She's a savior to some (the slaves) and a villain to others (the masters). Depends on POV.

Truth. But relativism at its worst. Sry :/

Thanks for your input, I usually bring up relativism myself too!

Utilitarian? I choose tens of millions of shaved slaves on planetos over the hundreds of masters.

Is virtue your concern? Dany has many, and with restraint is more virtuous than the masters, in many virtues but also morals.

Humanist? Def anti slavery.

Protestant? Do your own fucking labor.

Catholic? Slavery is immoral. Esp Chattanooga and permanent.

Jewish? Def kill the masters.

Muslim? The dragons r actually animals, not banned mass murder weapons. Just peace is important. Dany, with restraint, is a good thing.

Vedic in any way? That's their karma. Kill the masters if that's their fate, or at least don't work in any way to keep them in power if you're nonviolent.

Anarchist? Fuck the queen but yay daenaerys.

Stoic? Fuck the abusive masters.

Democratic above all else and in your morals? It's a step up.

Pirate? Get it girl.

Nihilist? Fuck it all.

*Polytheisms tend to have varying subsets of morality and ethics aren't locked into the beliefs themselves.

I'd say, and please pose to me any philosophy or religion unmentioned here, it's widely enough considered, even one could say objectively through rigorous analysis over thousands of years, that slavery is worth fighting against, and at the very least not something to fight to keep. It's worth shedding some blood over to most ppl and the masters aren't worth any blood.

She's a savior to some (the slaves) and a villain to others (the masters). Depends on POV.

Truth. But relativism at its worst. Sry :/

Thanks for your input, I usually bring up relativism myself too!

Utilitarian? I choose tens of millions of shaved slaves on planetos over the hundreds of masters.

Is virtue your concern? Dany has many, and with restraint is more virtuous than the masters, in many virtues but also morals.

Humanist? Def anti slavery.

Protestant? Do your own fucking labor.

Catholic? Slavery is immoral. Esp chattle and permanent.

Jewish? Def kill the masters.

Muslim? The dragons r actually animals, not banned mass murder weapons. Just peace is important. Dany, with restraint, is a good thing.

Vedic in any way? That's their karma. Kill the masters if that's their fate, or at least don't work in any way to keep them in power if you're nonviolent.

Anarchist? Fuck the queen but yay daenaerys.

Stoic? Fuck the abusive masters.

Democratic above all else and in your morals? It's a step up.

Pirate? Get it girl.

Nihilist? Fuck it all.

*Polytheisms tend to have varying subsets of morality and ethics aren't locked into the beliefs themselves.

I'd say, and please pose to me any philosophy or religion unmentioned here, it's widely enough considered, even one could say objectively through rigorous analysis over thousands of years, that slavery is worth fighting against, and at the very least not something to fight to keep. It's worth shedding some blood over to most ppl and the masters aren't worth any blood.

Relativism is just relativism. I don't see why pointing out that some would have different POVs is relativism at its worst.

If Dany helps destroy the WWs she will be a villain to them. But to the living, she'll be a savior. But what if the majority of people who benefit dictates the morality of it and the WWs and their zombies outnumber the living? Will Dany be a villian because she saves the minority (the living) at the expense of the majority (the zombies)?

Relativism is just relativism. I don't see why pointing out that some would have different POVs is relativism at its worst.

If Dany helps destroy the WWs she will be a villain to them. But to the living, she'll be a savior. But what if the majority of people who benefit dictates the morality of it and the WWs and their zombies outnumber the living? Will Dany be a villian because she saves the minority (the living) at the expense of the majority (the zombies)?

First of all, I think we're miscommunicating and it's my bad!! I'm using villain interchangeably with evil, which I shouldn't have done! Villain-hero dichotomy inherently carries subjectivity. Good-Evil can be subjective or objective(though getting the objective answer is muchhhhh harder!) I'm sorry for messing up this thread that way!!!!!!

I'm going to address the rest of my argument in terms of good and evil, for the sake of further conversation, but I know you said everything you did based on villain-hero! (And because I already wrote most of it when I noticed my own mistake lol)

I say at its worst because the greatest danger of relativism is saying that a perspective like the masters' is valid bc they exist and have a POV. It's very tempting, bc most of these ethics are based on validating the perspective of all conscious beings, I know mine are, but with our inclination to see all sides, empathize, sympathize and be fair, we shouldn't allow it to blind us.

