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    Default The ethics of raising a zombie army

    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.
    Last edited by -Sentinel-; 2021-03-08 at 02:07 PM.
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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Your situation reminds me of the D&D Narrative How My Players Learned What Chaotic Neutral Means where a similar situation came up regarding raising the dead and reasons for its use. Story is a revenge of sorts but what the DM creates is again similar to your situation.

    In answer to your question depends on use of the dead and how cosmology wise their reanimation plays into it. One positive use can be seen in some instance like with Skyrim on how undead Nords guard and maintain ancient tombs of their people. In your scenario there could be a force created of the undead that volunteer to be reanimated should the need arise after their passing. Given that the individual has given consent to do so after their death then it is justifiable and ethical reason for it. We do similar things such as organ donations or donating our cadavers to medical science upon our deaths in the real world so there is a parallel to draw from in that regard. But as with such things this may raise objections from the family yet may have its own set of supporters, as it does in the real world.

    Still an interesting scenario to see play out tackling the moral and ethical questions in this context.

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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Objections to creating undead tend to come in four general categories, not all of which may apply in a given setting:

    1) Creating an undead from a body harms the body's soul in some way.

    2) Necromancers are incentivized to kill people in order to have bodies to use.

    3) Undead, when not properly controlled by a necromancer, will attack the living.

    4) Undead are gross.

    In the scenario you're describing, 1 is not the case. 2 can be avoided by using trustworthy necromancers and/or keeping a close eye on the necromancers. 4 is not such an issue in a desperate situation. The only problem I see is 3 - what happens if the necromancer is killed or loses control of her zombies? Of course, that's less of a moral issue and more of a practical one.
    Last edited by InvisibleBison; 2021-03-08 at 02:27 PM.
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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Quote Originally Posted by InvisibleBison View Post
    Objections to creating undead tend to come in four general categories, not all of which may apply in a given setting:

    1) Creating an undead from a body harms the body's soul in some way.

    2) Necromancers are incentivized to kill people in order to have bodies to use.

    3) Undead, when not properly controlled by a necromancer, will attack the living.

    4) Undead are gross.

    In the scenario you're describing, 1 is not the case. 2 can be avoided by using trustworthy necromancers and/or keeping a close eye on the necromancers. 4 is not such an issue in a desperate situation. The only problem I see is 3 - what happens if the necromancer is killed or loses control of her zombies? Of course, that's less of a moral issue and more of a practical one.
    There is also (5) - the act of necromancy, even when it doesn't do one of the first four things, metaphysically harms the environment or otherwise hurts innocents in some indirect way. This is the one various editions of D&D have gone with, and more importantly is much harder for an aspiring necromancer to offset or mitigate than the others.
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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Quote Originally Posted by -Sentinel- View Post
    But can there be a situation where raising the dead is morally justified?
    Sure, consider the possible scenario of "I want to kill that dude, but he's all the way over there. And I've got a corpse right here."

    Or if it'd be funny.

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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    If we're talking D&D type zombies then raising them as undead totally *does* harm the person they used to be, because you render it impossible for that person to be raised from the dead until the zombie is destroyed. If we're talking a bit more real-world than that, then I question the usefulness of this scenario anyway--so, you raise Grandma's rotting corpse and send her against the enemy army? Not sure exactly what an unarmed woman would do against armed soldiers even if they were in tip-top condition, but in this scenario I think she gets chopped into rotting chunks before she gets close enough to hurt anyone.

    But, anyway, let's ignore all that and assume that your undead defence actually works and you chase off the enemy. Just how expensive is this going to be? If a necromancer is literally capable of producing an effective army from the local graveyard in a matter of hours, what's to stop him turning them against you and just taking your kingdom for himself, on the assumption he'll make more money looting the treasury than you could ever afford to pay him? Heck, what's to stop him selling his services to your bigger, presumably richer enemy and sending *their* undead hordes in so they don't have to sacrifice any of their sons? After all, we have to assume that someone who is willing to rob graves and resurrect the contents probably doesn't have an enormous amount of moral integrity.

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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    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.

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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    It wasn't a great movie, but in Tomb of the Dragon Emperor I couldn't really call raising a mummy army to fight the army of the mummy-tyrant who killed them wrong given how much worse the consequences of not doing anything and letting him win would've been.

    As a related question, does this become better or worse ethically if the undead 'linger' or if they're just around to get revenge on the person or entities that killed them and then go on to their afterlife or oblivion?

