Was Jaime right to push Bran?

[Light a wight tonight]

This topic was done to death a year or so ago and it progressed unpleasantly to the point where the original poster was banned, came back under another user name, and was banned again. I hope that this isn't the same guy and that it progresses better this time.

[Dofs]

However, this is where my sympathy for Jaime's situation ends. We don't have his POV of the incident, but I'm not convinced he actually was thinking of his children but was just thinking of what would happen to himself and Cersei if they were to get caught. Besides that, they really shouldn't have been having sex in an unknown place anyway. Anyone could catch them, and thy're just lucky it was someone they could easily deal with.

Martin says he did care. And really, we know that Jaime doesn't fatherly feelings towards his children. But he is conscious that they are his, he does think about them quite a bit, and he knows that they are extremely important to a person that is extremely important to him. As unimportant as they are to Jaime, they are still much more important to him than Bran. When he had found out that Joffrey died, his musings looked like it was the first time he realized how little Joffrey meant to him.

[Ferocious Veldt Roarer]

I can see the argument some people make. And while I do believe in owning up to your actions remember that their children would likely have to face those consequences as well. So by not pushing Bran he would be putting his own children, who are innocent of their parents crime, at risk.

Which would be relevant if not for the fact that Jaime didn't give a fuck about his children. "Joff was no more to me than a squirt of seed in Cersei's cunt". His motivation had nothing to do with them. Cersei said "he saw us", and Cersei gets what she wants. Let's not turn Jaime Lannister into a responsible pater familias, that's all kind of ridiculous.

[Light a wight tonight]

Jaime pulls Bran in and says that he should be more careful climbing around after dark. "You're being naughty, right? Well, we're being naughty, too. So if you don't tell on us we won't tell on you. It'll be our secret. Deal? Let's shake on it."

[complexphoenix]

Jaime does tell us in his first POV chapter that he has come to rue throwing Bran out that window. He also shows other signs of feeling guilty about it - he tries to justify it by telling himself and Catelyn that "he was spying on us." It's very much a bit of victim-blaming, but he's doing it as a psychological defense mechanism. Deep down, he hates himself for what he did. Cersei shows similar signs - she copes with her own feelings of guilt by blaming Jaime.

GRRM doesn't concern himself with making his characters likable or sympathetic, he aims to make them real and human. That necessarily means making 90% of them morally gray, because that's how most real people are. If you think you're a saint, if you think you're better than they are, you're wrong.

[complexphoenix]

Jaime pulls Bran in and says that he should be more careful climbing around after dark. "You're being naughty, right? Well, we're being naughty, too. So if you don't tell on us we won't tell on you. It'll be our secret. Deal? Let's shake on it."

Jaime and Cersei might have been able to intimidate/persuade Bran into silence for a while, but they could never count on it long term. Eventually Bran would have gotten older and wiser and come to understand the full import of what he saw. Once that happened, there's a good chance he'd tell his father and/or Robert. Killing him and making it look like an accident was by far their safest course.

[Tormund GiantsMANE]

They weren't just ahving sex "anywhere"...like out in the open in the stables or something. Humpty Dumpty took a great fall from the top of the walls of Winterfell. Bran was the best climber and was fearless of the heights.....if not for Bran i seriously doubt anyone would have caught them.

As far as Jamie's cavalier attitude about his kids, people usually don't are about stuff until they have a reason to. After Joff's death you see Jamie taking more interest in Tommen and the type of young man he is growing into. I think there's the scene after TL's funeral when Jamie consoles and comforts a squemish Tommen after his mother rebukes him

[Light a wight tonight]

Jaime and Cersei might have been able to intimidate/persuade Bran into silence for a while, but they could never count on it long term. Eventually Bran would have gotten older and wiser and come to understand the full import of what he saw. Once that happened, there's a good chance he'd tell his father and/or Robert. Killing him and making it look like an accident was by far their safest course.

Robert's death was already in the planning stages and would have happened long before Bran would (possibly) have related the incident. The Twincest was already suspected, too.

