Why is it evil to kill the prisoners?

[mythago]

Here are some real-world historical reasons for not killing prisoners.

1) You have to let them confess and/or convert to the One True Faith before you dispatch them; to do otherwise not just be killing an enemy, but damning their eternal souls. At the very least, you must take the time to instruct them in the basics of the OTF and to get them to truly accept it. THEN if you kill them, at least they go straight to heaven.

2) You're destroying your lord's property. Once you conquer their lands, serfs become the underlings of your lord. You don't waste his peasants (and their valuable labor) without his say-so.

3) These people have value in and of themselves, as slaves, workers, and so forth. They can contribute to the greater good with their labor much better than they can as fertilizer.

4) Revenge later. You kill all these people, their lord gets pissed and lays waste to twice as many of YOUR countrymen. On the other hand, this bunch of peasants doesn't want to risk their lives attacking you; they lost, they want to go home. You follow the unspoken rule that you won't slaughter any you don't need to. If one dumb peasant launches himself at you, you cut him in half, and the rest are better-behaved.

 

[DDK]

Fourecks humbly apologizes for the following...

Many of these historical figures most likely were not good. Can you give a historical example of a person who was good who savagely killed prisoners?

Alexander butchered women and children and he wasn't just good, he was GREAT!

 

[mmu1]

I think one of the reasons adventuring parties won't kill prisoners is the questioning which usually follows the capture.

If it's a good party, chances are they're not going to torture them for information. They might try Charm Person, and if that fails, or is unavailable, what usually happens is the good old "Tell us what you know, and we might let you live" spiel. Which, for most good characters, should and does make it a lot more difficult to execute the captives afterward.

 

[Umbran]

Why is it then suddenly evil to kill them because you've stopped fighting long enough to question them?
[...snip...]
If you're in a war, or any lethal conflict, you begin by justifying the murder of your opponants. Why does this suddenly stop at some point?

I think to some extent part of the answer lies here - at some point, the enemy stops fighting. They cease to be much of a threat. Once the fighting stops, once you have the enemy at your mercy, it's no longer the same situation as when he had a sword in his hand and was tryign to stab you with it. The moral justification is grounded in the context - when the tactical situation changes, so does the moral situation.

We shouldn't fool ourselves - the default morality of D&D (and the bulk of fantasy literature) is not the morality of the actual Dark Ages. Fiction of any sort is generally grounded in the morality of the author(s), not in the historical context from which the fiction borrows.

 

[Redleg06]

This happened in our game Friday night. We captured an assassin with a contract out on my character specifically. Actually he had poisened me, and my hcaracter was going to die in a week or something. (The contract was my character was supposed to suffer before being killed). Well we captured the assassin, got the antidote from him and I was going to kill him because, well, he was going to kill me! He had a contract with my name on it!

But no the Bard and Paladin in the group had to do the "let's role-play first before we kill the obviously evil thing". Which is appropriate in some circumstances, but considering that the assassin had already poisoned my character, I felt justified in lopping off his head.

Sadly it ended with my character quitting the group. If you can't trust your mates to kill the guy who is trying to kill you why stick around?

 

[Forrester]

I'm surprised no one has brought up orc babies yet.

 

[Silver Moon]

I'm surprised no one has brought up orc babies yet.

Orc babies are not considered a threat, as their mothers file down their fangs to prevent injury during nursing.

Seriously though, I got around this issue in my group by introducing a Lawful Good cleric who was totally opposed to killing prisoners, but his reasons were due to his own cultural background rather than the sticky moral issue. He was the nephew of his King, and his job in his home kingdom was the supervision and care of prisoners. In his homeland prisoner exchanges were the norm, and armies seldom fought to the death as a result. Prisoners were well treated, even during long-term conflicts where they might end up spending their entire lives as well-treated prisoner/slaves.