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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Quote Originally Posted by Arcane_Secrets View Post
    It wasn't a great movie, but in Tomb of the Dragon Emperor I couldn't really call raising a mummy army to fight the army of the mummy-tyrant who killed them wrong given how much worse the consequences of not doing anything and letting him win would've been.

    As a related question, does this become better or worse ethically if the undead 'linger' or if they're just around to get revenge on the person or entities that killed them and then go on to their afterlife or oblivion?
    Was going to mention something similar - there are stories where the past heroes of the land (read as: dead heroes) can be summoned back to defend the land once again by the not-dead hero brave/true/loyal/strong enough to do so. That's necromancy too, and always presented as not just acceptable, but laudable.

    Just depends on the flavor of your world. And the concept of consent.

    Still, zombies will always be a hard sell. Ghosts that can materialize, mummies, something like that less so.

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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    There was this anime i watched few months ago, i don't remember it's mamę, i Will try to look it up later, but the premise was that main hero was a self awere zombie, and zombie were used by generał public as free work force (they weren't self awere)

    The evil necromancer thing is to be honest a trope, and depends on setting. There is an assumption that necromany is an evil power (usualy not realy explained why) and by using it one is evil. If you make a setting were necromany is not necesserly evil you can make an argument for good zombie army, but for that you need to described what zombii is and whetver its has any impact on soul of raised person.

    Of course if you make An argument that zombii is just animated flesh, then practicly you recive an magical robot or something similar to golem.
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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Yes, Cavalry of the Dead is a trope, though notably it's usually portrayed as a "turn the tide in our darkest hour of desperation" sort of deal, not "this is my regular modus operandi for approaching fights" like more typical necromancy is portrayed in games etc.
    Quote Originally Posted by The Giant View Post
    But really, the important lesson here is this: Rather than making assumptions that don't fit with the text and then complaining about the text being wrong, why not just choose different assumptions that DO fit with the text?
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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    The Wandering Inn is going through a somewhat strange phase at the moment, but it's kingdom of Khelt is more or less this, the living do more or less as they like, and the undead work, and if an enemy comes the undead armies rise from the ground and counter attack.
    The end of what Son? The story? There is no end. There's just the point where the storytellers stop talking.

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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Quote Originally Posted by factotum View Post
    If we're talking a bit more real-world than that, then I question the usefulness of this scenario anyway--so, you raise Grandma's rotting corpse and send her against the enemy army? Not sure exactly what an unarmed woman would do against armed soldiers even if they were in tip-top condition, but in this scenario I think she gets chopped into rotting chunks before she gets close enough to hurt anyone.
    The dead vastly outnumber the living.

    Plus, there's the whole psychological warfare aspect. For one thing, the dead are scary. For another, there's the demoralizing factor of "we've lost a third of our forces already and haven't even put a dent into their living soldiers! Is it really worth it to keep trying to invade them?"

    (Here I'm assuming we're talking about a feudal turf war, where most "soldiers" are just peasants who aren't even sure why their lord is marching them to battle. Obviously things will be different if the soldiers are crusading zealots, professional mercs, etc.)


    But, anyway, let's ignore all that and assume that your undead defence actually works and you chase off the enemy. Just how expensive is this going to be? If a necromancer is literally capable of producing an effective army from the local graveyard in a matter of hours, what's to stop him turning them against you and just taking your kingdom for himself, on the assumption he'll make more money looting the treasury than you could ever afford to pay him? Heck, what's to stop him selling his services to your bigger, presumably richer enemy and sending *their* undead hordes in so they don't have to sacrifice any of their sons? After all, we have to assume that someone who is willing to rob graves and resurrect the contents probably doesn't have an enormous amount of moral integrity.
    I suppose the necromancer could be the lord himself, or someone related to him. Or perhaps the necromancer is a pragmatic mercenary who realizes that garnering a reputation as a backstabber will only burn his bridges.


    Quote Originally Posted by Yanagi View Post
    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.
    That's the main issue. The dead would likely need to be micromanaged so that they stop fighting once the enemy raises the white flag. Of course, from the defending lord's perspective, protecting his peasantry is far more important than making sure the invaders' Geneva Convention rights are respected.



