I (35+-5000, M?) am a wizard, specializing in necromancy, because that is a very useful and underutilized area of magic. I am very careful in my necromancy, and only cast spells in a way that doesn't leave necromantic residue that harms organic life. It's not hard, but most powerful necromancers don't care, which is part of the reason why they are hated.
Recently, i became one of the founders, and de facto leaders (we have a sort of triumvirate) of a city, and the society of that city, as result of unifying several local tribes.
I thought a lot, and am sure that creating it was the right choice. It has better life, material conditions, slightly more freedom. It is less aggressive and fights less wars than the tribes did before. (Some of them were pacifists, and they still remain pacifists. That they can now survive being pacifists is also an achievement of the new society.)
The society still fights. Not all local tribes were unified. And there are enemies from the outside here, sometimes. We almost never attack first, accept surrenders, avoid pointless cruelty.
But we still have loses. And would have less if our army was stronger. In fact, our enemies would have smaller loses, because if we are more powerful, we can win while killing less of the enemy.
So i found an ancient ritual, and them improved upon it. I cast the ritual, transforming 8 of our bravest warriors into a form of advanced undead, called wraiths.
Wraiths are incredibly powerful, and have useful magic abilities. They are very resilient, incredibly hard to destroy. However, they can still be destroyed. They take the same damage as anyone else, it just takes much more of that damage to kill them.
Unlike many lesser undead, wraiths are possible to repair from the damage inflicted to them. But the only way to do so is for them to drain the life energy of other creatures (same as with vampires).
The life energy can't just be given to the wraith through other magic, it must pass a process of transformation into a necrotic form, which can only happen when the energy is transferred from a living creature to the wraith. And for the living creature the process is very painful.
If i could create wraiths that heal differently, I would have. But i can't, creating wraiths that can heal at all was hard enough.Now, the wraiths are extremely useful. They are a big part of our military power (the armies are small enough that 8 very powerful warriors have a significant impact). They prevent a lot of deaths, and a lot of unjust action. I am not sure if it would be correct to say that the survival of the entire city lies on their shoulders, but it's also probably not completely wrong to think so.
This comes at the cost of suffering, because the wraiths must survive. Draining wouldn't be required if wraiths weren't intentionally damaged by war (they are usually very low maintenance), but it is required.
Many people volunteer for draining, sometimes, because they are grateful to the wraiths, and think safety is more important than pain. I often volunteer, because i am a pathological altruist.
But "there are people who volunteer to endure it" doesn't change the fact that it is still extremely painful, which i know from personal experience.
We decided, very recently, on a policy. When possible, we measure how much damage was inflicted to each wraith by enemy warriors, and then drain those warriors, if they are captured, by exactly the amount of life needed to heal the damage they are guilty of. We avoid pointless cruelty. We do not use torture in interrogation (it doesn't really work). But this seems necessary. And is, in a sense, fair, Lawful. The warriors always have the choice to die instead. They are only drained the fair amount, not more. Afterward, they have the same rights as everyone else, and some do in fact become productive members of our society (or just leave, which they have the full freedom to).But still, "they torture those who were captured or surrendered" ends up being a true fact about us. One suggestion was to instead of the soldiers, drain the leaders, who are at true fault for the fight. Maybe that is better?
And theoretically we can be so honorable and altruistic to never drain the enemy, even if the enemy is at fault for the draining being required in the first place, and it isn't just revenge or punishment, it truly fixes the problem, a compensation for the harm they caused. Even if we don't do that, the draining would remain necessary. It would just make our society worse to live in, at no fault of those who suffer.
It seems to me that it is the right choice, to create a world that is overall better than it would have been otherwise. But i keep thinking i am wrong. That it is a case where the cold pragmatism of ["Darkness"] should be discarded in favor if the idealism of ["Light"]. But i do not see a better solution.
(To clarify, draining life isn't dangerous. Healing living people is easy, we have a lot of potions for that (i am good at making them in bulk). Pain is the main problem. And "we heal you just so that we can hurt you even more" is obviously not a good thing, by any measure.)
INFO:
- does your society not contain any people who like that sort of thing?
- what's the minimum amount of drain that one person can usefully contribute at a time? how bad is it? could you pay large numbers of people to provide tiny amounts of repair each? if there's a small enough amount that it's merely very uncomfortable and not horrifically painful, that could work out better than draining a smaller number of people each a traumatizing amount
"Like that sort of thing"? You mean, sexually? I do not know that much about sexual life. I know some people enjoy being, say, spanked. But...this pain is not sexual. It's your soul...well, being ripped apart, a little. I...can't swear there aren't any people in the world who would enjoy their soul being ripped apart. But they are probably rare. And the population of our city is, depending on the definition, several hundreds to several thousands, we do not have any of those people, probably.
