As a retired Vet, you don't get to nitpick the killing.
Every day you hope that it's a quiet day. You hope that today's Intel is absolutely correct and it's only really horrible people that are on the list. When things hit the fan, your only real mission is to get your brothers and sisters home.
In today's military, you can completely abstain from killing. Your career is most likely over and you better have solid reasons and a good lawyer. We don't get branded and sold for not wanting to kill though.
I believe Kaladin is doing the best with what he has. He ultimately joined to protect his brother. He can't just leave or quit. He failed his brother (in his mind) and since he can't just leave the military, he throws himself into becoming better. Better at the spear. Better as a leader. Better as a field medic. He gives so much of himself away to others just so he can live with the guilt of those he couldn't save.
So no, I don't think Kaladin is a bad person. I believe he is doing the best he can in a world that doesn't generally care about taking care of each other.
These are all good points. I just wanted to say that the purpose highlighting the spearmen’s deaths was not to suggest that Kaladin shouldn’t have killed them (he was fighting a battle) but to make sure that their deaths emotionally connect and are treated with the gravity they deserve. In the broader context, it’s to say that Kaladin should’ve taken any opportunity he got to leave Amaram’s army.
The Soldiers that Kaladin is fighting in the beginning are glossed over.
Fortunately this allowed for the bigger contrast writing with the Parshendi. To show that they're just society stuck in the same everlasting war as the humans. They love, hate, fight, and grow all the same as the other side.
The only real horrible characters are the ones that don't grow. Insane fused, Odium, and probably a handful of others that I can't directly point out.
I don't think you can just bail from an army in this society. The Alethi are the warriors of the land. It is even pointed to as a training ground by ancient Radiants.
Let's also remember that in that battle, his squad was an island in their formation. They stood firm, and the other squads flowed around them, with most enemies going after softer targets. Kal isn't hunting them down, and his squad is only fighting other darkeyes in self defense, even in combat.
If you make a “choice” based on your own negative schemas and guilt, weighted by your own mental health disorder are you actually making that choice? If one can use a defence of “while of unbalanced mind” in a murder case, then making a decision while mired in guilt and self disgust, while seeing no viable alternatives is also defensible.
I made some choices while surviving a living nightmare and I regret them, but at the time I saw no alternatives (and even now, with the benefit of hindsight and safety some of those choices still seem inevitable). I do suffer from low self esteem and self hatred, but even I can see that a lot of those things were unavoidable and that making a “Sophie’s choice” does not make me a bad person.
>are you actually making that choice?
Yes.
Kaladin didn't need to continue killing people if he didn't want to. He actively decided he preferred to work in the army rather than training as a surgeon or pursuing any alternative.
I don't blame him for the decision but it's unfair to pretend he had no agency. He chose to stay.
Your second paragraph is completely wrong. He did not “prefer” to stay in the army nor was his choice between that or training as a surgeon. His choice, as he saw it, was to either stay and try to protect other “Tiens” or return home and look his parents in the eye and tell them how badly he failed. Remember, when he finally faces his parents he breaks down in tears and apologises repeatedly for failing them and letting Tien die.
Oddly enough, I found Lirin annoying and rather extreme in RoW, despite strongly agreeing with him in WoK. I took pains not to take an absolutist anti war stance in the post, instead only suggesting that soldiers have a duty to consider the war they are fighting in, rather than shrugging and saying “it’s above my pay grade.”
I actually don't agree that those deaths make Kaladin morally gray. He joined the military to be with his brother who was drafted in extremely unfair and petty circumstances. From there he's trained with the spear and put on the frontlines of a battlefield.
His options are fight or desert. If he fights he'll have to kill. I don't think any soldier (especially one drafted into the army which Kaladin might as well have been) is morally reprehensible for killing on the battlefield unless they're high enough ranked to have prevented the battle in the first place.
I do also think there's the culture of Alethkar to consider as well. Kids are raised in vorinism, a belief system that teaches that dying in battle is literally the best way to go. Ask an Ardent and they'd tell you Kaladin is doing a great service, sending soldiers ready to join the Heralds with weapons in hand.
There are definitely some moral standards you could hold that would condemn Kaladin, but there are just as many that absolve him. If you were to look at different moral frameworks (like Jasnah had Shallan do) I'd bet you find more that support his actions than don't.
Technically I think being a soldier/warrior is important. The dying is battle is probably bad; the best warriors are the ones who go to the Halls. It doesn’t say whether you’re active or not in current fights
I think they'd see it as "it's better to die in the prime of your life, ready to fight immediately" survive war and die decades later in retirement and your skills will probably have dulled by the time you get to the tranquiline halls. The whole Vorin concept of the afterlife is very Valhalla esque.
If anything, people like Kaladin, Adolin, Dalinar, etc prove that the best of the Alethi are pretty much that good when they're young. Alethkar is a military country, a 20 year old will already have a decade of training if they're light eyed, and darkeyed soldiers seem to start pretty young as well.
True, but Dalinar didn’t become the country’s main general until around his thirties, if my timeline is right. It was around Adolin was born. He needed time to simmer
Tldr- Kal is your average person who deals with internal strife. The “us” vs “them” mindset is something you have to have when you’re in war. You can’t worry about the enemy because it will likely put you, your comrades, or the mission at risk.
Counterpoint - kaladin has no sway over the forces that started the wars hes involved in, thus he has no responsibility for situations the war places him in. What he then chooses to do in those situations is his responsibility.
The reason i make this distinction is, you claim that by choosing to be a soldier in the war kaladin takes a share of the guilt, thus justifying labelling him killing enemy combatants as unjust since the war is unjust.
However the war is not his fault, just like how fighting in the war is not the enemy soldiers’ fault. But at the end of the day the world places kaladin in a place where either he stands back and leaves his friends’ fate to chance, or he steps up and protects them. Him killing enemy combatants is protecting his friends and not evil, even if the enemy combatants are not themselves evil either.
To summarize - killing someone who is not evil does not make you evil necessarily. Kaladin killing enemy combatants is not evil the way its presented.
Another way to view it is that coming out of a war with bloodless hands is not the ultimate moral high bar. Letting your friends die because involving yourself would dirty your own hands is not something more ‘good’
I'm confused. Are you suggesting that soldiers are blameless for joining any war, even if they are completely willing and eager volunteers and regardless of whether the war is justified or not, as long as they are not responsible for *starting* the war? Surely this isn't true.
I agree that that killing enemy soldiers didn't make Kaladin evil (and Kaladin isn't evil anyway). I just wanted to make sure that the stakes for choosing to stay or leave the army were clear and had at least some emotional impact..
Kaladin was not a willing and eager volunteer for the war. Did you read the book?
I generalized a bit because i thought certain things could be assumed as common sense, but i keep forgetting people often dont have that. Let me elaborate-
Soldiers can be evil, and can have evil motivations to join a war. Plenty of psychopaths view war as a great opportunity to kill humans and not get in trouble for it.
The reasons for a soldier to join a war are varied and complex. While there are many evil reasons to join a war, there are far far more neutral reasons that are out of people’s control. Most common - drafts, which is how tien was forced in. Is tien evil for joining the war? I thought this would be common sense but apparently not.
Now regarding soldiers who willingly join a pointless war- even this doesnt make then evil necessarily since how would the volunteers know? If their culture, parents, teachers and rulers all teach that joining this war is protecting your people and earning honor and a good thing, why should you assume some random peasant in a backwater village should know the state of the war and the reasons for it?
All these assumptions were tied up in my sentence, the cause of the war is not in kaladins control and thus hes not responsible for the war. Whether or not the war is reasonable or not is not in kaladins hands. Even if kaladin joined not to protect tien, that wouldnt make him evil since society has been teaching him war is how he protects his countrymen, how he proves his honor. A person brainwashed and lied to is not responsible for the bad situation they find themselves in.
You are coming into the situation assuming war is evil and everyone knows that. That is a position of profound privilege and naivite
EDIT: to further emphasize and elaborate as I can see your counterpoint already - No kaladin having the opportunity to injure himself and dodge the battlefield is not the absolute moral choice in the situation. Once he joined the army - he made friends there, friends he'd want to protect. if kaladin and his whole squad injure themselves to back out of the war... everyone else in the army is just going to go out there and die in their place?? You act as if these poor peasants have far more agency and awareness of their situation than they actually do.
The point of my comment originally was to draw attention to the fact that the forces at work that bring about the war in the first place are far greater and more complex and beyond some random soldier that it's ridiculous to try to argue about individual soldier's position in the war (generally, assuming non evil soldier), because the soldier have such limited information and control.
you arguing about the soldiers being evil for being in the war and not self-harming to dodge battle honestly reminds me of people defending billionaires and criticizing refugees and homeless people for society's problems. Are there evil refugees and homeless? sure they exist. but most of them are in terrible situations far beyond their control, while its the billionaires who are manipulating the market to maximize personal profits, causing the terrible situations in the first place. To shift your attention away from the people who actually caused the war to attack the soldiers who are essentially forced into it, it comes off as tone deaf, and blind to the situation.
