D&D 5E Why is animate dead considered inherently evil?

[Tolerable Tyrant]

I'm having a troublesome time understanding why the animate dead spell is considered evil. When I read the manual it states that the spall imbues the targeted corpse with a foul mimicry of life, implying that the soul is not a sentient being who is trapped in a decaying corpse. Rather, the spell does exactly what its title suggests, it only animates the corps. Now of course one could use the spell to create zombies that would hunt and kill humans, but by that same coin, they could create a labor force that needs no form of sustenance (other than for the spell to be recast of course). There have also been those who have said "the spell is associated with the negative realm which is evil", however when you ask someone why the negative realm is bad that will say "because it is used for necromancy", I'm sure you can see the fallacy in this argument.

However, I must take into account that I have only looked into the DnD magic system since yesterday so there are likely large gaps in my knowledge. PS(Apon further reflection I've decided that the animate dead spell doesn't fall into the school of necromancy, as life is not truly given to the corps, instead I believe this would most likely fall into the school of transmutation.) PPS(I apologize for my sloppy writing, I've decided I'm feeling too lazy to correct it.)

 

[Mournblade94]

I have seen better cosmological baselines other than words no one can on agree what they mean.

Your table only has to agree. I use the cosmology like Michael Moorcock did. For a cosmology though the nuances don't have to agree across tables. The problem comes from people thinking the PC's have to base their personalities on the alignments.

 

[Mournblade94]

Like the books tell them.

The alignments are guidelines. They never described a personality.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

As someone who started with 1E, I kind of love that we've now gone from enchanters being the good wizards and necromancers being the evil ones to enchanters being creeps with magic roofies and necromancers being pragmatic recyclers.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm not sure about 1e, but 2e grappling was kind of weird. You make an attack, consult a chart, and you might establish a hold or just do damage, lol. With a small chance of an instant KO (provided the target didn't have regeneration- this last bit caused a huge rules debate in a Dark Sun game. We were gladiators (not necessarily Gladiators), and we were unarmed against a Half-Giant Wrestler who was absolutely based on a 90's WWF Superstar. Anyways, he punches our Dwarf and the DM rolls the KO and says he's out, and the Dwarf is like "wait, I have 21 Constitution, I regenerate so I can't be KO'd!"- because that 1 hit point he regained every 5 turns is literally under the heading "Regeneration" on the Constitution table).

We always interpreted the first clause of the write-up "This ring enables the wearer to move and attack freely and normally" as being absolute, with everything else just being what-if examples of what it included. Thus someone wearing a RoFA can't be restrained, grappled, bound, etc. unless whatever is causing that restraint is not being worn by the ring-wearer. In practice this means you can confine such a person in a cage or locked room but any manacles, ropes, etc. put on in order to restrain the person will fall off.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I can't wait for the next topic.

"So, my adventurers need to save some coin on supplies, so they've started eating the townguards that they kill. Some dude complained that this is evil, but I'm like, WHO ARE YOU TO JUDGE? Gold piece saved is a gold piece earned! Then I tipped my fedora at him and started complaining about the lack of moral complexity in my fantasy game."

 

[Umbran]

But given that we are playing a fantasy imagination game, I don't understand why we should have to shackle ourselves to real world assumptions about what is right or wrong.

So, you're lading the conversation with emotional weight with words like "shackle".

As several have already said YOU CAN DO WHAT YOU WANT IN YOUR GAME. You are not, personally, shackled to anything. Okay?

Now, as far as a published game is concerned, there are reasons to go with fairly traditional ideas of what is right and wrong. It boils down to a very basic tenet of good writing - know the rules, generally follow the rules, and then break the rules selectively, for the impact that specific break has.

Taken to the (somewhat absurd) extreme - If you create a fictional world that is entirely decoupled from real-world assumptions of morality, the world will not be coherent to an audience without resetting them into the completely new moral framework. That puts a huge burden on the player, to set aside everything they know about morality, absorb the new framework, and rethink the moral and ethical value of every action.

And that's without noting how few moral philosophers there are in RPGs, such that coming up with entire moral frameworks that actually hang together under scrutiny is unlikely.

So, of course, creators just don't come up with entire frameworks - they use something like a traditional framework, and tweak it in a couple of interesting ways.

Thus, games are going to largely stick to moral concepts the audience understands, with only occasional deviations for specific effects.

If you want a world where there isn't a stigma against using the corpses of the dead for stuff, go to - if you embed that into a standard moral framework, you get to see all the interesting bits where that new assumption rubs up on the rest of the framework. That's a fine "what if" scenario to explore.

But, each creator is going to pick and choose which rules they are going to break. It isn't a failure if they haven't chosen this specific one to focus on.

 

[Clint_L]

I just don't think it is meaningful to talk about an action being evil or good without context. Immanuel Kant tried to establish absolute rules for good and evil via pure logic, arguing that morality could be as logically absolute as mathematics, but I think most will agree that he failed, largely because he was unable to see that his assumptions were rooted in his own cultural assumptions and biases. And his logic leads to some pretty wild outcomes when actually applied.

So casting animate dead can't be inherently evil because no action can be inherently evil. Actions are just actions, and evil is a subjective interpretation of what they mean. There is no getting away from it: context matters.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I've never considered Animating Dead to be inherently evil, but it's an act that generally offends people, and evil people will often delight in (or just not care about) offending people. So, while it's possible that one could participate in Necromancy in a respectful way, it's often perpetrated by evil sorts, which only serves to make society see it as an evil act, in a vicious cycle.

I think if people see the bodies of the dead as having some special significance or sacred quality, there simply isn't a way to respectfully animate a dead corpse. Just look at the real world. Would anyone ever suggest it is okay to use a person's body for some other purpose? Maybe if they donated it to science? But we just had a big case here in Boston where a medical facility at Harvard was selling body parts on the black market. It was getting used in things like macabre art, who knows what else. I think there is a reason people see this as a serious violation of morality, and it goes beyond merely offending peoples' sensibilities. It gets into the ideas of the soul, of what happens to us after we die, and into respecting the life that was once inhabited by the body. Even when hundreds or thousands of years have passed and we are doing things like excavating tombs of people who believed in gods we long stopped worshipping for research, there is a sense that this could be wrong (and I think you see that play out in things like the idea of a mummies curse).

I get one could have a purely material view of humanity and see the body, once it is dead as nothing more than flesh. So I get that an individual might be unfazed by it. but I just don't think the evil here is in daring to offend people. It's in the act itself. I would imagine if you took a poll of all humanity, the response would be one where the idea of animating a corpse (lets say through electric and mechanical means, in order to keep it grounded in the real world) was widely regarded as evil, not just offensive, but evil.

 

[Neonchameleon]

To me the 5e Animate Dead isn't evil because of the "foul mimicry of life" part but because it's a mind control spell where you continually bind the will of the undead or they stop obeying after a day. They don't want to do much and you're overriding their wills to make them.

Historically supernatural evil has been much more explicit than it is in 5e and more of a "football team shirt morality", and the turn undead of good clerics would destroy undead while the evil clerics could command them instead.