Sense and Sensibility 21-25: “Moral Dilemmas”
Emily and Lauren get philosophical about morality in Episode 5. Also included: secret affairs, lots of judgment, and relating to Chidi Anagonye.
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Show Notes
In which our hosts start off with little confidence in their ability to be professional and end up having a conversation spanning Plato, Kant, and The Good Place. This is what happens when two nerds start a podcast part…?
If this week’s episode hasn’t satisfied your need for content, you’re in luck — we’ll be part of the inaugural House of Dansridge Valentine’s Day Virtual Ball on February 14! Register for free to hear us chat about diversity in the period piece fandom with Amanda-Rae Prescott and vintage costume blogger Ayana of the Vintage Guidebook. There will also be poetry and dancing to end the evening.
The documentary that Lauren was so excited about ended up being…not her cup of tea, but if you’d like to get into simulation theory and want to get a little trippy, A Glitch in the Matrix is available to rent on platforms like Amazon and DirecTV.
Links to topics discussed in this episode:
Transcript
Reclaiming Jane Episode 5 | Sense and Sensibility 21-25: “Moral Dilemmas”
[00:00:00] Lauren: This is Reclaiming Jane, an Austen podcast for fans on the margins.
Emily: I'm Emily Davis-Hale —
Lauren: — and I'm Lauren Wethers.
Emily: And today, we're talking about chapters 21 through 25 of Sense and Sensibility with the topic of morality to guide our conversation.
Introduction
Emily: This is going to be a fun one today.
Lauren: This is going to be a truly fun one. We are going to see how well we can focus on the task at hand...if it fails, I apologize in advance.
Emily: We both apologize —
Lauren: — but it will make for a very entertaining episode.
Emily: Oh, absolutely. I mean, we're always entertaining.
Lauren: This is true. Thank you for reminding us of how awesome we are.
Emily: You're so welcome. You're welcome.
Lauren: But I am really excited to talk about these chapters because this was one of the really exciting instances where the theme that we want to read through actually showed up a ton in this section. So I feel like there's a lot of really great stuff that we can talk about and dissect, and maybe add somebody else to our hate club?
I think we'll find out as we continue this conversation.
Emily: Looking forward to it. We love having someone to hate.
Lauren: Ugh, yeah. I don't know how Fanny Dashwood has become a running joke, but I think it's cemented now.
Emily: Oh, absolutely. That's, that's just an integral part of our brand now is being the Fanny Dashwood Hate Club.
Lauren: Yeah. Yeah. You never really intend for your, your brand to happen. And now, now that's there.
Emily: I was actually laying in bed last night. Like, falling asleep was like, we should name the Discord, "the Fanny Dashwood Hate Club."
Lauren: What other kinds of thoughts do you have at one o'clock in the morning?
Emily: It's either that or existential despair, so.
Lauren: Oh, yeah, better Fanny Dashwood Hate Club. Yeah, just better for everybody involved.
Emily: If it's one or the other --
Lauren: [00:02:00] You know, it's been a great year for existential despair, not as bad as 2020, but 2021 is trying to like, [snaps fingers repeatedly] speed it up. Let's go.
Emily: That was a really nice snapping sound.
Lauren: Started the sentence and just had no idea where it was going. I just kind of follow it and discover it as it goes.
Thirty-Second Recaps
Emily: So since it's well established now that we don't know what we're talking about or what words are coming out of our mouth next, do we want to put that to a real challenge by attempting to summarize this section?
Lauren: Yes, I actually feel — okay. This might be false confidence, but I actually feel good about being able to summarize this section, which probably means that it's going to be a mess.
Emily: On your mark. Get set. Go.
Lauren: Okay. The Middletons have yet more cousins arriving because they always have somebody at their house. This time, it's the Steeles, who Lady Middleton absolutely loves, but Elinor cannot stand. One of them, Lucy Steele, has been secretly engaged to Edward for the past four years and has a very manipulative conversation with Elinor about it.
Elinor is horrified. Lucy continues poking to try and figure out how much information she can get out of Elinor about what her relationship is with Edward and his parents. But all of this is happening without knowledge of other people. And then Mrs. Jennings takes Elinor and Marianne to London, to town with them at the very, very end.
Emily: All right.
Lauren: Okay. That wasn't bad!
Emily: No, that was, that was good. I think your confidence was not false.
Lauren: Yes!