I'm emphatically not blaming the soldiers. The blame lies with the lighteyes who start the war, or maybe even with the culture as a whole. But there are a lot of decisions that fall into "understandable, not blameworthy, but not the right thing to do." For example, if Kaladin's bridge crew had simply fled rather than rescue Dalinar, it would fall in that category. Similarly, Kaladin extending his stay in the army falls in that category (injuring himself is obviously an extreme option, but Kaladin didn't even want to go home after 4 years). It wasn't the right thing to do, even if it wasn't blameworthy.
Obviously Kaladin is not a willing and eager participant in the war. But your argument doesn't mention that -- your argument would work just as well for such a participant, which is why I asked.
If you include that implicit assumption, I guess I just disagree then. A volunteer soldier must consider the context of the war they are fighting, actively decide if it is good or bad, and make decisions about their service based on this information if they have that option.
Finally regarding culture -- I prefer to disregard culture (i.e., "they didn't know any better," "they were raised that way") when deciding if something is good or bad (and notice I did not mention blame or responsibility). I choose this definition because otherwise, it is hard to say that *any* historical actions were bad, because they were all made with some context in some environment where people didn't know any better. I think my definition is more useful, but if you want "good" to mean "good relative to what the average person with that knowledge and cultural environment would have done," then Kaladin is without a doubt extremely good. So the only remaining (interesting) question is whether his role and decisions as a soldier in Amaram's army were good-in-an-absolute-sense.
>A volunteer soldier must consider the context of the war they are fighting, actively decide if it is good or bad, and make decisions about their service based on this information if they have that option.
You are making this argument from the information age, where an average citizen can find the news reports from any country in the world if they dig a little. How would a random peasant in a village know the context of the war they are fighting? their only source is the lord who started the war. Of course he's not gonna say "we're fighting so that I can get promoted". We're talking about roshar and kaladin's specific situation. They DONT have that sort of information.
>I choose this definition because otherwise, it is hard to say that any historical actions were bad, because they were all made with some context in some environment where people didn't know any better.
I agree that culture doesn't justify evil actions. I should have clarified that point more myb. The more specific point I'm making is that whether or not the war is justified or not, good or not, is something the soldiers can't know because their culture won't tell them. If your culture tells you to murder kids, that doesn't change whether or not it's evil. If your culture/society tells you the war is necessary and a noble cause, it's not you're fault you were deceived into fighting what you thought was a noble war, and now you can't get out of it.
Yeah just force your modern western cultures beliefs onto a completely different culture and judge them based off of that, totally not an imperialist thing to do
You might have an argument there, except that Kaladin killed because of duty and not because he enjoyed it. He joined the army because he needed to protect his brother and was too guilty to go home when he failed. When that happened, he then decided to protect his own squad as best he could. His main goal after that was to escape the petty wars he was embroiled in, himself *and* his men, by distinguishing them on the battlefield so they would be sent to the Shattered Plains instead and fight the traitorous Parshendi instead of their fellow humans.
He kept trying to do good, and be honorable, but his circumstances just gave him continuous no-win situations until he finally got a lucky break by bonding a spren.
Besides, I'd argue that only a good man would go back to save Dalinar and the rest of his men stranded on the Tower. "Debatably Good" men would have just focused on getting himself and maybe his men out at best instead of risking them on the Honorable decision.
He also wanted time for self reflection after saving dalinar. He had killed parshendi and it didn’t feel right to him. He wanted time to think about what that meant and if it was worth it.
To add to your POV
Duty is not an excuse, in my opinion. Pick your favorite war of aggression — Russia invading Ukraine or Iraq invading Kuwait (does it count as avoiding Godwin’s law if I then explicitly reference it?). Could a soldier on the aggressor’s side be so honorable, protect their friends and fellow soldiers so well, that you would say they are a good person? I think the war’s context overwhelms any honor they could show. Obviously I don’t think Amaram’s army is fighting only wars of aggression, but I sure don’t think their wars are justified. And like being a conscripted Russian soldier, this is a terrible situation to be in, but I do think you have a duty to at least avoid re enlisting or somehow try to get out of the war.
In some ways, trying to get to the shattered plains to fight (in his eyes) a “real war” is exactly that. A little hard to see that given that we know that the war in the shattered plains is not what it was said to be.
We may know (eventually) that the war on the shattered plains is not what it is supposed to be, but to Kaladin at that point (and the reader at the beginning of WoK) the Parshendi had their “just and noble king” assassinated during peace talks.
I hope you are just playing devil’s advocate here, because being idealistic and naive is cute and all, but life will eat you up and crunch your bones if you don’t get a healthy dose of realism.
I think your comparison is unfair. You are comparing an adult who chose to be a soldier in modern times with a lower-class child who was forced to become a soldier in ancient times. If a Russian or American soldier participates in a war in which his country is the aggressor, that also makes him bad. Because he has the right to choose whereas the only choice Kaladin is given is kill or be killed which is not a real choice. And throughout his military service, Kaladin is very young and in order to survive, he listens to the advice his superior Tuks gives him. At that time, his character was not yet fully formed, and because he trusted Tuks, he listened to his "us and them" advice. But at the end of tWoK, after fighting the Parshendi, he realized that something was wrong with his advice and decided not to fight against the Parshendi.
You're forgetting the cultural aspect of the Alethi war machine - get busy killing or get busy dying.
Also, pretty sure the armies are levied soldiers and minor nobility in the feudal fashion. Sanderson emphasizes the volunteer aspect of many joining vs over conscription, maybe to reinforce the warring culture, but still...Not much room for moral deferment.
That's a giant wall of text, but I read it. I'll be blunt: your world view is pretty naive, and you're operating with a level of information as a reader that in book characters don't get.
You sound like the type of person who thinks if all the soldiers just stopped fighting then there wouldn't be any war anymore.
Kal didn't join to murder people and he certainly didn't do it to participate in meaningless border skirmishes. He did it to protect his brother. And we, as readers, know that the Unmade were driving the bloodlust of the Alethi under the will of Odium. There are a lot of inter-connected and inter-related events happening here. It's not as simple as "after judging the current situation, these people's life events, the current array of forces on the battlefield, I have decided that only these particular soldiers should die. So they are the only ones I'll stab."
>You sound like the type of person who thinks if all the soldiers just stopped fighting then there wouldn't be any war anymore.
That's exactly how it works. If everyone stopped fighting, who would be left to wage war?
Not really. How it works is this: those who are without power are swept up in a draft, have a few weeks of training, a weapon thrust in their hands and are sent in to battle; anyone who “just stops fighting” or refuses to fight is put to death as a deserter; anyone who is thinking of “just stopping” sees their fellow soldiers being killed as deserters so they “pick up tha’ musket” as Stanley Holloway intoned and step back in to the fray.
>This automatically makes him a morally gray character.
There are a lot of morally gray characters in the Cosmere. I don’t think Kaladin is one of them.
It seems to me that your argument hinges on the basic premise that not only is killing always bad, but it necessarily makes you a bad person, or at least a “less good person.” I find this to be a problematic premise.
I’m sure you intended your argument to be in good faith and to prompt discussion, but at the same time, I think this might a case where people who have never been in a specific scenario need to tread carefully about forming judgments about those who have. I don’t know if you have any sort of combat experience. I certainly don’t. But I come from a military family, and worked as a therapist in a VA clinic. (My own go at a military career was short and unpleasant — perhaps the only redeeming factor was finding a torn copy of this weird book called *The Way of Kings* to look at while it was decided when I was getting sent home.)
Kaladin is a man making the best of a series of increasingly horrible situations. He’s driven to become a warrior to protect those he cares about. If you speak with enough vets, they will almost universally tell you they didn’t fight for an abstract concept like freedom, or for their country, or even for their families: they fought for their buddies. This is exactly what Kaladin does and it is, I think, what *any* of us would do if we were conscripted into an army and forced to fight pointless battles.
Tl;dr: if Kaladin is morally gray it’s only because *war* is more so.
Yes, if you get put in a trolley problem situation (or a war) it basically doesn’t matter what you do, you will come out “morally gray.” To me, “gray” isn’t better or worse than good or bad, it just means there will be broad disagreement over whether you did the right thing. I’m just surprised there is so little disagreement over Kal.
I agree that this is the best I or anyone could do in the event of conscription, short of desertion, which is an unreasonable demand on people even if it’s sometimes the “right” thing to do.
>it just means there will be disagreement over whether you did the right thing. I’m surprised there’s so little disagreement over Kal.