The cleric recognizes that he is now in a different society, but still argues for the merits of this philosophy. As a result, there have been many times where the party benefited by having the foes still around later for questioning as new discoveries were made. There have even been times where enemies later became allies, which would not have happened had they been executed as prisoners. Of course, this does not always work, and sometimes a foe will later come back to attack the party again - in which case even the cleric does not raise any objections then to an execution, feeling that the person has made the choice themself through their repeated actions.

In a campaign two years ago many of the senior party members decided to "look the other way" while a thief went to deal with the prisoners. Thankfully this cleric was around at the time to stop him, as the prisoners' allies were secretly watching them at the time, and would have mounted an attack if they saw that their friends lives were in immediate danger.

So consider that a logical rather than a moral position for not killing prisoners.

 

[mythago]

but considering that the assassin had already poisoned my character, I felt justified in lopping off his head

So you're not of Good alignment? That's revenge, not self-defense. And presumably the assassin's contract doesn't require him to keep coming at you even if it means his own life is in danger. (Hell, if I were an assassin, that's what I'd do.)

What I don't get is the insistence that a D&D world must exactly follow the mores of vaguely medieval Western Europe, with all the stuff about peasants being worthless and preserving nobles and so forth. Remember, people, we GMs can make up anything we want.

So maybe your fantasy world is like that of the Vikings--"Don't kill the prisoners! Those are valuable thralls, you moron!" Or perhaps Good is more of a Templar viewpoint--"We don't kill prisoners until AFTER they accept the True Faith."

Or, and I realize I'm being all wacky and madcap here, you could have a slightly more modern viewpoint, with value of human life and legal prohibitions against vengeance and all that newfangled stuff.

It would, after all, be amusing to see the "good" PCs hauled into court by the dead prisoner's relatives, and ordered to pay [a sum that bankrupts the party] as blood-guilt.

 

[Skade]

mmm orc babies...

recently in a gmae I set up a paladin for a series of moral tests. The killing of a goblin baby was one of those tests. The player and I had already discussed her gods faith, and the morality we both agreed was part of her church, so that part was covered.

When the time came, all the combatants dead and the mother shot in a hall running, the player killed the goblin baby in cold blood. She found the child while searching the chambers for clues, and stabbed it without a second thought.

I ruled this as an evil act.

It was not evil because she killed a baby. Had she killed the child because she knew it would not survive, or that its cries might alert more goblins I might have accepted it. I considered it evil because her character when asked about the rationalization did not consider goblins to be worthy of life. She could accept genocide.

On the larger scale this is my question: If the "good" characters act in the same way as the "evil" characters, then where is the moral high ground to rationalize ones actions? Where are good and evil if they both use with the same playbook?

Good and evil, in humanity, are not absolutes. I don't think any of us here can defintivly asnswer this question. How many books of philosphy and religion have sought to answer the question that we know toss around? There cannot be hard and fast rules on this. It has to be a combination of the characters philosphy, the restrictive alignment system, and the percieved morals of the world they live in.

No answers there, I know.

 

[Kichwas]

I'm surprised no one has brought up orc babies yet.

That's why I mentioned Mai Lai.

I could mention Wounded Knee also.


These are two cases by the way where we judged our actions to be immoral, not just after the fact, but right at the time of it as well (even in Wounded Knee, at the end of a long war of Genocide waged by the US, the day the General in charge of plain's forces got the report on what had happened he labeled it a disgrace on the part of the US --- by contrast, the author of the Wizard of Oz called it a reason that we needed to exterminate ALL of the remaining people with any trace of Indian blood in them...).

But...


That's the -in conflict- morality. It's the question of weather or not -total war- is morally justifiable. The question here is the post conflict morality.

If you ARE in a total war, then what is the morality of killing those you capture.

What if you capture them by force, not by surrender. As in you KO them, or disarm and immobalize them...

Does that change the morality?


I saw Two Towers last night. In it there's a scene where they offer to kill an Orc quickly if he tells them were Aragon is... Was this an evil act then? The orc is no longer a combatant, and yet they offer him no option of mercy.