Poll: Necromancy morality question (edited)

[kommando367]

Hello Escapist people. I have a morality question for you.

Let's say there is a large city somewhere in a fantasy setting that's about to be attacked
by something far more powerful than it can fully defend against and you are the one in charge of defending it.

The town has a rather extensive graveyard which a wandering Necromancer suggests raising corpses from to help defend against the enemy or enemies attacking the town. Of course, this graveyard contains the deceased former citizens and families of the city including some of your deceased family.

As the person in charge of defending the city, You have 3 options here along with the best case scenario of choosing each option.

1. Accept the help of the necromancer: He or She raises an army from the graveyard and
catacombs to successfully defend the town. The enemy is destroyed and the town is safe, but not all of its citizens were willing to accept the desecration of their dead as a necessary sacrifice and that has its own consequences which must be faced later.

Plus, you don't really know what the Necromancer's motives are.

2. Refuse the necromancer's help and attempt to defend the town: You die defending the town while about half of the citizens successfully flee the city and roughly half of the city is destroyed, leaving the remaining population at around 25% of the former population.

3. Refuse the necromancer's help and attempt to organize a full evacuation of the city: this results in most of the citizens hesitantly fleeing the town with a few stubborn fools staying to defend it before it gets destroyed.

Of course, both options 2 and 3 have the consequence of forcing everyone that flees to find a new life elsewhere.

EDIT: option 2 has been changed.

 

[WolfThomas]

Option 1 sounds good but of course you know it requires trusting a necromancer which first off is a terrible idea. Then even if they don't screw you over using the zombies and raised enemy soldiers the town's people might not react well and do something rash like burn them at the stake, then you've got a big ol'curse hanging over your town.

Defending the town alone is the right choice if you had a chance of winning, but here you've given a certain outcome that we'd lose. With 100% foresight then evacuation is the only choice.

 

[manic_depressive13]

Those options are very skewed. If you really want to establish what people think about the morality of desecrating corpses for a practical purpose you should at least have an option where you refuse the help and the town is saved but there are casualties.

Obviously I would accept the necromancer's help. I'd accept their help even if I could successfully defend the city myself. Hell, if there was no threat and they wanted to piss around in the graveyard and raise the dead just for shits and giggles, I'd let them do that too. They're just corpses.

Edit: Oh come one, if the necromancer is evil why are they asking your permission to raise the dead? In fact, why not wait until after your enemies attack so that there are more corpses at their disposal? There's no reason to assume the necromancer in the scenario is untrustworthy.

 

[Heronblade]

Assuming that the consequences listed were the only possible outcomes, option #1 all the way. The people may not like it, but can be made to accept it, particularly if reminded of the alternative consequenses.

However, there are a few other factors to be considered if we didn't have the benefit of such foreknowledge. The biggest of which is whether or not the necromancer can be trusted. Defeating one menace only to have another already inside the walls with an army...

 

[Matthew Kjonaas]

I would go with ONE but have them start out with my family so they will not feel so singled out and avoid taking more bodies than need to keep people alive.

 

[Biosophilogical]

I think you shouldn't do the necromancy thing unless there is some practical way to discriminate between corpses of people who would have been fine with it and people who wouldn't. I don't really care about the living people's views. If I want my body to be donated to science when I die, or to be an organ donor, or whatever, then that should be my choice to make/my view to be maintained/respected after my death.

As it stands, I'd be okay with MY body being resurrected (provided there wasn't some weird, re-installation of my mind where I'm trapped in my own body while a necromancer goes all puppet-master on me), because after I die, I see it as just a lump of flesh, but I also understand that other people view it differently, so I think their wishes should be respected.

So evacuation. Alternatively, I'd recruit the help of the remnants of the Grey Wardens, and stand our ground such that we might defend our town and take back the castle, ultimately killing the demon in control of a small mage-child ... oh wait, that's a game. But evacuation, because without a reasonable way to distinguish the wishes of the dead, and only raise those who would have agreed, it would be quite unethical to do so, and I'm not one to go breaking my own ethical code if I have a choice (I would consider it someone's right to decide what happens to their body after their death, and the thing about rights is that they shouldn't be violated except when they are done so to stop said person from violating the rights of another).

 

[kommando367]

Perhaps I could change the middle option and story a bit so it wouldn't be so 1 sided.

 

[Reginald]

Well, we can lose the city, decimate the population, or we can be a bit unhappy for a while. Option one might make some people unhappy, but they'll be alive, at least, and they'll have home in which it be unhappy. If the necromancer gets uppity, we could always just remove him.

Captcha: You are here. So stop complaining!

Perhaps I could change the middle option and story a bit so it wouldn't be so 1 sided.

It wouldn't be a bad idea.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

There is honestly little that is taboo about disturbing the dead in the modern era. We dig up bones and move them about and subject them to extensive testing all the time. A corpse is just that - a corpse. And if that corpse, no longer a person but simply an object, can be turned to a useful end, why not?