Okay. Emily, are you ready to sum up these five chapters in 30 seconds?
Emily: Nope.
Lauren: Great. We're going to do it anyway.
Emily: Cool.
Lauren: Ready?
Emily: Nope.
[laughter]
Lauren: It was supposed to be like ready, set, go and instead I just said ready again.
Emily: Yeah. You can't give me an opening like that.
Lauren: Okay. On your mark, get set. Go.
Emily: Apparently there are always people visiting at Barton because the Steeles, who are apparently distant cousins of. Mrs. Jennings, show up. They are not well-educated, they're not cultured. And then it turns out that the [00:04:00] younger sister has had a secret engagement with Edward for the last four years.
And she tells Elinor about it. And Elinor has a lot of feelings.
Lauren: Yep. Made it.
Emily: Okay. The -- yours was light years better.
Lauren: That's okay. Because we switch off with these all the time, so I'm sure probably next episode mine is going to be trash and yours will be great. So it'll just balance out.
Emily: Well, the main thing is that eventually, we get the point across to our listeners.
Lauren: Exactly. If we want to expand a little bit more on what happened in these five chapters --
Emily: I think we need to expand a lot more.
Lauren: Let's expand a lot more.
Enter Lucy Steele
Emily: So the very first thing is that Mrs. Jennings has been in Exeter and comes back and is like, "Oh my God, I ran into these cousins, the Steeles, Anne and Lucy, they're going to come and visit."
So, Anne who is 28, I think they said?
Lauren: Yeah, they said very close to 30.
Emily: Yeah. Anne's younger sister, Lucy is 22 or 23. They come to Barton and of course immediately, Sir John and Mrs. Jennings are like, you have to come and meet these girls. You have to come and dine with us. You have to come and hang out all the time.
Lauren: And the only reason that Lady Middleton actually likes them -- because as we well know, by this point, she doesn't really like anybody, truly. But because both of the Steeles kind of fall over themselves to spoil her children and --
Emily: Who are already pretty spoiled --
Lauren: -- who are already spoiled, but to dote on them and give them the same amount of indulgent attention as their mother does, Lady Middleton is like, "Oh, finally, some girls who are very agreeable," which is the highest compliment in her eyes because she doesn't really get more effusive than that.
So very agreeable to her is like, these are the best people who I've ever met in my entire life.
Emily: Unfortunately, from the perspective of the [00:06:00] Dashwoods, especially Elinor -- and Elinor's judgment. Oh my goodness. She is so judgemental here. Like I thought it was bad about the Palmers, but she goes fully in, on their lack of education and how badly mannered they are.
They're not well-bred. Yeah, it's, it's a lot.
Lauren: Elinor's patience is clearly wearing thin in this section because even with the Middletons' children, in the scene where they first meet the Steeles, the kids are running all over the place and screaming and Lady Middleton is doing nothing about it because she can only see them through the eyes of an overindulgent mother.
And so as they're pulling like Lucy Steele's hair, she's like, "Oh, look, they're playing," and has just no reprimands for them whatsoever. And eventually, the screaming children are taken out of the room and the Steeles are trying to say like, "ah, what lovely children," and Elinor is -- basically says, "you know, I never think ill of quiet children when I'm at this house, that's for sure." It just kind of lands very awkwardly because she's clearly saying I cannot stand these kids, you need to get them under control, but in the most polite, Elinor way possible.
Emily: Yeah. What Elinor really wants to say is, in the words of Kevin from Bling Empire, "Who raised you, wolves?!"
Lauren: I'm so glad you made that reference.
Emily: I couldn't not.
Lauren: If y'all haven't watched Bling Empire yet you, you definitely should. It's a treat. But anyway, back to the 19th century, not the 21st century.
Emily: Elinor is being judgmental and it does not help when they are, one day, walking from Barton Park, back to the cottage and Lucy and Elinor are walking sort of apart from the others.
And Lucy decides out of nowhere after like a day and a half of knowing each other to confide in Elinor that she and Edward have been engaged for the last four years. [00:08:00] Even though, like, the night before, she had basically declared to the whole assembled party, "we, we met him like once, that's, no, we have no idea who this guy is," basically.
And then is like, "Elinor, I need to tell you something. And I know I can trust you," but Elinor's like, "I don't know why you think that, but, okay. Yeah."
