★★★★☆ Responsibility and complicity

The Will of the Many

James Islington

Suppose you are a citizen of some nation. As a citizen, you pay taxes. Your government, supported by your taxes, does some horrifying evil thing. (I won't give an example, since we all, almost by definition, disagree about what those things are.) Are you responsible for the evil? Suppose that these immoral things done by your government benefit you, perhaps only in some indirect way over which you have no control. Are you complicit in the evil? Here is what one of the characters of The Will of the Many has to say on the subject

“Then they were participants and by definition, shared guilt.”
“They didn’t have a choice.”
...
"Anyone who does not resist them ... is lending them their strength. Is complicit in all that they do."

That is the view of just one character -- most others have more nuanced and realistic ideas. But those questions of collective responsibility and complicity are what The Will of the Many is about.

As philosophers often do, James Islington has constructed an artificial version of the ethical problem that sharpens the questions. The Catenan Republic (which, by the way, looks a lot like the Roman Republic in language and power structures) has a magic system. Every person has a sort of life force, called Will, that can be used to do magic. Most citizens are of rank Octavus. Each Octavus cedes half his/her Will to a Septimus, and each Septimus receives half the will of eight Octavae. (I am not a Latin scholar, so I will probably get the grammar wrong.) Seven Septimae cede half their will to a Sextus, and thus a Sextus receives Will from 56 Octavae. A Sextus therefore has stronger magic than a Septimus, who is stronger than an Octavus. And so on. The Will of the Many begins with a Table entitled "Catenan Rankings" that lists the the number of people from whom an individual of each rank (1-8 from Princeps to Octavus) receives Will. The number in this table come from a simple formula: n = 8!/r!, where n is the number of Octavae from whom a person of rank r receives Will. This is called the Hierarchy.

This exemplifies the feel of the Catenan Republic. They are logical people who respect structure, engineering, and straightforward mathematics. They build cities and machines based on these principles. And because of the way the Hierarchy works, each citizen supports the whole system by ceding Will to it. Thus the question arises whether they are responsible for and complicit in the acts of the Catenan Republic.

One of those acts was the conquest of an island kingdom in which our hero Vis grew up. He is now an orphan, his parents having been killed in the conquest, so these questions of responsibility are personal to him. He has never consented to either cede or receive Will from anyone else.

Vis is adopted (for reasons we only gradually come to learn) by a senator in the Military Hierarchy and sent to the Catenan Academy, an elite school for the children of high-rank citizens of the Catenan Republic. So, yeah, it's a magic school story, and the Catenan Academy is the Hogwarts of this nation. But it is not very Hogwarts-like.

There are dark mysteries, not just in the Catenan Academy, but also in the Republic. No one really knows how the magic works. The Catenan Republic is a postapocalyptic civilization formed from the remnants of some distant past and poorly understood event called the Cataclysm. Much of the Republic's technology/magic is based on structures and machines that survived the Cataclysm, which no one now alive really understands. We begin to glimpse near the end that Vis will uncover some of this mystery.

This all sounds very academic. (And of course it is! It's an Academy, after all.) But the story is surprisingly gripping. Vis struggles not just with ethical dilemmas, but with friendships and physical danger. One sympathizes with his battle to not be corrupted. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and long though it is, was still as interested at the end as at the beginning.

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