In the grim discourse of the Warhammer 40,000 fandom, there is only culture war. One flashpoint for this unending online conflict is the question of whether or not there really are no good guys in the Warhammer 40k universe. Today I’m visiting the reliquary to retrieve my artificer philosophy degree, donning my flame-proof ceramite, and heading into the trenches to answer the question myself.
As with many arguments in both Warhammer 40k fandom and in philosophy, a lot of problems arise from people using the same words to mean different things. Two people who fundamentally agree can still argue for hours because they’re using language differently. I’ll try and define my terms as I use them: if you disagree with my definitions, you’ll know exactly where my argument went wrong for you.
Another big problem with figuring out who is good or bad in Warhammer 40k is that it is fictional. In real life, we base our judgments of whether a person, system, or event is good or bad on facts, the more facts the better. Warhammer 40k is all made up. Its ‘facts’ are malleable, contradictory, and full of gaps. Any ‘objective truth’ you might find in Warhammer 40k will be infinitely squishier than the indifferent stuff of the real world.
So when people make assertions about whether a Warhammer 40k faction is justified in its actions or not, they have to apply their interpretation of what the fiction says, and then they have to fill in quite a lot of gaps where the fiction doesn’t say anything.
The idea of “good guys” is also very slippery, with a lot of potential meanings. You could call the factions and characters who we relate to, empathise with, and cheer on, the good guys – that’s usually how the ‘good guys’ of a story are written. Using that definition, the Imperium of Man is the ‘good guy’ of most Warhammer 40k stories, because it’s the star of the vast majority of Warhammer 40k books.
The problem with this rule is that, just because someone is the protagonist for a story, doesn’t mean we can work out whether they’re good or bad. Taking an example from within 40k, the Drukhari are the stars of the show in each of their Warhammer 40k Codexes, but they’re intentionally depicted as utter bastards.
Or to pick an example from outside Warhammer 40k, the protagonist of Nabokov’s Lolita, Humbert Humbert, is an erudite and droll man. He’s also a child molester. Nabokov spends an entire novel exploring this man’s inner world, but this doesn’t mean he wants us to like him or excuse his actions.
For that matter, just because an author thinks that a character is good or bad, doesn’t mean we have to form the same opinion. What an author wants to say, and what the audience gets from their stories, can be different. If that idea seems questionable to you, think of your least favorite political party, and imagine one of their political adverts – you probably disagree with its author.
Some people contend that 40k is intended as satire, and it depicts the Imperium in a way intended to critique it; I’ve argued elsewhere that Warhammer 40k is satire, but it’s too unfocused to be very good at it. Others argue that the sheer scale of the threats in the Warhammer 40k galaxy clearly shows the Imperium as justified; I’d say that’s a side effect of making the stories and character as cool as hell to sell toy soldiers.
If you disagree with me on one of those claims, you probably agree with me on the other. Both demonstrate that it’s hard to work out exactly what the many creators of 40k intend the stories to say, and that their intentions aren’t a reliable way to work out who is supposed to be good or bad in the setting.
I’ve just brushed over an important interpretation of the question “are there any good guys in Warhammer 40k”: many people take it to mean, “can the actions of any of any Warhammer 40k factions, or characters, be considered justified?”.
If we want to answer that question, we have to pick a moral framework to answer it under. Which ethical system we pick is very important. For example, if we ascribe to a specific set of religious laws, then there are definitively no good guys in Warhammer 40k. Space Marines do not follow Kosher eating rules. The Eldar have not accepted Jesus into their hearts. No Astra Militarum regiment prays to Mecca five times a day. And most religions agree that murder is bad.
But since real world humans can’t agree on a single set of religious rules, we need to turn to a more abstract ethical framework. ‘Consequentialist ethics’ is the framework many people intuitively reach for to work through moral problems – you may also have heard of ‘utilitarianism’, which is the most famous version. What will the consequences of an action, law, or system be? Will it maximise happiness and minimise suffering?
If you’ve seen a “trolley problem” dilemma, or watched season one of The Good Place (go watch the whole thing, it’s great), you’ve come across consequentialist reasoning. It’s popular because the idea “you should aim to get the best result for the most people” is pretty intuitive.
Sure, we can argue about how we measure “best result”, but it’s a pretty fair system: everyone’s life is equally valuable, and it doesn’t produce arbitrary taboos like “don’t touch green stones on Tuesday” for no reason. It also feels objective, because it turns moral problems into maths problems – if one person dies and saves five people’s lives, we’ve got a net positive of four lives saved.
