[OSSR]Factol's Manifesto

[Prak]

Devil's drain beings that are definitionally lesser than them of a necessary substance. It's like if you're in the desert, and the only way for you to get water is to string up rabbits and bleed them. Does this make humans evil? Vanishingly few people would say it does. Devils are only called evil for draining "evil" people of divine energy because we're people. If devils were people punishing evil rabbits, none of us would give a shit.

Demons basically just have a definition of "play" that we find repellent.

[hyzmarca]

Let's say that you've got this friend named Bob. You've known him since grade school. Bob is a Barbazu who got his Pain Technician License last year and now works the Liquid Pain Extraction Center in Avernus. It's a pretty decent job, but he's still going to night school because he wants to become an Evil Doctor. When he gets his Evil Doctorate he plans to build a giant "laser" on the moon and use it to hold the world hostage for One Million Gold Pieces.

Anyway, Bob tortures people for a living. Well, he doesn't exactly torture people. He runs the machines that torture people. It isn't that much different from being an MRI tech. You make sure that the guy doesn't have any metal on him, put him in the machine, tell him to breath, and press a button. Then there are the screams. And eventually the liquid pain comes out. It's really quite fascinating, he assures you.

Now Bob is your friend, in spite of the fact that he's a Devil, and he doesn't take his work home. You can totally go to a bar with him and there is no mention of torture at all.

Also, Bob has tickets to the Jimmi Hendrix concert next week. It's really hard to see Jimmi Hendrix play live, because he's been dead since 1970. Being a Devil does have its perks. Since you're his friend, he's offering you one. He's not asking for your soul or anything in return, and you won't be ambushed by Pit Fiends as soon as you try to leave the Malsheem Civic Center and Fairground. It's just a ticket to a great rock concert.

I'd totally go with him. Hendrix is awesome. I can overlook a lot of torture for that.

[Chamomile]

More important than Hendrix being awesome, refusing the tickets will not benefit the tortured souls of Hell in the slightest.

[Whipstitch]

Devils are only called evil for draining "evil" people of divine energy because we're people.

Personhood and regard for agency is a big deal and ignoring that makes your post come across as rather willfully incomplete and silly.


Hyz: Your scenario is still pretty damn grimdark. It's grimdark with banality-of-evil trimmings but that's still grimdark--using a torture machine on people is reprehensible regardless of whether the machine features obvious spikes or a swanky OLED display and soundproofing. And really, the question isn't whether you or Hendrix fans think Bob is an OK guy. It's whether the guys who are branded with capital "G" Good would hang out with his ass when their whole shtick is militant rejection of the forces of evil. I mean, this is fucking Dungeons and Dragons and my brother plays paladins. Affably Evil has made for some of my favorite fictional characters over the years but I'm not at all sold on how such characters can be Not Actually Evil without critically undermining the moral standing of Sir Smites-A-Lot.*



*And, like Lago, I don't mind if you actually undermine those guys. I just think it's weird to do it and then act like it makes sense without being grimdark, comedy or a case of role-reversal.

[Prak]

Devils are only called evil for draining "evil" people of divine energy because we're people.

Personhood and regard for agency is a big deal and ignoring that makes your post come across as rather willfully incomplete and silly.

How so, exactly? That's actually rather my point. We see devils as evil because they inflict pain on us. If it were people inflicting pain on rabbits for gasoline or electricity, or whatever, we wouldn't care. Devils are outsiders, pretty much literally a higher order of being. Rabbits would probably think the hunter is quite evil, but the hunter just wants dinner. Devils are evil because they hurt people and we're people.

Moreover, we actually have more moral agency than devils. If you're saying devils are inherently evil because they come from hell and are compelled to do evil because of that, then they have no moral agency. They are evil because they're tagged evil, but they do harm because they're programmed to, just like snakes kill mice because instinct tells them to.

So personhood doesn't really hold up, unless you're going in for an aggressively anthropocentric world, in which case you can basically ok mortals killing whatever they want, because being sentient humanoids gives them carte blanch to do as they please. Moral agency doesn't hold up either, because if you say devils do evil because they come from Hell then devils don't have agency, and if they have agency, then a pit fiend and solar sitting down for a beer together becomes more possible because for every horned-Hitler, there's a Bill Gates who just happens to have scales and a stinger that injects fireballs.

[tussock]

If you're saying devils are inherently evil because they come from hell and are compelled to do evil because of that, then they have no moral agency.

