Ethically Sound Necromancy

That's no different to when the same son reads a book written by his father who encountered the same problem and follows the solution word for word. Even n your example the son can still thinks about it for a moment and go "Neh, I still think my solution is better." or at least ask the dad "why?"

Look, that was one example of the issue. It would be nice if you could address the actual concern instead of picking apart a scenario that I mentioned offhand in order to demonstrate the sort of thing I meant.

Be not afraid...

What I am saying is that the reliance on people who are already gone will still require people to listen to them without thinking first, and that has nothing to do with being able to talk to the dead or not and all to do with people taking advice without thinking, because with and without necromancy that can still happen anyway. So if people choose not to move away from the shadows of their ancestors, as you say, they can still choose to via reading up on what thir ancestors did. Necromancy just makes it more direct.

edited 7th Oct '12 5:37:15 AM by IraTheSquire

People influence each other. You can't prevent that. Keeping them around to be talked to is prolonging the amount of time that they have to influence the world. I don't see how you can get around that. It's easier to dismiss the opinions of somebody who is dead and gone than someone who you can see and talk to and argue with. Particularly a loved or admired one.

As it is, people who have lived in previous time periods can only influence us indirectly. Letting them run around directly influencing things is going to change stuff. Or rather, I think it would make the world much more resistant to change.

Also, if we're talking actual bringing-people-back-to-life necromancy instead of just celestial telephone-style necromancy, presumably these undead people are still going to get to vote if they're living in our countries.

edited 7th Oct '12 5:51:07 AM by LoniJay

Be not afraid...

Having a direct line of contact with one's ancestors would definitely cause widespread social and cultural changes, I think. Just to make one example, knowing with certainty that there is an afterlife and (maybe) some details about it would turn death into something far less fearsome.

edited 7th Oct '12 5:45:21 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Say, we've been talking a lot about raising dead bodies, but what about summoning ghosts? (Though I guess we're touching on that subject already.)

edited 7th Oct '12 6:02:36 AM by KylerThatch

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

The fundamental issue is the same, I think — what happens to the soul?

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Not to mention a fundamental change in how things work. What we are talking about is a pattern of signals in the neural network being able to exist after the neurons stops firing. Will music do the same? Will the patterns fired in electric circuits do the same? Will that mean tht the file you just deleted leaves behind some kind of ghost, too?

Loni does have a point about the possible slower rate of change, social or otherwise. Presumeably, the functionally immortal elders will retain their positions of authority instead of handing it over to their descendents. It's not the farmer son making decisions while following his father's advice, it's the father never handed the farm over to his son in the first place.

There's that old saying about how people never really changes their minds. It's just that those who held the older ideas die off and the younger ones who grew up with the new ideas are the only ones left. Isn't there some studies that showed people have much greater difficulty changing their minds to accept new ideas once they're pass 35 or something?

edited 7th Oct '12 7:20:54 AM by nightwyrm_zero

Well there's limitations to necromancy. In Pathfinder/D&D, things like talking to the dead, at a low level anyway, are often not so great. The spell "Speak With Dead" is limited:

• You can only ask one question for every two caster levels.
• The dead can mentally will not to speak with them, especially if they would have disliked the questioner in life.
• Answers are usually cryptic and filled with riddles.
• You only get one minute per caster level to talk to them, so you can't exactly ask for in-detail answers.
• After the spell is cast, the corpse can lot be under the affects of Speak With Dead for one week.
• Also the corpse has to be in mostly-good condition, so that it can reasonably speak.

Then, when it comes to animating dead to serve your purpose, you also have limitations. Specifically, when your undead creature dies, it can no longer be brought back to unlife. So it's not like you have this never-dying army at your disposal.

Edit: Hell, in my opinion, true Resurrection type stuff is much worse than necromancy. Imagine wanting to stay dead, enjoying your afterlife, and then suddenly you're ripped from your cozy little place and thrown back into the world of living. This means you not only know what the afterlife is like and have to live again knowing this, but you also have to feel pain and die again. And usually Resurrection is used for even more selfish goals, i.e. "You were the only one who can defeat the Big Bad! You have to fight him again for us!"

edited 7th Oct '12 7:30:58 AM by HeavyDDR

I'm pretty sure the concept of Law having limits was a translation error. -Wanderlustwarrior

Remember in Harry Potter where Dumbledore tells Harry how people have died in front of the mirror that shows them their heart's desire?

