Why are undead inherently evil?

[VelvetViolet]

Most sources I've seen on the subject flip-flop over whether undead are inherently evil or not, despite negative energy itself being neutral and a perfectly natural part of nature. Meanwhile, Deathless are considered inherently good simply because they are literally nothing more than undead powered by positive energy, despite positive energy being no more aligned than negative energy is, and that's the only difference (there's nothing preventing the existence of deathless zombies, skeletons, wights, vampires, etc because it's just the polar inverse of negative energy but is otherwise identical).

Most of the arguments seem to come down to these things:

1) Desecration of a body. This is ridiculous because people in D&D have solid proof for the afterlife and therefore death holds absolutely no mystery or suspense for them. Therefore they shouldn't treat their dead the same way we in the real world do, because they know for a fact that corpses are nothing more than hunks of rotting meat that retains impressions of the memories of the soul that used to own it, but the actual soul has moved on to the afterlife and has no connection to the body other than for purposes of resurrection. Also, why isn't mind control considered just as evil, since it's still desecrating a (living) body and forcing it to your will?
2) Negative energy is evil, positive energy is good. For one thing, enough positive energy will make you explode. For another thing, without negative energy nothing would ever be able to die and make way for new things to exist. (or else, why would these two planes even exist?) Positive and negative energy represent life and death, respectively. But because death is scary, people assume it is therefore evil and then we get things like various grim reaper monsters that simply carry out the natural workings of the cosmos receiving "evil" as their alignment.
3) Undead are unnatural/It prevents resurrection magic. How is raising someone from the dead any less unnatural than raising them as a zombie? In fact, resurrection is MORE unnatural because it actually drags the soul from the afterlife and places it back in the body. Scratch that, raising it as an undead is just as natural as letting it rot, since both reanimation and the natural cycle of decay are caused by negative energy (otherwise, why would the plane exist?). Which is really inconsistent that the force responsible for natural rot also preserves undead bodies, but we'll ignore that little self-contradiction.
4) Animating a zombie/skeleton/whatever tortures the soul inside it. For one thing, most undead explicitly do not have souls, as stated by any spells that can manipulate souls. The only undead that retain their souls are things like liches and vampires, whereas others are either mindless hunks of meat/bone or developed a simple intelligence to replace their original soul. For those latter undead, their souls are enjoying the afterlife, and nowhere near the reanimated corpse. Even for intelligent undead, their souls aren't being tortured, they were either evil to begin with or had an alignment shift (or were/stayed good for some reason), which still isn't soul torture and is usually reversible.

Most of the arguments for undead being evil/deathless being good are nonsensical because they rely on premises that are explicitly disproved by the rules or rely on concepts that shouldn't exist in the game world because of differing physical laws/cultural beliefs.

 

[Shemeska]

It's interesting, because the animating source of undead (negative energy, and the negative energy plane itself) has --never-- been evil in any edition of (A)D&D (can't say about basic D&D, know nothing about it, and can't speak for 4e which has its own completely different planar continuity going on). Every edition has placed Negative Energy as explicitly neutral, and likewise it's the same thing in Pathfinder.

Yet you still have sources (like the 3e BoED) that have this bizarre notion that positive energy is awesome and pure and good, and negative energy is icky, gross, and evil. Which is completely contradictory to any mention of the energy planes themselves.

That said, most undead being evil relates not to what they are or what animates them, but the way in which they died, the means by which they were dragged back, etc. A lot of those involve horrible agony, loss, anguish, or willing debasement of themselves into something inhuman. Negative energy is not and never has been evil, neither is fire, neither is water. The trick is the way in which that energy is used. Lighting a fire to burn down an orphanage with locked doors and people inside is evil. Lighting a fire to stay warm is not. Using negative energy to heal yourself if you are sustained by negative energy, not evil. Using negative energy to pollute the positive-energy based soul of your dead cat and create a wraith kitty, that's misguided at the very best, and a very slippery slope descending down into evil if it's used that way.

Metagame-wise, non-intelligent undead only became evil in 3.5 because the design team wanted paladins to be able to smite them apparently. Those rules filtered down into Pathfinder, and as a result while PF still has that going on, it has an in-game rationalization for that (which works even if its positive and negative energy planes are neutral - if populated by xenophobic jerks and equal-opportunity antimatter 'anti-positive-energy-and-that-includes-undead-too' creatures respectively). The PF rationale is that under most (but not all circumstances) undead are evil as a result of the methods and rationale behind their creation and an inherent twisting of the path of the mortal soul - damaging the mortal soul being among the worst things out there. James Jacobs has discussed the reasoning behind the PF stance before, and I'd suggest looking at his answer on the topic for a fuller answer.