    Quote Originally Posted by Psyren View Post
    Yes, Cavalry of the Dead is a trope, though notably it's usually portrayed as a "turn the tide in our darkest hour of desperation" sort of deal, not "this is my regular modus operandi for approaching fights" like more typical necromancy is portrayed in games etc.
    True. And with the Cavalry of the Dead trope, the dead still possess free will, and come to the aid of the living out of a sense of duty.
    Last edited by -Sentinel-; 2021-03-08 at 05:09 PM.
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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Why human zombies? If Necromancy is basically fleshy golems in this setting humans would be just about the worst bodies for them, being fragile with thins tearable limbs.

    Now Cow Zombies, that would be a good army. Just run over shield walls and trample them to death, your own army consists of archers who hide behind the bovine wall.

    The ethical concerns for undead are probably: If they are human zombies it probably uses souls or something. If you lose control on dying and they eat people it becomes difficult to defend as the zombies live forever. They drop gooy bits that can make you sick, attract flies and bugs, etc.
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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    There's always Karrnath in the Eberron setting.

    Now, Karrnath is not the shining beacon on the hill of Khorvaire, but Eberron isn't about objectively good or evil countries in the first place. Just countries that make decisions based on circumstances than arrange ideologies to defend them.

    So, you have a brutal, lengthy war. Your country has a harsher climate than most and a relatively weak agricultural infrastructure, combined with the outbreak of plagues, death is everywhere. A - dubious if not explicitly evil - necromantic cult shows up and offers aid in exchange for official state recognition, desperation and pragmatism makes you as king accept it... also you're a vampire now and that's less than great.

    Anyways, Karrnathi society absorbed the prospect of the undead bolstering their ranks - especially as it came with an abundance of food and the end of the plagues - to the point where it became ingrained the character of the nation. Karrnath was a more authoritarian and militarized state to begin with, where duty and sacrifice is lauded and demanded. That duty would carry unto the grave fits that self-concept well. Every undead soldier is taking the burden off of someone's living son or daughter serving in their army, and without needing to expend more of your limited food supply. The alternative would most likely be defeat in the war and many more causalities, which, what would be the point of all that hardship and sacrifice?
    Last edited by Kitten Champion; 2021-03-08 at 05:10 PM.

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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Cows are generally killed and eaten, you are unlikely to have a cow graveyard readily available. Slaughtering a large number of cows specifically for zombification is going to destroy the wealth and livelihood of a large portion of the population. And when you destroy the wealth and livelihoods of peasants, you tend to get famine and disease running rampant.


    I think the better question from a worldbuilding perspective is, if you can raise an undead army, why aren't the invaders already doing it? If the strategy works, unless necromancy is new, one would expect either its use, or reasonably effective countermeasures to be pretty common on all sides.
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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    That's the main issue. The dead would likely need to be micromanaged so that they stop fighting once the enemy raises the white flag. Of course, from the defending lord's perspective, protecting his peasantry is far more important than making sure the invaders' Geneva Convention rights are respected.
    Unless your lord is planning on "protecting" his people by mutilating, torturing, performing experiments on, or using as forced labor his opponents, the Conventions don't really apply. Also...consider that you're using a kind of appeal to emotion that voids rather than deepens the dissection of ethics. Rather than following the potential lines of inquiry--how could this be good or bad--you're stressing that there is a commanding expediency...which is exactly how unethical things happen, especially in war.

    I mean, from A Very Specific Level of Applied Ethics, an undead army is fine, but that's mostly because the thought experiment as presented just doesn't address most of the context that would create ethical implications. Ethics is not a perfunctory inspection and ticking a box on a form: as the scenario plays out the ethics can transform as the background elements lead to subsequent choices that have ethical implications. The specifics create implications that overturn the general impression.

    For example...in the context of feudalism a lord by virtue of being a lord isn't protecting people with an army, he's protecting the land the people are living on so that they can continue to labor and he can continue to live off their labor....so part of the ethics conundrum is how precisely the army is used, but also how that usage reflects the priorities of power and capital that precede the specific conflict. The lord can build an army to protect people, putatively, but in application his priorities as a lord--he has a duty, a legal and ethical obligation, to obey his lieges and get them their money from the land he controls--mean that the priority of land over people is present and part of the calculation of "what is right to do with this power I have."