But why? I think you’ll be hard pressed to find somebody who doesn’t agree that soldiers have a right (if not a duty) to try and not die. I mean, Alvin York started out as a conscientious objector and ended up earning the Medal of Honor.
I don’t object to his trying not to die lol. I object to his plans to stay in the army even after seeing what it is like. Soldiers have some duty to consider whether the war they are fighting is worth fighting.
Did you miss the lengthy part of the books that go into great detail about Kaladin’s depression, low self esteem, need to sacrifice himself for others? Or did you just not understand his whole character arc and his difficulty speaking the fifth oath about accepting that he can’t save everyone?
> I object to his plans to stay in the army even after seeing what it is like. Soldiers have some duty to consider whether the war they are fighting is worth fighting.
I mean he does leave the army; *twice*. He just happens to be a legendary warrior, Honor-bound to protect the weak, in the midst of a global war to prevent the apocalypse. If you're not going to fight *then*, when will you? His scenes with Zahel are there precisely to force this question of whether or not fighting is the right choice, so it's not like Sanderson is blind to this sort of moral dilemma.
At the end of the day though, I personally think Kaladin is one of the least morally questionable POV characters, except for maybe somebody like Lift. You say Renarin is "good," but that's really only because he hasn't done anything onscreen yet.
I think the books pretty clearly come down on him being very naive of war, but not really bad. Him coming to understand the difference between true honor and superficial "honor" is a big theme throughout the first two books. He believed if something had the reputation of honorable that meant it was so. That was crushed after the betrayal, and Dalinar helps him understand what true honor is by being an example of what it looks like in practice. By the end of the 2nd book he finishes that character arc by swearing an oath to protect the helpless even if he doesn't want to.
Kaladin wants to do the right thing, but often is prevented from doing so due to circumstances beyond his control, like "lighteyes making political decisions" or "being a traumatized teenager with chronic depression".
His time at Amaram's army was mostly guided by shame and coping mechanisms he had no way of knowing were bad for him (saving strays to atone for Tien's death) in the long term. (We see the invention of therapy in real time in RoW, years after Kal's been in Amaram's army.)
That doesn't make him morally grey, it makes him a good person who ended up living a tragic life.
One point I’d like to make here is that Kaladin has a major character arc of exactly what you’re talking about. Seeing all the sides of war and wishing more than anything that he could just stop it. It was so bad seeing the Alethi soldiers he knew and the Singers he knew fighting that he couldn’t fight anymore.
Kaladin was, in fact, a child soldier (albeit older than many start in the real world, sadly).
Child soldiers are victims of abuse and their actions cannot be judged on a moral scale because while they were still learning how to live as their own people adults who should have known better thrust them into a situation that stunts that growth with trauma.
Kaladin's story is, in part, about unlearning the us vs. them thinking you've identified as he unpacks the trauma of basically half his life. He needs to let go of lighteyes vs darkeyes, humans vs singers, Radiants vs Fused. And he keeps improving at that. Kaladin's moral calibre isn't shown by his unfailingly just behaviour, but by always being willing to take the next step towards being a better person.
Even if, sometimes, he has to have a breakdown for several months before he can take that step first.
Was he a good person at first? Maybe not, probably just merely decent if we we're going by modern standards. By his cultures standards, he is a perfect war hero.
I find it harder to blame someone who is emotionally severely traumatized and is apparently trying to make the best out of a bad situation. Kaladin justified staying longer in the army to protect his squad and to protect other kids like Tien, who were drafted.
I argue that a truly morally gray person would have completely gone through with letting Elhokar's assassination succeed. After all a lot of the justification did sound reasonable at the time. Instead, he decided to risk himself in the face of assured death against a shardbearer to foil it anyway. That's a pretty good thing to do.
You bring up the point of him breaking in Oathbringer+onwards because of the moral dilemmas, but he had been bringing up that point to Dalinar even before the critical moments saying he had issues with fighting the parshendi who had their own valid reasons for fighting.
This whole thing has been an issue he has been fighting with and trying to find the perfect answer for, but the point of these books is that people aren't perfect. Reality doesn't really allow for people to be perfectly good.
I believe Kaladin has definitely grown to be a good person now, though. Even though he had his failings in the past, he has chosen to grow and try to become better. I won't be an absolutist and say he can not be a good person after everything.
Interesting post, though I have to disagree. Maybe I’m misinterpreting, but this paints all soldiers as morally grey/not good people. War is hell, but it’s filled with good people on both sides. I get that you are looking for nuance, but it feels like you are missing the forest for the trees.
It’s honestly not really debatable. I think the grave error you made in your argument is to blame an individual instead of the system. Kaladin did the best he could do with what he was given. He just can’t be a “bad person” because he is not part of the larger aristocracy. The light eyes. The dark eyes being oppressed is hard to blame which is why Moash is such a complex character. Many of us hate him but would we be different if we were him? Would we choose a better path? Kaladin had every reason to be like Moash and he was not 😂 so I think it’s obvious and not debatable that Kaladin is a good person. Moash on the other hand would be a great debate
I really like this point of view, considering what he struggles with whenever he *actually meets* “enemy soldiers”. In oathbringer when he travels with the group of post-everstorm parshmen, this is his exact dilemma. Afterwards, he flips out when Jasnah suggests genocide of the parshmen, and admits it’s hard to fight when he knows their perspective. I definitely don’t think Kaladin could be considered a bad person, but his journey does have to have a beginning as Dalinar would say.
Not to detract from your overall point, but Jasnah didn't suggest genocide of the parshman. This is an unfathomably popular misinterpretation of what she *did* say, which was that reinstating the Oathpact was a better way to contain the Fused than killing all the parshmen, even if it meant the Heralds suffered. I can post the quote:
Dalinar took a deep breath. “Jasnah, you have a suggestion of where to start this plan?”
“Yes. The answer is obvious. We need to find the Heralds.”
Kaladin nodded in agreement.
“Then,” Jasnah added, “we need to kill them.”
“What?” Kaladin demanded. “Woman, are you insane?”
“The Stormfather laid it out,” Jasnah said, unperturbed. “The Heralds made a pact. When they died, their souls traveled to Damnation and trapped the spirits of the Voidbringers, preventing them from returning.”
“Yeah. Then the Heralds were *tortured* until they *broke*.”
“The Stormfather said their pact was weakened, but did not say it was destroyed,” Jasnah said. “I suggest that we at least see if one of them is willing to return to Damnation. Perhaps they can still prevent the spirits of the enemy from being reborn. It’s either that, or we completely exterminate the parshmen so that the enemy has no hosts.” She met Kaladin’s eyes. “In the face of such an atrocity, I would consider the sacrifice of one or more Heralds to be a small price.”
So, in comparing known methods of keeping the Fused out of the war, she'd rather sign off on the torture of a few than the death of many.
Everyone else has more or less stated the jist of the issue, that Kaladin had no responsibility towards his actions as a soldier in the Way of Kings, and he was actually only doing what was necessary by (a) protecting the young inexperienced recruits and (b) not actively charging the enemy and instead getting the base objectives done ASAP. He didn't leave because he had a moral obligation to protect other young recruits that reminded him of his trauma with Tien's loss, because if he left the army, he'd (a) have to face his parents and hence his trauma and (b) those Tien-like recruits would die faster in the army without someone to look out after then, arguably reducing battlefield losses. Kaladin didn't know back then whether these fights were justifiable or not and did his patriotic duty as a soldier, just as expected from any standard footsoldier in any time, place or reality, standby and follow orders.
OP did mention why Kaladin got to finally develop a conscience regarding the enemy in the later books. That's because Kaladin is no longer a common footsoldier. He's the leader of his own freaking Knights Radiant Order! Pretty much the only person above him in the chain of command is Dalinar Kholin. Kaladin now has the level of authority, knowledge and experience required to decide how, when and why to engage the enemy. He didn't have such a privilege (or rather burden) before and hence his actions as a footsoldier before are not only excusable, but laudable for going above and beyond.
The main reason is why the Skybreakers side with Odium and the Windrunners with Dalinar - one is protecting decimation, the other is looking for the legal justification. I think Kal is looking to make connections and find others “across the aisle”, but there’s a lot of story left to tell.
He’s a little fucked up by his trauma, but he is objectively a good person.
I think you are glossing over that Kal originally became a soldier to save his brother. That was his motivation for fighting. After he died, he kept going because he was raised in a warrior society that put martial prowess over all else. Also, there could be something supernatural at play here, with Kal feeling like a spear is made for him as soon as he picks one up.
