Quote Originally Posted by -Sentinel- View Post
In virtually all works of fantasy, necromancers (of the D&D "raise an army of corpses" kind, not in the older "converse with the spirit of the dead" sense) are portrayed as unambiguously evil. And yeah, I get it, leading an army of zombies does not look very good, PR-wise! The living dead are scary! Plus, there is often an underlying theme along the lines of "death is the natural order of things".

But can there be a situation where raising the dead is morally justified?

Picture this. You are the lord of the land. Not a vast kingdom or anything... I'm talking about a land small enough that you know the village innkeeper by name and can go out for a drink without a bunch of guards at your side. Your land is frequently targeted by the depredations of barbarians, goblins, or a rival lord with whom you have a border dispute. You care deeply for your people and you want to protect them, but you don't have much of a standing army. Waging war requires you to draft your farmers' sons. It's always a difficult thing to do, because you know that some will not return alive. Even the deaths of just 10 or 20 young men would be a terrible blow to your land and make your people resent you.

So what do you do? You have a necromancer raise the dead to do the fighting for you. Sure, the families will not like it either. The idea that their beloved grandma will rise from her grave and shuffle around with a spear is terrible to bear. But is it not better than the alternative? In desperate times, should we not have the dead defend the living?

Granted, it all depends on whether raising zombies involves disturbing the soul of the deceased. If it does, then necromancy becomes a lot less defensible than if it merely consisted of making a mindless sack of rotting meat walk again.
Personally, I've always viewed necromancy as something that could be culturally available as a solution to social problems that require mechanical labor. I've studied and been to cultures where it's seen as normal to think of the dead as present and protecting people as spirits, and there are definitely cultures that don't treat a cadaver as a taboo object to be interred or destroyed. I've written more than a few fantasy cultures that just see it as part of life, if not a sacred duty, for people to be reanimated. For example, in a region with no domesticated animals, skeletons become essential physical labor, and it's seen as "right" to use skeletons as physical laborers. It's just a utilitarian calculation, and an undead army under extremes conditions would be very much the same.

In effect...an undead army is just automated combatants equivalent to drones, and the ethics of that army are exactly like those of people using remote systems: how does friend/foe/noncombatant recognition happen and how effectively, and how do command decisions change when warfare is remote and the compounding harm is not directly interacted with. But a great deal of the ethics depends on variables not accounted for, mentioned by invisible bison. To their list I'd add that if walking corpses remain disease vectors or are a type that can propagate undead, or the army are "zombie" in the sense of required anthropophagy to function, then there's a couple of other issues.

The two things that do have to be established is (1) if there's some kind of spiritual hazard to undeath--to the dead person, to the environment, to the natural order of death as enforced by deities or higher power, (2) the cultural baseline of how acceptable it is to interfere with a corpse...a ruler has to tread carefully around societal norms, since part of rulership is guardian of cultural practices and too big of a taboo-violation would mean that mere reasoning wouldn't be sufficient justification.

Also important is that you're describing different scenarios with different ethical snarls: police functions (versus bandits), border security, state-versus-state warfare, and irregular warfare versus non-state actors ("barbarians"). People tend to be more permissive of error and "wrong"behavior when faced with what's viewed as an outside threat by strangers and "The Other," and/or when the conflict is distant. People could be fine with glitchy zombies out campaigning, but deeply disturbed with them used as garrison forces.