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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 957541" data-attributes="member: 3146">I've chimed in on the "game logic" discussions of why animating undead is evil before but I've realized that it's rather pointless. This thread seems to pop up a couple times a year on D&D message boards. Much the same questions are raised and much the same answers are given about the internal moral coherency of the D&D core rules. I don't think that internal moral coherency has much to do with it though. I believe that the game really judges animate dead to be evil because in the archtypical literature and myth, zombies animated dead, and those who animate them are generally seen as evil.The long and the short of it is that animating the bodies of the dead is evil in the game for precisely the same reason that murder is considered evil in the game: because it is generally considered to be evil in our common cultural mythology.One can house rule an alignment rules system where animating dead is not evil. One could also house rule an alignment rules system where animating dead is actually good. It would be equally possible to houserule a system where Bane gets the "good" label and murder is [good]. The primary difference between the two is the relative strength of our general inclination to judge the change in the rules a perversion of the real meaning of good.Why do some people who otherwise believe that good has a non-arbitrary meaning and that it would be wrong and perverse to house rule murder to be a [good] act think that there is no justification for animate dead being [evil]? I believe that it is because many modern people have difficulty conceiving of going beyond any set limit--except perhaps the utilitarian limit of not harming another person unless it is for a greater good--as being evil. At least the shared moral language of the West is very contractarian in nature and has difficulty explaining why anything all parties agree upon could be wrong. It hasn't always been that way and, in fact, moral language may only be an illusion under contractarian presuppositions. Many more ancient societies believed in an order of the world in which actions were right or wrong by virtue of their intrinsic nature or fittedness with the purpose of the universe and intersubjective agreement was irrelevant. (The D&D core rulebooks seem to lend more support to this ancient view of good and evil than the modern view but I think that a nuanced contractarianism or (especially) utilitarianism could fit within the core rulebooks).The question of whether animating dead is good or neutral or evil in a campaign world will depend upon the assumptions that that particular campaign makes about the natures of good, evil, and magic. Animating dead would be evil in a utilitarian moral universe if it damaged or caused pain to  the souls of the departed. It could be evil in a non-utilitarian moral universe even if it had no effect other than to sever the tie of the soul to the body--that could be an evil act whether or not it caused pain or prevented pleasure.A technological model of magic is also necessary for animating dead to not be evil. If all magic is simply another power of nature to be harnessed like gravity or the power of the atom then it's as good as the purpose to which it is put.  This model of magic appears to be what is at work in the Harry Potter novels and it is almost certainly what one finds in most D&D inspired fiction. If, on the other hand, magic involves the manipulation and invocation of spirits and powers that, by their nature have moral qualities, then it is much more feasible for a spell to be [good] or [evil]. Technology would not be an appropriate metaphor for magic under this understanding. It may be that some spells (those with the [evil] descriptor) are only possible through the invocation of malign entities or energies.In any case, a more coherent and comprehensive system of ethics and metaphysics than the D&D rulebooks offer is necessary to justify the labelling of certain spells and actions as [evil]. And for those DMs who set out to create such an ethical and metaphysical system, the rules and [good], [evil], etc. descriptions may be used either as evidence that the final system needs to explain or as prima facia claims that may be either validated or invalidated, ultima facia, by the system that is developed.</blockquote>

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