I’m just musing, ignore if you like. (Oh, and I just spent an hour writing this out and it disappeared. This is my second attempt. Can I punch something please?)
So, Toriyama had stated that he didn’t intend Goku as a righteous hero. Essentially, that Goku’s actions result in good might be called a happy accident. Not that Goku is bad or evil, just that he’s…more neutral, I guess.
This is interesting to think about, because Goku has a very “live and let live” mentality. He doesn’t wish evil on others, and in fact he gets angry when innocent lives are threatened. (Especially if it’s his friends or family.) He doesn’t even kill his enemies in many cases…though a large motivation for this is that he wants to fight them again. (He even says so.) But I’ve also seen it said by others that he views others as their own individuals with their own ideology and motivations. From what I’ve seen, I think this is true, too. His decisions seem to have multiple reasonings.
Still, he seems willing enough to kill in some cases. The general at the Red Ribbon tower, Piccolo, Piccolo Jr, Cell.
The case of the general at the Red Ribbon Army tower…I don’t remember if this is in the anime, but in the manga when the general threatens to kill the village elder and the village elder says to not worry about him and just stop the general, Goku is like “really? If that’s what you want, okay”. (Then the elder changes his mind when he realizes that Goku will actually go through with it.)
Piccolo….Goku actually did kill him. As much as Piccolo was a monster, I think a lot of Goku’s motivation was revenge over Krillin’s death. Not to say that the rest of the world being under Piccolo’s rule wasn’t also a motivation.
Piccolo Jr, Goku was willing to kill at one point. (He fired a kamehameha wave that he expected to kill him.) At the end of the fight, he stated that he didn’t want Kami to die, but he also said (at least, in the manga) that he didn’t want to lose his rival. His reasoning being that he beat Piccolo once and he could do it again. I find it interesting that Goku didn’t want to kill Kami, despite him being fully willing to die. Whereas in the example just above Goku was willing to let someone die in a fight if that’s what they wanted. I suppose it has a lot to do with the bigger picture…no Kami, no dragon balls, no earth guardian.
As far as we know, it doesn’t appear that there was any question about killing Cell. He was a heartless monster who killed innocents AND Goku knew he was no match for him.
Goku is stated to be mainly motivated by the desire for a good fight, but it does seem pretty clear that he, at least, considers intentionally hurting others to be wrong. He is horrified by his Saiyan heritage when he first hears about it, and calls them monsters and doesn’t fully consider himself a Saiyan until the Freeza saga.
Still, his desire to fight is strong enough that it often does overshadow everything else and he makes some decisions that puts everyone, including family and friends, in *more* danger. (Letting Vegeta live, not killing the creator of the androids before he could make them, etc. His main motivations being that he wants to fight them, and he says so.)
I’d like to say that he perhaps doesn’t always see the bigger picture and realize how bad those decisions are, but thinking on the glimpses we get into his thought process I’m not entirely convinced that’s true. Others have typed him as a Sensing type (MBTI), and I agree with that. Meaning that Intuition, or the ability to see the “big picture” is an inferior function. Still, there are plenty of instances where he does use intuition and use it well, such as when he realizes that the dragon balls would be gone if Kami died. His thought process is very much internal, too, and we only get glimpses of it.
It is clear that he doesn’t want to hurt others, but I would say at the very least that he allows his desire to fight and become stronger to impair his judgment. Perhaps he justifies it to himself by rationalizing that he won’t allow himself to lose, or that any damage that is done can be undone by the dragon balls.
Goku seems to somewhat project his love of fighting onto others, too. (At least other fighters.) He states that he could have killed Buu when he was in SSJ3 form, but that he wanted to give the kids a chance at him. He assumed that they wanted to fight as much as him. Which, to be fair, isn’t an idea that’s severely out there, considering that Goten and Trunks are half Saiyan and gifted martial artists. (Still, that’s a lot of pressure to put on a couple of kids, even if they seemed pretty eager to do it. Did Goku even consider the ramifications of that choice?) Goku more than once seems to think that others deserve a chance at fighting and is willing to let them. (Though the primary example that comes to mind other than the one I just mentioned is the Son Goku and His Friends Return OVA, and I’m not sure if that’s canon or not. Pretty sure there are examples from DBZ itself, too, aside from the one I just mentioned.)
Does all this make Goku “innocently selfish”? I don’t know, but despite what I may have thought a couple days ago, probably not…? I do think it likely that his perception is skewed somewhat because he isn’t normal or human.
Perhaps it’s just because I always see the best in others whenever possible, especially when it’s a character I like and genuinely don’t want to see in a bad light, but to me…it only makes Goku a guy who isn’t perfect and who is pretty selfish. And we all are selfish to an extent…heck, I don’t think even our best actions are entirely void of selfishness. …so, who am I to judge? And I do think he’s a well meaning guy for the most part. Plus, this is fiction, and fiction is great for exploring things you wouldn’t necessarily want to happen in reality.
Anyway, there goes another hour and a half I spent just because pondering this is interesting.
