Ethically Sound Necromancy

In this story no, in fact they never bugged you because payment was inevitable.

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

That would drive interest rates way down.

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.

Actually, no, the way you just described it, delivery of the collateral was inevitable. That's like saying banks never bug anyone for their mortgage payments because acquiring the house is inevitable. Banks would way rather have the payments than the house.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

What it would do is drive down the cost of manual labour. After all, who's going to negotiate that you only get to have five years work out of their corpse instead of fifty? It's a corpse.

Rather than a loan, it sounds more like selling your body while still alive. You get money up front, and then when you die the bank gets to reanimate your body as a slave. Of course, that would lead to the question of what happens if you die in such a way that your body is useless or irretrievable. I guess the bank would take that into account when negotiating the price.

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.

I cant imagine that you could get a lot of money by selling your post-mortem labor rights. The supply is too high.

Another issue I haven't seen discussed is economic sustainability. How long do reanimated corpses last? Do they ever wear out to the point they cannot be re-animated? Another source of loss is active destruction by competing necromancers. If the rate of loss is greater than the death rate in human society, then eventually they run out of dead bodies. This can also happen if the birth rate falls for some reason- for example if unskilled human labor disappears and everyone ends up as a member of an educated elite. Is a necromancy-based economy sustainable in the long run?

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

How can what I say be wrong when I'm quoting a story?

The creditors didn't care if you didn't pay back your loan before you died because they would work the money off of your corpse. In this system, the reanimates, as they were called, were everything from waiters and prostitutes to miners and general laborers. They got their money back regardless.

So if anything, instead of hounding people for their money back, it would be in their intrest to encourage people to borrow more in hopes they die before it's paid off.

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

Probably. Fundamentally, it's not much different than a slave-based economy, or substituting actual manual laborers for robots. As long as the undead produce more than they consume, it would be an efficient economic model.

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.

@Gab- I'm not claiming that you are wrong, although it is possible that the author of the story you are quoting is. I agree that under the scenario you have described, creditors will encourage irresponsible borrowing. They would then be under strong financial incentive to "encourage" their debtors to die sooner...

@Lawyer- the dead consume stuff? Actually, that doesnt matter- even if they consume nothing, it's the consumption of the necromancers that matters- even if the only thing they are consuming are dead bodies. If the rate of consuming the dead exceeds the death rate, then necromantic economics isn't sustainable.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

RE: What the dead consume. I'm assuming that reanimating bodies requires some sort of limited resource, or they need some sort of ongoing energy input to keep working. If it's magic, then the number of undead is limited to the number of necromancers who can create and control them. Or perhaps there's some sort of mystical energy source that they tap into, sort of the undead equivalent of petroleum.

Or maybe the ritual to raise the dead can only be performed at midnight on the night of the new moon using a piece of ash wood carved into the shape of a skull, coated in the blood of a freshly-killed baby rabbit and then burned in a stone bowl using a mixture of nightshade and fly amanitia while reciting the proper incantation in ancient Sumerian.

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.

Necromancy could supplement the workforce instead of just replacing it. I can cycle, and yet I often also walk.

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

I would expect that a necromancy-based economy would necessarily have skipped some of our own technological advances, so the economics of zombie labour would reflect the economics of self-service checkouts at supermarkets. They haven't done away with checkout assistants, just one can now manage around 6 checkouts at once.

That's why in the story, there was no threat of not being paid back, the dead didn't need sleep, food, breaks, insurance, or salary. They were able to work 24 hours a day with no problem. So they don't have to worry about making a profit.

There also wasn't any movement to kill those who owed money because there wasn't a point. As long as they were alive, they could always borrow more, be willing to do jobs that they don't like in order to pay off their debt, and it kept the economy moving because this is the kicker,

You still need living people to sustain the need for dead labor. You run out of living people, society can crash. You still need accountants, electricians, all sorts of skilled labor that needs a human mind to do it. The dead are not capable of working computers, realize they've taken damage, or have the capacity to make decisions.

It prevents them being smart enough to rebel, but it also makes them dumb enough humans keep their jobs too.

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

It isn't necessary for zombies to entirely replace the labor force for the overall level of education to go up, or for the birth rate to go down. The living merely need to shift to skilled labor.

The reason I think that the zombie-based economy is at risk for collapse is because the demand will eventually exceed the supply. Owners of zombie labor forces will try to compete with each other using economy of scale- the more zombies you have, the more stuff you can produce and sell at cheaper and cheaper prices. As the skill level of the living goes up, so will compensation and consumer demand. I think that a labor supply problem is inevitable. This will happen even faster if the birth rate of living human consumers remains high (although it may not).

And think about it, the fastest and most cost-efficient way for a necromancer to collect more laborers is to use his current workforce as an undead army and kill a whole lot of people. This may be the origin of the "evil necromancer" trope, at least in works where the author has thought things through. It's the Big Bad's standard approach in XKCD for example.

It seems to me that necromancy, while technically not "evil" per se, is inherently at risk for abuse and isn't sustainable in the long term.

