Virtue in The Lord of the Rings: Part II
I’ve been examining the virtue ethics in The Lord of the Rings. In Part 1, I sketched an overview of how differently Tolkien’s characters think and make decisions as compared to the modern self. Now we are going to start zooming in on certain characters in particular. Our first character study will be Elrond, because I believe he is a character particularly difficult to grasp with modern sensibilities. However, the virtue I want to attribute to Elrond is not necessarily one you will find in traditional lists of virtues (unless I am being obtuse). I think rather, in some ways, it has become a virtue because of the breakdown of how we think and talk about morality in modern society, and I like to think that Immanuel Kant would have called it one of the chiefs of all virtues (even though he was not a virtue ethicist). It is the virtue of respecting autonomy.
When people list their favorite characters from LOTR, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Elrond make the short list. I don’t think it’s because readers don’t like him, but because he is less “shiny” of a character. In fact, he often is the butt of jokes in the LOTR fandom, the most common two being 1) no one listens to him and 2) he should have pushed Isildur into the lava. I think when we examine the questions behind these two jokes we actually get to the core of Elrond’s character, and perhaps why he is under-appreciated.
Let’s start with number two first. I cannot say whether people who joke about pushing Isildur into the lava to destroy the one ring, really believe that he should have or not. But I have to admit the thought has definitely crossed my mind. We can’t help but watch that scene in the movie (he does counsel Isildur to destroy it in the books but it does not say they are literally inside Mount Doom together) and think that so much evil could have been prevented in that moment. If Isildur didn’t have the strength of will to destroy it, then shouldn’t Elrond have intervened in some way? But would it have been right? What would that action have done to Elrond, himself? I think we are far too accustomed as a society to tell ourselves that some evil actions are acceptable for the greater good (particularly because it has been preached to us). But in Elrond’s situation we need to remember a few things:
1. He didn’t know what the future would bring. Sauron was dead. It is pretty clear that nobody knew at that point how much his life force was tied to his ring, or that he would be able to return.
2. To push Isildur into the lava, or even to try to physically force him to relinquish it would be to override Isildur’s autonomy. And that is exactly what Sauron was known for—bending people to his will and enslaving them.
It is significant that in the final climax, Tolkien spares Sam such a choice. It is a mercy for Sam that Gollum comes and forces the ring from Frodo, and that decision destroys both him and the ring. Such an action would have destroyed Sam as well (whether physically or spiritually) and I think it would have destroyed Elrond.
Allowing Isildur to make his own decision to keep the ring was not a weak moment for Elrond. It took incredible strength. And when we begin to look for it, we see that respecting other people’s autonomy is a theme for Elrond throughout the series, and a mark of his goodness and his wisdom.
This is where the first joke comes in—that nobody listens to him. He gives his wisdom and counsel, but allows people to make their own decisions.
• When Thorin and company come to Rivendell, Tolkien notes that Elrond does not approve of Dwarves’ love for gold. Still he gives them aid and allows them to leave, with tragic consequences for Thorin and his house.
• When the Fellowship is being formed, Elrond is set against Merry and (especially) Pippin going because he fears the Shire will be in danger soon and wants to send them back. It is good that he yields, because Merry and Pippin play a valuable role in the redemption of Boromir and the salvation of Faramir and Eowyn. But Elrond wasn’t wrong about the Shire, either, as (in the books) the hobbits return to find it in peril.
• Only after Frodo volunteers to take the ring, does Elrond reveal that, “‘I think that this task is appointed for you, Frodo; and that if you do not find a way, no one will (Tolkien, 303)’”
• When the Fellowship is formed, he makes sure they are all going of their own free will, every step of the way: “The others go with him as free companions, to help him on his way. You may tarry, or come back, or turn aside into other paths, as chance allows…no oath or bond is laid on you to go further than you will. For you do not yet know the strength of your hearts, and you cannot foresee what each may meet upon the road (Tolkien, 315).”
• The more I think about it, the more I have to admire this aspect of Elrond’s character. I don’t know whether you have ever been tempted to override another person’s autonomous agency, but in all transparency, I have. It is incredibly hard to watch people make decisions which you think will yield destructive fruit. It is agonizing to watch people you love do so. Yet, some have argued that violating another person’s will is one of the defining elements of evil.