If you have a necromancy situation like that, I can see a good portion of the population using communication with the dead as a crack fix.

The only way I see this working is as skeletons being labor. If their skeletons:

1) you don't know who is who. So you can't whine about relatives or celebrities.

2) you don't have the biohazard of rotting or preserving the body.

3) you can resist the uncanny valley problem.

4) you can repair them easier.

"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur

Another possibility: depending on what you need your undead servants for, you might be able to sidestep a few ethical issues by using dead animals instead.

On that note... pet skeleton cat?

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

If we go by D&D, if I am not mistaken the dead person gets to choose whether to be resurrected or not. That's a plot point in a couple of parts of Order Of The Stick, for example.

Why? I would certainly be interested in talking with my dead loved ones, and I would obviously be also interested in learning about the conditions of the afterlife; but I would not have any reason to get addicted to talking with them, no more than I risk getting addicted to perpetually talking with my living loved ones...

edited 7th Oct '12 9:26:24 AM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Hmmm...

Regarding "starving jobless" problem. That's an evil created by market solutions to resource scarcity. It's not like you MUST have jobless people starve. You chose to do that. If you choose to arrange society in that fashion, you're evil, not the necromancy. You could just as easily go up to Jim Bob Brown and ask him "Hey, how's your skeleton run farm?", "Oh great, they got a huge haul this year while I sat on my ass and did nothing."

Most feudal systems were heavily planned economies in which the local lord decided how to distribute food. Given modern mechanisms for democracy and information sharing, we wouldn't have local lords any more. We'd have local bureaucracies and public servants. If any starving is going on, it's due to poor government, not necromancy.

Next up is the "respect for the dead". As this is cultural, I will simply say that some cultures will use necromancy and some will not, depending on their respect for the dead. In my opinion, because it is such a powerful tool without non-cultural drawbacks, those who embrace necromancy will eventually supplant societies that do not use it. But of course, you could argue there are non-cultural drawbacks.

Ecologically speaking, it depends what keeps undead animated. If it's some spellcaster based skill, then we are creating a class of "rich" who are the mages capable of controlling more undead and thus being able to accomplish more labour than others by virtue of being born with more skill. If it's just a general "mana cost", then it'd be more like current society (with the same issue of needing money to make more money), alternatively we could socialise mana, and so this isn't inherently good or evil, it depends on how you run your society.

If you need to enslave souls, that's a major problem, though, humans don't generally act kindly because they want to go to Heaven or something... normally humans are pushed (over a historical time period) to act kindly because it's actually favourable to them in the long run even if they don't realise it (ie. like morality pushes people to act in a way game theory says they should not). So it has to be that enslaving souls causes major problems in the long run. Like say, it opens the gates of hell every so often. Undead rebellions because magical chaining of their freedom of will breaks every so often. It takes more mana upkeep for evil chaining of undead than undead of free will.

If we're talking about using up too much natural resources, actually probably not an issue. If you look closely at food production versus population, the trend is that population never outgrows food production. If it ever tries to do so, something terrible happens from war to disease. The "natural" population pressures that exist (which are hard to see at the micro level... like say lack of food production causing piracy in Somalia through a complex chain of events and factors) tend to keep us within Malthusian limits throughout time. Would conflict be greater or lesser? Probably about the same. The thing is, people simply will have less kids, or there will be a higher child mortality rate to keep population levels basically the same as today (in terms of resource consumption).

So then, is it an economic issue for dead people to displace the positions that would normally be occupied by living people? Forever leadership is a problem, but it's hard to say how long that would last. I imagine that in the early days (like say before classical age), people would worship these forever leaders as eternal undead gods. But eventually, the fact that doing so causes your society to be all backwards and crappy (and thus lose out against societies that are more liberal and forward thinking) is the largest factor to simply eliminate that. People will have all sorts of cultural rules and morality about how you get advice from the undead, how you talk to them, what's good to do, what's not good to do. They'll have had thousands of years to deal with these problems. They would not be like us questioning the very basics of undead. They'll be citing hundreds of events, writing essays every year, producing all sorts of opinions and so on.