(I had a similar thought, once, that among tactics that are considered evil but may be good, i could make agreements with some demons, the kind who are strengthened by pain, that they helpmeus and in exchange get pain, but only the kind of pain people are really fine with. I didn't think about any details, and demons are never trustworthy, "I have a great plan involving summoning demons!" is the kind of thing The Inquisition would be right to kill me for. Unlike my completely safe necromantic practices.)The process of draining is not perfectly consistent or measurable. But the smallest amount of energy a wraith could ever drain is very significant. Or rather, a wraith can drain less, but then the energy isn't enough to do anything, so it's a lose-lose situation. [To heal you must drain at least 3 (GURPS) HP.]
The idea that a small cost for many people is better than a large cost for few people (or the opposite, that making a lot of people a little stronger is better than making only few much stronger) is one that perfectly fits my philosophy, I do believe in it. And I am just now working on systems for distribution of energy. Magical energy, not life energy, but they are similar. It is possible that after many years of research, I could build something that takes small amount of life from many people, and then "condenses" enough that the wraiths can use it.
[Several paragraphs of details about thaumatological engineering omitted.]
But I can't do it now, and I have no idea if it is possible at all. Though I hope with all my heart that it is.
in that case I think that rather than extracting torture from your prisoners you should import some grapes set up some kind of system where you pay your citizens to undergo souldrain
and if they won't volunteer when paid amounts you can afford, this suggests that your system is flawed
They are paid, sort of? Our society is pretty new and doesn't have a fully legible and organized economy yet. But people do get compensated/rewarded for being drained.
By "volunteer" i mean "someone who agreed to", not someone who agreed to only of their great kindness without expecting reward.
That people are getting rewarded doesn't solve the fundamental problem, that suffering is required.Also, not sure how "pay them" applies to enemy soldiers. Is it ok to drain them forcibly, as long as they are rewarded later? Probably not.
They are, in a sense, considered to have a debt towards the city, for harming it, and draining clears that debt. Having it be a literal formal debt in money, that they can pay for in other ways, really might be better.
Though that in turn might create the incentive and culture of fighting more and finding value in defeating people, which we shouldn't have, the whole point of the "deserved draining" policy is to restore the damage lost in the fighting, and nothing else.
yeah i recommend that, if you choose to construe your captured prisoners as owing you a debt for the damage to your wraiths, you make the debt ~fungible and let them decide how they prefer to repay it
Words echo from the void, moving across unreality...
NTA, sounds like an overall improvement, there will always be some people who think it's not "worth" the "amount" of suffering, but until peace is more sought after globally, it sounds like you're doing an admirable job. are there memory spells or potions you can use after the fact to erase people's memory of the horrible pain?
Memory spells? Hm. I am not good at all with mind-affecting spells. We have some people who can do them, but not very strong ones.
And I don't really think not remembering your suffering makes the suffering less bad? But that's a very philosophical question without a clear answer.
Also, we try to be very careful with mind-affecting magic, because we do not want to become a society built on mind control. Which i know sounds very hypocritical in the context of mandatory draining.
I know there are spells that make you not feel physical pain, though i can't cast them myself. This is not physical pain, and so i think they won't help at all.
But. We should research more into ways to use mind affecting magic to ease the suffering of draining, in various ways. It is a good suggestion. We didn't do it already, because there weren't any low-hanging fruit in that direction, but it is very important, we should try more.
(It would still, i am sure, not make draining completely harmless or painless.)
He was right, creating a shouting-into-void-device Interdimensional Untargeted Communicator was not a waste of time after all!
I’m waffling, a lot, because I don’t really understand what you’re going through, with the war. In my experience people mostly attack others because they've been driven irrecoverably insane and evil by magic. I can't imagine what it's like to have people in their right minds choosing to attack you in an organized way, and I know that did happen to people who weren't criminals a long time ago so I'm not just assuming you must be in the wrong. And I see why it'd bother you to ask this kind of sacrifice of people specifically because they haven't caused problems.
But why would people surrender to you if they'll be made into involuntary sacrifices? I'm not sure I trust that this works out to encouraging peace. And it's so easy to demand sacrifices that aren't worth it when the people being sacrified have no say.
I could change my mind but I think YTA.
"I'm not sure I trust that this works out to encouraging peace. And it's so easy to demand sacrifices that aren't worth it when the people being sacrificed have no say."
Yes, exactly. That is the source of my doubt.
How much say the sacrificed have on the matter is the exact thing we are thinking about now. As said previously, I think it is very important that they have the choice to die instead of suffer, as I consider the right to death to be...well, sacred, essentially. (Context for the rest of the multiverse: on death souls continue to exist, and supposedly travel to realms of gods, though no one knows how that work exactly or what happens to a soul, and I am not 100% sure gods actually exist.)Also, to clarify, not all enemy soldiers are drained, only those who directly harmed a wraith in the fights. Doing otherwise would have been unfair.
Being fair but not merciful is kind of the theme here.
Also, while i agree with your words, if you live in a context where only people driven insane by magic ever harm each other, i suspect your insights are less useful, because our contexts are incompatible.
Words echo from the void, moving across unreality...