@Gab: As soon as your ability to pay is exceeded by the future value of the collateral, there is an incentive to "collect the debt" as quickly as possible. This is a real danger for people who lose their job, for example. That's why banks generally refused to rewrite mortgages of houses that were worth less than the original loan during the recent housing crisis.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

I'd imagine supply would actually far exceed demand, if the undead in question don't require anything after an initial raising. The amount of people who've died (even if necromancy is limited to at least semi-intact bodies) would probably exceed the overall demand for labor several times over.

Of course, this is all just wild conjecture. We'd require a set of rules necromancy would operate under to formulate an actual hypothesis on how society would be impacted. Just saying necromancy exists allows for anyone to be right if they come into this discussion with their own idea of necromancy.

In conclusion, this thread basically amounts to

edited 11th Oct '12 10:34:51 AM by Ekuran

Marquis, in a world where zombie labor is good labor, I'm willing to consider banking and loan practices can change.

Especially since the ability to raise dead is not restricted to one entity or the government. It's readily available and apparently doesn't cost a thing to do.

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

Even this depends on the D&D world in question - Plane Scape has the Dustmen faction, who are not evil and practice necromancy on a daily basis; they pay people for the use of their bodies after death and rent out animated zombies as manual labor.

There are specific laws in place for when and how a person can be raised, as well as some physical limitations. There's at least one other animator who's treated as a villain because they don't adhere to the law for raising zombies.

Oooh! The yakuzombie? []

It depends on the nature of the animation; zombies that rot/decay are not going to be good farm workers because they'll contaminate everything. Likewise, an undead military will simply go to the country that can field more bodies than any other, or can otherwise disrupt the opponents' forces without being touched.

At one point, I wrote out a long scene where a necromancer summons up the spirit of someone and binds them in a courtroom to testify. Personally, I don't think this would be much different than issuing subpoenas to make people show up to testify. And raising soulless, mindless corpses, isn't inherently unethical, it's raising the corpses without the approval of the family or prior approval of the person that makes it unethical.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw

@Ekuran: Yeah, that's basically right, I'm just making some assumptions in order to structure the argument. I'm assuming that the undead wear out eventually, and need to be replaced. Also- you all seem to be assuming that the supply of the dead is essentially infinite. It isn't, of course, and although someone once estimated that a little over 100 billion people have ever been born, that sounds like alot, but it isn't infinite. This is starting to sound like debates over "peak oil". What do we do when zombies start wearing out faster than they can be replaced? WE HAVE TO CHANGE TO A SUSTAINABLE SOURCE OF LABOR! BEFORE THE ECONOMY COLLAPSES!!

@Gab: The world will have to change pretty radically before banks stop being interested in making the largest profit they can as quickly as possible.

"It's readily available and apparently doesn't cost a thing to do." Where did that premise come from?

edited 22nd Oct '12 7:54:18 AM by DeMarquis

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Every form of raising that dead that I've heard of in fantasy has some sort of cost attached, even if it's just the investment of time and power that the necromancer has to commit in order to be able to raise servants.

Also, most animate undead tend to be single-minded creatures. They don't learn or reason like human beings, so they're usually just useful as guards or performing simple, repetitive tasks.

What about attaching a bunch of skeletons to turn an enormous turbine to generate power?

What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.

Marquis, if they do degrade, then yeah, we'll eventually run out of our unnatural resources for our post-scarcity society to function. It probably won't be before we replace them with advanced robotic labor, though.

Of course, this is all just like, our opinions, man.

@ Marquis, the same story I've been quoting. It's part of The Walking Dead anthology. My boyfriend has my copy so I can't really go look up the title.

The author set it up that the method was free and easily accessible for anyone. Those who were "Unwillings" were cremated upon death with no stigma. Poverty was eliminated due to everyone being able to take minor loans against their bodies to start up businesses or get to graduate school. College became more accessible at large because zombie labor was practically free, so more profits could be spent on healthcare and education. The banks were closely regulated as well as self governed. The poorest people were still upper middle class by today's standards. Making the method of creating reanimates free made this possible.

Basically he set it up so there is practically no financial or political insentive for messing with the system, regardless of where you are in the economic ring.

That leaves only personal motives, which is the driving conflict of the story.

edited 22nd Oct '12 8:51:20 AM by Gabrael

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

Well, obviously an authors premises are always correct within his own fictional universe. Whether it makes any sense to generalize from there, on the other hand...

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

I don't see how replicating his system would be a problem since it is bound in a very ethical system with little chances of abuse towards both the living and the dead.

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

First, I'd assume the skeleton or mummy shouldn't be too broken in order to be able to do work. Then again depending on the mechanics of the magic you might be able to make a full skeleton out of a couple of degraded ones. Secondly, we wouldn't be using just old supplies: according to [1] there have been 146000 deaths today. Then again the worlds oil supplies are renewing at this very moment, just not as fast as we're using it... (but with that it's not just about running out of it).

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

@193: But people are a renewable resource ... though technically that's not ethical.

That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw