Why is creating undead Evil?

[illyahr]

Creating undead, even becoming a lich, only became evil in 3rd edition. Before that, they weren't. Negative energy and Necromancy weren't inherently evil either (even Cure spells were Necromancy before 3rd). They only became evil because the editor added his own religious and spiritual views when they edited the edition.

[farothel]

Actually it's not always evil. It depends on the system you use. In Pathfinder 2E the animate dead spell doesn't have the evil trait. Granted, it only lasts for 1 minute, so it's not permanent, which might be the reason, but it's not evil.

[Vaern]

There's the fact that, apparently, having your body turned into a undead stops you from being resurrected, full stop. While obviously your soul is still in the appropriate afterlife, this points to undead's mere existence messing up with some sort of Cosmic Balance.

That's not entirely true. Being turned into an undead creature prevents Raise Dead from working, but [True] Resurrection can still revive someone who has been reanimated and then destroyed. The line saying that undead creatures can't be revived in Resurrection and True Resurrection means that you can't revive, for example, a vampire, but you can revive the creature that the vampire was before becoming undead. The fact that lower-level resurrections don't work, though, would appear to be evidence that becoming undead does somehow scar the soul of the creature whose body is being defiled by negative energy.

[ShurikVch]

On another note, they are mindless and "do nothing unless instructed" so they shouldn't have a moral alignment in the first place.

Fun fact: in the d20 Modern, it works in that exact way:

Allegiances: A skeleton loses any previous allegiances and adopts a new allegiance to its creator. This allegiance cannot be broken.

Allegiances: A zombie loses any previous allegiances and adopts a new allegiance to its creator. This allegiance cannot be broken.

Human Zombie: CR 1⁄2; Medium-size undead; HD 2d12 plus 3 (Toughness feat); hp 16; Init –1; Spd 30 ft.; Defense 11, touch 9, flat-footed 11 (–1 Dex, +2 natural); BAB +0; Grap +1; Atk +1 melee (1d6+1, slam); Full Atk +1 melee (1d6+1, slam); FS 5 ft. by 5 ft.; Reach 5 ft.; SQ undead, move or attack action only; AL none or creator; SV Fort +0, Ref –1, Will +3; AP 0; Rep +0; Str 13, Dex 8, Con —, Int —, Wis 10, Cha 1.
Skills: None.
Feats: Toughness.
Possessions: Burial clothes.

[noob]

Because with those spell slots used to create undead you could be creating cute and harmless lantern archons or undyings.
Unless you are creating undead with level 2 spell slots or lower level spell slots but then it is usually by killing a creature (which is not necessarily evil).

That's not entirely true. Being turned into an undead creature prevents Raise Dead from working, but [True] Resurrection can still revive someone who has been reanimated and then destroyed. The line saying that undead creatures can't be revived in Resurrection and True Resurrection means that you can't revive, for example, a vampire, but you can revive the creature that the vampire was before becoming undead. The fact that lower-level resurrections don't work, though, would appear to be evidence that becoming undead does somehow scar the soul of the creature whose body is being defiled by negative energy.

Low level resurrection spells basically requires the body to not have suffered from too much damage(ex: if the head is cut you can not ressurect).
So if body damage counts then undead creation might just be damaging the body itself and not the soul (ex: the corpse lose all its flesh when turned in a skeleton and maybe it rots instantly when turned into a zombie and so on).

[ShurikVch]

Note: Sticks and Stones spell (Shining South) isn't [Evil], but gives you access to Energy Drain at level 5+...

[Saintheart]

And what's about the making Undead from the low-Int or Mindless creatures?

This is, indeed, a major point in trying to nail down what, precisely, is inherently evil about casting animate dead. The rules fully support creating bone rat and corpse rat swarms with it, as both are skeletons or zombies well within the HD limits. Since controlling them isn't really a problem any more than controlling your fireball or your summoned monster from summon monster III, no "but if you lose control" clauses really justify making the casting of it automatically evil.

An example that doesn't apply to animate dead as written (since such requirements would be spelled out in the spell somewhere) would be if it required the sacrifice/murder of an intelligent creature to make it work. That would make the casting inherently evil, no matter how beneficent the use of the undead thus created was. It also is said that [evil] spells don't automatically make you turn evil for casting them, even for purely selfish reasons, as long as you don't make a habit of it. So whatever inherent evil there is to the casting must be minor enough to be uncomfortable for the good-aligned, and maybe not something neutral people would be happy doing if they had a better option, but can't be as egregious as murder.

Moreover, preparing the spell isn't evil. Just casting it. So whatever it is must be part of the casting of the spell, not something we can relegate to what you did off-screen when preparing it.

As said: there are different degrees and types of evil, but making undead from low-INT or Mindless creatures is still achieving the [Evil] aim of horrifying the living with the sight of the dead. Evil can be achieved by acts designed to destroy good, which include mockery or perversion of good's principles.

[Segev]

As said: there are different degrees and types of evil, but making undead from low-INT or Mindless creatures is still achieving the [Evil] aim of horrifying the living with the sight of the dead. Evil can be achieved by acts designed to destroy good, which include mockery or perversion of good's principles.

That would only work if you were guaranteed to show "the dead" to "the living."

No, it has to be something inherent to casting the spell. Either that, or something inherent to what animates the dead must be causing harm in a quantifiable way. No "ambient negative energy that may someday somehow do something bad somewhere." Somebody has to be being quantifiably harmed by it.

[Doctor Despair]

That would only work if you were guaranteed to show "the dead" to "the living."

No, it has to be something inherent to casting the spell. Either that, or something inherent to what animates the dead must be causing harm in a quantifiable way. No "ambient negative energy that may someday somehow do something bad somewhere." Somebody has to be being quantifiably harmed by it.

Have you considered that maybe the spirits and negative energy used to animate undead entities may object to being used for such purposes? I thought not. It's not a story the Wizards would tell you. Typical anti-differently alive folk propaganda

[NigelWalmsley]

Creating Undead is Evil for the same reason that nuclear power is Evil: it is morally unacceptable to work with things that are dangerous in the hands of people who aren't trained professionals.

Alternatively, the D&D alignment rules don't make any sense.

[Saintheart]

That would only work if you were guaranteed to show "the dead" to "the living."

No, it has to be something inherent to casting the spell. Either that, or something inherent to what animates the dead must be causing harm in a quantifiable way. No "ambient negative energy that may someday somehow do something bad somewhere." Somebody has to be being quantifiably harmed by it.

There are multiple ways an act can be Evil. Evil can be evil in result or evil in principle.

[Segev]

Have you considered that maybe the spirits and negative energy used to animate undead entities may object to being used for such purposes? I thought not. It's not a story the Wizards would tell you. Typical anti-differently alive folk propaganda

The ones animating skeletons and zombies are definedly mindless. They don't have the capacity to object any more than your computer has the capacity to object to posting to web forums.

One of the things I am not satisfied with but have toyed with is the notion that a portion of the corpse's prior soul is grabbed and dragged back. Just enough to give a metaphysical "shape" for the negative energy to flow through and bind to the corpse itself. This might be an ongoing discomfort or pain for the dead soul, in which they have no say. There are still things that create exceptions to the "it's always evil to cast it" rule with this explanation, though, and it's weird and feels a bit trite, which is why I find it unsatisfactory. But it is one I still toy with to see if I can shake a solid metaphysic out of it.

Creating Undead is Evil [because] it is morally unacceptable to work with things that are dangerous in the hands of people who aren't trained professionals.

Anybody who can cast animate dead is at least a 5th level caster, and thus qualifies as a "trained professional."

Since the act of casting the spell is an evil act, it can't be anything about how responsibly the spell is or is not used that is in consideration, here.

Alternatively, the D&D alignment rules don't make any sense.

They make sense. They just don't make perfect sense, and are imperfectly or inconsistently applied by some writers. It's really only we who insist on picking everything apart who look at animate dead and demand to know what's so evil about it from base principles. "Oh, yeah, making undead's something villains iconically do" is enough for a lot of people. Not for me, mind, but I am here pointing out that this isn't a failure of the rules to make sense, just a failure of the rules to be consistent or rooted in base principles.

[nedz]

It's the negative energy = evil, positive energy = good paradigm — but there are other views.

Positive energy and negative energy are just elemental forces no different to Fire and Cold — they even have their own elemental planes.

Druids are evil. They claim that they like animals, but they keep summoning them to watch them die painfully in combat.
The things I summon are already dead and so suffer no further pain. Now the ends to which we put our summons are the same; but I'm regarded by the cosmos as evil even though I cause less suffering in the world ?

[Mechalich]

They make sense. They just don't make perfect sense, and are imperfectly or inconsistently applied by some writers. It's really only us nerds who look at animate dead and demand to know what's so evil about it from base principles. "Oh, yeah, making undead's something villains iconically do" is enough for a lot of people. Not for me, mind, but I am here pointing out that this isn't a failure of the rules to make sense, just a failure of the rules to be consistent or rooted in base principles.

It's really only animate dead, and the handful of other spells that create mindless undead, that is the problem. Creating intelligent undead is fairly well established as trapping/binding/entwining or otherwise doing something awful to the spirit of the being in question such that it doesn't end up going where it is supposed to go. This is fairly obviously a massive disruption of the cosmic system to the point that it angers even many clearly evil deities: Asmodeus and co would very much prefer that your soul end up in Hell like it's supposed to rather than run away to lichdom and potentially be lost eternally somewhere beyond standard planar boundaries.

But this doesn't seem to happen with regard to mindless undead, and of course in 2e - which is when all of the more complicated metaphysics of what happened after death was worked out in detail - creating mindless undead was not an evil act. As such, the best explanation is that the 3e design team simply made a category error by failing to distinguish between intelligent and mindless undead.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Maybe there's something inherently evil about obsidian in D&D-verse. Dumb, but possible.

As said: there are different degrees and types of evil, but making undead from low-INT or Mindless creatures is still achieving the [Evil] aim of horrifying the living with the sight of the dead.

If that were [Evil], then opalescent glare wouldn't be a [Death, Good] spell, despite using the powers of [Death] to terrify the living. Even good creatures can be affected, if they fail the save.

