Humanity In Ender's Game

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The Command School authorities made the better choice for humanity's sake at the expense of Ender. What they chose was the intended goal of Command School, and it also saved the most people. Their decision might not be free from ethical questioning, but in the end, it was best for humanity and hence justified.
In a utilitarian perspective, Colonel Graff and Major Anderson did nothing wrong. Their purposeful trickery of Ender and his fellow young commanders was the best way to ensure the largest amount of surviving people. This is comparable to the famous Trolley Problem, where a trolley is about to run over five people, but you have a lever that switches the tracks so the trolley runs over only one person. In Ender’s Game, however, it’s the …show more content…

Humans tend to have an us-vs-them mentality, leading to the feeling of moral superiority and portraying the other side as more evil than they are. Little is known of how the buggers lived and if they cared for their kind, but the mercurial and diverse nature of humans is well known. In some sense, it would be better for humanity to die off, considering our damage to the environment. As eloquently said by Graff, “It isn’t the world at stake. Just humankind. As far as the rest of the biosphere is concerned, we could be wiped out and it would adjust.” (Card 35) During the First Invasion, buggers killed humans in cold blood. To them, killing individual humans is like killing off a couple of genetically identical cells in one body. The buggers, like actual bugs in a colony, are all offspring of one queen. Their unified thinking allows them to communicate instantaneously; all the buggers are of one mind but in separate bodies. In this regard, each and every individual human is akin to a bugger queen. If the buggers had known this, they likely wouldn’t have killed the humans. Due to the incompatible communication styles between humans and buggers, misunderstandings caused most of the bugger wars. After the Second Invasion, the buggers became peaceful towards the humans. However, the humans cannot possibly know this, so they had to kill off the buggers in order to guarantee no further attacks. Thus, the Command School