Lauren: Elinor is being very judgmental of Lucy, but also her judgments are correct. In some cases, her judgments are correct, I'll say. And one of the things that she notices about Lucy is that she is very concerned with how other people perceive her and is always thinking about how her actions are going to be perceived.
But Elinor can see through her most of the time, or at least the narrator can, and is letting us know that Lucy is not what she seems, because, throughout this conversation with Elinor, she's very closely monitoring every single reaction that Elinor has to see how it's going to be received.
Emily: And then she modifies her statements as soon as she's seen what Elinor thinks.
Lauren: Mhm, her statements, behavior, all based off of however Elinor responds. And she also clearly knew that Elinor and Edward had an attachment because this didn't come out of nowhere as much as she would like to try and pretend that it did.
She tries to get Elinor to just believe like, "Oh, I just, you know, I've only told Anna about this," who is her older sister, but is saying, "I just, I just really need some advice. And I was wondering if you could help me. And I just feel that I could trust you. It feels like we're like sisters and I value your judgment more than anyone." And Elinor is thinking to herself, "you value my judgment more than anyone already? You've known me for a day and a half." I mean, we've seen her manipulate Lady Middleton into liking her.
We see her try and manipulate Elinor. So it wouldn't be too far fetched to believe that she also manipulated Mrs. Jennings into getting an invitation so that she could see her competition.
So I think one of the places where Elinor's judgment maybe clouds her a little bit is when she keeps making all of these really snide jabs about Lucy's education.
And in her dialogue, you can see that she doesn't speak the same way as Elinor, but also intelligence isn't just your book [00:10:00] education. And Lucy is quite smart because she's successfully manipulating everybody. But Elinor doesn't recognize that.
Emily: She may not have an elegant trained intellect, but she's definitely clever.
Lauren: Yep. And then we also find out that Lucy has another motive for wanting to manipulate Elinor because she mentions to her -- so they have another meeting at the Middletons' home, and in this conversation, when she mentions to Elinor, "Oh, I'm sure, you know that Edward wants to join the church. Can you maybe ask your brother if he would let him because if your brother lets him then surely he has to."
And she was like, well, Edward's sister is married to my brother. So if his sister can't convince him, I don't know what you think I'm going to do. And Lucy's like, okay but --
Emily: We have seen how much influence Fanny has. So if she wanted her brother to have the living at Norland, he would have it.
The Morality of Honesty
Lauren: It would be done. And Lucy either does not understand that or understands that and is hoping she can find a way around it by manipulating Elinor.
It's a lot of lying and deception and trying to control other people going on in these five chapters. So one of the questions that I have written down -- so a lot of my notes were just questions that don't actually have real answers because people have been trying to answer these questions for forever.
But because there was so many different instances of deceit and lies and lying when it's polite. So for example, Elinor has a moment where she says, "Oh, well, lying is polite now. So like, now I'll give you this answer that I don't actually believe."
So Lucy says what a sweet woman Lady Middleton is. And it goes on to say, “Marianne was silent. It was impossible for her to say what she did not feel, however trivial the occasion, and upon Elinor, therefore, the whole task of telling lies when politeness required, it always fell. She did her best when thus called on by speaking of Lady Middleton with more warmth than she felt, though with far less than Miss Lucy," which also goes back to Lucy doing whatever she can to be able to get what she wants from the people around her, but is lying ever [00:12:00] polite? Is lying moral?
Emily: It seems to me that especially Elinor's perceptions of morality here are also very tied to what we talked about regarding class in our last episode because it's polite and well-bred to give a little white lie, right. In the interest of politeness. But she considers Lucy's concealment of her engagement to Edward to be like the height of duplicitousness.
Lauren: What type of lie is acceptable, according to genteel manners? And what types of lies are not only unacceptable, but immoral and indicative of a poor character, which is the opinion Elinor clearly has of Lucy. She doesn't like her at all.
The Shifting Nature of Morality
Emily: Yeah. And that's. That's what I found in my research for this, as well, for the historical context of how morality would have been conceived at the time is that during the previous Georgian period, it was much more defined by good breeding.
So high class was good morals, whereas with the Industrial Revolution, the middle-class was growing and there was also a surge in evangelical movements in the Anglican church and outside the Anglican church. And so they were moving away from the idea of class-linked behavior, indicating good morals and towards what we kind of see as that classic Christian capitalist ethic, where if you work hard and you abstain from excess, that's what makes you a moral person?