[complexphoenix]

Robert's death was already in the planning stages and would have happened long before Bran would (possibly) have related the incident. The Twincest was already suspected, too.

"Planning stages"? It seems to me that Cersei had a vague, general idea that she'd kill Robert once Joffrey was old enough but hadn't decided on any details. By the time Joffrey turned 16, Bran would be 11 - old enough to know such things. As for the suspicions, I don't think Cersei knew at that point that Stannis and Jon Arryn suspected and were investigating. Remember her conversation with Tyrion at the beginning of ACOK? It's clear she had nothing to do with Jon Arryn's death and she implies that she didn't know about Jon Arryn's suspicions until Ned confronted her in the godswood. Given that she admitted in that same conversation to fucking Jaime and killing Robert, she had no reason to lie to Tyrion about those things.

[Faint]

Jaime does tell us in his first POV chapter that he has come to rue throwing Bran out that window.

Yes, but only because of the constant grief he receives about the incident from Cersei. It had nothing to do with his feelings towards Bran or feeling bad about having crippled him. This idea that Jaime in someway feels guilty about the act beyond its effects on himself is simply reader projection undertaken as a defensive mechanism for liking a callous asshole.

[The Wolves]

Yes, but only because of the constant grief he receives about the incident from Cersei. It had nothing to do with his feelings towards Bran or feeling bad about having crippled him. This idea that Jaime in someway feels guilty about the act beyond its effects on himself is simply reader projection undertaken as a defensive mechanism for liking a callous asshole.

Lol!!!

[Hotpie Targaryen]

This is not relevant.

Bran has more right to climb that tower in Winterfell than Jaime has any right to breath in Winterfell. Even if Bran shouldn't have been climbing he should have been safe climbing buildings that he's been doing his whole life and that's his family's ancestral home.

Also the fear was that Bran would fall from climbing not be pushed by someone.

It's as relevant as people bringing up the fact that Jaime and Cersei shouldn't have been having sex (I.e., not at all). What brought each person to that place is irrelevant. The fact is, that is the situation all 3 found themselves in. Given that situation, the question is, did Jaime have the right to kill someone else in order to save his life and the life of his lover and the children she loves? And if I were in that situation, I think his was a viable solution. Regrettable, and horrible, and a burden I would carry for the rest of my days, but one that isn't too hard to understand unless you're completely incapable of abstract thought.

[Gneisenau]

Well I think we must first separate morality from any law/legal aspect.

I don't really see it as wrong for Jaime to push Bran.

Legally Jaime committed assault and attempted murder.

[Tormund GiantsMANE]

Robert's death was already in the planning stages and would have happened long before Bran would (possibly) have related the incident. The Twincest was already suspected, too.

Twincest suspected is not twincest confirmed....ask Ned Stark about the difference.

[Buried Treasure]

It wasn't Bran's life against the other 3 children with no option of all four children living. Joff, Tommen and Mycella were the Starks guests too, and although the treason of Cersei and Jaime would surely have led to them being uninvited and later subject to arrest, the the kids were innocent and could have remained under Stark protection as guests. Of course, Jaime was far too proud to have ever gone to Ned to ask for such protection for his children, but the notion he had to murder one child to guarantee the safety of his own is bullshit.

[Batbob45]

no

[KingslayerHodor]

I sincerely hope I never meet some of you people in real life. You're attempting to justify the attempted murder of a child for seeing something that he probably didn't fully understand. I don't know what I would do in that situation, but I definitely wouldn't murder the blameless 8 year old.

Posts like these make me smile. Let me change it up a little bit:

I sincerely hope I never meet some of you people in real life. You're attempting to justify the eventual murder of 3 children. I don't know what I would do in that situation, but I definitely value my children's lives more than a stranger's child.

Just as you and others think we're ethically inferior, we think the same of you.