YTA: creating beings who must feed off others to survive is morally abhorrent, must never be done, and is worth letting your society collapse to prevent.
you should let the wraiths decay and attempt to negotiate for peace, or if that cannot be achieved, trade.
And that is...also fair. True, partially. I don't like the situation. Civilization is not a sacred goal, that justifies suffering.
But it can itself prevent suffering. And "just negotiate or trade" is also not a real solution, it's easy to say from a different reality.
And technically wraiths cause less harm than an average carnivore, because a wraith that is undamaged, isn't hit in combat or falls down the stairs or whatnot, doesn't need any sustenance beyond a high magical background. But i am making excuses why my actions aren't as bad, and counterarguments exist, it's possible for carnivores to hunt and kill without inflicting the deep fundamental pain of soul-drain. But I don't know if it's actually worse than death. Especially from the perspective of animals, who might have both preferences different than sapients, and maybe less moral value, except how the chaos would I calculate it. Except also...aggghhh!
[Message was left unsent on the Communicator.]
Here ends the thread, or was supposed to originally, but i think leaving the option for people to write in if they have something to write is better than not.
The problem with this sort of thing is always in the messy details. It sounds like you're trying really hard to nail down the edges of your tarp here, but it seems like it might be built on metaphorical sand? A major problem with policies like this is the norms and incentives it creates. It's one thing to weigh consequentialism vs whatever the opposite of that (i forgot) but also you should think 'when strangers hear about us using horrific soul-draining to sustain an elite core of necromantic minions, what incentives and impressions does this give them?' Like your demon thing. It just sounds really awful, anything where you go 'I know how this sounds BUT' is iffy. You know? I would go further than that and say maybe any plan that involves systematic torture should be at least firmly suspiciously squinted at. 'Oh we stopped doing the torture, it was a mistake' is a lot better than 'Yes we torture people, what of it?' From the more squeamish potential allies perspective and for establishing a general trend of less awfulness going forward.
But we chose similarly once upon a time. We invited an apocalypse with all it entails, in order to secure long term gains. So who am I to judge?
NTH
-A fox
Yeah, ideally, there shouldn't be any true facts that make people suspicious of you. On practice, that is much harder to achieve (especially as "necromancy!" is a much more notable for most people then "also painful way for 8 of the undead to heal").
And "yes, we sometimes torture people, but only in a specific predictable way, and only if they attack first, and only up to a specific limit, and for a clear instrumental purpose rather than pure sadism" is...much better than many others can truthfully swear to. Though of course "there are others who are even worse" is never an excuse for doing something bad.
The other coin to being known for evil actions is being known for being very honest and open about anything you are doing, such that, if you did something evil, you would admit it openly, just like you admit the other evil things you are admitting openly. It's a coherent approach. Ideological Lawfulness, that is. Not sure how practical.
(To clarify, the demon remark was about different thing. Not "people will be suspicious, but it's actually fine", it's "if i think it's fine, then i am probably just wrong", because of the, uh, "recursive evilness" of demons. The wraiths aren't recursively evil. They don't try to convince me that draining is fine and there is nothing to worry about. Or that i should create even more wraiths. They are very chill guys, actually.)
I'm super chaotic so idgi beyond the story.
And the story here is 'necromantic monstrosities, but in a good way, I swear'.
Life is hard. Governments are heavy. The wheel grinds ever on.
In my experience, such policies often turn out not worth it, in the end. The benefits are immediate and legible; the costs are indirect and illegible. If you choose to pursue such a policy, I recommend that you do so only after you have a few centuries of experience in governance, and that you take great care for both the appearance you may give to neighboring polities and the precedents you may set for future generations.
Carefulness with appearance and precedents is of course essential.
Centuries of experience in governance are also useful, but, inconveniently, require both you and the government to exists for centuries. Which, unfortunately, is hard to achieve in precisely the kind of hostile conditions that would require such radical strategies in the first place.
I’m glad you reached out with your questions before you made any major mistakes (as I think some of the other answers might be directing you towards)!
First and foremost, you are not the asshole or the villain in this situation. You’re an innovator, and you shouldn’t let outward appearances or the reactions of the ignorant to those appearances discourage you! It’s your society and your (I would hope consensually adopted) rules!
Those enemy warriors did economic damage to you, not only through damaging the quite valuable wraiths you’ve ingeniously created but likely through other harms to your society. I am a firm believer in the non-aggression principle, but as they’ve caused damage it is only fair and right that you extract value out of them equivalent to the damage you’ve caused. And as your ritual allows, you can in fact have them pay for the most direct and expensive damage they’ve caused. If anything not accounting for any other damage they’ve caused and doing more to extract equivalent value (such as through compelling their involuntary labor or using the necromantic arts to extract it from their person) is a warning sign of possible excessive moralistic and unpragmatic tendencies on your part.
Now, you mention your society doesn’t have a “fully legible and organized economy yet”. I would recommend working on this as quickly as possible. With a more legible economy, you could more accurately calculate how much they owe you (and your society) in damages and offer them alternatives on repayment. With legible economics and payments, you will likely find many people employable for your process! I have some advice on strategies for hiring people for such processes, if you should like it.
