Although known to only a few, even Chewbacca voices this sentiment in the Boba Fett-driven cartoon segment of the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special.
Actually, this is a wonder entertained only by Marxists studying Das Kapital. And so we doubt that it applies to many of you.
This question was much entertained at cocktail parties on Alderaan right up until the tragic and unexpected events of A New Hope.
The fact that George Lucas recasts what Star Wars is really about with the three prequel films—from the mythic hero-journey of Luke Skywalker to the fall and redemption of Anakin Skywalker—is evidence of Lucas’s own fascination with issues of fate and moral responsibility.
See Linda Zagzebski, The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 33-34.
See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation, edited and translated by Timothy McDermott (Allen: Christian Classics, 1989), p. 23; Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, “Eternity,” Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981): pp. 429-457.
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, p. 41.
Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, translated by Anna S. Benjamin and L.H. Hackstaff (New York: Macmillan, 1964), Book III, §4.
Note that free-will libertarians are not the same as political libertarians.
No one is completely free, because we’re all subject to the laws of gravity and inertia, the impulse to satisfy our hunger and thirst, the drive to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and so on.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1695), edited by Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), Book II, Chapter 21, §10.
Augustine, Free Choice, Book I, §1.
Ibid., Book I, §4. Augustine is setting quite a high standard for morality here.
Interview in “The Return of Darth Vader” documentary included on the bonus disc of the original Star Wars Trilogy DVD release (2004).
Augustine, Free Choice, Book I, §16. For more on the origin of evil according to Augustine and others, see Chapter 6 in this volume.
Ibid., Book III, §17.
I’m most grateful to Jennifer Vines, Kevin Decker, Kevin Timpe, Greg Bassham, and Bill Irwin for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
Check the internet for The Stoic Voice Journal, The Stoic Registry, The Stoic Foundation, The Stoic Place, and the International Stoic Forum.
See Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998).
Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale is one of the most highly decorated officers in the history of the U.S. Navy. He credited Stoicism for his survival while a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He was Ross Perot’s Vice Presidential running mate in 1992.
Dr. Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy is inspired by a Stoic approach to emotional problems.
As opposed to the hologram in The Empire Strikes Back.
In Attack of the Clones Yoda, hobbling forward on his cane, uses the Force to defend himself from Count Dooku’s telekinetic attacks. Yoda and Dooku, his former padawan, duel with lightsabers and Yoda protects his wounded comrades Obi-Wan and Anakin.
Discourses I.6.19-21; translation adapted from The Discourses of Epictetus, The Handbook, Fragments, edited by C. Gill (London: Dent, 1995), p. 17.
On Anger I.1.2, in Seneca: Moral and Political Essays, translated by J.M. Cooper and J.F. Procopé (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 17.
Yoda, in contrast, denies that the Dark Side of the Force is stronger. He tells Luke it is quicker, easier, and more seductive than the Light Side. Greg Bucher has suggested to me that the partisans of the Light and the Dark Sides of the Force speak at cross-purposes, neither understanding the motivations of the other. In the end the Light Side prevails because they have better people in their ranks, not because the Light Side is superior in power to the Dark Side. The vision of the empire which Vader and the Emperor champion, while neither desirable nor good, is not inherently unworkable.
Vader’s admission underscores the Stoic idea that it takes a lifelong commitment to stand a chance to become good. Vader has grown too old to reverse his evil course, apparently.
When Obi-Wan expresses his concern that the talented Anakin Skywalker is becoming arrogant, Yoda concurs: “Yes, yes, a flaw more and more common among Jedi. Too sure of themselves they are, even the older, more experienced ones.”
Note that Obi-Wan and Yoda do not die suffering.
I thank Gregory S. Bucher, Susan T. Bart, and Scott Rubarth for their excellent, generous comments on this paper. I also thank the editors and the series editor for their suggestions.
See Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Face (New York: Princeton University Press, 1949).
Laurent Bouzereau, Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays (New York: Ballantine, 1997), p. 180.
Ibid., p. 36.
D.T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: Bollingen, 1959), p. 107.
Ibid., p. 111.
John Stevens, The Sword of No Sword (Boston: Shambhala, 1984), p. 26.
Ibid., p.18.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 39. Egoism is often mistakenly associated with the views of Adam Smith, who does argue that a healthy dose of self-interest is useful for a capitalist economy, but who also thinks it can lead to gross injustices. See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), I.ii.2 and V.i.f.50, and The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976).
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism. Second edition, edited by George Sher (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), p. 7.
Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government, edited by J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 3.
E.M. Forster, “What I Believe,” in Two Cheers for Democracy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), p. 68.