So as with basically everything we've talked about, it was really in flux at the time that Jane Austen was writing. So there's a… not contradiction, but a tension, I think, between the previous system versus the burgeoning idea of Christian morality.
Lauren: Mm. [00:14:00] And that's, it's always really cool to me to see how morality shifts, depending on the time period and how things that people think are so intractable, like your own moral code, can shift based on what's happening in society.
Emily: I know my own moral code has shifted over the years and I'm sure it will change radically in the years to come as well.
Lauren: Yeah, I think it's interesting how morality is so often tied to religion, too. One of the arguments I used to hear for why people needed religion or why people had a mistrust of atheists because there was a lot of very conservative Christians in the area where I grew up, the reasoning that they always gave was that, well, if you.
If you don't have a religion to follow, then how do you have a moral code? And didn't realize you could have a moral code outside of religion, because, to them, religion was how you had a moral code. And this is specifically just the people that I interacted with. Not painting this brush to everybody who might identify as conservative or Christian, because that's impossible to do.
But in this particular area, they really just didn't understand that you could have a moral code outside of religion because the two are so closely tied in their minds.
So this was another question that came up as I was reading, was thinking about Lucy's duplicitous nature and how she presents herself because she's a different person to everyone she speaks to, pretty much.
Does that count as lying in a way? Or on the other hand, you know, what... are you obliged to be fully honest about who you are at all times? When is it duplicitous or when are you being false about who you are, if you're being polite and masking your emotions, for example, and then on the other end of the spectrum, do you have to be totally honest all the time about who you are and what you feel to be moral?
Emily: That is a really tricky question.
Lauren: Right?
Emily: I mean, there is no one answer because there's so [00:16:00] many different ways that that comes into practice because yeah, in some situations there are people who, like, pathologically alter their behavior, depending on who they're trying to get something out of, basically.
But then there's also just generally, I don't want to say it's like, not knowing who you are, but you know what I mean? Just like, that being a people pleaser.
Lauren: I just finished reading Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski who are two twin sisters who have written this book together about burnout and how it manifests in women, especially.
And one of the terms that they use is "human giver syndrome," that basically says that women are conditioned to give of ourselves at all times to the detriment of ourselves, because that's what society has told us that we need to do, you know, put other people in front of yourself, even when it means giving up on sleep or sacrificing your own mental or physical health and things like that. And I think part of what they would term human giver syndrome is recognizing when other people are, are uncomfortable and then immediately altering our behavior to make sure that we can try and alleviate some of that discomfort.
But I don't know that that would be considered duplicitous, you know, or lying.
Emily: Yeah.
And I also wonder what part of this might be influenced by just Lucy's general position in society and in life, because she does come from presumably a slightly lower class than the Dashwoods. But then she's also the younger sister to a woman who is extremely blunt.
So how much of this apparent duplicitousness is coming from trying to compensate for her sister's rudeness. And then also just being aware of the fact that because of her social position, she does have to work a little harder at ingratiating herself to people, basically.
Lauren: Yeah. And I don't think that, [00:18:00] in the same vein, that you owe anybody any part of yourself, so you never have to completely share yourself or be fully honest because people don't owe, like, they're not owed that and you don't have to give it to anybody.
Doesn't mean that you can manipulate people and change things based on what you want --
Emily: [fake coughs] Bridgerton.
Lauren: But you don't have to tell everybody everything about yourself or your deepest secrets or your deepest fears, to be honest with them, or to be, to be close with someone. That's not required and it's not necessary.
So I think there's, there's levels of secrecy, I guess you could say that have nothing to do with morality and everything to do is just protecting your own personal privacy.
Emily: Yeah. I feel like Elinor might even have respected more if Lucy had decided to not say anything. And if later the news about the engagement came out, because I feel like that would have seemed more like just trying to protect herself, whereas Elinor knowing explicitly that Lucy has told her and she told her sister and she's hiding it from everybody else. I feel like that comes off very differently.
The Complicated Art of Secrecy
Lauren: Elinor also has a tricky view of emotions, too, and secrecy. 'Cause she takes sense a little bit too far just as how we more easily see Marianne taking sensibility too far, because she's more likely to be rude in social situations or to be overdramatic. It's easier to recognize because we're like, here she goes, she's being melodramatic once again.