I will caution and advise you on several points of economics and finances in developing a more legible market economy for your society. Often, many societies allow moralists to impose excessive restrictions on voluntary economic interactions, substantially raising transaction costs. Likewise, they impose artificial subsidies of certain persons and actions that undercut more natural and efficient economic exchanges. You seem like an influential person in your society, so I would recommend utilizing your full influence to avert these… inefficiencies. I can give extensive examples of the benefits of avoiding them and the flaws and waste of societies that embrace them. Finally, you seem like quite the innovator, make sure your society’s developing rules include a proper accounting of intellectual property so that you will be properly compensated for your efforts.
Oh, and if this unusual mean of communication should fail and leave this my last message to you, remember the power of compounding effects!
As implied previously, strategies of the "enslave defeated enemies" type will make fighting a big incentive, such that, even if the rule is "we never attack first", provoking the enemy into attacking first will become profitable. Which would go against the desired principles. The whole point of draining to restore wraiths is that it doesn't incentivise the wraiths to fight more, is not better than the default state.
Your use of the word "moralists" is concerning too. It's true that sometimes people use moral arguments to prove something false and/or harmful, without understand the true workings of reality, or caring about them. But the problem is that they are wrong, not being motivated by morality. Being motivated by morality is good, almost axiomatically so. I am motivated by morality. My goals of technical, logistical and economical efficiency are motivated by morality. I see efficiency itself as a form of morality (or maybe morality as a form of efficiency. But that gets into semantics).
NTA!! Suffering and loss can never be fully eliminated from the universe; the job of the state is to minimze it, and to make sure it is borne by those who should be able to understand its necessity. It doesn't sound like being fed on by a wraith is a fate worse than death (it is not impossible but it is very very hard to come up with a fate worse than death, if the people you are subjecting a fate to are not begging you to mercy kill them you probably have not done it and even if they are you should proceed with caution before concluding you have) so unless you belong to a civilization containing exclusively obligate herbivores you should probably be turning more people into wraiths.
There are always going to be taboos; my own civilization, the Consortium, sounds like it's much larger than yours, and we've seen taboos against plural marriage, against singular marriage, against marriages between the same gender in species that have genders, against changing one's gender, against swapping between less common sorts of biological castes or categories, against any kind of body modification at all, against letting people join hive minds, against letting people not join hive minds, against eating people instead of animals, against refusing to eat one's own children, against letting meat-eaters live in the first place. You have to be able to critically examine your culture's taboos, try to figure out what they're warning you against, and whether those taboos are the best way of avoiding those outcomes. You know more about wraiths and necromancy than I do, but to me it sounds like you're doing a good job at that; it's a difficult and frightening task, and I'd like to commend you for it if you feel it's my place to do so.
I share some of your concern about draining captured or surrendered soldiers, though. If they recover from the experience of being drained, and if they reliably choose being drained over being killed and don't express regret for that choice afterwards, then it sounds like you are successfully offering your captives and the people who surrender to you an option better than being killed. It's an improvement over replacement scenario if you can be very sure that the foes you drain would otherwise have died - this seems hard to be sure of, but you have more information than I do and I have never fought in a war. But it sounds like you have eager volunteers for being drained! I would advise queueing up those volunteers to be drained before your captives, even if it means letting some of the captives "off the hook" for the damage they've inflicted to your wraiths; draining enemy combatants in proportion to the damage they've caused is a sensible way to allocate dubiously consensual draining but if you have enough volunteers to obviate some or all of the necessity for dubiously consensual draining, it seems better to prefer using the volunteers.
You may already be doing this, in which case it's probably insulting of me to recommend it and I apologize. But your description of why you've made the decision to start draining captive soldiers leaves it a bit ambiguous whether you don't have enough volunteers or whether you're trying to spare some of the volunteers the pain. IMO it makes abstract sense, in a game theoretic kind of way, to drain the people who make it necessary to drain people, but I think in practice punishment doesn't work as reliably on even cognitively and morally adult species as game theory says it should, and being tortured, especially by something you perceive as a profane monster, sounds like the sort of punishment that would generate more pain, trauma, and psychological backlash than reflection and contrition. (On a related note, I also second the idea of giving your prisoners multiple options in re: how to repay the debt for the damage they've done.) Morally, based on your description, I am inclined to look at wraiths draining people like eating meat. Any population of a species that needs to eat meat to survive is inevitably going to have to eat somebody who's both innocent and unwilling, but if you have a population of volunteers, you still eat them first, even before the people who deserve it. If you wouldn't kill someone if you didn't need to eat them, maybe they don't really have it coming!
I want to stress that the ability to change from a kind of being that needs to kill moral patients to survive into a kind of being that doesn't is nothing short of miraculous, and reiterate that even if there are side effects, you should probably be very seriously considering turning more of your people into wraiths.
Just because people prefer pain to death doesn't mean the pain is not a problem. You can easily present me with a choice of two options, and i would confidentially choose one because it is much better, but would also strongly prefer not having to choose either of them.
