This chapter talks about the war between the Formics, a seemingly malevolent species of aliens, and humans in the Ender's Game. The great tragedy of the violence that erupted from the Human/Formic war was the result of two deep misunderstandings. The Formics not only failed to grasp the capabilities of humanity, but humanity also deeply misunderstood the creatures that they would come to nickname “buggers.” These misunderstandings may have resulted from what is sometimes called “cultural incommensurability.” The chapter relates (...) that what is most important about Ender is not merely his ability to understand his “enemy,” but his ability to love them. He is able to harness the sympathies of the humans and change their minds about the buggers. Along with the Formic hive‐ queen, Ender now occupies the space in between the two conceptual schemes—a space he can never retreat from—and has begun translating their meanings. (shrink)

Ender, in Ender's Game, seems to be more a superhuman or a god than a normal human being. Colonel Graff structures Ender's life to support Ender's maturation into a superman. A focus on the power of the human will—over oneself or over another—frames the story of Ender. Ender occupies a middle position between Peter and the buggers, who share a hive mind. His development fleshes out insights that Aristotle had about friendship and humanity over two thousand years ago. The (...) fact that the queen is able to communicate with Ender establishes a form of “political” community between them in Aristotle's sense. The real heart of the story lies in the truth about human nature that Aristotle realized long ago: that friendship is necessary for human life and human beings are political animals, not solitary supermen. (shrink)

Given the portion of his life spent at military schools, it is striking that Ender and his peers apparently never study military ethics. The ethical lessons Ender and his peers might have learned are so obviously relevant to operations against the buggers that you cannot help but ask how the I.F.'s leadership could have failed to teach military ethics at all. This chapter presents some highlights of Western thinking on the ethics of war and analyzes Ender's education and actions (...) in light of those moral traditions. Ender's Game teaches powerful lessons for students of just war theory and the just war tradition because it asks questions that matter to everyone, from national decision‐makers all the way down to individual soldiers. Genocide and xenocide are extreme in their quantity of killing, but not necessarily in their moral magnitude. (shrink)

This chapter of Ender's Game addresses two questions. First, are Ender's killings of Stilson and Bonzo morally permissible? He destroys them both and robs their families of them. Could this ever be morally permissible? Second, is Ender morally responsible for the consequences of his actions? Ender blames himself for the destruction of the buggers, but would he have done the same thing if he had known it was all for real? Perhaps by allowing the I.F. to train him for (...) this purpose, he had always intended to do it. Of course, Ender is not the only one involved here: maybe the International Fleet Command is responsible for the consequences of Ender's actions. After all, they unquestionably manipulate and structure Ender's surroundings, and clearly, it is the I.F. that intends for the buggers to die‐even if Ender does not. (shrink)

Toward the end of Ender's Game, after the manipulations of the Battle School officials stand exposed, Ender Wiggin must face the terrible consequences of what has really been going on during the last simulation. In the spirit of diplomacy, political leaders decide that Ender will not return home, since his presence on Earth could spark a war. Instead, he will be part of the pioneering groups launched out into space to explore and to establish settlements on the “bugger worlds.” We (...) gradually realize that Ender has another destiny‐revealed through the significant philotic connection that the Formic hive‐queen has made with him‐the new role of Speaker for the Dead. The special nature of his connection with the buggers is the real reason Ender cannot go home. In searching for a way to bring back the Formics, Ender has to establish a new community. (shrink)

Ender Wiggins, the title character of Ender’s Game, spends much of the book playing games of one sort or another. These games range from simple role-playing games with his siblings (“buggers and astronauts”) to battle room contests to a strange fantasy game in which he must kill a giant and confront his deepest fears. Finally, at the end of the book, Ender and his Battle School classmates play one final “game” that leads to them (unknowingly) destroying the bugger homeworld (...) and wiping out nearly the entire species. The games that Ender plays undoubtedly prove crucial to his development as a military commander. It is worth asking, however, whether these games help Ender develop into a morally good person—a person who takes seriously the concerns and interests of other people. This question is one with deep relevance for our own lives, since games and sports play a major role in shaping the way the both children and adults approach the world. In this essay, I'll take a closer look at the role that games play in Ender's moral development. I'll begin by offering a preliminary definition of game, according to which games are a specific type of goal-directed, rule governed activity. I’ll then consider how games relate to play, which is a sort of activity done for its own sake. These distinctions will be fleshed out with examples taken from the book, which clearly demonstrate that not every game is a type of play. I'll then discuss the impact that games have on Ender's moral character—the combination of qualities that lead him to make good (or bad) moral choices in his life outside of game-playing. I'll argue that Ender's experiences show that the relationship between good games and the development of good character Is a complex one, and that there is certainly no guarantee that a well-designed, challenging game will be the sort of activity that builds good character. I'll conclude by briefly discussing the lessons that Ender's games have for the more mundane games that most of us are used to playing. (shrink)

