J. E. Landau

I’ve been reading a little horror, and one recurring trope I’ve noticed is that really terrible monsters are often described as being neither good nor evil but some other thing. I’ve thought about it, and I’m not sure if that idea is coherent.

In Terry Pratchett’s The Color of Magic, the first (in publication order) book of his excellent Discworld series, there is a monster called Bel-Shamharoth, the flip side of the coin of which Good and Evil are but one side.” Naturally it’s a squid thing that lives in a crypt and which tries to eat the book’s protagonist. The Discworld books have an elaborate fantasy cosmology with good and evil gods, and so Bel-Shamharoth’s failure to align with that system might be construed as exiting it, but is that philosophically coherent?

There is, of course, the question of whether or not evil is a thing that exists. Most Christians, for example, do not accept the possibility of “positive evil”. According to the Augustinian Theodicy, evil is merely the absence of good, so saying that something is neither good nor evil is incoherent; things simply have a position on the good-evil axis, which moves towards or away from God.

To contrast, more secular philosophies may recognize independent notions of evil and good. If you are a utilitarian, for example, you might weigh suffering (evil) against joy (good) to determine utility balances in different situations.

This is not necessarily a useful distinction, and probably not one that many horror authors would recognize. In Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart, the novella that kicked off the Hellraiser franchise, the Cenobites are described as being neither good nor evil, and they blend pleasure and pain in their sadomasochistic torture dimension where they torture people forever. Most people would not enjoy this, but the Cenobites (at least in the book) only take willing victims. Does that make it okay? How can we evaluate this morally? Certainly, I think, they have a better claim to being beyond good and evil than most eldritch horror creatures.

H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos made similar claims about its various creatures. Azathoth, idiot king of the universe, is a described as a sleeping god, that will end reality if it awakens. This, is, I think, actually a somewhat morally neutral action, since it doesn’t require any intent. The other beings, like Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, and Shub-Niggurath seem far more malevolent, as they do sometimes meddle with the affairs of mortals directly.

Of course, Lovecraft’s writing mostly describes the destructive influences of these entities as largely part of their natures. They harm the world not because they are intending to harm the world, but because their nature is harmful to the world as we understand it. We are ants, they are elephants, and if we are crushed underneath, it’s hardly their fault, right? If we believe that an immoral action requires the intent to do harm (guilty mind) then this is a meaningful distinction, but if we judge actions and people based on their net contribution to the world, these beings are surely evil.

This is not to say that no other dimensions exist in moral consideration. The Dungeons and Dragons tabletop games famously feature an alignment system that exists on two axes: good vs evil and law vs chaos. Now, the exact definitions of law and chaos have varied, but usually “lawfulness” either means sticking to the laws of the society around your or something like sticking to your stated principles and keeping your word. The former definition is probably orthogonal to good and evil, since the law is not the final word in ethics, but the latter seems to overlap quite a bit.

Lying, for example, is often (but not always) considered to be an immoral action. The Abrahamic religions generally forbid it, as do other faiths, although there are sometimes exceptions for “white” (non-harmful) lies, which utilitarians would probably support as well. Similarly, hypocrisy has often been condemned as immoral, both in religious as well as secular contexts, as have fairness in dealings and constancy, all of which are “lawful” traits.

Still, certain “unlawful” or chaotic actions might be seen as good. Is it righteous to go back on your word to protect an innocent person? To cheat an evil person out of their money? To change your mind about a particular situation, after taking a stand on a general rule? These are actions we may or may not see as “good”, but we can imagine how someone might see them as good, so clearly this is another dimension to decisionmaking.

Is it different from good and evil? I think it might be, but the results hardly look like any sort of ordinary eldritch creature. In the cosmology of D&D, good celestials and evil infernals are accompanied by lawful modrons and chaotic elementals. The modron are like robots, with regimented hierarchy and the ability to only do and think a limited number of things, while the elementals are embodiments of pure elemental forces like fire, water, and earth. Still, the modrons do intend to do things, and so do the elementals, so presumably there is some amount of good and evil there. And even if they have no intents as such, their actions still have positive and negative consequences on the world.

Utilitarianism generally presents problems for these sorts of things. If we can judge the existence of a rock or a tree as good or evil, there is very little that we cannot assign a conventional univariate morality, and so there really is nothing beyond good and evil, except for those things which blend joy and suffering together, like the Hellraiser example. Of course, then, you can simply subtract the pain from the joy, and call that good or evil.

In general, I think, the nature of moral judgements is that they tend to also include people who do not subscribe to them. A Christian has no trouble judging a Buddhist, a Buddhist has no trouble judging a utilitarian, and a utilitarian has no trouble judging a Christian.

The main people who have trouble judging the actions of others are those who go by intent, and there we can really distinguish good, evil, and the things that lie on the other side of the coin, of which good and evil are but one side. I think that when people refer to these things, they often are thinking of intent. Somehow, our Lovecraftian monsters are supposed to have incomprehensible intents. Rarely, I think, is this accomplished in fiction.

Partly this is a limitation of plot. Having rules about what characters do is important for plot structure, and having characters who act in a way that is too arbitrary can frustrate your audience.

Another issue is that we are very good at assigning intent to things that have none. Who hasn’t stubbed their toe on a chair, and then been angry with the chair for being there? Or, to use an example from my own life, I have to confess that I feel a debt of gratitude towards the car I was t-boned in. After all, I walked away in one piece, and I might not have.

Did the car do anything to deserve my thanks? Did the chair do anything to deserve my anger? No. This is an anthropomorphizing tendency, where we project our own intents onto something from the outside. These inanimate objects simply are. They are not actors that can be good or evil on their own, although their creation and use might be good or evil.

If I read something like Blindsight, there is the question of whether or not we should assign moral agency to the aliens, which are incomprehensible to us and have no intelligence. In a way, they are depicted as being truly eldritch, and above good and evil, in that they cannot have intents or choose to do anything. Is an intelligent, but not conscious alien a moral actor? Maybe, maybe not, but if they harmed us, we would fear and hate them all the same, and there is likely nothing alien about the feelings and intents we would ascribe to them.

I do think that audiences can make that distinction.

A while ago I read Unto Leviathan by Richard Paul Russo, which was about some people on a Catholic generation ship encountering a dangerous alien force. The aliens were inscrutable and frightening, and they massacred people they came across. It was very scary, to me, and they felt truly unknown.

Then, I had an online argument with Seth Dickinson, author of the (very good) book Exordia, who insisted that the aliens were, in fact biblical demons. He had some textual evidence for this, and I had my own explanation, and neither of us persuaded the other. I still don’t think I was wrong, but I think I was arguing in bad faith.

I didn’t want the aliens in Unto Leviathan to be demons, because I thought that the prospect was incredibly boring, and I think that the reason it was boring is because it was easy to understand the intent of demons. There is something about the unknown that is far more frightening than the simple explanation that a thing is simply evil.

I wanted the horrifying thing to be beyond good and evil, because evil feels too simple. Especially an unmotivated, inherent evil. It is frightening to think that someone may wish you harm for no good reason, because they are simply evil, but it is easy to understand. That, I think, is what people want out of eldritch horror: something that is, perhaps, evil in its actions, but which they cannot understand in their usual terms and ideas of evil.

Unfortunately, I think that I might always be disappointed.