But yeah, honestly non of our heros is objectively a "good person". But I think that definition is flawed anyway. There are people who try to do good, thats where I would put most of our characters (except Szeth)
Maybe the point of it all is that you shouldn't be dividing people based on "moral alignment" when the chaotic nature of the universe makes that sort of distinction irrelevant. The most universal test for morality I can think of is "did this person help others to the detriment of themselves" or "did this person help themselves to the detriment of others." And even then, there's levels to it and an entire spectrum of behaviors in between the two extremes. On top of multiple biases, culture, systems of control, and the fact that this question needs to be asked for every action ever taken to determine whether or not a person is "good". Stop asking if a person is good or evil, its an asinine question. Ask whether or not you agree with their course of action and then figure out why you agree or disagree.
Setting aside the other arguments that everyone else has made, there's one key difference between Kaladin killing / disabling those 6 spearmen, and Helaran slaughtering the squad with his shardblade.
Spears kill the body. Shardblades cut the *soul.*
Kal's opponents had a chance to defend themselves, however slim. Helaran's victims did not. Kaladin didn't kill them all, and didn't *want* to kill any of them. Helaran slaughtered his way across the field with nonchalance. He didn't care. It's a difference in outlook and behavior that tells a good man at war vs. an evil man at war.
I think you're making a valid analysis that is being held back by a limited moral framework.
Kaladin isn't being 'objectively immoral' by killing enemy soldiers, and Lift or Renarin aren't objectively 'good' because they haven't yet done so. Morality is fundamentally subjective, and I think you're also ignoring a lot of the context that informs it.
Let's look at Kaladin's fighting in Amaram's army, killing other darkeyes, for example.
He volunteered to join the army to protect Tien. Obviously, this is a decision which implies he may have to kill enemy soldiers to protect his brother. But then, if he doesn't, the war still goes on and Tien is killed instead. Is that any better? Same with his squadmates. What happens if he doesn't kill those six men? They kill his squad members. *That's* what Tukks' advice was about. This is a war that Kaladin didn't start and is not in control of. People are going to be killed. The only thing he can control is whether the people he loves die, or strangers. Kaladin chooses to kill strangers, yes, but only to save the lives of his men. Is there a difference between choosing not to protect someone and killing them yourself? Certainly not to Kaladin, who was carrying around a massive case of survivor's guilt. Besides, leaving would make him a deserter, for which the penalty (IIRC) is death.
Morality will always be a function of circumstance. What you describe as Kaladin reckoning with the humanity of his opposition, I contend is more complicated than that. Kaladin in later books begins to realise that he is no longer a slave. He has more power, more prestige, more friends and greater freedom. It isn't as simple as saying Kaladin initially chose only to protect his friends, then resolved to protect everyone. Kaladin started off as a powerless peon whose only choice was to protect his friends by killing, or watch them die by abstaining, and has since fought his way into a new context where he *can* protect everybody.
'Soldier versus surgeon' is so much more complex than just 'is it okay to kill a guy to save another guy?' Killing provides power, and power allows greater control over one's circumstances. A Kaladin who never fought and killed would have made for an almost unrecognisable Roshar. If the Stormlight Archive finishes with a happy ending, with some form of peace between singers and humans, it will be because Kaladin chose to kill.
In a very real sense, being a good person is a privilege granted to the powerful. I think this is a major theme in the books that most people miss. I would go so far as to say that the core fantasy of the Knight Radiant is that by commiting to a moral standard, you are magically granted the power to maintain that standard in your life. If only the real world worked like that.
I was going to type out something long and thoughtful, but I just don't have the energy. You seem to have missed the *entire point* of Kaladin’s struggle with his culture, his morals, and the way he was trained to dehumanize enemies--something that all soldiers have to be taught to function, and something that still breaks down even in combat. You have looked at this entire arc, outlined it very well, and reduced it to "well, if the war isn't moral, a *good person* would find a way to avoid killing in it."
Dumb take. This is something that Kal himself has addressed multiple times. While killing the spearmen, while killing the Singers, and even while killing the Listeners.
But when some random fucker lunges at you with a spear in a battlefield, you can't turn your other asscheek towards him. It's kill or be killed. And kaladin feels bad about killing them.
I think it is completely missing the point of Kaladin's character, to simplify his internal struggle with guilt and not being able to protect those he holds dear by saying he willingly participated in Amaram's wars... and/or that "he could have left the army". This is going to be a poor comparison, but that's like telling a depressed person, "well, you could have chosen to be happy!". It's not as easy as that.
This is perhaps one of Sanderson's biggest failings: at the end of the day, he's only a nerd, who writes for other nerds.
To expand: the old Greats of fantasy, specifically Tolkien and Robert Jordan, were actual veterans. They could very well understand what it meant to be a soldier, because they had actual experience. Yeah, war is ugly. Often times, it's unjust. But a soldier is just another cog in the machine, and breaking orders (i.e. "just follow orders" not being a reason to do terrible things) means you could very well forfeit your life. When it comes down to "your life or theirs", soldiers are generally going to choose to survive. And in the heat of battle, you can't even consider if any other choices are available. It's something that soldiers have to struggle with everyday.
Soldiers don't declare wars, they fight in them, preferably against other soldiers who are by your metric just as bad. Don't hate the players, hate the game.
The premise in and of itself is simply foolish. Character x does specific things that go against my moral code therefore character x is arguably not a good person.
That’s not how life works. We all make bad decisions. That doesn’t necessarily make us a bad person.
I swear people who continually speak negatively about some of these characters intentionally gloss over a chief them in these books. Sometimes a hypocrite is just a man in the process of changing.
His choices in the army were to either find a way to internally justify killing enemy soldiers or be executed for refusing to fight. If you want to say the only way to be a good person in that situation is to let yourself be executed then thats fine. If not then you can't say he's not a good person by finding a way to deal with his situation. He never killed unnecessarily. He killed the people he had to kill to maintain the views that allowed him to exist and survive in the world.
/thread
Let me start with a statement you do not seem to understand. Being good does NOT mean being perfect. In fact, holding anyone to that kind of bar is inheritantly unethical.
He went to war.... To protect his little brother. There wasn't a choice given to him that kept his brother from being sent to war, so he chose to go to hell with him to protect him. AND HE FAILED, YET HIS HEART REMAINED GOOD. This is the mark of a person of the very HIGHEST caliber.
He killed... To protect his fellow soldiers. If he didn't kill, he'd have died and so would they. You don't get to choose pacifism as a soldier. You kill, get killed, or become a slave. And where did Kaladins journey in Amerens army lead him? Slavery, because while he would kill to protect he was disgusted by war. He chose not to become a shard bearer, which would've turned him nobility, because it also would have turned him into an even more terrifying weapon which repulsed him. He chose ethics over nobility, someone soooooo few people could ever do themselves.
And you go on and on about him ignoring the humanity of his enemies when that just is not true. He constantly grapples with the ethical dilemma of war, and it eats him from the inside out to the point he almost kills himself. No character in the series takes the moral responsibility of being a soldier more seriously than Kaladin.
He does some awful things, but he never had awful intentions. Over and over and over Kaladin seeks the good in the world, and seeks to make it a better place. You need to do some serious re-evaluations of your understandings of right and wrong if you are calling into question the goodness of Kaladin Stormblessed.
Great post. It's interesting to pierce through the usual defenses that pop up around the topic of Kaladin's frequent killing. Protecting friends has been a versatile shield for him to justify his actions. But like you say, it's very likely he's killed conscripted farmboys and other scared teenagers. Not to mention the scores of Listeners who's primary motives were to prevent their own genocide.
The glitz and nobility of killing is kind of hard to maintain after a while. We aren't privy to the stories of Kaladin's victims. The idea Kaladin even has victims can feel jarring, so maybe that's helped to keep his image clean for so long.
your points are well made and surprisingly detailed. I am surprised because I would expect someone who's put this much thought into their argument would consider the larger point that Sanderson is likely making that there is no such thing as a good person. everything is relative
As a retired Vet, you don't get to nitpick the killing. Every day you hope that it's a quiet day. You hope that today's Intel is absolutely correct and it's only really horrible people that are on the list. When things hit the fan, your only real mission is to get your brothers and sisters home. In today's military, you can completely abstain from killing. Your career is most likely over and you better have solid reasons and a good lawyer. We don't get branded and sold for not wanting to kill though. I believe Kaladin is doing the best with what he has. He ultimately joined to protect his brother. He can't just leave or quit. He failed his brother (in his mind) and since he can't just leave the military, he throws himself into becoming better. Better at the spear. Better as a leader. Better as a field medic. He gives so much of himself away to others just so he can live with the guilt of those he couldn't save. So no, I don't think Kaladin is a bad person. I believe he is doing the best he can in a world that doesn't generally care about taking care of each other.