• In her landmark defense addressing the problem of evil, philosopher Eleonore Stump notes: “The stronger the human willing is that is violated in the evil a person endures, the worse the evil seems. Evils that (as we say) break the will of their victim…are horrifying to us ( 7).” Stump also notes that, “It is important to be clear that not every contravention of a person’s will counts as a violation of his will. Violating a person’s will is more nearly a contravention of something at the core of a person’s volitional structure. For want of a better term, I will call this core ‘the desires of the heart (7).’”
This is part of the danger and horror of the ring. It becomes the core desire of a person’s heart, so that forcing it from them, even for their own good, becomes an act of violating their core desires.
Unfortunately, this whole concept of respecting the autonomy and agency of others is becoming foreign to our society, which not only leans too quickly toward utilitarianism (as if good and evil were quantifiable calculations), but has built a whole economy around manipulation of other people. There are two reasons for this (both explained and expounded on much more eloquently in Alasdair MacIntyre’s book After Virtue).
The first reason is that the overwhelming acceptance of emotivism((basically the concept that moral judgments are expressions of emotion) in our society has made manipulation of others a societal norm. “For evaluative utterance can in the end have no point or use but the expression of my own feelings or attitudes and the transformation of the feelings and attitudes of others. I cannot genuinely appeal to impersonal criteria, for there are no impersonal criteria. I may think that I so appeal and others may think that I so appeal, but these thoughts will always be mistakes. The sole reality of distinctively moral discourse is the attempt of one will to align the attitudes, feelings, preferences and choices of another with its own (MacIntyre, 24).” In other words, if I can’t appeal to anything objective for my morals, and my emotions are my morals, and I want someone to agree with me, I have no grounds to reason, only manipulate them into feeling the way I feel.
The second reason for the prevalence of manipulation is that the “morally neutral” bureaucracy that our economic system is founded on must use manipulation to achieve its goals because any real telos has been stripped from it (MacIntyre, 74). For the only telos it can claim is productivity and efficiency, neither of which is a Good in itself. The typical manager cannot appeal to common goods (human flourishing, the good of the community, the good of the family, justice, honor, integrity) because all of these are disputed. Thus, as MacIntyre says, the chief function of the manager becomes “that of controlling behavior and suppressing conflict…(27)”
“For the whole concept of effectiveness is, as I noticed earlier, inseparable from a mode of human existence in which the contrivance of means is in central part the manipulation of human beings into compliant patterns of behavior; and it is by appeal to his own effectiveness in this respect that the manager claims authority within the manipulative mode (MacIntyre, 74).”
Here is where we bring in Kant. There are as many as six different versions of Immanuel Kant’s famous categorical imperative, but one of them goes as follows: “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means (Kant, 496).”
There is much debate about what he meant by that. Alasdair MacIntyre interprets him as follows: “For Kant…the difference between a human relationship uninformed by morality and one so informed is precisely the difference between one in which each person treats the other primarily as a means to his or her ends and one in which each treats the other as an end. To treat someone else as an end is to offer them what I take to be good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, but to leave it to them to evaluate those reasons. It is to be unwilling to influence another except by reasons which that other he or she judges to be good (23).”
What would it mean in our lives if we never treated another human being only as a means to get what we want (whether that be happiness, pleasure, power, success, attention etc.)? This is what we see in Elrond, and it is all the more remarkable because of the thousands of years of history that he has seen. His wisdom is that he does not revert to control or manipulation. He sees men, dwarves, and hobbits, even with their incredibly short life spans, as autonomous beings worthy of respect who need to make their own choices.
Sources:
Kant, Immanuel. “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.” Ethical Theory: An Anthology. Russ Shafer-Landau. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, 496.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
Stump, Eleonore. Wandering in Darkness. Oxford University Press, 2010.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Ring. Ballantine Books, 1994.
About the Author
Elisabeth Dawson is an award-winning author of science fiction and fantasy. Raised in the remote mountains of New Guinea, she has lived in California, Florida, the Bahamas, and Brasil. She currently lives in Idaho with her best friend and roommate, drinking lots of tea and learning crochet. She holds a B.A. in Biblical Studies and is currently pursuing a Master’s of Philosophy at Biola University.
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