But with Elinor, it's a little bit more subtle when she has, when she goes to the extreme, because Elinor's extreme is she's heartbroken because she's just found out who, that somebody who she thought was going to eventually propose to her that maybe loved her, has been secretly engaged to somebody else without a shred of doubt, because Lucy has made it very clear -- purposely -- that it can't be anybody else. She shows her a picture of him. She shows her a letter that he's written to her and Elinor [00:20:00] recognizes his handwriting. And so she knows without a doubt that Edward and Lucy have formed an attachment and she's heartbroken and she cries about it in secret for two hours and then comes downstairs like nothing is wrong.
Doesn't tell her mother, doesn't tell her sister. And she's sworn to Lucy that she won't say anything, but she also doesn't give away any trace of being sad or upset or anything like that when she would have been well within her rights to continue to be sad. And she doesn't have to say anything about it, but she doesn't feel as though she can express that type of emotion.
And I think she also expects that same ability to easily put your emotions in a box and seal the box and lock the box away room from everybody else around her. And doesn't realize that what she's doing, isn't actually healthy.
Emily: Actually. Now that you've brought up the excesses and the differences between Marianne and Elinor, both of them really are hiding the truth of their feelings and the reason behind it, because Marianne has not told them what's going on with Willoughby.
But she and Elinor approach that hurt in such different ways because Elinor is determined not to let her family know that she's upset at all.
Lauren: Right.
Emily: Whereas it's very clear that Marianne is keeping something to herself and that it's very deeply emotional.
Lauren: Right? They can more easily see that Marianne is upset, but they don't know why, but they can see the emotion written very clearly across her face.
Emily: But Elinor won't even let them know that she's upset. At all.
Lauren: And is proud of herself when they don't see anything wrong at all.
Emily: Girl, you got to get over this eldest sister syndrome.
Lauren: Oh my gosh it really is eldest sister syndrome. Oh, man. From 1813 to now. And I think that brings up, I mean, so many interesting questions that you can talk about that I'm sure if I wanted to be an ultra nerd and look up papers about this, I probably could, but you know, when…
When is it moral to indulge your emotions? When is it honorable to deny them, like, when is it the right thing to do what Elinor does and put your emotions in a box and never look at them again. And then when is it the right thing to let yourself just fully feel [00:22:00] something? Not, I don't pose these questions, expecting an answer.
Nobody has the answer, but I just think it's interesting to think about.
Sense and Sensibility and The Good Place
Emily: It definitely is. Yeah. Did you have a particular pop culture connection in mind for this?
Lauren: I did, actually.
So I was thinking about philosophy and pop culture. And of course, whenever I think about philosophy and pop culture, there was one TV show that comes to mind.
And I know you know it.
Emily: Yes. Because you were listening to the podcast about it in the car.
Lauren: I was hoping you would pick up on that. Cause I didn't tell you about what my pop culture connection was going to be.
Emily: Well, I didn't, I didn't connect that to it being today's topic, but I'm very excited. I'm very excited to talk about it because I also love this show, which is...
Lauren: The Good Place. It is one of our favorite TV shows. And if you didn't watch it when it was airing, The Good Place is a sitcom on NBC. It had four seasons and it made these really deep, complex, philosophical questions really accessible and funny. And I loved that it did that in sitcom format where I could watch and be entertained and laugh for half an hour, but then also come away with these really introspective questions about the world and how we interact with it.
It was such a great show, 10 out of 10, wholeheartedly recommend, but one of the core questions of season one and this one, I can talk about without spoilers, so if you haven't watched The Good Place and you are going to, do not worry, I'm not going to spoil it for you because this part comes up in the first episode.
So Kristen Bell's character wakes up in the good place. But everybody thinks that she's somebody who she's not, and she quickly realizes, "Oh, I've been sent here by mistake. I'm not actually supposed to be here." And she's matched with somebody who she thinks is her -- well not who she thinks, who she's told is her soulmate who's named Chidi, who was a philosophy professor in real life before he died.
And eventually confesses to him, "Hey, guess what, buddy? I'm actually not supposed to be here. I'm not who you think I am. This is all a farce, you've got to help me." [00:24:00] And so Chidi has some questions about this because his big question is, is there a moral imperative to help you? So he uses the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who... we can talk about him a different day.
Cause he has a lot of baggage going on, but his 'categorical imperative' is the idea that we all have to act according to a really set, unwavering, set in stone, moral code that has nothing to do with the situation at hand. So according to Kant --
Emily: Morality is not relative.
Lauren: Morality is not relative, so lying can never be justified.