[Noxangelo]

What about animate objects? It's entirely usable on a corpse, since said corpse has no Wis or Cha scores, and thus it is an object.

According to the DMG P. 300 "Dead" is a condition and therefore a corpse as a "Dead" creature may, by RAW, still technically count as a creature and not an object.

[Silly Name]

Creating undead, even becoming a lich, only became evil in 3rd edition. Before that, they weren't. Negative energy and Necromancy weren't inherently evil either (even Cure spells were Necromancy before 3rd). They only became evil because the editor added his own religious and spiritual views when they edited the edition.

I mean, becoming a lich was tied to committing some dark, twisted and unspeakably evil act in AD&D too, right? I'm pretty sure that is enough to send most people who do turn into a lich towards the deep end of the alignment pool.

(Yes, there are exceptions, arch-liches, baelnorn, etc etc. Your average lich, however, must kill infants or drink the blood of puppies or whatever to become one)

[noob]

Maybe obsidian can only be obtained by destroying the soul of a young angel?(going with the "the evil portion of the spell is the component")

[Jack_Simth]

That's not entirely true. Being turned into an undead creature prevents Raise Dead from working, but [True] Resurrection can still revive someone who has been reanimated and then destroyed. The line saying that undead creatures can't be revived in Resurrection and True Resurrection means that you can't revive, for example, a vampire, but you can revive the creature that the vampire was before becoming undead. The fact that lower-level resurrections don't work, though, would appear to be evidence that becoming undead does somehow scar the soul of the creature whose body is being defiled by negative energy.

Ah, but there's the "and then destroyed" step. True Resurrection, which requires nothing of the subject's body, cannot revive someone if their body is walking around elsewhere as a shambling corpse. Cremate the shambling undead, however, and it works again.

[ShurikVch]

I mean, becoming a lich was tied to committing some dark, twisted and unspeakably evil act in AD&D too, right? I'm pretty sure that is enough to send most people who do turn into a lich towards the deep end of the alignment pool.

(Yes, there are exceptions, arch-liches, baelnorn, etc etc. Your average lich, however, must kill infants or drink the blood of puppies or whatever to become one)

Actually, no: they kept exact mechanics of Lich transformation vague pre-3E (save for one Dragon article at the end of "Blue Box" era)

Monstrous Compendium vol. 1 listed both Lich and Demilich as "ALIGNMENT: Any", because "the lich has no interest in good or evil as we understand it"

Moreover, there is one more canon counterpoint:



You can read more about Seragrimm the Just in the Oerth Journal #33

[Efrate]

It's not a negagive energy thing either since spells like enervation explicitly use negative energy and do not have the evil descriptor.

[Segev]

I mean, becoming a lich was tied to committing some dark, twisted and unspeakably evil act in AD&D too, right? I'm pretty sure that is enough to send most people who do turn into a lich towards the deep end of the alignment pool.

(Yes, there are exceptions, arch-liches, baelnorn, etc etc. Your average lich, however, must kill infants or drink the blood of puppies or whatever to become one)

I think the specifically "unspeakably evil act" that is part of becoming a lich is a 3e addition. (They never specify the unspeakably evil act in question.)

And then 5e forgot the point of becoming a lich at all and made them soul-vampires.

[Silly Name]

I think the specifically "unspeakably evil act" that is part of becoming a lich is a 3e addition. (They never specify the unspeakably evil act in question.)

I mean, if they told you about it, it wouldn't be actually unspeakably evil, would it?

[Venger]

I mean, if they told you about it, it wouldn't be actually unspeakably evil, would it?

You make a sandwich and then cut it into rectangles horizontally so one half has both of the round lobes on it and one half is a rectangle.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

You make a sandwich and then cut it into rectangles horizontally so one half has both of the round lobes on it and one half is a rectangle.

That's...

That's Disney evil!

[137beth]

Ultimately, the reason is because one of the authors decided it should be evil and added the [Evil] tag without bothering to explain themself.

Personally, I'm not a fan, mainly because, as Unavenger said:

I mean, yeah, the fact that animate dead on a corpse is Evil, animate objects on the same corpse is nothing, and animate with the spirit on the same corpse is not just Good but Exalted is part of the sticking point for alignment making sense, here.

So whenever I run 3.5 I house-rule it out.
(BTW, may I have permission to put that quote in my extended sig?)

You can try to offer a retroactive explanation, but most simple-sounding "explanations" create new contradictions, as Segev keeps pointing out.

[Saintheart]

You make a sandwich and then cut it into rectangles horizontally so one half has both of the round lobes on it and one half is a rectangle.

You monster. What's next, drinking tea with no milk in it?!

[MaxiDuRaritry]

You monster. What's next, drinking tea with no milk in it?!

Two words: vegan tofucheesecake.

[Particle_Man]

If there were some anti-necromancer that specialized in creating Deathless (from Book of Exalted Deeds) would the OP arguments also apply to make this practice evil?

[Troacctid]

You can try to offer a retroactive explanation, but most simple-sounding "explanations" create new contradictions, as Segev keeps pointing out.

What's the contradiction with pollution?