes with a low enough dust density to permit a jump.
“Most revolutionaries and many tyrants began as idealists.”
“So why did they change?”
“Because they expected too much from the common people. Director Desoll, he protests that he does not. But he does.”
That was another disturbing thought, at least to Van. “In what way does he expect too much of people?”
“He expects that they will act in their own interests. They do not, because they do not know what is best. They only know what they want.”
Van nodded, thinking of his fathers and the conversation they once had had about most people being creatures of appetite rather than of thought.
“Someday he will do something that is terrible and wonderful,” Eri said. “Again.”
Again? Van straightened in the command couch. “What did he do before?”
“I do not know. Nynca said that, but she would not explain.”
“What exactly…is she his daughter?” Van blurted.
Eri smiled. “No. I do not know, but…she may be the daughter of his granddaughter. I do not know this, but from what they have said, I think it may be so.”
Van frowned. Marti had said that Trystin was old, but Nynca was older than Van, and, if she were his