Stealing can never be justified. So even if you're stealing a loaf of bread to feed a hungry child, stealing was still wrong.
Emily: He's Javert.
Lauren: Yes! Yeah. And so, so Chidi's question is that, you know, on the one hand, Eleanor was not supposed to be in the good place, so maybe helping her is wrong, but on the other hand, is denying somebody help, who clearly needs it, a good or a bad thing.
And he eventually decides to help her because he thinks that that can fall within his moral code. So I thought it would be interesting to look at that. Look at what we read in Sense and -- Sense and Sensibility through that really rigid lens of is lying ever a good thing was, is lying, always wrong. Even when you're lying to be polite to somebody who you need to keep up a social relationship with. And is lying to protect your family members, because you know that their emotions are going to be hurt for you, which is what Elinor is doing.
She doesn't tell her family about what's going on, not just to protect Lucy, but also because she knows that her mom and Marianne and Margaret would all be really upset for her. And rather than say anything about it, she just decides we won't even go down that road. I'm not going to tell them. I'm going to hurt so that they don't have to, and is lying by omission, but is that right?
Can you lie to protect someone or is lying still wrong? I don't necessarily agree with Kant, I think things are a lot more gray than black and white, and I don't think that there's ever something that's always wrong, no matter the situation, but I think it's an interesting lens to look at.
So there wasn't, [00:26:00] I didn't have a huge pop culture connection, but I did like how you can apply the same questions from like that season one of The Good Place that makes these philosophical questions really accessible and then use their same framework to look at Sense and Sensibility instead, and look at the moral questions that these five chapters raised.
Emily: Yeah. I mean, humans have been struggling with the same philosophical questions for thousands of years, which is why, you know, in, in The Good Place, they're talking about morals and philosophy, they're referencing Plato and Socrates and Aristotle.
The arguments that they made are still considered to be relevant. They're still an active part of the discussion today.
Lauren: One of the things that I admire so much about The Good Place that these are, these really complex questions that we've been able to dissect and look at from all these different angles for literal millennia, thousands of years, that we've been able to rehash and talk about these questions over and over again, but it manages to make it understandable. Because a lot of times, philosophy is just very opaque and difficult to understand because it's so big picture and out there, and it's also not written to be accessible, it's written to be as complex as the question is, and doesn't lose any of the actual meat of the question while making it funny and while making it something that everybody can understand and relate to, because these are questions that affect everybody.
They're just not always posed in a way that everybody gets.
Emily: Yeah. And I've also seen people engaging with these philosophical questions. Like in, in sort of a comedic way, but in a way that you genuinely have to consider, so one, one instance in The Good Place, I think it's actually in season two, but still, I don't think is really a spoiler.
Chidi has introduced them to the trolley problem, which yeah, if you're unfamiliar, the concept is that you [00:28:00] are the driver on a trolley that is unable to stop and you're barreling down a track towards five people who will definitely die if you don't do anything. But if you change the direction of the trolley to another track, there's one person.
But the idea is that you have to make that active decision to redirect the trolley and kill that one person. But if you don't make that decision, then you're still killing five people. And there's a post that I've seen going around saying, essentially, this is really stupid because that's not a philosophical problem.
That's an engineering breakdown somewhere along the line. And just talking about like, okay, here are all the maintenance problems that like, this never should have happened. This shouldn't be a philosophical problem.
Lauren: There should just be brakes. You should just be able to stop it.
Emily: Right.
It's like, Oh, well, What if, what if the, the brakes just aren't working?
It's like, okay, that's a failure of maintenance. It's just, it's both funny and thought-provoking, just like the entire show of The Good Place. And I think does a good job of illustrating how these philosophical quandaries, these thought experiments by design have to be divorced from the reality of what that situation would look like.
Lauren: Yeah. If you put too much of the real-life detail, it loses the question that they're actually trying to ask. So you get all the what-ifs. It's like, no, no, no, stop adding more variables into the question. I specifically posed it without these, you're, you're making it more complicated than it needs to be. I recognize I could just stop the trolley.
I'm saying right now I can't. So what are you going to do?
Emily: But it's not even complicating it. In that particular instance, it's not even complicating it by putting it into a real-life context. It's saying, okay, there's literally one variable somewhere along the way someone didn't do that, their job.
Lauren: Yep.
The Hosts Become Amateur Philosophers
[00:30:00] Emily: It ultimately, it would come down to one thing that didn't happen.