There is no full guarantee that they wouldn't die if they were not fighting wraiths. Or that a fight would happen at all. And "but what would happen otherwise, maybe if you did nothing at all" is a complicated kind of approach/calculation that, while i admit might be useful for some very smart entities, is not practical in my case.There are no "eager" volunteers. Just "those willing to endure, to a smaller or larger degree". Having enough is a complicated question, it's not a binary "agree/not agree". If there are no other options, i am willing to provide all the energy, no matter how much is needed. So in one sense it can be said that there is no problem at all, because it means no one else needs to make that sacrifice, all the suffering can be inflicted on only me. But i would prefer not to do it alone, for all my altruism (i think this is a deontologically acceptable perspective, even not counting "damaging my mental state that way would on net reduce the amount of utility i can produce"). There probably are economic, psychological and mathematical terms and theories relevant here, about the relative preference for things, though i don't remember them precisely.
There are also the essentially impossible questions of quantifying suffering. Can some amount of pain can be said to be precisely twice larger than another? Is it better (all else equal) for one person to experience two units of pain, or for two people to experience one unit each? Maybe spreading the pain around will be worth it on net despite the additional possibility of psychological trauma (which is not a punishment and not intended to change anyone's behavior). Or maybe not.
Creating more wraiths is essentially impossible (it uses a resource that i know no way of acquiring more of). We are experimenting with creating simpler and weaker forms of undead, with the possibility of converting everyone at some point. But all types have their own disadvantages, and undead are fundamentally not able to repair their bodies when damaged (except for the highest undead that can do that by draining life from others, like vampires and wraiths). We are working on workarounds for that too, but there is no way to tell yet if that is possible at all.
(If the concern about "the need to kill moral agents to survive" is about meat, i will note that life magic can theoretically be used to affect nutrients bodies need, and/or modify plants to have different nutrients. That is not my specialty, and not currently seen as a priority by anyone.)
The discourse has been rational so far, it seem worth continuing.
Perhaps we should engage in some more "semantics", it seems I have miscommunicated somewhere...
First of all, I never advocated for "slavery". I used the term "compel" colloquially, but in fact what you would be doing is offering them an additional option to pay back the damage they caused. The fact that the alternative payment options involve immense amounts of pain is not a game theoretic threat on your part, it is your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. Many moralists would wring their hands about some abstract sense of slavery or coercion, but I fail to see how providing people additional options can in any way be "enslavement" or "coercive" in the truest, most logical sense of the words.
As to my usage of the term moralist... I've picked up that you are still relatively young? As you experience life you will encounter many people that try to appeal to arbitrary rules and felt senses that in fact correspond poorly to reality. I have encountered many such people. Occasionally I can make some slight progress in persuasion when they agree to civil discourse, but often it breaks down into name calling and insults from them. They claim to be motivated by "morality", and I in fact agree that one's core utility function is not up for compromise, but in fact the moralists take many actions that are suboptimal for fulfilling their alleged values and fail to take many options that would greatly support their alleged values. If anything, in terms of efficiently providing value to society, I greatly surpass them, so I would claim that from a logical, utilitarian perspective of morality I am the more moral person. But I digress. If you are truly motivated by morality, following my advice will be quite useful for optimizing for your moral values! I use the term "moralist" to disparage those that follow an arbitrary, false, self-righteous, contradictory "sense" of moral rules (instead of a logically, consistently self-articulated value function).
As to the other commenter you responded to... if a moralist is so far gone as to consider an animal as a moral patient there is likely no appeasing them. On a side note, if, for some bizarre reason, animal suffering actually factors into your value function, I would recommend a campaign of mass extermination. Proper large scale necromantic rituals can exterminate animal life painlessly and swiftly, thereby minimizing animal suffering. I do not have this value myself, but once offered to design such a ritual as payment to someone I thought was rational enough to at least consider the offer in good faith (they promptly ended our previously fruitful discussion with pointless ad hominins).
Well, let’s imagine a situation:
You need labor, but don’t have enough of it, and you don’t actually want to pay for it, or can’t. But you have a powerful and skilled army. And so you attack someone, and enslave them, for your own economic benefit.
Let’s say you can't do that, because there is a very important principle, that the army only exists for defense, and never attacks first, and can only compel to work people who have hurt you during war. But you still have a powerful army. And you still have an incentive to get the labor for free. So you will have an incentive to provoke sides (which are weak enough to easily defeat) into technically attacking you first, and them compel them to work, as compensation for harms they technically caused you (your incentive to interpret everything as harm also becomes large) legally and without officially breaking the principles.
Is it slavery? Maybe not. I called it strategies of the "enslave defeated enemies" type. It doesn’t matter what I call it, the situation will remain the same (which what "getting into semantics" usually means), an outcome which is opposed to "the general efficiency of the world", or "the project of civilization", or whatever people want to call it.
And providing people options in a situation can be coercive if you are the one who put them in a situation in the first place (which not necessarily be the case. But it’s a possibility worth remembering).