That's not right. You can have it where you choose the path to Hell, so that they chose an everlasting compulsion toward Evil in the afterlife. That's plenty of agency. Not to mention how they have to be especially willing and talented at Evil to progress in the hierarchy.

[Prak]

The draining of divine spark removes all personality and memory from the people. For all intents and purposes, the person who winds up on the banks, and the devil they become are entirely different beings. Once they're a devil, then they're compelled to be evil, and you essentially can't really blame them, especially since any choice they have is often tossed out the window because the higher-ups are coercing them. If a devil does well, he gets promoted. If he does poorly, he gets tortured. Real stellar choice there.

[Ice9]

Let's say that you've got this friend named Bob. You've known him since grade school. Bob is a Barbazu who got his Pain Technician License last year and now works the Liquid Pain Extraction Center in Avernus.

...

I'd totally go with him. Hendrix is awesome. I can overlook a lot of torture for that.

That's grimdark as fuck, and the fact that this isn't obvious is due to a perceptual flaw where people generally have a harder time conceptualizing larger and/or more unlikely things.

For example, if you hear about a guy who cooked and ate a baby, that's obviously fucking horrible and I don't think anyone would want to be his friend. On the other hand, talk about a necro-priest that turns into an undead kaiju by eating entire villages, and some people would apparently think that's cool and you could team up with him. But in fact - no, it isn't actually better. A perceptual failure is not a good basis for morality, and it gets a bit repugnant to pretend that it is.


And on that subject, let me make your example less palatable just by scaling it down:

Let's say that you've got this friend named Bob. You've known him since grade school. Bob is a neo-nazi who joined a gang last year and now helps curbstomp minorities.

...

Now Bob is your friend, in spite of the fact that he's a neo-nazi, and he doesn't take his work home. You can totally go to a bar with him and there is no mention of aryan purity at all.

[Ice9]

The draining of divine spark removes all personality and memory from the people. For all intents and purposes, the person who winds up on the banks, and the devil they become are entirely different beings. Once they're a devil, then they're compelled to be evil, and you essentially can't really blame them, especially since any choice they have is often tossed out the window because the higher-ups are coercing them. If a devil does well, he gets promoted. If he does poorly, he gets tortured. Real stellar choice there.

By that logic you should just destroy them though. Smallpox is compelled to reproduce in a way that's destructive to us - doesn't mean we shouldn't have eliminated it.

[Prak]

I don't know about anyone else, and, ok, yeah, I'm the den's resident evil cock-bag, but I think neo-nazi-ism is worse than impersonal torture of damned souls. I mean, Liquid Pain Extracting Bob is just doing a job, and his evil isn't personal. He didn't really choose "I'm going to torture these specific people because they're brown, or missing their foreskin." Neo-Nazi Bob made a choice to be a dickhead who tells people to bite the curb because their brown and/or missing a bit of dick-skin.

Hell, 70 years ago, Torture-Bob may have been a nazi. But that's different. Either he joined up because he had to, it was the only way to save his wife and kids, and thus the only change is that he's now pitiable, or he chose to be a nazi torture-man, and is reprehensible for being a nazi.

[Prak]

The draining of divine spark removes all personality and memory from the people. For all intents and purposes, the person who winds up on the banks, and the devil they become are entirely different beings. Once they're a devil, then they're compelled to be evil, and you essentially can't really blame them, especially since any choice they have is often tossed out the window because the higher-ups are coercing them. If a devil does well, he gets promoted. If he does poorly, he gets tortured. Real stellar choice there.

By that logic you should just destroy them though. Smallpox is compelled to reproduce in a way that's destructive to us - doesn't mean we shouldn't have eliminated it.

Smallpox isn't sentient. We're in the one area where sapience and moral agency don't necessarily go hand in hand.

[hyzmarca]

Hyz: Your scenario is still pretty damn grimdark. It's grimdark with banality-of-evil trimmings but that's still grimdark--using a torture machine on people is reprehensible regardless of whether the machine features obvious spikes or a swanky OLED display and soundproofing. And really, the question isn't whether you or Hendrix fans think Bob is an OK guy. It's whether the guys who are branded with capital "G" Good would hang out with his ass when their whole shtick is militant rejection of the forces of evil. I mean, this is fucking Dungeons and Dragons and my brother plays paladins. Affably Evil has made for some of my favorite fictional characters over the years but I'm not at all sold on how such characters can be Not Actually Evil without critically undermining the moral standing of Sir Smites-A-Lot.*



*And, like Lago, I don't mind if you actually undermine those guys. I just think it's weird to do it and then act like it makes sense without being grimdark, comedy or a case of role-reversal.

