Morality and Survival Theme Analysis

At the beginning of Ender’s Game, Ender Wiggin faces a difficult choice. He’s bullied by a schoolboy named Stilson, and one afternoon, Stilson pushes Ender, and Ender decides that he has no choice except to fight back. Ender gains the upper hand in the fight, and knocks Stilson to the ground. Ender realizes that he can either walk away and expect to face Stilson tomorrow, or kick him while he’s down, effectively winning all the “future fights.” Ender makes a decision that few have the stomach for: in order to protect himself, he kicks Stilson while he’s already down, inadvertently killing him. It is this act of calculated violence that ultimately wins Ender a place in Battle School.

Ender’s attack on Stilson is thus both defensive and preemptive: he didn’t want to fight Stilson, but when he does, he doesn’t show Stilson the mercy that most people would. We might ask, then, if it’s ever right to attack an enemy before the enemy has struck first—or if it’s only morally acceptable to defend oneself from one’s opponents. As the book goes on, Card poses a far more challenging version of this question: is it morally justifiable to attack an entire species (the Buggers) that’s known to be dangerous to human beings, even if the species shows no signs of wanting to fight again?

For most of his time at the Battle School, Ender doesn’t have the willpower to attack his opponents preemptively—his innate sense of right and wrong tells him that he has to wait to fight back. In the virtual reality game he plays with the Giant, however, Ender ultimately decides to “think outside the box” and attack the Giant. This only happens after dozens of rounds in which the Giant kills and eats him, though—Ender doesn’t consider the Giant a threat until it’s overwhelmingly obvious that the Giant leaves him no other way to survive. A more disturbing example of Ender’s defensive instincts comes when Ender learns that Bonzo Madrid wants to kill him. Ender avoids Bonzo for as long as he can, finally fighting him in a shower when Bonzo corners him. Ender hits Bonzo defensively, then finishes the fight to ensure (preemptively) that Bonzo will never hurt him again. Ender is devastated by his own actions—he can’t handle the guilt of a preemptive attack, even when there’s good evidence that he’d be dead if he had waited any longer to act.

By the time Ender arrives at Command School, he’s come to understand that the Bugger War itself is a problem of preemptive strategy. He learns that the Buggers have shown no signs of wanting to hurt human beings since their first invasion—there’s a decent chance that they want nothing more to do with Ender’s species. But Colonel Hyrum Graff argues that this simply isn’t good enough: humans must attack the Buggers preemptively to guarantee victory. Ender can’t entirely agree with Graff’s point of view, even when his new teacher, Mazer Rackham, tries to teach him to attack his opponents before he even knows that they’re opponents. It becomes clear that Ender, a moral person, could never choose to preemptively murder an entire species. It’s for this reason that Mazer and Graff lie to Ender about his computer games, not telling him that he’s killed the Buggers until it’s too late for him to change his mind. Previously, we had assumed that Graff’s answer to the question of preemptive genocide was an enthusiastic “yes”—but Card shows us that even Graff doesn’t have the willpower to kill so indiscriminately. This is why he gets Ender to kill for him, and gives Ender the alibi of not knowing that his computer games were real.

In the end, Ender’s Game suggests that the answer to the question of preemptive offense isn’t “yes” or “no”—it’s simply too enormous a question for any human being (even a hardened soldier like Graff, let alone a child like Ender) to answer. Furthermore, Card suggests that the question itself is a false dichotomy. Ender realizes that the challenge of the Buggers isn’t “kill or be killed” (just as the Giant’s challenge wasn’t really “drink this potion or drink the other one”), but rather, “kill or understand.” Although Ender realizes his mistake too late, he gets a second chance, and resolves to devote the rest of his life to understanding Bugger society and repopulating the Bugger species.