Believe me, I have enough experience with people incoherently believing some completely normal thing to be inherently and overwhelmingly immoral for reasons they can’t justify. And I can distinguish those cases from coherent moral positions relying on valid arguments.
That's why i don’t call them "moralists", I call them "idiots" or "fanatics", or "naïve deontologists" (as opposed to rational deontologists) if I am trying to be somewhat polite. Though, again, that’s semantics, the name doesn’t matter if we agree about the actual phenomenon.
The idea of exterminating life to prevent suffering is internally coherent, but flawed, because it assumes a very simple meaning of the term "suffering", which is not the meaning most relevant to moral arguments (though whether animals are capable of the relevant type of suffering is questionable. I don’t have a strong opinion on it, myself, focusing on higher priorities).
Anesthesia affects the body, and pain coming from the body. It doesn't, as was mentioned earlier, help with the feeling of vital energy being drained out of your soul.
You have people willing to sacrifice themselves to support your civilization? You do, because you have an army.
Allow them that sacrifice. Take volunteers, or order your soldiers, for a set of people, perhaps one per wraith, who will shield all the rest.
You can heal people, and so those you choose can sustain the wraiths as long as they live. If their minds cannot bear it, break or erase their minds. They no longer serve a need.
Note to self: double check that the Communicator doesn't allow any magical or mental contact to the entities on the other side.
Would it be possible to drain animals that would be being killed anyways? I'd also want to see if you could make it work with brain dead people - some maladies destroy the mind but leave the automatic functions of the body still running, and if you have enough healing capacity, it seems like it could be a workable solution without causing sapient suffering persay.
This is a very good question!
It doesn't work on animals. Animals are not sapient, and that means their souls are not..."structured" enough, or "saturated"? To be effectively drained.
But, does that apply to creatures that were sapient, had those kind of souls, but then lost their capability for thought? I genuinely have no idea!
The energy drained is vital energy, not mental, so technically speaking, it shouldn't matter. Though maybe lack of feeling and not just thought would be serious enough to make the soul no longer fully function...But there is not really any knowledge on that in practice. That would require research.
Still not the most ethical research. Not like we have a lot of brain-dead patients. But killing those we were going to kill anyway is not that much worse, in the large scale of things.
There’s a complementary question and an experiment that question naturally suggests! Do creatures that will gain the capacity for sapient and thought have souls?
The obvious follow-up question and experiment: Does the ritual work on babies? Now, I don’t know if you have any way to check without trying the ritual on a baby… Babies present a complicated ethical challenge, as they are (seemingly) not yet economic agents able to consent, but they will become economic agents in the future. You could try to predict how much payment they would want it/when they consent. (Have you heard of prediction markets? They are an excellent tool for making fair future estimates!). Alternatively, if your society has the moralist constraint of considering children under the protection of their parents, you could try compensating their mothers instead!
For a clever third option: advanced telepathic magic may allow you to acquire consent even if babies aren’t yet verbally communicative. (And for added redundancy you can compensate the parent(s) as well.) This is my preferred solution to rituals that work best with babies. (I personally have found a few surprising results where rituals that you think would work best with a fully developed soul actually work best with souls with the most potential, I.e. baby souls! As an added bonus, although babies often have tricky abstract requests, on net providing these requests and a payment to parents is often far cheaper than compensation for equivalent ritual roles to adult employees!)
Oooh, more opportunities to talk about thaumatology!
"What a soul even is" is a complicated question. Some even classify physical bodies as part of the soul, "the first layer".
I am part of the approach saying that a soul is the astral structure associated with a living body, so bodies don't count, and neither do inanimate objects, which merely have "astral shadows", but not real souls.
Plants, however, do have souls, just very simple souls, lacking a lot of the "higher" components sapient creatures have.
[Several paragraphs of confusing details, clarifications and disclaimers omitted]
That has nothing to do with morality, though, the lack or presence of a soul is not what i consider to be the reason of being a moral patient. Neither is the ability of becoming an economic agent, really, that affects the actions you can take, not the actions you should take or those that would have been beneficial if you could do them.
What's important is the capacity to experience suffering and happiness, because meta-morality is the goal of maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering among those who can experience it. And specific facts about the structure of your soul can, sometimes, be evidence about your capability to experience suffering, despite not being the reason why the consideration is important in the first place. Though no one, to my knowledge, understands spiritology to a level deep enough to make evidence about suffering conclusive, as opposed to just suggestive.
And as mentioned before, getting consent is not the problem, even if of course harming those who consent is better than those who don't.
It seems they operate off different magical and metaphysical systems. Eli suspected as much given the unprecedentedly unusual nature of the communication, but it’s still disappointing. Still there are some points of similarity, even those few confused paragraphs have sparked a few idea for new experiments!
