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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thikket" data-source="post: 3828142" data-attributes="member: 13333">Aw, ethicists love to find new problems! Don't spoil my fun. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />These sorts of ethical questions will not be important to a majority of characters in a D&D world, but that does not mean we can't talk about them. Furthermore, I'd have to be convinced the considerations I posed do not exist -- at the very least, concerns like this will exist in some characters' minds.I believe perspectives like this make for interesting characters in some games, especially since D&D is so much about killin'. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Maybe there's errata I don't know about, but my PHB says the awaken spell involves "no special empathy or connection with a creature [the caster] awaken<s>". Moreover, alignment doesn't appear anywhere in the spell description. </s><s></s><s>The language part of your observation is in the spell, though I have a different interpretation of that too -- I view bestowing the language as cramming 5 years' of Common lessons into the spell's casting time. And the XP cost (albeit at 250XP, not 500) does exist. So I suppose if in your world, XP translates to a character's soul, then this is definitely valid!</s><s></s><s>My personal interpretation runs differently, obviously. The very first line of the spell description is: "You awaken a tree or animal to humanlike sentience". This is the important one for me, because of the following sketch of an argument:</s><s>Edit: I've included a more rigorous argument beneath the spoiler block below.</s><s>(1) Awaken grants humanlike sentience.</s><s>(2) If a character in a D&D world respects sentient life, he or she must (to remain consistent) respect awakened non-sentient individuals.</s><s>(3) If a character in a D&D world respects potential sentient persons -- those who do not currently have human sentience, be it from curses or being born mentally handicapped (though I realize the minimum INT for a character in D&D is 3, and the max for an animal is 2) -- then they ought to respect animals (and trees!) in the same way, as they are also potentially sentient persons, by (2).</s><s></s><s>[sblock]</s><s>Premise 1. Character A respects the life of "humanlike-sentient" individuals.</s><s>Premise 2. Character A respects the life of an individual who has been feebleminded.</s><s>Premise 3. A feebleminded individual is not of "humanlike-sentience", but does have the ability to gain "humanlike-sentience" via a spell: heal.</s><s>Premise 4. Character A ought to respect all lives of individuals with the ability to gain "humanlike sentience" via spells. [Assumptive-equality generalization of Premise 3]</s><s>Premise 5. An animal is an individual not of "humanlike-sentience".</s><s>Premise 6. Awaken grants "humanlike-sentience" to animals.</s><s>Conclusion 1. An animal is an individual with the ability to gain "humanlike sentience" through a spell. [By Premises 5 & 6].</s><s>Conclusion 2. Character A ought to respect the life of an animal. [By Premise 4 and Conclusion 1].</s><s></s><s>I think the stickiest point is Premise 4, but the observation about the feebleminded individual and the fact that ethical considerations should usually be treated in an arbitrary-equality fashion lends a lot of strength to that point.</s><s>[/sblock]</s><s></s><s></s><s>You'll have to explain to me a little more why using a 5th level Druid spell (awaken) to bless a creature with intelligence and grant it personhood is significantly different from using a 6th level Cleric spell (heal) to cure a cursed individual's lack of (mental) personhood. At any given instant, both the cursed individual and the animal have equivalent sentience. Both corrective procedures have costs, and both have a strong result.</s><s></s><s>I think it's also interesting to use this concept of the awaken spell to explain why elves stereotypically have such a connection with trees and the forest, and why gnomes stereotypically respect animals as equals. I figure many Good gnomes would be opposed to magical/alchemical animal testing, but that's also setting-dependent.</s><s></s><s>**</s><s></s><s>While I think a discussion on awaken's possible ethical implications is interesting for a thread on animal testing in D&D, as one might get some interesting new personality traits and arguments for characters responding to such testing in a D&D world, I do realize this is not entirely on-topic, and I'd be happy to take this discussion to another thread or remove it altogether.</s></blockquote>

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