I'm sorry but not sorry- their perspective doesn't count, IMO. Even from an unbiased utilitarian view, their good lives are so heavily outweighed by the many slaves. The only way to validate them is to advocate that sovereignty is valid when it means who has the power to execute people rules, and even then Dany is just as valid or good of a ruler. With the most monarchistic, feudal, oligarchical view, Dany has an even greater right.

The WW were brought up so I'm gonna go there....maybe put it in a diff thread later? I donno, it's been done. TANGENT WARNING! (I come BK to Dany later on in it).

.............,.....
WW:

1. Utilitarianism isn't just the #s it's a complex equation of greatest good for the greatest number. (Hard to quantify globally, but still determinable in a single given case). In order to determine if the WW (or Dany) are good in the utilitarian sense, or virtuous or moral, we have to consider whether life as a wight is a good one, first; and what the WW's values and goal are (which we don't really know). It may very well turn out the WW are the good, and humans are relatively more evil, and I think GRRM will make it at least debatable by the end of the books, when and if, but we'll see with GoT. My arguments don't express what I think he meant but are an attempt at a rather academic analysis.

(I). Since the likely answer is wights have no consciousness at all, then only the WW count and that's so few it's hard to argue their good lives are worth more than all humans combined and weighted.

(Ii) Personally, I try not to value humans above all other life. And the WW strongly implicate environmentalism! If the WW were to do it all, make the world a new Eden, amoral nature that isn't as twisted (nor as creative) as we are, and would never be evil to their own, I might be down! But the WW bring TOTAL COLD, most life doesn't grow if it's always winter everywhere, after life had developed in mostly warm. A few evergreens and mammals, and the number of wights (that is, if their lives are good) is still less than all life on planetos, even if all humans become happy-go-lucky wights. (Again by all accts wights are not consciousness). It depends on the vague conclusion of how good or bad life is for the humans on Planetos. If the WW are driven only by the goodness in the original intent of the magic from the CotF there is likely an environmentalism aspect to their metaphor and purpose.

Some days I think I'm down with our extinction, when it comes, bc of our damage, so now you know my bias! Some days though, I just want to make sure I'm on the ark to Mars. It's a DEEP ambivalence for me, which is why I enjoy discussions of morality and ethics.

Anyway, Planetos humans cause less environmental destruction than we do, to whatever degree. Not to mention part of that original WW intent was pure destruction of humans, not love for the environment of the Children and the Weirwoods on whom they turned.

2. Similar arguments apply to virtuistic philosophies, religious morality (both ours and Planetos religions!) and other philosophies. We would need to know their values and goals, the degree to which they can feel suffering (which isn't the same as pain). We just don't have this information. Still, their low numbers aren't in their favor in these schools of thought either.

.......
WW and Dany

3/A. If anything, human acts like chattle slavery, rape, etc are a reason to argue For the WW as objective good, but not for saying Dany is bad or objectively villainous, to return to the point. That would mean we determined humans are more bad than good (if we're to lose the ethics comparison against the WW), which makes Dany an even better human compared to the masters....

.....
Dany:

B. Yes, POV changed the opinion of each character on Dany. But we as viewers are not the masters of the slaves, we are third parties.

C. As long as Dany is precise in targeting, as she was using the Unsullied (maybe not in every use of the dragons tho), she can easily be considered good. Westeros has been at war on and off for several years, would continue to be at war whether she was there or not (and destroyed by WW probably), and will see war again long after she's gone if they survive. She might even bring peace after. While we can say war is objectively a bad choice, ethically, because it is so normal, Dany must be judged in the context of her environment.

At this point, Dany bears some interesting resemblances to Chingis Khan (you all probably know him as Genghis...). He has a terrible reputation in the West, but the Mongols revere him and when you start to look into his policies, he had some pretty enlightened ideas.

After his father, who was the chief of his clan, was killed by enemies, Temujin (as Chingis was known as a kid) and his family fled to the wilderness and barely managed to survive. Temujin is reputed to have killed his older brother at around age 12. Temujin was eventually enslaved by a rival clan, broke free with the help of a powerful totem animal (in his case, the wolf), and married the woman he'd been engaged to as a child. Then she was kidnapped, he formed an alliance with another clan to get her back, and that kicked off his sweeping conquest of the known world.