It sounds like we operate off of, and perhaps even exist within vastly different magical and metaphysical systems. Still, in case any of this is useful… [Several pages of magical and metaphysical theory, not exactly well organized, but better explained than Raz’s details about the soul. A notable takeaway: the majority of souls in Eli’s universe are reincarnate, a small percentage are siphoned off by benevolent and malevolent extraplanar beings. Also, the mentions of experimental evidence indicate Eli (or else he’s taking credit for other people’s work) has exhaustively and ruthlessly tested every aspect of the soul, reincarnation, and afterlife he can, with very little regard for suffering (some experiments put souls in near indefinite states of suffering or altered cognition, some utterly destroy souls, and some consign them to malevolent outsiders).]
But anyway, it seems to me “economic agent” and capacity for suffering and happiness are in practice near identical. If a creature has a capacity to suffer or feel happy, it will nearly inevitably exert preferences for them, and thus act as an economic agent (if not a rational one). Life is filled with both happiness and suffering, who are you to avoid suffering on behalf of another creature if it willingly consents? Even if pursuing a value function of maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering across all creatures (as you seem to indicate, although I would encourage to consider if you truly care), an efficient economy is one of the best ways of achieving that goal! And in the long run, scientific and magical progress are essential to achieving any goal as effectively as possible, so you shouldn’t let temporary smaller exchanges of happiness and suffering (so long as they are consensual) deter you from progress.
I did have a few questions [several pages of question on magic, focusing on souls and the afterlife]. On that note, you didn’t mention if you’ve discerned any afterlife within reach of your reality, many moral philosophers think quite a lot of suffering may be worth it for an eternally blissful afterlife.
Eli is starting to worry that this person is, despite their rational discourse and pragmatism (and not whining about Eli experimenting on babies), ultimately a moralist. He’ll make one last entreaty and maybe try to elicit some more magical knowledge before giving up on the discussion.
Yeah, he gathered (from Buss, the reason he is even here, living this life) that the multi/meta/omniverse is big and has varying laws, often causing great linguistic complexity where the most accurate translation of a word refers to similar but very different concepts.
And some of the notes, if they are accurate, and can be trusted (both of which are doubtful, coming from the mad economist-necromancer), might be useful even if they are not immediately relevant.
My knowledge of the working of souls is mostly focused on interacting with the souls of still living creatures, usually my own; necromantic manipulation of bodies already dead and soulless; or necromantic transformation of souls in still living bodies to prevent them from experiencing the normal process occurring at the death of a body.
But, from what i do know:
On death, biochemical processes in the physical body stop. The connection between the soul and the body is severed. The vital energy in the soul dissipates, like water in a bucket full of holes, preventing the soul from having an anchor in the material world or ability to influence it; this might happen quickly or slowly, depending on the soul and the causes of death. The core of the soul survives, but it's hard to tell what the core actually is, or what it does. The astral body survives, but no longer reflecting a physical body, it can distort and take weird shapes. The mental/emotional part (sometimes called the fifth and sixth layers; this terminology seems inaccurate, because it is not clear whether they are two different parts, whether they are part of the core, and whether the seventh layer, which might or might not exist, also contains thoughts and emotions. Also the number counts the physical body as the first layer), might survive that process or not, or maybe survive in a diminished state.
Supposedly, after losing their anchoring on the material, souls move to the realms of gods.
I am not fully convinced gods exist, or that those realms exist. (Though if they do, it is possible that it happens because the core can be used as a source of spiritual energy (a plausible hypothesis, but one i am not sure about), and gods do use them for that purpose. All evidence of the contrary could be myths and rationalizations just as plausibly as being based on reality.)
I am sure that there is not any real evidence that souls retain the ability to act or make choices after death, and doubt but not fully sure that there is no evidence they even keep experiencing or feeling anything.
Because, importantly, there is a difference. Being able to act is not the same as being able to feel. Very small children are not able to act in a coherent way, not able to make plans or build models of the world, but they are able to feel and have preferences. That is the reason why simply having preferences is not the same as exerting preferences, and that being an economic agent is not the same as being a moral patient (though it largely is the same as being a moral agent, i think). And Economy is not the same as morality (though of course, a developed economy does usually help achieve many morally desirable goals).
I guess it's possible to imagine a scenario where i can't act on my own, like being physically paralysed, but i do think clearly and have coherent preferences and plans, and someone reads my mind, and acts based on what they see in my mind? And so i am technically an economic agent. But i don't think i would be exerting preferences in that case, as much as i would just have ideas, and someone else who has a preference to act on those ideas would exert their preference, while i will be fully dependant on them.
Finally, the question of consent.
Happiness is a result of alignment between a person's values and the events surrounding them. Suffering is a result of misalignment between a person's values and the events surrounding them. The values are "fulfilled" or "negated".
If we assume a very simple model, of only one relevant value, it is impossible to "willingly" suffer – if you will something to happen, it aligns with your values, and so you can't suffer from it.
In reality, most creatures have many values at once, and sometimes those come into conflict.