As in any sort of resource, reanimating the undead still has to abide by some law of conservation of energy. As in, the energy to create and maintain a horde of zombies has to come from somewhere. Well, if you can do that, then why would you spend it on reanimating the dead instead of caring for the living? For me, it seems a waste of resources (unless there is no opportunity cost involved). Or unless reanimation requires a one-time only expenditure of resources that couldn't go anywhere else, and the undead do not require any sort of maintenance, and don't eventually rot away on their own. But that stretches the boundaries of my suspension of disbelief.

In short, there is limited space and resources. Where should they be spent, on the living or the dead? In my opinion, prioritizing the dead over the living would qualify as immoral.

edited 7th Oct '12 9:59:44 AM by Lawyerdude

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.

A skeleton parrot would look wicked!

It could be if we had zombie pets like with "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". Let's say you always wanted a pet horse, but never had the land or money. Well, the Skeleton version doesn't need to eat. Doesn't need a lot of room, and can still do the same job as a real horse. Saddles need slight modification, but all works great!

"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur

I think we're assuming that either 1, necromancy is magic and thus is a one-time expenditure and the resultant zombies/skeletons require zero or minimal upkeep and no food or 2, necromancy is some form of robotics or nanotech, so while the zombies might need resources for upkeep, they don't overlap with human needs.

But I agree if you raise a zombie that needs living flesh to survive, then yeah, that's no better than a human worker and quite likely far worse.

Either way, somebody is going to need to work to collect and use whatever resources you need to make zombies. Suppose you needed to feed zombies with magical crystals mined from underground. OK, well you'll need either living people to mine them (taking away from labor that could be used to build things or grow food), or the zombies mine them.

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.

And if the crystals aren't needed for anything else and 1 undead can mine the crystals for 2 undead that's a networkforce of 1 undead. As said earlier, needs won't necessarily overlap.

Laws are made to be broken. You're next, thermodynamics.

Okay, let's work this out using Dungeons And Dragons mechanics. Just so we have some hard numbers.

Animate Dead requires a 25 gp onyx gem per HD of undead created, and no more expenditures after that. Basic skeletons are 1 HD, zombies are 2. Let's assume everyone uses skeletons for hygiene reasons. So that's a one-time expenditure of 25 gp per worker. Converting gold pieces to dollars is difficult; sometimes it looks like 1 cp equals 1 dollar, sometimes 1 sp, and sometimes even 1 gp. Let's go with the worst case scenario, 1 cp equals 1 dollar. That means each skeleton costs 2,500 dollars (10 cp equals 1 sp, 10 sp equals 1 gp). A living worker can easily make 50 dollars a day—usually more, but I'm rounding down to keep it easy. That means the skeleton worker will pay for itself after fifty days. Less, if it can work 24/7.

So...there you go. While there are both moral and practical concerns with that type of necromancy (for one thing, Dn D also has control undead spells and abilities), economically it's easy. An undead workforce can easily replace unskilled living labor. Obviously, there would still need to be living overseers, but other than that nothing.

That's just the raw materials cost. You also need a living, breathing necromancer or priest to create them and control them. So who pays the necromancer to cast animate dead all day, to collect the onyx you need, and stand over the skeletal horde to control them?

That's why necromancers tend to work on their own in their own towers. Their undead are usually employed as their own servants or guards.

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.

Perhaps we need to ask how necromancy would be regulated assuming we did have a code of practice.

What you guys seem be talking about can be applied for robots and machines, except replace the necromancers with maintainence workers/engineers/etc.

One thing I don't believe anyone has touched on that I'm interested to see how people feel about is autonecromancy. This would be stuff like becoming a Lich, a type of undead that seals his/her soul in an object to allow him/her to live perpetually after death, and is a type that is almost exclusively done by a necromancer to him/herself. I personally would find there to be far less moral issues with that, as it is done to oneself, but stuff like that is still almost universally presented as bad.

Not necessarily. That isn't much different from the pursue of immortality in transhumanism.