These restrictions usually take the form of individual rights, which utilitarians think can be grounded in what creates the greatest happiness in the long run. See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, edited by Elizabeth Rapaport (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), especially Chapter II.
Bernard Williams, “A Critique of Utilitarianism,” in J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 98-100.
For more on the Sith’s and Jedi’s use of deception and truth, see Chapter 16 in this volume.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), III.1.ii.1.
Mill, Utilitarianism, p. 18.
For further discussion of the value of love and attachment from a Hegelian philosophical perspective, see Chapter 12 in this volume
Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), p. 47, Ak. 429.
I would like to thank Jason Eberl, Kevin Decker, and Jennifer Kwon for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.
For further discussion of love and attachment, see Chapter 12 in this volume.
See Plato, Timaeus, 28b-29; Republic, Book X, 596b-597d.
Plato, Phaedo, 66-67, translated by R. Hackforth, in R.E. Allen, ed., Greek Philosophy: Thales to Aristotle (New York: The Free Press, 1991), p. 164.
For more on the issue of freedom, see Chapter 1 in this volume.
Augustine, Confessions, Book VII, paragraph 7, translated by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 116.
In the recent DVD release of Return of the Jedi, Hayden Christensen (the young Anakin) appears as Anakin at the victory celebration instead of Sebastian Shaw (the old Anakin), further underscoring the theme of triumphant redemption.
See Richard Routley and Val Routley, “Against the Inevitability of Human Chauvinism,” in K.E. Goodpaster and K. M. Sayre, eds., Ethics and Problems of the Twenty-First Century (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979).
Peter Singer, “Not for Humans Only: The Place of Nonhumans in Environmental Issues,” in Ethics and Problems of the Twenty-First Century, op. cit., p. 194.
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (St. Albinos: Paladin, 1975).
Holmes Rolston, III, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 199.
Holmes Rolston, III, Conserving Natural Value (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 81.
Ibid., p. 174.
Rolston, Environmental Ethics, p. 228.
Rolston, Conserving Natural Value, p. 177.
Ibid., pp. 143-44.
For more on this Platonic view of the Force, see Chapter 6 in this volume.
Symbiotic relationships regularly occur in the natural world; for example, think of all the good that bacteria do to clean environments. Rolston describes an ecosystem as “a community, where parts fit together in symbiosis” (Rolston, Environmental Ethics, p. 311).
Rolston, Environmental Ethics, p. 105. See Aristotle, Physics, Book II, Chapter 1, 192b10-35, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, edited by Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 236.
For further discussion of a philosophical view of technology, see Chapter 9 in this volume.
Rolston, Conserving Natural Value, p. 81.
Ibid., p. 311.
This chapter has benefited from helpful comments and suggestions from Jerold J. Abrams, Jason Eberl, Kevin Decker, and Bill Irwin. May the Force be with them.
For further discussion of the ethics of Jedi “mind tricks,” see Chapter 5 in this volume.
See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by Joan Staumbaugh (New York: SUNY Press, 1996).
For an excellent study of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, see George Pattison, The Later Heidegger (New York: Routledge, 2000). For an analysis of Heidegger’s general philosophy, see Magda King, A Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); and George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, 1989).
Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 1.
True thinking for Heidegger has been lost today—lost really ever since the fifth century B.C. It was Plato and Aristotle who started to lose sight of the question of being. They effectively shifted the problem to a new set of questions: “How can we know beings?” and “How are beings related to one another?” The medieval philosophers, such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, were not much better, following closely in the footsteps of Plato and Aristotle. But it was really Descartes who achieved the modern shift in knowledge, putting the human knower over and above the material world, separate from nature and matter as the set of objects to be known and controlled.
Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Heidegger, Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1977), p. 221.
Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 31.
Heidegger made this remark in an interview with Der Spiegel, entitled “Only a God Can Save Us,” translated by Maria P. Alter and John D. Caputo in Philosophy Today 20 (4th April, 1976), pp. 267-285.
David West Reynolds, Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary (New York: DK Publishing), p. 25.
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 214.
See Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, p. 193.
Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, p. 301.
Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 31.
See Aristotle, Politics, Book I, Chapter 4, 1253b20-35, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, translated by Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 1131. For more of Aristotle’s theory of technology, see his Physics, Book II, Chapter 1, 192b10-193b20, in Basic Works, pp. 236-38.
Heidegger writes: “Saving does not only snatch something from a danger. To save really means to set something free into its own essence. To save the earth is more than to exploit it or even wear it out. Saving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from boundless spoliation” (“Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Basic Writings, p. 328).
I would like to thank Bill Irwin, Jason Eberl, Kevin Decker, and Elizabeth Cooke for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this chapter, and Chris Pliatska for many discussions of Star Wars.