He was well known for descending on cities and pillaging and destroying, but would leave cities intact if they surrendered. He would also accept the fealty of certain former enemies. If they betrayed him, however, they were executed, as were those who would not, as Dany might put it, bend the knee. He subsequently established one of the more enlightened, pluralistic, religiously tolerant regimes of the Middle Ages, but he enforced very strict policies about fealty and betrayal and codes of hospitality.

Dany's story parallels Chingis' in broad strokes - dispossessed of her inheritance after the murder of her father, cast out, essentially sold into slavery, responsible for her older brother's death, the loss of a spouse that eventually propels her into the role of conqueror with the help of magic animals and unlikely alliances, and pretty strict codes about loyalty. Oh, and of course, an enormous army of the most skilled horsemen on the planet.

I don't understand why people insist on labeling Dany as entitled or seeing her as a less satisfying female character than the more traditional female characters. Yes, even Arya and Brienne are more traditional in the sense that girls-with-swords have been done many times in fantasy - but women who are unrepentant conquerors have not. I find Dany interesting for exactly this reason. She's doing what the real world's most successful conqueror did when he established a new world order in Eurasia. She's giving the conquered a choice, and she's taking them at their word about their intentions towards her. And you have to wonder how long it would take any of the other characters in this story to deploy dragons if they had them - can you imagine Tywin with dragons? Cersei? Olenna? Ellaria? Robert? Any of them would use them, maybe some with greater restraint than others, but soldiers and civilians alike would die in dragon flames. Jon is probably the only character who would not use them in battle against other humans; he'd just fly north to roast the White Walkers. So the ire directed at Dany from some quarters seems to hold her to a unique and frankly unrealistic standard. She's doing what conquerors do. Her early life experiences taught her that brutality is inevitable and that if you're going to survive and thrive, you have to be pretty demanding and assertive. She struggles to reconcile that lived reality with her own impulses towards being kinder and striving to create a less brutal world. But she's up against the pragmatic understanding that you can't make new rules without first playing by the rules of the system you want to break. It reads as realistic to me.

I don't love or idolize Dany, but I root for her, maybe as much because of this moral ambiguity as in spite of it.

At this point, Dany bears some interesting resemblances to Chingis Khan (you all probably know him as Genghis...). He has a terrible reputation in the West, but the Mongols revere him and when you start to look into his policies, he had some pretty enlightened ideas.

.....

Great post, I love how you framed them both.

I don't understand why people insist on labeling Dany as entitled or seeing her as a less satisfying female character than the more traditional female characters. Yes, even Arya and Brienne are more traditional in the sense that girls-with-swords have been done many times in fantasy - but women who are unrepentant conquerors have not. I find Dany interesting for exactly this reason. She's doing what the real world's most successful conqueror did when he established a new world order in Eurasia. She's giving the conquered a choice, and she's taking them at their word about their intentions towards her. And you have to wonder how long it would take any of the other characters in this story to deploy dragons if they had them - can you imagine Tywin with dragons? Cersei? Olenna? Ellaria? Robert? Any of them would use them, maybe some with greater restraint than others, but soldiers and civilians alike would die in dragon flames. Jon is probably the only character who would not use them in battle against other humans; he'd just fly north to roast the White Walkers. So the ire directed at Dany from some quarters seems to hold her to a unique and frankly unrealistic standard. She's doing what conquerors do. Her early life experiences taught her that brutality is inevitable and that if you're going to survive and thrive, you have to be pretty demanding and assertive. She struggles to reconcile that lived reality with her own impulses towards being kinder and striving to create a less brutal world. But she's up against the pragmatic understanding that you can't make new rules without first playing by the rules of the system you want to break. It reads as realistic to me.

I don't love or idolize Dany, but I root for her, maybe as much because of this moral ambiguity as in spite of it.

You also covered these points well, thoroughly laid out. I agree, many of the viewpoints about Dany, across the range, are a result of our own culture exposure and dispositions. The ethics of violence in that world are very different, or many reasons. As are the gender dynamics.