 

[Yopaz]

You can take advantage of the dead in order to save the living. Well of course I would pick that one. Let's say you don't pick that one. Your enemy has succeeded in both thinning down your numbers and obtained a new stronghold from where they can attack again. Then the next time you have to face a stronger enemy that has more resources while you will be a weaker force than when you couldn't beat them before. If the enemy is destroyed then that's the end of that.

 

[Xaio30]

Simple, really. Option 1. You could even make some rallying speech about how the people's ancestors rose up to defend the city out of love for their descendants. Who said you had to tell the people anything?

 

[Bertylicious]

Blatently option 3. The ends never justify the means and you'd just end up with zombie plauge and camp vampires everywhere; a fate worse than death.

 

[Bertylicious]

Simple, really. Option 1. You could even make some rallying speech about how the people's ancestors rose up to defend the city out of love for their descendants. Who said you had to tell the people anything?

When they see Unlce Kenneth gnawing on some bandits eyeballs they may guess.

 

[Xaio30]

Simple, really. Option 1. You could even make some rallying speech about how the people's ancestors rose up to defend the city out of love for their descendants. Who said you had to tell the people anything?

When they see Unlce Kenneth gnawing on some bandits eyeballs they may guess.

Uncle Kenneth was always a bit retarded different.

 

[Laser Priest]

*Cracks Knuckles*

Well, the dead aren't doing much down there. More bodies - possibly bodies immune to pain and fear - are always helpful. At the cost of offending a few people, I see no reason not to go for it.

Blatently option 3. The ends never justify the means and you'd just end up with zombie plauge and camp vampires everywhere; a fate worse than death.

You confuse undead for zombies, Vampires are not necromancer's slaves and you just flat out have no faith in Necromancers. Maybe you're from out east, and I'd understand, there are no good necromancers there, but you've gotta assume that you've got a competent necromancer on your side.

 

[RejjeN]

To me it would largely depend on how Necromancy worked in this fantasy world. Does it just use magical power to animate the corpses, or does it bind their souls to their rotting vessels? If the former I wouldn't have a problem with it, but if the later I'd probably choose to evacuate, just not a fan of torturing my ancestors

 

[DEAD34345]

I think you shouldn't do the necromancy thing unless there is some practical way to discriminate between corpses of people who would have been fine with it and people who wouldn't. I don't really care about the living people's views. If I want my body to be donated to science when I die, or to be an organ donor, or whatever, then that should be my choice to make/my view to be maintained/respected after my death.

As it stands, I'd be okay with MY body being resurrected (provided there wasn't some weird, re-installation of my mind where I'm trapped in my own body while a necromancer goes all puppet-master on me), because after I die, I see it as just a lump of flesh, but I also understand that other people view it differently, so I think their wishes should be respected.

So evacuation. Alternatively, I'd recruit the help of the remnants of the Grey Wardens, and stand our ground such that we might defend our town and take back the castle, ultimately killing the demon in control of a small mage-child ... oh wait, that's a game. But evacuation, because without a reasonable way to distinguish the wishes of the dead, and only raise those who would have agreed, it would be quite unethical to do so, and I'm not one to go breaking my own ethical code if I have a choice (I would consider it someone's right to decide what happens to their body after their death, and the thing about rights is that they shouldn't be violated except when they are done so to stop said person from violating the rights of another).

It's more unethical to disrespect the wishes of some corpses who don't feel like helping you out than it is to disrespect the wishes of an entire town of living people who don't feel like being forced from their home and/or murdered? Sounds silly to me.

OT: I've pretty much summed up my opinion above. While it would be nice to not have to violate the rights of the dead, I consider the rights of the living to be quite a bit more important, and that's what this choice boils down to. There's no way to not violate anyone's rights, so 1 seems like the clear choice to me.

(This is assuming the necromancer is 100% trustworthy, these are the only possible choices and are guaranteed with 100% certainty, etc...)

 

[Shadowkire]

Fantasy setting eh? I would put a local hero in charge of pre-battle preparations, and whenever that hero talks to me I keep saying "Are you sure you have done everything? There is no going back."

This of course creates a temporal stasis field around the enemy forces so they will only arrive the exact moment the hero says s/he is finished. I use this time to recruit an army of heroes, one by one, and send each one out to look for and kill a set number of enemy scouts and bring back their badges as proof before I give them some praise and pocket change. I of course am aware that less than half of the scouts actually have badges, this forces the heroes to kill a few more members of the enemy army than they would have liked.

For every hero that finishes that quest I will send them to attack the enemy camps, some will get missions to sabotage equipment or kill enemy lieutenants or steal weapons and supplies or I give them a laundry list of enemies to kill a specific number of like swordsmen, archers, etc..

Those who come back from all that should be powerful enough that I can group them together and send them against the enemy general with a decent chance of success.

 

[Esotera]

So this is a metaphor for the escapist forums right? Because I'd refuse and defend, as there's every chance we can rebuild the population, kill the necromancers once and for all, and have a functioning society in the same place.