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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9636446" data-attributes="member: 4937">It's strictly true, in that orcs are either not people or else they people.  But it's also misleading.To talk about it, I'm going to move from talking about orcs to goblins (and probably more Star Trek and sci-fiction).  The trouble is that being a person doesn't necessarily imply being human.  For lack of referents, let's imagine that humans are no more capable of being evil than is average for a sentients.  I think we will all agree humans have a variety of character flaws that led them to acts of evil.  We might not agree entirely on what those acts are, and we might argue about the origin or correctability of those flaws, but we all agree that they are there.  One problem that the "biological essentialism" crowd runs into is that it's completely plausible and reasonable to link our maladaptive behavior to our biological imperatives and origins.  Greed was a successful survival strategy because it meant in situations of limited food stuffs, you and your descendants were more likely to have adequate nutrition.  A lot of what we think of as evil can be justified biologically, either in a modern context or especially in the context of our own evolutionary history.  Now, I don't mean to suggest that makes evil less real, but I do mean to suggest that think you can do away with something like "biological essentialism" in a species description is not thinking past the first step in your thinking.  If you look at Star Trek, you have a lot of things that are near human.  These nearly human things have a lot of the qualities we associate with being human and as such are near enough to being human that morality should suggest that they deserve the sort of treatment we would give another human.  "Vulcan rights" are going to be really close to "human rights", and there logically exists some sort of blanket "person rights" that all people near enough in nature to recognize each other as persons would possess.  But within this framework we see various differences in the propensities for evil and how that evil is expressed.  The biological essentials of Vulcan, Andorran, Human, and Klingon lead to different tendencies toward evil.It's not hard to imagine that there exist among sentient species, species with sufficient biological differences and sufficiently different accompanying world views that they either can't successfully communicate or can't agree on what rights the other deserves.  Indeed, it's easily possible to imagine a sentient species so biologically different that it can never recognize you as a person no matter how hard you try to treat it as one.  The concept of shared personhood you are trying to communicate is not one it recognizes precisely because of its biological differences.   Card refers to this concept as "Varelse", too alien to have any communion with because you lack any shared context. But it's also possible to have "near Varelse", beings that while they are closer to you than a true Varelse are still so far from you that any shared framework or shared goals or mutual respect is basically or at least normally impossible.  The vast majority of time the near Varelse treat you as non-persons, no matter how much you attempt to teach them otherwise, because their biological essentials and resulting culture tends to make them behave in a way that is evil.  (Or if you don't believe in evil, then in ways that invariably don't involve mutually beneficial interaction, but which tend to treat you as prey to exploit.)That's Goblins in my game.  While they are "people" and you can have a relationship with them and some of them are even honorable, for a variety of reasons in their background including biological reasons (they are a product of selective breeding program to reinforce certain traits and propensities) most goblins do live up to their negative stereotype as vicious people eaters unconcerned with treating anyone else as a person.  They are obligate carnivores that tend to not understand you as anything other than "food" and really don't care if you have feelings.There are no orcs in my homebrew.  There are only goblins.  People fear them for a reason.  You can treat them like people, and the better ones will respect that, but don't assume that the recognition is reciprocal.  The vast majority of them are fully on board a campaign to genocidally wipe out and eat every other non-goblin person in the world.And this doesn't even get into the fact of what does "biology" mean in a world that doesn't run on science.  Having a supernatural origin in a fantasy world is the norm.  No one has a purely "natural" origin in the sense that a person who doesn't believe in anything but a material cause would understand the term.  Saying that a fire elemental can have an essential nature as inherently evil because it's not a natural biology is meaningless in the context of a fantasy universe.  The persons in my homebrew game that have an essential nature that lets them choose between good and evil have that nature explicitly as the result of an accidental gift by the gods that gave them that nature.  They have true freedom to choose right or wrong precisely because that is the way they were made.  The vast majority of things in the setting lack that freedom in whole or in part, and are slaves to their biological essentialism that forces them to behave in a single way and gives them no emotional context for behaving in any other way.  Player characters are part of a limited range of "free peoples" with perhaps in some sense more free will than the deities that made  them.  That's my setting and I find it coherent.   I don't necessarily find other people's settings coherent or thoughtful, but on the other hand, it's their setting and they can do what they enjoy.  But don't try to stuff down my throat the ill-considered insanity that you can't be a person and have a biologically dictated essential nature, because that's not how any of this works.UPDATE: The trisolarians from "Three Body Problem" and the Ruml from "The Alien Way" are examples of near Varelse.  In fact, both settings seem to suggest that on average, any two alien species will always be near Varelse and be unable because of biological imperatives to form stable relationship with each other.  In fact, Liu Cixin basically suggest in this series that because of biological essentialism, any sentient species that fails to act and think like near-Varelse and accept this situation as normal goes extinct as a Dodo in short order for failing to recognize it is to everyone else just food (or a threat).</blockquote>

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