Of course, Jaime could have avoided this whole situation from ever coming up by simply refraining from fucking his sister. So that limits my sympathy. Jaime and Cersei were unambiguously wrong in having their affair. What they did benefited nobody but themselves and put the entire realm at risk, which was monstrously immoral by any measure.

Many people made this response, and I think it was adequately responded to. See the first post.

[A Man Has Said]

Utilitarianism (to be more precise, act utilitarianism) is the view that an act is morally right if and only if it an act maximizes the good. I don't want to get into how the goodness of this act would be evaluated (some distinguish between the expected amount of goodness as a result of an action vs. the actual amount of goodness). Now, it's plain here how Jaime had reason in pushing Bran out of the window. He had 5 lives to save: his own, Cersei's, Joffrey's, Myrcella's and Tommen's. Killing Bran would prevent 5 other lives from being lost.

[...]

Something I find really funny is the major double standard exhibited in some of the posts I've seen. Now, Jaime is considered to be this evil, awful character, while Ned, who is considered the paragon of morality by the vast majority of the people here, isn't even so sure what he'd do:<snip>

(I'm just responding to the OP. I haven't read responses yet, but I hope most of them vigorously oppose this line of reasoning.)

I think you lose this argument right off the bat on two counts. First, you can't "[not] want to get into how the goodness of this act would be evaluated." It's an ethical and logical dodge of the most critical point. It's like saying you want to discuss physics without going into silly things like force and mass. It takes your argument out of the realm of the serious into a Cloud Cuckooland where you get to win because you get to make the rules at the beginning.

The main problem with the entire construct of utilitarian ethics is that only one person or body can make an evaluation about the goodness of an act, and they're ALWAYS going to make a biased evaluation - coming up with a solution that is 'good' from their point of view, but not necessarily anyone else's. That's a general observation.

In OUR universe, you often see this sort of thing come up when you're talking about the actions of religious fanatics. One man's terrorist is another man's martyr. So how do you see the utilitarian virtue of flying a plane into a skyscraper?

“The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires.”

~ Susan B. Anthony

The specific problem in the example given is that Jaime is willing to kill Bran to save, CERSEI AND JOFFREY, who rank among the most evil characters in the series of books. Take those two out of the story and way more than five people survive who otherwise die if Cersei and Joffrey are allowed to live. So the only 'good' in this assessment is the preservation of Myrcella and Tommen's lives.

Now you're equation of 'utilitarian' good becomes Myrcella and Tommen's lives versus those of Bran (who survived, but that was not Jaime's intent) Mycah, Robert, Ned, and countless soldiers and civilians who died in the Wo5Ks. (and I'm leaving out several more named characters that Cersei and Joffrey had killed 'just for kicks' in the subsequent story.)

So it all boils down on who is making the assessment of greatest good.

There is no objective, unbiased way to make that assessment.

Even if there was, I would argue that Jaime would have created more good overall by throwing Cersei out the window and jumping out after her.

[Faint]

I am with Cersei on this one; regardless of the utilitarian value of throwing Bran off the tower, I doubt Jaime put much thought into the matter before he acted. The idea that he was actually thinking of his three children at the time is laughable. From his perspective, it was little more than crushing a fly. He was irritated more than anything else.

[KingslayerHodor]

First, you can't "[not] want to get into how the goodness of this act would be evaluated." It's an ethical and logical dodge of the most critical point.

It's very simple, isn't it? You don't need to write a long wall of text on this point.

Expected value: Jaime expected 5 people to die.

Actual value: Counterfactually, 5 people would have died. The possible world in which Bran wasn't pushed has less value than the actual world in which Bran was pushed.

In fact what's funny about the actual value is that Bran wouldn't have gone to Bloodraven and saved the world if he hadn't been a cripple, lol. So it's thanks to Jaime that Bran saves the world.

It's a little bit silly to accuse Jaime of doing the wrong thing because he saved Cersei and Joffrey's lives. It's like accusing a person of being a murderer because they threw a banana peel on the floor and a grandma died 10 years later because of it. You have to draw the line somewhere sooner than that.