An Unwilling Hero

Orbit Unlimited, part four, 9.

On Rustum, Mayor Theron Wolfe explains to Jan Svoboda why he, Wolfe, has pressured Svoboda into becoming a hero:

"'Now that the initial struggle to survive is past, each family has retreated more and more into its own selfish concerns. We can't have that. Man can't live alone. The lost, the sick, the weak, and poor have got to be helped, or how can we depend on their help when our own luck runs out?'" (p. 157)

Too right. Those who believe that morality is a list of divine commands ask secularists where we get our morality from. I reply that we have been naturally selected to help others either because they bear the same genes or because they might help us in return and that we experience this latter motivation as moral obligation, not as calculating self-interest, which is what it sounds like if it is expressed in purely evolutionary terms as I have just done. But there is also a countervailing tendency towards narrow self-interest and Wolfe schemes to shame Rustumites out of this!

(If you see children suffering, do you think, "This must not happen to any children?" or "This must not happen to my children?" The latter can entail that whatever it is must continue happening to someone else's children.)

Wolfe's manipulativeness matches that of Mayor John Amalfi in James Blish's Cities In Flight.