See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975 [1694]), Book 2, Chapter 27; John Barresi, “On Becoming a Person,” Philosophical Psychology 12 (1999), pp. 79-98; Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms (Montgomery: Bradford, 1978); Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Scott Glynn, Identity, Intersubjectivity, and Communicative Action (Athens: Paideia Project, 2000).
Most thinkers doing work in psychology, philosophy of mind, and the neurosciences subscribe to the idea that “the mind is what the brain does.” Those doing work in artificial intelligence alter this by saying that “the mind is what something that functions like the brain does.” Since personhood is an extension of one’s mind, it is safe to say that for these folks personhood is what the brain (or something that functions like it) does as well. See Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991); Hans Hermans et al., “The Dialogical Self: Beyond Individualism and Rationalism,” American Psychologist 47 (1992), pp. 23-33; Eric Kandel et al., eds., Principles of Neural Science (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000).
See Dennett, Consciousness Explained; Ned Block, “Troubles with Functionalism,” in Ned Block, ed., Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 1 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 268-305; Philip Johnson-Laird, Mental Models (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1984).
See George Boolos and Robert Jeffrey, Computability and Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and James Robert Brown, The Laboratory of the Mind: Thought Experiments in the Natural Sciences (London: Routledge, 1991).
See Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Can’t Do (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).
See David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 6-11.
See George Roth and Michael Wullimann, Brain, Evolution, and Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
See Mark Hollis, The Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Ronald Lipsey, Introduction to Positive Economics (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).
Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 58-61.
See David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge and P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), Book I, Part iii, §§ii-vi.
Ibid., Book I, Part iii, §vi.
G.W. Leibniz, Monadology, in G.W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, edited by Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), §7, pp. 213-14.
In this example, I’m using the actions of a person, whom we might reasonably believe makes his own decisions and acts autonomously, so the analogy with inferences about causes in general wouldn’t make sense in this case. But the main point still holds; in any series of events, from the fact that they’ve always been observed to behave in a specific way, it doesn’t follow that they must continue to behave that way unless we have an independent reason for making that judgment.
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (New York: Norton, 1929), p. 180.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 808.
Lucas relates that in preparing for Star Wars he read fifty books on the religions of the world, but of these he mentions only one, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell’s book details the many myths and tales of the hero’s adventures as essentially a journey of self-transformation. Based on this reading, Lucas says that he “worked out a general theory for the Force, and then I played with it.” (Laurent Bouzereau, Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays [New York: Ballantine, 1997], p. 35).
See G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume I, edited by Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
For further discussion of the depiction of technology and nature in Star Wars, see Chapters 7 and 9 in this volume.
For further discussion of this political transformation in Star Wars, see Chapter 14 in this volume.
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 131.
Epictetus, Enchiridion, #3. Available at http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html . For more discussion of Stoic philosophy, see Chapter 2 in this volume.
See G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume III, edited by Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, edited by Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 279, paragraph 258.
See G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume II, edited by Peter C. Hodgson. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 740-41.
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume III, p. 326.
Ibid., pp. 327-28. See James Lawler, “God and Man Separated No More: Hegel Overcomes the Unhappy Consciousness of Gibson’s Christianity,” in Jorge J.E. Gracia, ed., Mel Gibson’s Passion and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), pp. 62-76.
William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” Available at http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww331.html.
Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume I, pp. 347-48.
Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 110.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I, Chapter XIV, in Great Books of the Western World, Volume 23 (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952), p. 85.
For further discussion of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as depicted in Star Wars, see Chapter 13 in this volume.
See Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume III, p. 128.
See Plato, Symposium, in Great Books of the Western World, Volume 7 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), pp. 167, 210.
In the climactic battle of The Matrix Revolutions, Agent Smith, with characteristic disgust, similarly tells Neo that “only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love.” See James Lawler, “Only Love Is Real: Heidegger, Plato and the Matrix Trilogy,” in William Irwin, ed., More Matrix and Philosophy: Revolutions and Reloaded Decoded (Chicago: Open Court, 2005).
G.W.F. Hegel, translated by A.V. Miller, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) §178-184. All other Hegel citations will be from this edition, with the relevant sections in the text.
Ibid., §186
Ibid., §187
Ibid., p. 111.
Hegel’s Dialectic of Desire and Recognition: Texts and Commentaries, edited by John O’Neill (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 55.
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 119.
See Chapter 14 in this volume, which also discusses the Emperor’s use of fear in governing.
For a discussion of Luke’s faith in his father and its effect on Vader, turn to Chapter 17 in this volume.
See Philip Pettit, Republicanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, translated by G.D.H. Cole (London: Dent, 1973), quoted in part in Michael Rosen and Jonathan Wolff, eds., Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 62.
