Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6160699" data-attributes="member: 17106">Even in a high-magic D&D world, I think trading a life for another is a pretty special case. I also don't know whether a good deity would allow these things. It isn't enumerated anywhere, but I think there's a good case to say that, if an unwilling sacrifice is used to power it, Raise Dead should acquire the Evil descriptor and be forbidden to some clerics.I don't know that being able to make moral judgements is a prerequisite of having a soul. This is mostly me talking about souls; the rules make it clear that they exist but don't exactly talk much about them. I would think that many humans with low mental ability scores might have a very limited ability to make moral judgments, but they still have souls.And well-fed cats hunt because they don't know any better. Hunting is not a rational choice, but they are unable to understand that and act accordingly.There's plenty of space between acknowledging that something exists and is valid and doing it oneself. Many followers of real life pacifist/vegetarian ideologies clearly revere nature, including its violent aspects, but hold themselves to a different standard than some of the creatures they observe.Ouch. Yes. There's risk there.Under the core rules, a scenario can unfold where an evil cleric tries to raise a good character to use him as a prisoner or something, the good character says no, and the 5000 gp diamond is wasted because the spell fails. I would carry the same principle forward.Maybe. Maybe not. If the character talked with an elder he trusts beforehand about the value of life and the elder decides that (as discussed in previous posts) the life of a young hero is worth more than his last years, maybe the good character is honored by the sacrifice and accepts it. Conversely, a charismatic hero might have fans willing to give their lives for him, and he might decide that using them that way is wrong (though as stated, said fan is likely dead either way). These examples are malleable though. In some interpretations, suicide might simply be evil under the "respect for life" definition, making raise dead a guaranteed evil spell.Let me go back to this one real quick. To me, good or evil is internal rather than external. I had a trenchant moment as a young child where I would sometimes look down at the sidewalk, see some ants crossing it, and go out of my way to step on and crush the ants. I then reached a point where I realized that this was wrong. I think many (not all) would agree that such an action is wrong, not so much because ants have rights or feelings, but because it indulges our own worst impulses. Would I kill an ant if it was invading my house? Sure. Do I kill some purely by accident? Undoubtedly. Would I kill some that are not causing me problems just for the sake of doing it? No. Because doing so would be wrong. That's a line that I drew.Would I kill a bug to eat it, or for some other gain unrelated to alleviating any problems or danger it is associated with? Again, I file that under wrong. Gray area, definitely.Just warming up for my ethics conference this week. I'm guessing that raising the dead won't be on the agenda, but there will be some issues that require a lot of thought to reach no definitive answer.</blockquote>

Verification