And let's agree not to talk about "positive energy undead".

 

[Ahnehnois]

Another typical, if not universal feature of undead is that they are inherently destructive. Most of them have cravings for blood or the like, and even if they are intelligent, they have to fulfill those cravings. Thus, vampires/wights/ghouls/etc. are evil, and thus creating them brings evil into the world.

If you're looking for someone to defend the deathless type though, I won't. I don't mind non-evil undead on occasion, but this deathless business is BS.

 

[Mistwell]

They have no soul, but used to have one.

 

[Cyclone_Joker]

They are Evil because the system of morality in D&D is completely objective. This is made painfully obvious if you compare BoED and BoVD, where we learn that poisons are inherently Evil, but you can get Good totally-not-poisons-why-do-you-keep-calling-them-that to meet all the effects you want anyways, as well as wonders like Good brand(TM) Mind Rape.

Good and Evil are defined cosmic laws. They are totally divorced from any real sense of morality just as much as the Modrons or anything from the Far Realms. Any action that is Evil is Evil, no matter what the results are.

This is one of the first things I excised from my games. It's completely nonsensical and completely absurd, even if you ignore the horror that is BoVD page 8.

 

[Henry]

In my opinion it's because the story trope has implied it in western literature as long as it's been around - its master Hades was a douche, Hel is a raging bee-yatch, Ghuls and later ghouls were seen as evil, Dracula was a pretty nasty customer, and The Grim Reaper prior to the 20th century was rarely seen as a nice guy. To make undeath a nice guy is to partly disavow a thousand years of tradition - not that it's incorrect, I'm just saying why I think the tradition will continue.

 

[MichaelSomething]

The awesome thing about D&D is that you can change it in your campaign!

 

[Ragmon]

Just to add my 2 cents.
We cant really answer your question, since only the developers know, but in my opinion it was ll about fitting everything into a stereotype. As I see it there was no real deep thought about the philosophy about how things would work, I understand cause that would be over complicating the development process.

I agree that mindless undead should be neutral, cause well hey, they only crave flesh and blood... sounds familiar doesn't it, when an animal gets hungry, what does he do, eats flesh and blood.
On the other hand we have the sentient undead, this is a different problem, I'm not completely sure how is this resolved in the game....BUT, imo sentient undead should be inherently evil, cause they came back cause of an evil mentality (but this should involve the original soul in the body).

Oh and check this shiat, Evil Outsiders are evil incarnate right? Right. But they don't have anything to do with negative energy, in fact they are fine with positive energy. This is an interesting contradiction on the developers part, negative energy is evil it helps create evil undead....buuut, evil outsiders don't like negative energy. Weird if you ask me.

 

[Dioltach]

In my opinion it's because the story trope has implied it in western literature as long as it's been around - its master Hades was a douche, Hel is a raging bee-yatch, Ghuls and later ghouls were seen as evil, Dracula was a pretty nasty customer, and The Grim Reaper prior to the 20th century was rarely seen as a nice guy. To make undeath a nice guy is to partly disavow a thousand years of tradition - not that it's incorrect, I'm just saying why I think the tradition will continue.

As I recall from my classical upbringing, Hades was no more of a douche than the other Olympian gods, and pretty much everyone, whether god, monster or mortal, in Greek mythology. And then there's Arawn in Celtic mythology: despite his portrayal by Lloyd Alexander, in the Mabinogion he's a very nice and honourable bloke. (Interestingly, I can't recall any instance of apparitions/ghosts/undead in Celtic mythology.)

I agree that it's a cultural thing, though. But I think it stems mostly from very real risks, in pre-modern times, of disease caused by corpses and the probability of being killed by things that lived in the dark.

 

[Aenghus]

I think the OP is putting the cart before the horse on this question. Players, DMs, developers have the feeling or intuition of undead tendencies to evil first, and make up mechanics to support that opinion. And people have different opinions, and place different value on the importance of consistency. The incoherent mechanics on this issue reflect the lack of agreement and consistency. There's evidence to support all sorts of opinions on the issue scattered through the various D&D editions and products.

The Isle of Jakandor setting featured a society of necromancers who considered undead and necromancy neutral.

A little detail in the Forgotten Realms specified that even unintelligent undead were prone to going randomly berserk and destructive to life if not constantly controlled. Some editions have unintelligent undead as neutral, others as various shades of evil.

If you prioritise consistency, then you have to houserule the contradictory material away.

Myself, I prefer undead to be strongly drawn to evil, and as I value consistency, I houserule away the objective declarations and evidence for their neutrality.

There isn't a "correct" answer on the issue, just opinions.