The Choice You Do Not Have, Except to Make:

Dilemma is the heart of narrative, as is established by Jeff Kitchen in his interviews. Yet what appears to be dilemma, a decision in between two evils, is quite often nothing more than a scenario wherein one course of action is defensible and others cannot be, but failure is a common risk. It’s in the aftermath of such a failure that excuses come, and often such excuses harden into orthodoxies which become a moral dogma. Yet a moral dogma, though it is dogmatic, is not moral. Though it’s paradoxical to say that something we describe as “moral” is not moral, that’s because to classify a thing as “moral” means to claim that it *aspires* to be moral, yet the possibility of failure leads us to conclude that it is not what it pretends to be, and contradictions in semantics cease to bother us when we remember what the nature of a moral act is truly.

 

Fans of anime who vilify Light Yagami may claim that it was Light’s *decision* to employ the Death Note which leads to his downfall. Yet there is one scene in *Death Note* wherein Light is truly obligated to employ the Death Note in a manner which, from that point forward, lends him credence for his project, and that is the scene with the attempted rape. In that scenario, Light truly “has no choice”; he *must* employ the Death Note in the manner that he does, and anyone who’d fail to do as he does would be absolutely impotent in judging of him. Here, to say “he had no choice” is no “excuse” for “murder”, since necessity and social duty are not mere “excuses” for immoral action, but the very fundaments of *moral* action. Here, the question is not ever, “Why did you attack and kill those rapists?”; it is always rather, “Why did you *not* kill those rapists?” or, more properly, “What made you hesitate in saving that poor girl??” Within these short few seconds, Light is Heroism at its purest and most uninhibited, and here he truly is the archetype of Justice as It Ought to Be, devoid of any bureaucratic pretense, any propaganda about “universal human rights”, and any other sick, amoral apathy which seeks to drag the virtuous down to the level of the vicious. What is universal is more basic and more primal: kill the enemy; protect the damsel in distress. Nobody *needs* excuses to fulfill this burden; those who make excuses are the ones who fail to do so.

 

By acknowledging that people *do* fail I acknowledge that there *is* a choice involved. Yet it’s a choice that, in this instance, is a purely black and white dichotomy, not a dilemma. It is pass or fail, with little time to think and only just enough to *act*. So, even if one claims that there’s a “contradiction” in my argument, it does not matter, as there is no time to worry about “contradictions” in the moment, and, in retrospect, there is no contradiction, truly. True: Light has no choice, though there’s a choice involved. Yet when we say, “I had no choice,” we really mean, “I would not dare to choose another path,” for when we “have a choice” we’re facing a *dilemma*, one wherein no option is ideal but either may appear to be superior. In Light’s case, this is not the case. Light “has no choice” since there *is* no dilemma and, as such, no time to *think* as *though* one had a choice; one merely has to execute. To choose to fail, to take the weaker path and let injustice reign, is not to “have a choice”, since one “has not” to make a choice in such a situation but to act instead on what *necessity* requires.

 

This necessity is what the character of Chuck McGill refers to when he says Kim Wexler “has no choice” but to report the crimes of Jimmy. He does not “deprive” her of her “agency”, as was the claim John Teti made in his “Ological” analysis. It is not that she *cannot* choose to lie, as we all know she does. It's rather that to lie is “not a choice at all”, as she says in another conversation with the Kettlemans. In that scenario, as well, the people who are told they “have no choice” do choose, regardless, to refuse the only choice they have, and that seems paradoxical, though only in semantics. In reality, the Kettlemans delude themselves, believing that they have a choice when it is obvious to everybody else that they do not. That Jimmy turns to crime in order to undo their faulty logic does *not* mean that crime is justifiable entirely. He’s put in a dilemma in that situation, so he has a choice, but he is only put in that dilemma owing to the fact that they believed they had a choice when they did not.

 

To have one proper choice is not to have a choice at all, because to have one proper choice is to be dutybound to just *one* course, whereas to “have a choice” is to have numerous alternatives available; the paradox of having something which one does not have is cleared away in common practice. That’s because to *have* is to *possess*, and with possession comes the freedom to “do with it what one wills”. To have a choice is to possess that freedom. Yet that freedom is not truly one’s possession if it’s illegitimate. As such, although Kim “has a choice to make” when Chuck insists she “has no choice”, Chuck is not wrong, since he acknowledges that there’s *one* choice that Kim *must* make, and as such it is not *her* choice to make, and as such she cannot be said to “have” it. In the plainest terms, she has no moral choice, although morality requires her to make the moral choice. The moral choice is not a choice at all, since any moral person would just *do* it.

 

**[({R.G.)}]**

There is one moral choice you have to make,

Though, making it, you have no moral choice,

For, though your own morality’s at stake,

In what you choose you have no moral voice.

 

There is a choice, and what you choose decides

Whether you stay the course and so prevail

Yet does not change the nature of the sides

But only where you stand or, falling, fail.

 

To have a choice, to hold it for your own,

The nature of that choice must be possessed

Yet here one choice is natural alone

And you do not decide which choice is best.

 

So, make the moral choice, or choose defeat

It is not yours to choose, but to complete.

 

[({R.G.)}]

 

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