Ender Wiggin spends much of Ender's Game playing games of one sort or another. These range from simple role‐playing games with his siblings (“buggers and astronauts”), to battleroom contests, to the strange free play Giant's Drink video game in which he must kill a giant and confront his deepest fears. This chapter examines the role that games play in Ender's development as both a military commander and as a human being. It considers a number of interrelated questions: What is (...) a game? Is it really appropriate to call Battle School activities “games,” given how serious they are? What is the relationship between a good game and the development of a good person?. (shrink)

Unlike most areas involving taboo, where language-internal innovations tend to dominate, homosexuality is characterized by a basic international vocabulary shared across multiple languages, notably English, French, Italian, Spanish and German. Historically, the lexis of nonnormative gender identity has shared space with that of sexual orientation. This lexicon includes (inexhaustively) the following series of internationalisms:sodomite, bugger, bardash, berdache, tribade, pederast, sapphist, lesbian, uranist, invert, homosexual, bisexual, trans, gay, queer. This common terminology has resulted from language contact in a broad sense, and (...) more specifically from lexical borrowing (loanwords). Several framing devices are expressed through the lexicon: religious censure, distancing in time and space, othering, medicalization or pathologizing, but also in recent decades LGBTQ self-assertion and demands for equality. Rather than necessarily being subject to taboo, then, queerness represents a pragmatically marked semantic field in which the lexicon is highly dependent upon social factors and the communicative context. (shrink)

At the climax of Ender's Game, we see Ender exhausted and at wit's end. Sorting out the mess of who is actually responsible for what is difficult–we feel conflicted about the whole thing, just as Ender does. In this chapter, Aristotle helps us make sense of responsibility and voluntary action and considers whether a person can be responsible for something that he or she did not cause. It looks at why we should care about whether a fictional character is responsible (...) and consider an alternative notion of responsibility that explains Ender's post‐xenocide actions as Speaker for the Dead. The chapter first establishes what moral responsibility is and then contrasts moral responsibility with causal responsibility. He is not to blame for the destruction of the buggers, he does what he can to try to make things right. (shrink)

Just consider, for sheer paranoia, the range of synonyms when the mask is ripped, the silence broken, the deferment brutally concluded: angel-face, arse-bandit, auntie, bent, bessie, bugger, bum-banger, bum boy, chicken, cocksucker, daisie, fag, faggot, fairy, flit, fruit, jasper, mincer; molly, nancy boy, nelly, pansy, patapoof, poofter, cream puff, powder puff, queen, queer, shit-stirrer, sissie, swish, sod, turd-burglar, pervert. For Aristophanes, as for Norman Mailer and Mary Whitehouse, buggery equaled coprophagy: a corrupt, destructive, hypocritical, excremental, urban scatology. Heterosexuality equalled the (...) fecund, rural norm. Aristophanes' diet for a giant dung beetle was turds from a buggered boy: "he says he likes them well kneaded."1To this day degeneracy often seems to be just another code word for homosexuality, as does perversion and decadence; this very essay will seem to many a "decadent" project. Nor would I balk at the term as long as it is interpreted in the French sense: intent on fulfilling Baudelaire's program of transforming the erotically passive to the intellectually active, the voluptuous to rational self-mastery.· 1.Literally, "a hetairekos boy": male prostitute, or boy-friend .Harold Beaver, reader of American literature at the University of Warwick, was recently elected to the new chair of American literature at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on American literature and is currently completeing a collection of his articles, The Great American Masquerade. (shrink)

To understand political power it's necessary to comprehend why individuals and entire nations make the choices they do. Two influential approaches to understanding the intentions behind human behavior are known as realism and liberalism. Neoliberalism developed in response to the charge that liberalism represented an overly utopian view of the world. To explain whether cooperation or conflict should be expected between two parties, international relations scholars often try to calculate costs and benefits of either strategy. Among the most famous of (...) their scenarios is the “Prisoner's Dilemma”. In the case of Ender's Game, the humans and buggers face a dilemma about whether or not to cooperate with one another or defect, which means fighting a war for survival. The dilemma for Ender and the I.F. is complicated by the fact that there seems to be no possibility of communication between humans and buggers. (shrink)

Ender's tortured conscience is an illustration of the moral importance of following principles of just war theory—the “unspoken rules of manly warfare”—and their apparent tension with the demands of war and survival. This chapter talks about the ethics of conflict in Ender's various games—his battles and wars. It asks, was justice served in the Third Invasion and destruction of the bugger worlds, the event that came to be called the xenocide. Ender's life is actually a testimony to the just war (...) axiom that all people desire peace. In the tradition of just war theory, there are five principles that lay out the requirements of jus ad bellum, or how to go to war in an ethical way. They include just cause, legitimate authority, right intention, probability of success, and last resort. Ender's strategy is always to use devastating force to incapacitate the enemy. (shrink)