Philosophers have found lots of issues with consequentialism (because finding complications with things that initially look simple is their day-job), but it’s not a bad rule of thumb.
And it’s how most people argued about whether or not there are good guys in Warhammer 40k: arguing about whether or not their actions truly maximise happiness and minimise suffering. Some argue that the Imperium of Man is justified in its atrocious actions because of the extremity of the threats it faces – if it wasn’t this extreme, humankind would be annihilated. Others contend that the Imperium of Man is self-defeating, and that better results would be possible if the Imperium could be reformed.
But this argument is doomed to go nowhere, because consequentialism cannot assess the morality of fictional actions. That’s because cause and effect in fiction are not the same as cause and effect in reality. For a very clear example of what I mean, if Road Runner paints a tunnel mouth onto a stone wall, he can run into it to escape from Wile E. Coyote. If you paint a tunnel mouth onto a stone wall and run into it, you will get a concussion.
The consequences of actions in fiction are decided by the author and the story they want to tell, and often by genre conventions. In the case of 40k, they’re also decided by the need to sell toy soldiers, which means “long lasting peace” can never be a consequence of an action.
If we try and apply consequentialist reasoning to fiction, we get really weird results. In Star Trek TOS, a predictable consequence of an away mission is the death of a red-shirted ensign. In reality, neither away missions nor wearing a red shirt necessarily result in death, but in the world of TV tropes they sure do. That makes away missions equivalent to manslaughter, and putting on a red shirt equivalent to suicide, under a consequentialist analysis.
Whether we think the Emperor’s Great Plan, or the Imperium of Man’s political systems, are mankind’s best hope for survival, or the very thing that are dooming humankind, cannot be judged by looking at causes and effects inside 40k fiction, any more than you can work out how to escape from a lone shooter by watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
We could try and imagine a “rational” version of 40k, a cut down version that we have refitted so that it better resembles reality, in which we can try and do moral reasoning. But I don’t hold out any hope for this approach – I think 40k is too fantastical to survive adaptation.
I don’t mean the Chaos gods or the Tyranids or 40k psykers – I mean the economics! 10,000 years of political stability and technological stagnation, despite a never-ending war? I don’t think so. Any attempt I make to reconcile Warhammer 40k with what I know about reality makes the whole Imperium of Man disintegrate.
That’s just my opinion about reality, of course. But therein lies the problem. Whenever we try and work out “what 40k would be like if it was real”, we’re inserting huge amounts of our preconceptions about the real world. Arguing about which parts of Warhammer 40k are realistic and which aren’t is really arguing about what we think of reality itself.
That’s a worthwhile discussion to have, but doing it via proxy arguments in Warhammer 40k forums is a very inefficient way of going about it.
To be able to coherently talk about good and bad in Warhammer 40k, we need to find a form of moral reasoning that is better suited to fiction. I suggest virtue ethics. This form of reasoning isn’t concerned with the outcomes of actions. Instead, it considers which virtues (or indeed vices) a person demonstrates in their deeds.
It works whether you’re talking about a real person, or just the idea of a person. Sangiunius never fought Horus Lupercal because Sanguinius and Horus never existed: but his story demonstrates the virtue of bravery and self-sacrifice.
Virtue ethics originates with the ancient Greeks, the OG Western philosophers. Accordingly, it’s a system well suited for analysing a world that is equally cultured and barbaric, civilized and belligerent. Virtue ethics doesn’t attempt to reach a final or coherent judgment: someone can be noble and foolish, courageous yet wrathful, pious but meek.
It can also help us recognise the role that context plays in how moral someone is. The protagonists of every Warhammer 40k story are required by their rigid social roles, their violent universe, and the dictates of genre fiction to commit or be complicit in acts of violence and hatred. But they will still demonstrate virtues and vices that, in another context, would have different outcomes.
Are there any good guys in Warhammer 40k? That’s the wrong question. The question is, how are they good and how are they bad? I don’t expect that framing to stop the arguments. But I do think it will make them much, much more interesting.
If you want to get as obsessively into overthinking Warhammer 40k as I am, but don’t know where to start, I recommend the DK Ultimate Guide to Warhammer 40k. Site editor Alex Evans’ gave it a brief review which should tell you whether or not it’s right for you.
Source: Wargamer
