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.