Yeah. So it feels like the things that we most commonly use to consider morals, they're arbitrarily constructed.
Lauren: And I think that scares a lot of people.
Emily: Oh, definitely. It's really freaky to think about cognition. Metacognition is like that. Tripped me out every single time. One of the Wrinkle in Time books, like talked about that.
And I was reading those at like age 10. It was like, I don't think I want to think about how, like my eyes are lying to me and I don't actually know what anything is or looks like.
Lauren: No, it's a little too trippy for me.
Emily: Yeah.
Lauren: It was all a dream. None of this is real.
Emily: I don't need that. Don't need that. It still freaks me out, you know?
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: 18 years later, like, mm, no, I don't think I could go back and read that because it's just, it's freaky.
Lauren: You know, so there's a movie that will have premiered at Sundance by the time that this episode airs, it's called A Glitch in the Matrix by Rodney Ascher. Ascher? That's, it's a documentary that's examining simulation theory.
So the idea that the world that we live in might not be entirely real, which is as old as Plato's Republic. Again, going back thousands of years to questions that we've been having, basically, since we were able to understand that maybe our brains might not be telling us the whole truth. They are paralleling conversations with people who believe we're living in a computer with a purely digital nature of the film itself.
All interviews were conducted via Skype. All reenactments were digitally animated and archives are largely drawn from nineties era, cyber thrillers, and video games. So really playing with the idea of what's real, what's reenactment, what's a simulation. What's not. And I feel like it's going to be both fascinating and terrifying.
Emily: But yeah, I think because of our ability to basically [00:32:00] anonymize these concepts, and divorce them from their real-world or real-world contexts.
We end up almost unable to see the nuance because sure. You can say, okay, let's do a thought experiment. If you've stolen a loaf of bread, is that a crime? Or if you are concealing an ill-advised engagement, is that lying?
Lauren: Yeah.
Emily: Everything is shades of gray. There is always more to consider when you're looking at any kind of decision or moral quandary, which is where I become Chidi and am paralyzed by choices.
I'm not only anxious. I'm also a Libra.
Lauren: That's -- that is the most Libra aspect of you, to be fair, is --
Emily: The total indecision?
Lauren: Yes.
Final Takeaways
Lauren: Okay, Emily, what is your final takeaway from this section?
Emily: Final takeaway is that morality is flexible and that it very much depends on the context of the person making the judgments as well as the person being judged.
What about you? What's your final takeaway, Lauren?
Lauren: I think, I think my final takeaway might be that honesty isn't always the best policy. I think sometimes being always honest and forthright isn't the best thing for the situation, whether that's because of sharing information that could be hurtful or oversharing information that people don't need to know.
Even though I think honesty is usually best, like how Elinor probably should have been honest with her mother and her sister, that it's not a universal need or a universal best choice, that sometimes it isn't always the best thing. And it's a little bit more gray than perhaps we sometimes want to believe.
Emily: How many shades of gray do you think there are to morality?
Lauren: 50.
[00:34:00] That's a great ending. Thank you.
Emily: A gray-t ending?
Lauren: [groans] You were doing so well.
Emily: What, until that moment? You're counting the 50 Shades of Gray joke as doing well?
Lauren: That was funny!
[audio fades out, theme music begins]
Emily: Thank you for joining us for this episode of Reclaiming Jane. Next time, we'll be reading chapters 26 through 30 of Sense and Sensibility through the lens of sexuality.
Lauren: We will also be joined by the creators of "Rational Creatures," which is a web series based on Jane Austen's Persuasion. So we're very excited to have our first ever podcast guests. Until then check out our website, reclaimingjanepod.com for show notes, transcripts, and links to our social media.
Emily: If you'd like to support us and help us create more content, you can join our Patreon, @ReclaimingJanePod, or just leave us a review on iTunes. Reclaiming Jane is produced and co-hosted by Lauren Wethers and Emily Davis-Hale. Our music is by LaTasha Bundy and our show art is by Emily Davis-Hale.
Lauren: We'll see you next time.
[theme music ends]
Yes. Yeah. And --
Emily: My god, Javert goes by Kantian morals.
Lauren: Oh god. Where's that paper?
Emily: I'm sure it exists.
Lauren: The philosophy of Les Mis. Oh, it has to. Academia is a bunch of nerds. And I know there are theater nerds who've written that paper. They have to exist.