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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
    I think the better question from a worldbuilding perspective is, if you can raise an undead army, why aren't the invaders already doing it? If the strategy works, unless necromancy is new, one would expect either its use, or reasonably effective countermeasures to be pretty common on all sides.
    Now I'm imagining a fantasy world where all wars are fought with zombies, to the point where sending the living to war has become unthinkable. Once a side runs out of zombies, they just surrender. 0 casualties. Mind, it's not a very interesting scenario, but I suppose it would be the logical conclusion of "easy" necromancy.

    But of course, in most fantasy settings, necromancy would not be a common art. It's not like getting a college degree. You need a natural aptitude for magic, and then you have to track down one of the rare few necromancy masters and convince them to take you on as an apprentice.


    Quote Originally Posted by Yanagi View Post
    For example...in the context of feudalism a lord by virtue of being a lord isn't protecting people with an army, he's protecting the land the people are living on so that they can continue to labor and he can continue to live off their labor....so part of the ethics conundrum is how precisely the army is used, but also how that usage reflects the priorities of power and capital that precede the specific conflict. The lord can build an army to protect people, putatively, but in application his priorities as a lord--he has a duty, a legal and ethical obligation, to obey his lieges and get them their money from the land he controls--mean that the priority of land over people is present and part of the calculation of "what is right to do with this power I have."
    A lord still needs peasants and taxpayers. And while the invading lord sends his peasants and taxpayers into the meatgrinder, the defending lord only sends corpses. Even outside of ethical considerations, it just makes a lot of sense to defend your land with an undead army.
    Last edited by -Sentinel-; 2021-03-08 at 06:55 PM.
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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Quote Originally Posted by -Sentinel- View Post
    Now I'm imagining a fantasy world where all wars are fought with zombies, to the point where sending the living to war has become unthinkable. Once a side runs out of zombies, they just surrender. 0 casualties. Mind, it's not a very interesting scenario, but I suppose it would be the logical conclusion of "easy" necromancy.
    One of the worlds in Weis & Hickman's Deathgate Cycle does this. Since the undead deteriorate both physically and lose progressively more 'muscle memory' of their living aptitudes, the various city states also signal their commitment to war by sending newer or older corpses into combat. If you're serious, send in the fresh ones, if you just want to signal a notational objection or hold the opposition off without causing them any real damage, use the old dead.

    Also the entire thing takes place in a steadily freezing underground hellscape. It's not exactly an optimistic place.
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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Quote Originally Posted by -Sentinel- View Post
    True. And with the Cavalry of the Dead trope, the dead still possess free will, and come to the aid of the living out of a sense of duty.
    Well, coercion might still play a role - Aragorn's dead were obligated to answer him because they failed the previous king, and were cursed accordingly - but that ultimately stems from an authority they were beholden to in life, not some random unrelated spellcaster showing up later.
    Last edited by Psyren; 2021-03-08 at 07:10 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by The Giant View Post
    But really, the important lesson here is this: Rather than making assumptions that don't fit with the text and then complaining about the text being wrong, why not just choose different assumptions that DO fit with the text?
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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
    Cows are generally killed and eaten, you are unlikely to have a cow graveyard readily available. Slaughtering a large number of cows specifically for zombification is going to destroy the wealth and livelihood of a large portion of the population. And when you destroy the wealth and livelihoods of peasants, you tend to get famine and disease running rampant.
    This has basically been tried in real life actually. It was thought that the sacrifice of many cattle would bring back an army of ancestors in 1856-7. Famine and disease occurred, loss of wealth etc crippled the tribes involved basically. Then again they didn't actually get a spirit army out of the deal so comparisons should be taken with a fair bit of salt.

    Do not recommend...unless you have a way of raising lots of extra steers, or can raise bison from seasonal migrations through your lands that would otherwise "go to waste".

    But I like the principle..if the zombies last near forever perhaps a cattle tax for zombi-forces may be workable.


    Then again I think Zombie Whales as a method of blockading ports could probably be developed...especially if Karrnathi Zombie version could be developed.



    overall I'd say if you want it in a worldbuild it could be done. The rules of necromancy is really what controls the ethics of undead. The real issue you've pointed out is that "Negative Energy"/Death/undeath/Chaos have all been muddled with literal evil in the D&D game for as long back as D&D has been a thing and that is a kind of gross oversimplification without a good enough explanation to back it up in the vast majority of cases.
    Last edited by sktarq; 2021-03-08 at 07:53 PM.