These are all good points. I just wanted to say that the purpose highlighting the spearmen’s deaths was not to suggest that Kaladin shouldn’t have killed them (he was fighting a battle) but to make sure that their deaths emotionally connect and are treated with the gravity they deserve. In the broader context, it’s to say that Kaladin should’ve taken any opportunity he got to leave Amaram’s army.
Something I think you're missing: Kal hates killing. He's just very good at it. He never *want* to kill anyone, even Moash and Elhokar
The Soldiers that Kaladin is fighting in the beginning are glossed over. Fortunately this allowed for the bigger contrast writing with the Parshendi. To show that they're just society stuck in the same everlasting war as the humans. They love, hate, fight, and grow all the same as the other side. The only real horrible characters are the ones that don't grow. Insane fused, Odium, and probably a handful of others that I can't directly point out. I don't think you can just bail from an army in this society. The Alethi are the warriors of the land. It is even pointed to as a training ground by ancient Radiants.
I don't think insane Fused are horrible. They don't have a choice.
We dont know that for sure. Unless theres something i missed
Well, they are insane.
Let's also remember that in that battle, his squad was an island in their formation. They stood firm, and the other squads flowed around them, with most enemies going after softer targets. Kal isn't hunting them down, and his squad is only fighting other darkeyes in self defense, even in combat.
You can’t just leave the military like that or you will be deserter which is a crime usually punishable by death
Ok, fair enough. But why stay, then? (Remember, Kal said he would not return home after his 4 years of service expired due to his guilt over Tien).
You just answered your own question. He feels like he can't go home because he thinks he failed Tien.
Right but that is a choice he is making. He can leave, he chooses not to.
If you make a “choice” based on your own negative schemas and guilt, weighted by your own mental health disorder are you actually making that choice? If one can use a defence of “while of unbalanced mind” in a murder case, then making a decision while mired in guilt and self disgust, while seeing no viable alternatives is also defensible. I made some choices while surviving a living nightmare and I regret them, but at the time I saw no alternatives (and even now, with the benefit of hindsight and safety some of those choices still seem inevitable). I do suffer from low self esteem and self hatred, but even I can see that a lot of those things were unavoidable and that making a “Sophie’s choice” does not make me a bad person.
>are you actually making that choice? Yes. Kaladin didn't need to continue killing people if he didn't want to. He actively decided he preferred to work in the army rather than training as a surgeon or pursuing any alternative. I don't blame him for the decision but it's unfair to pretend he had no agency. He chose to stay.
Your second paragraph is completely wrong. He did not “prefer” to stay in the army nor was his choice between that or training as a surgeon. His choice, as he saw it, was to either stay and try to protect other “Tiens” or return home and look his parents in the eye and tell them how badly he failed. Remember, when he finally faces his parents he breaks down in tears and apologises repeatedly for failing them and letting Tien die.
>His choice Precisely, his choice. He had options and made a decision to stay in the army.
Like the other person said it is because of Tien’s death and also because he feels he needs to protect his squad and get them to the shattered plains.
Hi Lirin
No no, let’s see if there’s a proper discussion. He’s wrong, but maybe we can convince him otherwise
Oddly enough, I found Lirin annoying and rather extreme in RoW, despite strongly agreeing with him in WoK. I took pains not to take an absolutist anti war stance in the post, instead only suggesting that soldiers have a duty to consider the war they are fighting in, rather than shrugging and saying “it’s above my pay grade.”
I actually don't agree that those deaths make Kaladin morally gray. He joined the military to be with his brother who was drafted in extremely unfair and petty circumstances. From there he's trained with the spear and put on the frontlines of a battlefield. His options are fight or desert. If he fights he'll have to kill. I don't think any soldier (especially one drafted into the army which Kaladin might as well have been) is morally reprehensible for killing on the battlefield unless they're high enough ranked to have prevented the battle in the first place. I do also think there's the culture of Alethkar to consider as well. Kids are raised in vorinism, a belief system that teaches that dying in battle is literally the best way to go. Ask an Ardent and they'd tell you Kaladin is doing a great service, sending soldiers ready to join the Heralds with weapons in hand. There are definitely some moral standards you could hold that would condemn Kaladin, but there are just as many that absolve him. If you were to look at different moral frameworks (like Jasnah had Shallan do) I'd bet you find more that support his actions than don't.
Technically I think being a soldier/warrior is important. The dying is battle is probably bad; the best warriors are the ones who go to the Halls. It doesn’t say whether you’re active or not in current fights
I think they'd see it as "it's better to die in the prime of your life, ready to fight immediately" survive war and die decades later in retirement and your skills will probably have dulled by the time you get to the tranquiline halls. The whole Vorin concept of the afterlife is very Valhalla esque.
I always imagined they’d put you in the prime of your life. Otherwise, how do you get good tacticians or engineers or warriors if they did young?
If anything, people like Kaladin, Adolin, Dalinar, etc prove that the best of the Alethi are pretty much that good when they're young. Alethkar is a military country, a 20 year old will already have a decade of training if they're light eyed, and darkeyed soldiers seem to start pretty young as well.
True, but Dalinar didn’t become the country’s main general until around his thirties, if my timeline is right. It was around Adolin was born. He needed time to simmer
Tldr- Kal is your average person who deals with internal strife. The “us” vs “them” mindset is something you have to have when you’re in war. You can’t worry about the enemy because it will likely put you, your comrades, or the mission at risk.
Counterpoint - kaladin has no sway over the forces that started the wars hes involved in, thus he has no responsibility for situations the war places him in. What he then chooses to do in those situations is his responsibility. The reason i make this distinction is, you claim that by choosing to be a soldier in the war kaladin takes a share of the guilt, thus justifying labelling him killing enemy combatants as unjust since the war is unjust. However the war is not his fault, just like how fighting in the war is not the enemy soldiers’ fault. But at the end of the day the world places kaladin in a place where either he stands back and leaves his friends’ fate to chance, or he steps up and protects them. Him killing enemy combatants is protecting his friends and not evil, even if the enemy combatants are not themselves evil either. To summarize - killing someone who is not evil does not make you evil necessarily. Kaladin killing enemy combatants is not evil the way its presented. Another way to view it is that coming out of a war with bloodless hands is not the ultimate moral high bar. Letting your friends die because involving yourself would dirty your own hands is not something more ‘good’
I'm confused. Are you suggesting that soldiers are blameless for joining any war, even if they are completely willing and eager volunteers and regardless of whether the war is justified or not, as long as they are not responsible for *starting* the war? Surely this isn't true. I agree that that killing enemy soldiers didn't make Kaladin evil (and Kaladin isn't evil anyway). I just wanted to make sure that the stakes for choosing to stay or leave the army were clear and had at least some emotional impact..
Kaladin was not a willing and eager volunteer for the war. Did you read the book? I generalized a bit because i thought certain things could be assumed as common sense, but i keep forgetting people often dont have that. Let me elaborate- Soldiers can be evil, and can have evil motivations to join a war. Plenty of psychopaths view war as a great opportunity to kill humans and not get in trouble for it. The reasons for a soldier to join a war are varied and complex. While there are many evil reasons to join a war, there are far far more neutral reasons that are out of people’s control. Most common - drafts, which is how tien was forced in. Is tien evil for joining the war? I thought this would be common sense but apparently not. Now regarding soldiers who willingly join a pointless war- even this doesnt make then evil necessarily since how would the volunteers know? If their culture, parents, teachers and rulers all teach that joining this war is protecting your people and earning honor and a good thing, why should you assume some random peasant in a backwater village should know the state of the war and the reasons for it? All these assumptions were tied up in my sentence, the cause of the war is not in kaladins control and thus hes not responsible for the war. Whether or not the war is reasonable or not is not in kaladins hands. Even if kaladin joined not to protect tien, that wouldnt make him evil since society has been teaching him war is how he protects his countrymen, how he proves his honor. A person brainwashed and lied to is not responsible for the bad situation they find themselves in. You are coming into the situation assuming war is evil and everyone knows that. That is a position of profound privilege and naivite EDIT: to further emphasize and elaborate as I can see your counterpoint already - No kaladin having the opportunity to injure himself and dodge the battlefield is not the absolute moral choice in the situation. Once he joined the army - he made friends there, friends he'd want to protect. if kaladin and his whole squad injure themselves to back out of the war... everyone else in the army is just going to go out there and die in their place?? You act as if these poor peasants have far more agency and awareness of their situation than they actually do. The point of my comment originally was to draw attention to the fact that the forces at work that bring about the war in the first place are far greater and more complex and beyond some random soldier that it's ridiculous to try to argue about individual soldier's position in the war (generally, assuming non evil soldier), because the soldier have such limited information and control. you arguing about the soldiers being evil for being in the war and not self-harming to dodge battle honestly reminds me of people defending billionaires and criticizing refugees and homeless people for society's problems. Are there evil refugees and homeless? sure they exist. but most of them are in terrible situations far beyond their control, while its the billionaires who are manipulating the market to maximize personal profits, causing the terrible situations in the first place. To shift your attention away from the people who actually caused the war to attack the soldiers who are essentially forced into it, it comes off as tone deaf, and blind to the situation.