If i want to improve the world, and help my friends, and protect New Isengard, and also demonstrate my altruism and bravery and resilience, i will value giving my life force for the wraiths to drain. If i also want not to experience the feeling of all parts of my body, and some things that can't be part of my body but still feel that way, simultaneously go numb and cold and stretched out (which i am of course describing from experience), that means i also value that not happening! One value is fulfilled while the other is negated.
Just because i value doing that doesn't mean i wouldn't value not doing it even more. But then this is still a smaller net-loss of utility for me than it is for someone who doesn't want that to happen at all, and also hates the wraiths personally. So willingness/consent has value, but not enough of it to fully counteract the suffering. This is an important aspect of psychology and sociology that treating consent as a simple binary misses completely. (I predict a high probability that people, for all their lack of logic, would be more willing to listen to you if you actually understood the principles they base their lives, even if the things you are saying are the same things.)
If my goal is to reduce suffering (and yes that is my goal, i "truly care" without doubt, this is the only reason for my life), then consent solves part of the problem, but not all of it. A paper saying "i consent" doesn't solve the experience of suffering. Other people agreeing to do it isn't different from me agreeing to do it, it's still a problem for me, and reasonable to assume still a problem for them. If, as the first commenter suggested, i find someone who is genuinely unharmed by the experience itself, doesn't experience it as suffering, as opposed merely having additional reasons to value the action despite the suffering involved, that would solve the problem. But that would depend on the details of internal experience, not simple agreement or disagreement.
(For some dumb reason Raz felt previously that merely mentioning the existence of metamoral principles would automatically provide his collocutor with all the relevant information about that framework, like "several values can exist at once". This is an extremely obvious case of Illusory Transparency, mistake of a kind he never really makes.
Triple check the Communicator has no mental effects. Increase safety scans. Make larger pauses between communication sessions.
Stopping the usage still seems unjustified, considering the great benefit that was already provided.)
It does seem he is talking to a moralist, albeit a more pragmatic and rational one than usual. But, the mention of Gods has sparked Eli's curiosity. He'll ignore the increasingly pointless discussion about consent and focus on the fun parts like metaphysics!
You mentioned "Gods"... could you say more about that?
In my world, there has been several completely different things called "Gods" across various cultures and times in history:
Extraplanar beings, both malevolent and benevolent. Some of them (usually the more malevolent and anarchic ones) have actively embraced this title and the varied cultural associations (such as supreme unbounded capabilities, innate archetypal natures, and some pattern of worship), while others have refused the label or at least clarified their limits (psychology they tend to be more "pure" than mortals in focus and goals and methods, and their magic seems of the same kind available to ordinary material plane beings, just aided by a few innate capabilities and the properties of their home planes). Although they are extraplanar, they have discrete bodies, which can even be killed under the right circumstances.
The Archetypes fit various cultural associations of "God" much better, but in fact are limited by their very nature. Their mind are embedded in conceptual space*, rendering them nearly utterly invulnerable and eternal with vast sensory percepts of reality related to their concepts. Despite their vastness, they are quite limited in their ability to directly interact with reality: they each make possible a few unique spells, and have an ability to intervene through those spells, for example by weakening one of their spells that would oppose their interests or empowering one of their spells at an especially critical moment.
Various magical phenomena have been incorrectly attributed agency, but careful experimentation shows they respond to purely mechanical rules, without even the willful interventions of the Archetypes.
And finally, there are some entirely false stories about all-powerful being(s). These stories persist through a variety of means, from deliberate social engineering (such as asserting moral value via the origin or enforcement of some powerful being), to the entertainment value of the stories, to the explanatory value of the story to ignorant people, to coincidental cultural association. From your skepticism about your world's Gods, would you place them in this category? Or do you have firmer evidence?
*(I am uncertain if your reality even has a conceptual space. It is [several pages of dense jargon about how innate concepts interact with magic, Platonism, and more theoretical musing on nonmagical interaction with "pure concepts".])
I don't know much, is the whole thing.
Gods supposedly exist, and do things. But i haven't found any evidence yet that proves gods are the ones who do those things. For example, divine power is supposedly granted to priests as reward for their devotion, but, in my limited and subjective view, i don't expect anything to be different if divine power was actually a direct spiritual manifestation of the power of belief the priests themselves have. [Couple paragraph digression about soul layers, "Ba-Khion", spiritual energy, and the obscure unfalsifiable hypothesis about belief being a measurable form of energy.]
And gods never seem to be proactive, or make any decisions; people make those, using the gods as justification.
Spirits do in fact exist in immaterial planes, can be summoned, can grant favors or execute tasks, and make demands back of those who deal with them. I am not a shaman myself, but i do observe this happening often.
So maybe gods are in fact a very weird and powerful type of spirit. Or, precisely because spirits are a known thing, and their presence is visible and easily detected by those like me who knowledgeable of thaumatology, while gods aren't, that means gods don't really exist.
There are a lot of legends about gods doing things directly, sometimes incarnating in mortal bodies, but they are obscure, confused and ambiguous. Not actually proof, and barely evidence. "Would that rumor exist in a world where it wasn't actually true, and does that mean the thing id true if the rumor exists" is a hard question like that.