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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Quote Originally Posted by -Sentinel- View Post
    A lord still needs peasants and taxpayers. And while the invading lord sends his peasants and taxpayers into the meatgrinder, the defending lord only sends corpses. Even outside of ethical considerations, it just makes a lot of sense to defend your land with an undead army.
    Look apparently I'm just visualizing this very different than you, because your initial description did not use language that lead to a picture of direct battle with two lines across a field of contest. Depredation means plundering...as in seizing and running away with valuable resources. "Barbarians" and creatures like goblins are raiders, not invaders. And border disputes aren't invasions where you roll in with a van--it's mostly chevauchee/cabalgada and terror tactics that create social and economic impositions that force a diplomatic resolution.

    Every argument I've made has been based on a picture of conflict that isn't a single engagement, but a campaign in which there would counter-offensives, a need for garrisons in key locations, plus field reconaissance. Hence me pointing the relative importance of property versus people in a feudal context: if you have an undead army that has no autonomy and can't perform complex tasks then choices have to be made about what is important to defend.

    If feudal lord has already decided that people matter most and that the undead army will be used to protect people then there is no ethical dilemma..

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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
    Cows are generally killed and eaten, you are unlikely to have a cow graveyard readily available. Slaughtering a large number of cows specifically for zombification is going to destroy the wealth and livelihood of a large portion of the population. And when you destroy the wealth and livelihoods of peasants, you tend to get famine and disease running rampant.
    Unless you have access to the Secret Cow Level.

    (Sorry, I couldn't help it...)

    No, seriously, this is a good point and I agree with it.

    I think the better question from a worldbuilding perspective is, if you can raise an undead army, why aren't the invaders already doing it? If the strategy works, unless necromancy is new, one would expect either its use, or reasonably effective countermeasures to be pretty common on all sides.
    Aren't the demographics of magic users in the general population and the expenses of magic items pretty limiting against this? I'd have to grant that there could be circumstances in which this isn't necessarily true, such as if the invaders themselves could automatically create undead innately, or they had access to a location or a form of magic that drastically lowered/negated the costs of raising undead.

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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    I just recalled another example -- Larry Correia's Grimnoir series. In that alterative history's WW1, the Kaiser used necromantic magic to resurrect the war dead as a zombie army. Problem being that the zombies kept existing even after the war, and they had to drag them all into Berlin and then wall off the city creating their own permanent hell on Earth.

    It's like something between Frankenstein's Creature and land mines. As in, outside of the ethics of the initial necromancy, are you then creating a population of cursed undead that are going to be stumbling about decades if not centuries later, well after the crisis that necessitated their creation is no longer relevant?

    If, like Diablo II, a Necromancer can just cancel their Undead with a brief thought, then you don't have to worry about taking up that responsibility.

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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Quote Originally Posted by Arcane_Secrets View Post
    Unless you have access to the Secret Cow Level.

    (Sorry, I couldn't help it...)

    No, seriously, this is a good point and I agree with it.
    If you have the cow level handy, then obviously its undead Bessy as far as the eye can see.

    Aren't the demographics of magic users in the general population and the expenses of magic items pretty limiting against this? I'd have to grant that there could be circumstances in which this isn't necessarily true, such as if the invaders themselves could automatically create undead innately, or they had access to a location or a form of magic that drastically lowered/negated the costs of raising undead.
    If magic is rare and expensive, then one has to wonder why Bob the Necromancer is holed up in a poor as dirt backwater that can't afford his rates. If militarized undead are possible, somebody will have thought of it before, and Bob could go rent his abilities out to somebody who can pay well for them. If magic is common and cheap, then one would expect everyone to have either their own necromantic horde, or some magical counter to said horde.

    I think the ways around this are either necromancy being fairly new, so warfare has yet to resume equilibrium, or else it being very strongly taboo. And if it's that strongly taboo, why? People don't usually surrender things that give them enormous military advantages after all.

    My personal take is that undead are inherently evil, and animated by residual negative emotions of the living such as fear, pain and hatred. Being made out of these, they inevitably both experience and spread them, so creating undead inherently makes the world a worse place.
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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
    My personal take is that undead are inherently evil, and animated by residual negative emotions of the living such as fear, pain and hatred. Being made out of these, they inevitably both experience and spread them, so creating undead inherently makes the world a worse place.
    I have a slightly different take on things. I don't consider undead to be intrinsically evil, whatever the likes of D&D says. The act of *raising* the dead is what's evil. I mean, I don't personally care what happens to my body once I'm dead and no longer using it--you can feed it to the dogs for all I care. However, the same may well not be true for my loved ones, who might very well care what happens to my body and would be upset if they learned it was wandering around carrying out the orders of some complete stranger. The act of necromancy is perforce ignoring those concerns, which is at the very least highly self-centred and at worst sociopathic.