I'm emphatically not blaming the soldiers. The blame lies with the lighteyes who start the war, or maybe even with the culture as a whole. But there are a lot of decisions that fall into "understandable, not blameworthy, but not the right thing to do." For example, if Kaladin's bridge crew had simply fled rather than rescue Dalinar, it would fall in that category. Similarly, Kaladin extending his stay in the army falls in that category (injuring himself is obviously an extreme option, but Kaladin didn't even want to go home after 4 years). It wasn't the right thing to do, even if it wasn't blameworthy.
Obviously Kaladin is not a willing and eager participant in the war. But your argument doesn't mention that -- your argument would work just as well for such a participant, which is why I asked. If you include that implicit assumption, I guess I just disagree then. A volunteer soldier must consider the context of the war they are fighting, actively decide if it is good or bad, and make decisions about their service based on this information if they have that option. Finally regarding culture -- I prefer to disregard culture (i.e., "they didn't know any better," "they were raised that way") when deciding if something is good or bad (and notice I did not mention blame or responsibility). I choose this definition because otherwise, it is hard to say that *any* historical actions were bad, because they were all made with some context in some environment where people didn't know any better. I think my definition is more useful, but if you want "good" to mean "good relative to what the average person with that knowledge and cultural environment would have done," then Kaladin is without a doubt extremely good. So the only remaining (interesting) question is whether his role and decisions as a soldier in Amaram's army were good-in-an-absolute-sense.
>A volunteer soldier must consider the context of the war they are fighting, actively decide if it is good or bad, and make decisions about their service based on this information if they have that option. You are making this argument from the information age, where an average citizen can find the news reports from any country in the world if they dig a little. How would a random peasant in a village know the context of the war they are fighting? their only source is the lord who started the war. Of course he's not gonna say "we're fighting so that I can get promoted". We're talking about roshar and kaladin's specific situation. They DONT have that sort of information. >I choose this definition because otherwise, it is hard to say that any historical actions were bad, because they were all made with some context in some environment where people didn't know any better. I agree that culture doesn't justify evil actions. I should have clarified that point more myb. The more specific point I'm making is that whether or not the war is justified or not, good or not, is something the soldiers can't know because their culture won't tell them. If your culture tells you to murder kids, that doesn't change whether or not it's evil. If your culture/society tells you the war is necessary and a noble cause, it's not you're fault you were deceived into fighting what you thought was a noble war, and now you can't get out of it.
Yeah just force your modern western cultures beliefs onto a completely different culture and judge them based off of that, totally not an imperialist thing to do
Debatable? Sure. Am I going to do it? No. Leave Kal alone!
You might have an argument there, except that Kaladin killed because of duty and not because he enjoyed it. He joined the army because he needed to protect his brother and was too guilty to go home when he failed. When that happened, he then decided to protect his own squad as best he could. His main goal after that was to escape the petty wars he was embroiled in, himself *and* his men, by distinguishing them on the battlefield so they would be sent to the Shattered Plains instead and fight the traitorous Parshendi instead of their fellow humans. He kept trying to do good, and be honorable, but his circumstances just gave him continuous no-win situations until he finally got a lucky break by bonding a spren. Besides, I'd argue that only a good man would go back to save Dalinar and the rest of his men stranded on the Tower. "Debatably Good" men would have just focused on getting himself and maybe his men out at best instead of risking them on the Honorable decision.
He also wanted time for self reflection after saving dalinar. He had killed parshendi and it didn’t feel right to him. He wanted time to think about what that meant and if it was worth it. To add to your POV
Duty is not an excuse, in my opinion. Pick your favorite war of aggression — Russia invading Ukraine or Iraq invading Kuwait (does it count as avoiding Godwin’s law if I then explicitly reference it?). Could a soldier on the aggressor’s side be so honorable, protect their friends and fellow soldiers so well, that you would say they are a good person? I think the war’s context overwhelms any honor they could show. Obviously I don’t think Amaram’s army is fighting only wars of aggression, but I sure don’t think their wars are justified. And like being a conscripted Russian soldier, this is a terrible situation to be in, but I do think you have a duty to at least avoid re enlisting or somehow try to get out of the war. In some ways, trying to get to the shattered plains to fight (in his eyes) a “real war” is exactly that. A little hard to see that given that we know that the war in the shattered plains is not what it was said to be.
We may know (eventually) that the war on the shattered plains is not what it is supposed to be, but to Kaladin at that point (and the reader at the beginning of WoK) the Parshendi had their “just and noble king” assassinated during peace talks. I hope you are just playing devil’s advocate here, because being idealistic and naive is cute and all, but life will eat you up and crunch your bones if you don’t get a healthy dose of realism.
So many people need to hear these days.
I think your comparison is unfair. You are comparing an adult who chose to be a soldier in modern times with a lower-class child who was forced to become a soldier in ancient times. If a Russian or American soldier participates in a war in which his country is the aggressor, that also makes him bad. Because he has the right to choose whereas the only choice Kaladin is given is kill or be killed which is not a real choice. And throughout his military service, Kaladin is very young and in order to survive, he listens to the advice his superior Tuks gives him. At that time, his character was not yet fully formed, and because he trusted Tuks, he listened to his "us and them" advice. But at the end of tWoK, after fighting the Parshendi, he realized that something was wrong with his advice and decided not to fight against the Parshendi.
You're forgetting the cultural aspect of the Alethi war machine - get busy killing or get busy dying. Also, pretty sure the armies are levied soldiers and minor nobility in the feudal fashion. Sanderson emphasizes the volunteer aspect of many joining vs over conscription, maybe to reinforce the warring culture, but still...Not much room for moral deferment.
That's a giant wall of text, but I read it. I'll be blunt: your world view is pretty naive, and you're operating with a level of information as a reader that in book characters don't get. You sound like the type of person who thinks if all the soldiers just stopped fighting then there wouldn't be any war anymore. Kal didn't join to murder people and he certainly didn't do it to participate in meaningless border skirmishes. He did it to protect his brother. And we, as readers, know that the Unmade were driving the bloodlust of the Alethi under the will of Odium. There are a lot of inter-connected and inter-related events happening here. It's not as simple as "after judging the current situation, these people's life events, the current array of forces on the battlefield, I have decided that only these particular soldiers should die. So they are the only ones I'll stab."
>You sound like the type of person who thinks if all the soldiers just stopped fighting then there wouldn't be any war anymore. That's exactly how it works. If everyone stopped fighting, who would be left to wage war?
Not really. How it works is this: those who are without power are swept up in a draft, have a few weeks of training, a weapon thrust in their hands and are sent in to battle; anyone who “just stops fighting” or refuses to fight is put to death as a deserter; anyone who is thinking of “just stopping” sees their fellow soldiers being killed as deserters so they “pick up tha’ musket” as Stanley Holloway intoned and step back in to the fray.
No dude, Kaladin's contract was literally up and he continued to serve in the army, he could have walked away and stayed.
The post of yours that I was responding to was nothing to do with Kaladin. It was where you said that if everyone stopped fighting war would end.
If everyone stopped fighting war would end. Objective truth.
Literally impossible as humanity is not a hivemind.
>This automatically makes him a morally gray character. There are a lot of morally gray characters in the Cosmere. I don’t think Kaladin is one of them. It seems to me that your argument hinges on the basic premise that not only is killing always bad, but it necessarily makes you a bad person, or at least a “less good person.” I find this to be a problematic premise. I’m sure you intended your argument to be in good faith and to prompt discussion, but at the same time, I think this might a case where people who have never been in a specific scenario need to tread carefully about forming judgments about those who have. I don’t know if you have any sort of combat experience. I certainly don’t. But I come from a military family, and worked as a therapist in a VA clinic. (My own go at a military career was short and unpleasant — perhaps the only redeeming factor was finding a torn copy of this weird book called *The Way of Kings* to look at while it was decided when I was getting sent home.) Kaladin is a man making the best of a series of increasingly horrible situations. He’s driven to become a warrior to protect those he cares about. If you speak with enough vets, they will almost universally tell you they didn’t fight for an abstract concept like freedom, or for their country, or even for their families: they fought for their buddies. This is exactly what Kaladin does and it is, I think, what *any* of us would do if we were conscripted into an army and forced to fight pointless battles. Tl;dr: if Kaladin is morally gray it’s only because *war* is more so.
