Octavia Butler's "Lilith's Brood", among other things, is an extremely thorough exploration of morality. Firstly, it challenges the emotional connection to morality by creating a situation where standard sympathy for characters doesn't necessarily reflect who has the moral high-ground. A lot of books use sympathy for the characters to give an impression of the moral situation. However, in this book, it's nearly impossible to determine whether events are ethical, because the characters that those events affect are both human and alien. For the humans, my sympathy center works fine, but the Oankali are presented as such a truly alien species that it seems nearly impossible to understand the reasons behind their actions. Though the book attempts to give some insight into the machinations of the Oankali mind, especially in "DAWN", it's very hard to pin down exactly how they think. For that reason, the same reason I don't judge a crocodile for attacking a person, I find it difficult to judge the Oankali, and find it difficult to sympathize for them. Any sympathy analysis of the situation yields a bias towards the humans that may not necessarily be fair. The notion of a people who are motivated by the incorporation of new genetic material into their society is so completely foreign that my ethical sense becomes irrelevant, and I can only analyze the inter-species conflict intellectually. This presents a problem.
How does one analyze intellectually an emotionally based subject like ethics? This question has strange relevance to the world that has been presented in "Lilith's Brood", because it derives ideas from both human and Oankali thought. For the humans in the story, moral right is a very subjective and emotional issue. It's clear that the decisions and moral convictions that humans make are based on their emotional state, which frequently includes fear and resentment. These lead to convictions, which demonize the Oankali, and lead the more radical elements of Phoenix to believe that cosmetic surgery on construct children is a moral imperative. On the other hand, the Oankali see morality very scientifically. They have incredible insight into the genetic foundations of life, and for that reason they are able to analyze the core of different organisms' actions on their most basic level. When analyzing the human genome, the Oankali see a conflict between the hierarchical nature and intelligent nature of human beings, which they believe to be a fatal flaw. Because the Oankali perceive organisms to be merely the sum of their parts, this flaw seems inescapable to them. Since their society is morally motivated by genetic diversity, they see modifying the human race, and effectively eliminating the flawed genes, as the obvious ethical solution. Letting the human race continue to propagate in its current state seems would be a crime. When Akin is asked why the Oankali wouldn't help humans settle on Mars, he explains that, "The only thing that would be more terrible would be to murder you all with my own hands." (502) He goes further to explain the Oankali position, saying that "You can't see and read genetic structure the way they do. It isn't like reading words on a page. They feel it and know it." (502) The Oankali moral positions are driven by analysis of a perception which is near scientific. The fact Oankali, which are all provided with similar information, come to a consensus on this moral issue shows that their moral reasoning is deterministic, and not subjective. This divergence in ethical reasoning between humans and Oankali turns the earlier question to something different: how does use Oankali reasoning to analyze human ethics?
I believe the character Akin was made for the purpose of making the aforementioned question answerable. He gives the most exposure to the Oankali type of thought, but at the same time, he is the most human of the constructs. This gives him a perspective, which allows him to use his Oankali reasoning, but also address the emotions which are important to human moral reasoning. Ultimately, he comes to the conclusion that there is a lack of symmetry between the two species, and that humans deserve an independent equivalent to the Oankali Akjai. He realizes that the nature of Oankali necessitates symbiosis with other species, but he also is very aware of the injustice of forcing the human race into extinction in the process. Ultimately, he shows that moral justice between two societies necessitates balance.