    If we start talking about sciomancy (actually talking to the spirits of the dead) then that's quite possibly even worse, because you're explicitly pulling the person's eternal soul from wherever it's hanging out and forcing it to answer your questions.

    Of course, this is my own take on it and it probably doesn't match the majority opinion.

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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Quote Originally Posted by InvisibleBison View Post
    Objections to creating undead tend to come in four general categories, not all of which may apply in a given setting:

    1) Creating an undead from a body harms the body's soul in some way.

    2) Necromancers are incentivized to kill people in order to have bodies to use.

    3) Undead, when not properly controlled by a necromancer, will attack the living.

    4) Undead are gross.

    In the scenario you're describing, 1 is not the case. 2 can be avoided by using trustworthy necromancers and/or keeping a close eye on the necromancers. 4 is not such an issue in a desperate situation. The only problem I see is 3 - what happens if the necromancer is killed or loses control of her zombies? Of course, that's less of a moral issue and more of a practical one.
    Quote Originally Posted by Psyren View Post
    There is also (5) - the act of necromancy, even when it doesn't do one of the first four things, metaphysically harms the environment or otherwise hurts innocents in some indirect way. This is the one various editions of D&D have gone with, and more importantly is much harder for an aspiring necromancer to offset or mitigate than the others.
    There's also (6) the source of the power used for Necromancy. If you're harnessing say *waves hands* the unfulfilled need of the restless dead to rise up and defend their homeland. Probably ok. If you're making deals with the Mephistopheles Great Prince of the 7th Hell, Lord of Agonizing Torments who demands a yearly sacrifice of 1000 fresh babies slathered in BBQ sauce... Probably less ok.

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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Quote Originally Posted by Thomas Cardew View Post
    There's also (6) the source of the power used for Necromancy. If you're harnessing say *waves hands* the unfulfilled need of the restless dead to rise up and defend their homeland. Probably ok. If you're making deals with the Mephistopheles Great Prince of the 7th Hell, Lord of Agonizing Torments who demands a yearly sacrifice of 1000 fresh babies slathered in BBQ sauce... Probably less ok.
    While I agree, the act of slathering and sacrificing babies is what would be evil in that example, rather than the necromancy itself.

    With that said, there is something to the idea of "making deals with evil powers strengthens them, regardless of how or why it is used" - that is a trope that surfaces periodically too, though it's more commonly associated with fiends than undead.
    Quote Originally Posted by The Giant View Post
    But really, the important lesson here is this: Rather than making assumptions that don't fit with the text and then complaining about the text being wrong, why not just choose different assumptions that DO fit with the text?
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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Quote Originally Posted by Thomas Cardew View Post
    There's also (6) the source of the power used for Necromancy. If you're harnessing say *waves hands* the unfulfilled need of the restless dead to rise up and defend their homeland. Probably ok. If you're making deals with the Mephistopheles Great Prince of the 7th Hell, Lord of Agonizing Torments who demands a yearly sacrifice of 1000 fresh babies slathered in BBQ sauce... Probably less ok.
    This too. I had an e6 campaign which used the Book of Vile Darkness sacrifice rules as plot magic.

    In ancient times one group discovered the rules to sacrifice and would capture enemy civilians to bind devils and make magic items, which forced the continent into a sacrificial arms race as the only way to win battles was to butcher more civilians then your enemies to get more devils. Eventually the whole thing collapsed into a dark age with haunted cities and magic artifacts, and a prohibition on human sacrifice so strong the rules were lost.

    Undead usage could easily lead to the same. Best place to get soldiers and energy to raise them is your enemies' civilian population or any unsuspecting group you can raid.
    Quote Originally Posted by The Glyphstone View Post
    Vibranium: If it was on the periodic table, its chemical symbol would be "Bs".

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    Default Re: The ethics of raising a zombie army

    Many types of undead appear to be actively rotting, which is a disease risk.

    If they're intelligent undead, they have every reason to rebel. If they're not, they can be countered by digging a ditch which they will march into until they fall over and break bones.

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