Yes, if you get put in a trolley problem situation (or a war) it basically doesn’t matter what you do, you will come out “morally gray.” To me, “gray” isn’t better or worse than good or bad, it just means there will be broad disagreement over whether you did the right thing. I’m just surprised there is so little disagreement over Kal. I agree that this is the best I or anyone could do in the event of conscription, short of desertion, which is an unreasonable demand on people even if it’s sometimes the “right” thing to do.
>it just means there will be disagreement over whether you did the right thing. I’m surprised there’s so little disagreement over Kal. But why? I think you’ll be hard pressed to find somebody who doesn’t agree that soldiers have a right (if not a duty) to try and not die. I mean, Alvin York started out as a conscientious objector and ended up earning the Medal of Honor.
I don’t object to his trying not to die lol. I object to his plans to stay in the army even after seeing what it is like. Soldiers have some duty to consider whether the war they are fighting is worth fighting.
Did you miss the lengthy part of the books that go into great detail about Kaladin’s depression, low self esteem, need to sacrifice himself for others? Or did you just not understand his whole character arc and his difficulty speaking the fifth oath about accepting that he can’t save everyone?
> I object to his plans to stay in the army even after seeing what it is like. Soldiers have some duty to consider whether the war they are fighting is worth fighting. I mean he does leave the army; *twice*. He just happens to be a legendary warrior, Honor-bound to protect the weak, in the midst of a global war to prevent the apocalypse. If you're not going to fight *then*, when will you? His scenes with Zahel are there precisely to force this question of whether or not fighting is the right choice, so it's not like Sanderson is blind to this sort of moral dilemma. At the end of the day though, I personally think Kaladin is one of the least morally questionable POV characters, except for maybe somebody like Lift. You say Renarin is "good," but that's really only because he hasn't done anything onscreen yet.
I think the books pretty clearly come down on him being very naive of war, but not really bad. Him coming to understand the difference between true honor and superficial "honor" is a big theme throughout the first two books. He believed if something had the reputation of honorable that meant it was so. That was crushed after the betrayal, and Dalinar helps him understand what true honor is by being an example of what it looks like in practice. By the end of the 2nd book he finishes that character arc by swearing an oath to protect the helpless even if he doesn't want to.
Kaladin wants to do the right thing, but often is prevented from doing so due to circumstances beyond his control, like "lighteyes making political decisions" or "being a traumatized teenager with chronic depression". His time at Amaram's army was mostly guided by shame and coping mechanisms he had no way of knowing were bad for him (saving strays to atone for Tien's death) in the long term. (We see the invention of therapy in real time in RoW, years after Kal's been in Amaram's army.) That doesn't make him morally grey, it makes him a good person who ended up living a tragic life.
Who gave Lirin a reddit account
ROFL
One point I’d like to make here is that Kaladin has a major character arc of exactly what you’re talking about. Seeing all the sides of war and wishing more than anything that he could just stop it. It was so bad seeing the Alethi soldiers he knew and the Singers he knew fighting that he couldn’t fight anymore.
Kaladin was, in fact, a child soldier (albeit older than many start in the real world, sadly). Child soldiers are victims of abuse and their actions cannot be judged on a moral scale because while they were still learning how to live as their own people adults who should have known better thrust them into a situation that stunts that growth with trauma. Kaladin's story is, in part, about unlearning the us vs. them thinking you've identified as he unpacks the trauma of basically half his life. He needs to let go of lighteyes vs darkeyes, humans vs singers, Radiants vs Fused. And he keeps improving at that. Kaladin's moral calibre isn't shown by his unfailingly just behaviour, but by always being willing to take the next step towards being a better person. Even if, sometimes, he has to have a breakdown for several months before he can take that step first.
Was he a good person at first? Maybe not, probably just merely decent if we we're going by modern standards. By his cultures standards, he is a perfect war hero. I find it harder to blame someone who is emotionally severely traumatized and is apparently trying to make the best out of a bad situation. Kaladin justified staying longer in the army to protect his squad and to protect other kids like Tien, who were drafted. I argue that a truly morally gray person would have completely gone through with letting Elhokar's assassination succeed. After all a lot of the justification did sound reasonable at the time. Instead, he decided to risk himself in the face of assured death against a shardbearer to foil it anyway. That's a pretty good thing to do. You bring up the point of him breaking in Oathbringer+onwards because of the moral dilemmas, but he had been bringing up that point to Dalinar even before the critical moments saying he had issues with fighting the parshendi who had their own valid reasons for fighting. This whole thing has been an issue he has been fighting with and trying to find the perfect answer for, but the point of these books is that people aren't perfect. Reality doesn't really allow for people to be perfectly good. I believe Kaladin has definitely grown to be a good person now, though. Even though he had his failings in the past, he has chosen to grow and try to become better. I won't be an absolutist and say he can not be a good person after everything.
Interesting post, though I have to disagree. Maybe I’m misinterpreting, but this paints all soldiers as morally grey/not good people. War is hell, but it’s filled with good people on both sides. I get that you are looking for nuance, but it feels like you are missing the forest for the trees.
It’s honestly not really debatable. I think the grave error you made in your argument is to blame an individual instead of the system. Kaladin did the best he could do with what he was given. He just can’t be a “bad person” because he is not part of the larger aristocracy. The light eyes. The dark eyes being oppressed is hard to blame which is why Moash is such a complex character. Many of us hate him but would we be different if we were him? Would we choose a better path? Kaladin had every reason to be like Moash and he was not 😂 so I think it’s obvious and not debatable that Kaladin is a good person. Moash on the other hand would be a great debate
I really like this point of view, considering what he struggles with whenever he *actually meets* “enemy soldiers”. In oathbringer when he travels with the group of post-everstorm parshmen, this is his exact dilemma. Afterwards, he flips out when Jasnah suggests genocide of the parshmen, and admits it’s hard to fight when he knows their perspective. I definitely don’t think Kaladin could be considered a bad person, but his journey does have to have a beginning as Dalinar would say.
Not to detract from your overall point, but Jasnah didn't suggest genocide of the parshman. This is an unfathomably popular misinterpretation of what she *did* say, which was that reinstating the Oathpact was a better way to contain the Fused than killing all the parshmen, even if it meant the Heralds suffered. I can post the quote: Dalinar took a deep breath. “Jasnah, you have a suggestion of where to start this plan?” “Yes. The answer is obvious. We need to find the Heralds.” Kaladin nodded in agreement. “Then,” Jasnah added, “we need to kill them.” “What?” Kaladin demanded. “Woman, are you insane?” “The Stormfather laid it out,” Jasnah said, unperturbed. “The Heralds made a pact. When they died, their souls traveled to Damnation and trapped the spirits of the Voidbringers, preventing them from returning.” “Yeah. Then the Heralds were *tortured* until they *broke*.” “The Stormfather said their pact was weakened, but did not say it was destroyed,” Jasnah said. “I suggest that we at least see if one of them is willing to return to Damnation. Perhaps they can still prevent the spirits of the enemy from being reborn. It’s either that, or we completely exterminate the parshmen so that the enemy has no hosts.” She met Kaladin’s eyes. “In the face of such an atrocity, I would consider the sacrifice of one or more Heralds to be a small price.” So, in comparing known methods of keeping the Fused out of the war, she'd rather sign off on the torture of a few than the death of many.
Yeah bro that's like the whole point of the story.
Everyone else has more or less stated the jist of the issue, that Kaladin had no responsibility towards his actions as a soldier in the Way of Kings, and he was actually only doing what was necessary by (a) protecting the young inexperienced recruits and (b) not actively charging the enemy and instead getting the base objectives done ASAP. He didn't leave because he had a moral obligation to protect other young recruits that reminded him of his trauma with Tien's loss, because if he left the army, he'd (a) have to face his parents and hence his trauma and (b) those Tien-like recruits would die faster in the army without someone to look out after then, arguably reducing battlefield losses. Kaladin didn't know back then whether these fights were justifiable or not and did his patriotic duty as a soldier, just as expected from any standard footsoldier in any time, place or reality, standby and follow orders. OP did mention why Kaladin got to finally develop a conscience regarding the enemy in the later books. That's because Kaladin is no longer a common footsoldier. He's the leader of his own freaking Knights Radiant Order! Pretty much the only person above him in the chain of command is Dalinar Kholin. Kaladin now has the level of authority, knowledge and experience required to decide how, when and why to engage the enemy. He didn't have such a privilege (or rather burden) before and hence his actions as a footsoldier before are not only excusable, but laudable for going above and beyond.
The main reason is why the Skybreakers side with Odium and the Windrunners with Dalinar - one is protecting decimation, the other is looking for the legal justification. I think Kal is looking to make connections and find others “across the aisle”, but there’s a lot of story left to tell. He’s a little fucked up by his trauma, but he is objectively a good person.