You can read a defense of the idea that droids are deserving of equal treatment in Chapter 10 of this volume.
Aristotle, Politics 1295a20-23, translated by B. Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 2, edited by J. Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 2056.
Niccolò Machiavelli, selections from The Prince, in Michael Curtis, ed., The Great Political Theories, Volume 1 (New York: Avon, 1981), p. 222.
Plutarch, Parallel Lives: “Solon,” quoted in Readings in Ancient History: From Gilgamesh to Diocletian, second edition (Lexington: Heath, 1976), p. 151.
Leo Strauss, “The Liberalism of Classical Political Philosophy,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. 28.
John Dewey, “Individuality, Equality and Superiority,” in John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899-1925. Volume 13 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), p. 297.
John Dewey, “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us” in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1952. Volume 14 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988), p. 227.
See the interview with Shadia Drury: http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-3-77-1542.jsp.
I am grateful to Jason Eberl, Keith Decker, Robert Arp, Bill Irwin, and Suzanne Decker for reading and commenting on this chapter. This wise “Jedi Council” helped to improve it in crucial ways.
Aristotle, Physics, translated by Richard Hope (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 194b12.
Ibid., 193b9-12.
Aristotle, De anima, translated by J.A. Smith, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 414a28-b20.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, translated by Hugh Lawson-Tankred (London: Penguin, 1998), 1028b33-1029a7.
Aristotle, Politics, translated by Ernest Barker (Oxford: Clarendon, 1946), 1253b35.
Aristotle, Parts of Animals, translated by A.L. Peck (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, revised edition 1945), 645a29-31; 645a23.
For further discussions of Yoda as a “Zen master” and a “Stoic sage,” see Chapters 2 and 3 in this volume.
For further discussion of the “personhood” of R2-D2 and C-3PO, see Chapter 10 in this volume.
Aristotle, Physics, 199b10.
See Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (New York: Scribner’s, 1937); Peter Geach, God and the Soul (London: Routledge, 1969); Henry Veatch, Rational Man (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962).
The big exception would appear to be the speech he gives to the Senate in Attack of the Clones, which certainly seems to contradict the facts. I’ll discuss this shortly.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” (1873), in The Portable Nietzsche, edited by Walter Kaufman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), p. 43.
Ibid.
For the story of Milarepa and Marpa, see http://www.cosmicharmony.com/Av/Milarepa/Milarepa.htm.
For further philosophical analysis of Yoda’s character, see Chapter 2 in this volume.
See Plato, Protagoras.
Nietzsche, op. cit.
In other words, hiding it in plain sight. For an interesting exploration of this idea, see Wendy Doniger, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Lotus Sutra, Chapter 3: “Parable of the House on Fire” http://www.buddhistdoor.com/bdoor/0112/sources/lotus7_p1.htm .
Plato, The Republic, Book III, 414d-415d. For more on this subject, see Chapter 14 in this volume.
Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, PBS (Mystic Fire Video, 1988).
For further discussion of the de-humanizing nature of technology depicted in Star Wars, see Chapter 9 in this volume.
William Clifford, “The Ethics of Belief,” in Lectures and Essays; reprinted in William L. Rowe and William J. Wainwright, eds., Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, third edition (Harcourt Brace, 1998), pp. 456-461.
Ibid., p. 460.
Ibid., p. 456.
Ibid., p. 460.
William James, “Ethical Importance of the Phenomenon of Effort,” in John J. McDermott, ed., The Writings of William James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 716.
The only empirical test I can think of that might be performed is the blood test for “midi-chlorians” that Qui-Gon performs on Anakin in The Phantom Menace; but as far I know, this test is not available to Luke.
William James, “The Will to Believe,” reprinted in Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, p. 466.
Yoda and the other members of the Jedi Council had the same reluctance to train Anakin. It’s interesting to speculate about James’s attitude towards the justification of Qui-Gon’s faith to take Anakin as his padawan. Initially, it seems that Qui-Gon’s faith is unjustified since Anakin turns to the Dark Side. Nevertheless, it appears that in the end Anakin fulfills the prophecy by killing the Emperor, and thereby restoring balance to the Force. So perhaps Qui-Gon’s faith was justified after all.
I wish to thank Kevin Decker and Jason Eberl for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to thank Seetha Burtner and C. Joseph Tyson for fruitful discussions about Star Wars and philosophy, as well as my mentor, Professor Charlene Haddock Siegfried, Donald Crosby, Wayne Viney, and William Rowe from whom I learned so much about William James. Additionally, I would like to thank Andrea (Cummings) Gerig who caused me to begin thinking about the ethics of faith “a long time ago.”