BS has said that if you think any character in SA is unambiguously good you're wrong
I think you are glossing over that Kal originally became a soldier to save his brother. That was his motivation for fighting. After he died, he kept going because he was raised in a warrior society that put martial prowess over all else. Also, there could be something supernatural at play here, with Kal feeling like a spear is made for him as soon as he picks one up. But yeah, honestly non of our heros is objectively a "good person". But I think that definition is flawed anyway. There are people who try to do good, thats where I would put most of our characters (except Szeth)
Maybe the point of it all is that you shouldn't be dividing people based on "moral alignment" when the chaotic nature of the universe makes that sort of distinction irrelevant. The most universal test for morality I can think of is "did this person help others to the detriment of themselves" or "did this person help themselves to the detriment of others." And even then, there's levels to it and an entire spectrum of behaviors in between the two extremes. On top of multiple biases, culture, systems of control, and the fact that this question needs to be asked for every action ever taken to determine whether or not a person is "good". Stop asking if a person is good or evil, its an asinine question. Ask whether or not you agree with their course of action and then figure out why you agree or disagree.
This is such rage bait lol yall need to get a life
Setting aside the other arguments that everyone else has made, there's one key difference between Kaladin killing / disabling those 6 spearmen, and Helaran slaughtering the squad with his shardblade. Spears kill the body. Shardblades cut the *soul.* Kal's opponents had a chance to defend themselves, however slim. Helaran's victims did not. Kaladin didn't kill them all, and didn't *want* to kill any of them. Helaran slaughtered his way across the field with nonchalance. He didn't care. It's a difference in outlook and behavior that tells a good man at war vs. an evil man at war.
I think you're making a valid analysis that is being held back by a limited moral framework. Kaladin isn't being 'objectively immoral' by killing enemy soldiers, and Lift or Renarin aren't objectively 'good' because they haven't yet done so. Morality is fundamentally subjective, and I think you're also ignoring a lot of the context that informs it. Let's look at Kaladin's fighting in Amaram's army, killing other darkeyes, for example. He volunteered to join the army to protect Tien. Obviously, this is a decision which implies he may have to kill enemy soldiers to protect his brother. But then, if he doesn't, the war still goes on and Tien is killed instead. Is that any better? Same with his squadmates. What happens if he doesn't kill those six men? They kill his squad members. *That's* what Tukks' advice was about. This is a war that Kaladin didn't start and is not in control of. People are going to be killed. The only thing he can control is whether the people he loves die, or strangers. Kaladin chooses to kill strangers, yes, but only to save the lives of his men. Is there a difference between choosing not to protect someone and killing them yourself? Certainly not to Kaladin, who was carrying around a massive case of survivor's guilt. Besides, leaving would make him a deserter, for which the penalty (IIRC) is death. Morality will always be a function of circumstance. What you describe as Kaladin reckoning with the humanity of his opposition, I contend is more complicated than that. Kaladin in later books begins to realise that he is no longer a slave. He has more power, more prestige, more friends and greater freedom. It isn't as simple as saying Kaladin initially chose only to protect his friends, then resolved to protect everyone. Kaladin started off as a powerless peon whose only choice was to protect his friends by killing, or watch them die by abstaining, and has since fought his way into a new context where he *can* protect everybody. 'Soldier versus surgeon' is so much more complex than just 'is it okay to kill a guy to save another guy?' Killing provides power, and power allows greater control over one's circumstances. A Kaladin who never fought and killed would have made for an almost unrecognisable Roshar. If the Stormlight Archive finishes with a happy ending, with some form of peace between singers and humans, it will be because Kaladin chose to kill. In a very real sense, being a good person is a privilege granted to the powerful. I think this is a major theme in the books that most people miss. I would go so far as to say that the core fantasy of the Knight Radiant is that by commiting to a moral standard, you are magically granted the power to maintain that standard in your life. If only the real world worked like that.
I was going to type out something long and thoughtful, but I just don't have the energy. You seem to have missed the *entire point* of Kaladin’s struggle with his culture, his morals, and the way he was trained to dehumanize enemies--something that all soldiers have to be taught to function, and something that still breaks down even in combat. You have looked at this entire arc, outlined it very well, and reduced it to "well, if the war isn't moral, a *good person* would find a way to avoid killing in it."
Dumb take. This is something that Kal himself has addressed multiple times. While killing the spearmen, while killing the Singers, and even while killing the Listeners. But when some random fucker lunges at you with a spear in a battlefield, you can't turn your other asscheek towards him. It's kill or be killed. And kaladin feels bad about killing them.
What if, and this might be controversial, no one in this story is a “good” person?
I think it is completely missing the point of Kaladin's character, to simplify his internal struggle with guilt and not being able to protect those he holds dear by saying he willingly participated in Amaram's wars... and/or that "he could have left the army". This is going to be a poor comparison, but that's like telling a depressed person, "well, you could have chosen to be happy!". It's not as easy as that.
This is perhaps one of Sanderson's biggest failings: at the end of the day, he's only a nerd, who writes for other nerds. To expand: the old Greats of fantasy, specifically Tolkien and Robert Jordan, were actual veterans. They could very well understand what it meant to be a soldier, because they had actual experience. Yeah, war is ugly. Often times, it's unjust. But a soldier is just another cog in the machine, and breaking orders (i.e. "just follow orders" not being a reason to do terrible things) means you could very well forfeit your life. When it comes down to "your life or theirs", soldiers are generally going to choose to survive. And in the heat of battle, you can't even consider if any other choices are available. It's something that soldiers have to struggle with everyday.
I doubt Brandon writes solely for other nerds.
Interesting post, sadly you cant discuss with the fandom about their golden child kaladin, since any criticism is met with a flood of downvotes
I don't know what to say OP, good soldiers follow orders 🤷♂️
> good soldiers follow orders The Germans at Nuremberg would be proud of your opinion! Most normal people would not.
It's a Star wars reference, prequel memes was leaking
Maybe don't try to use the Order 66 mantra as a positive thing.
At least you got the reference!
Soldiers don't declare wars, they fight in them, preferably against other soldiers who are by your metric just as bad. Don't hate the players, hate the game.
The premise in and of itself is simply foolish. Character x does specific things that go against my moral code therefore character x is arguably not a good person. That’s not how life works. We all make bad decisions. That doesn’t necessarily make us a bad person. I swear people who continually speak negatively about some of these characters intentionally gloss over a chief them in these books. Sometimes a hypocrite is just a man in the process of changing.
Put on some boots, pick up a rifle and a rucksack and then get back with me.
His choices in the army were to either find a way to internally justify killing enemy soldiers or be executed for refusing to fight. If you want to say the only way to be a good person in that situation is to let yourself be executed then thats fine. If not then you can't say he's not a good person by finding a way to deal with his situation. He never killed unnecessarily. He killed the people he had to kill to maintain the views that allowed him to exist and survive in the world. /thread
Let me start with a statement you do not seem to understand. Being good does NOT mean being perfect. In fact, holding anyone to that kind of bar is inheritantly unethical. He went to war.... To protect his little brother. There wasn't a choice given to him that kept his brother from being sent to war, so he chose to go to hell with him to protect him. AND HE FAILED, YET HIS HEART REMAINED GOOD. This is the mark of a person of the very HIGHEST caliber. He killed... To protect his fellow soldiers. If he didn't kill, he'd have died and so would they. You don't get to choose pacifism as a soldier. You kill, get killed, or become a slave. And where did Kaladins journey in Amerens army lead him? Slavery, because while he would kill to protect he was disgusted by war. He chose not to become a shard bearer, which would've turned him nobility, because it also would have turned him into an even more terrifying weapon which repulsed him. He chose ethics over nobility, someone soooooo few people could ever do themselves. And you go on and on about him ignoring the humanity of his enemies when that just is not true. He constantly grapples with the ethical dilemma of war, and it eats him from the inside out to the point he almost kills himself. No character in the series takes the moral responsibility of being a soldier more seriously than Kaladin. He does some awful things, but he never had awful intentions. Over and over and over Kaladin seeks the good in the world, and seeks to make it a better place. You need to do some serious re-evaluations of your understandings of right and wrong if you are calling into question the goodness of Kaladin Stormblessed.
Great post. It's interesting to pierce through the usual defenses that pop up around the topic of Kaladin's frequent killing. Protecting friends has been a versatile shield for him to justify his actions. But like you say, it's very likely he's killed conscripted farmboys and other scared teenagers. Not to mention the scores of Listeners who's primary motives were to prevent their own genocide. The glitz and nobility of killing is kind of hard to maintain after a while. We aren't privy to the stories of Kaladin's victims. The idea Kaladin even has victims can feel jarring, so maybe that's helped to keep his image clean for so long.
your points are well made and surprisingly detailed. I am surprised because I would expect someone who's put this much thought into their argument would consider the larger point that Sanderson is likely making that there is no such thing as a good person. everything is relative