I probably have a different standard for Grimdark. My standard for Grimdark is over the top hopeless shit like 40k and Cthulhutech, where everyone is going to die horribly and you literally cannot win. A world where some people do bad things, but can't do bad things to you and the vast majority of people in spite of their massive cosmic power because of various deals they made, isn't all that Grimdark.

Really, D&D is fairly hopeful.

But I also prefer to have badass Old Testament Angels, rather than the wussy Roma Downy Angels.

I'm an angel. I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now till kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why.

Old Testament style angels are kind of dicks. They do things like threaten to kill every firstborn child in Egypt if the Pharoh doesn't free the Isrealites, and then when he relents mind control him into refusing so that they'll have an excuse to show that they really mean business.

Of course, I also prefer to make explicit that Good and good aren't the same thing. That Capital G Good is really an inhuman cosmic force that is no less hospitable to life than Evil is and that you can be Evil without being a total ass.

And, it the end of the day, Sir Smites-a-Lot lives in the Twelfth Century and it will be at least 800 years before anyone figures out that racism and genocide are morally wrong. The moral stance of slaughtering the entire orc village doesn't need to be undermined. Even if the orcs are evil, it's still obviously wrong. But it might not be Evil. Because, ultimately, right and wrong and Good and Evil are not the same things. They can't be the same things. If they were then there wouldn't be any evil people at all because the correct path is obvious.

[Whipstitch]

If they were then there wouldn't be any evil people at all because the correct path is obvious.

I would hold that D&D uppercase E evil is often all about seeing the "correct" path, deciding the other path is badwrong and then taking the badwrong path anyway, because you're a cartoonishly evil monster and D&D isn't nuanced. I can respect wanting to make it nuanced but at that point we need to have real talks about what kind of character concepts we're willing to marginalize to get there.


As far as the agency bit, I clearly need to become a better communicator because what I was actually trying to get at here had more to do with the agency of the victim then the agency of the perpetrator. Basically, I don't think killing a rabbit and killing a person is morally equivalent and for reasons that go beyond "Does it look like me? Y/N." As far as the agency of demons go, I actually don't think it changes things that much. If they have a choice in the matter and continue to do demon things, than they're vile shitstains that I can't fault a culture for at least imprisoning. If they can't control themselves, then they are basically like someone who is mentally disturbed but incredibly violent--I pity them, but just letting them wander around wearing people as hats is still way irresponsible and morally repugnant.

[Username17]

We're in the one area where sapience and moral agency don't necessarily go hand in hand.

This is an incredible, fundamentally stupid way to look at things.

Whether "Free Will" exists or not is something that is incapable of mattering. There is only one past and there only will be one future you actually experience. Basing you moral judgments on whether different choices could have been made is equal parts pointless and insane. You'll never be able to know for sure whether different choices could have been made for anyone under any circumstances. There's still only one past and there was only ever going to be one past whether it was indeterminate at some point or not.

Either you have free will or your choices are fated, and it does not and can not make any fucking difference under any circumstances. Ever.

-Username17

[Ice9]

I don't know about anyone else, and, ok, yeah, I'm the den's resident evil cock-bag, but I think neo-nazi-ism is worse than impersonal torture of damned souls. I mean, Liquid Pain Extracting Bob is just doing a job, and his evil isn't personal. He didn't really choose "I'm going to torture these specific people because they're brown, or missing their foreskin." Neo-Nazi Bob made a choice to be a dickhead who tells people to bite the curb because their brown and/or missing a bit of dick-skin.

Hell, 70 years ago, Torture-Bob may have been a nazi. But that's different. Either he joined up because he had to, it was the only way to save his wife and kids, and thus the only change is that he's now pitiable, or he chose to be a nazi torture-man, and is reprehensible for being a nazi.

It's true that torture-Bob is in fact more like a nazi than a neo-nazi - organized, industrial evil. That doesn't actually make him any less bad though. Because while he may have been born into it, he has ample opportunity to defect (the same thing that prevents angels from face-smiting him in Sigil prevents other devils dragging him back home), and he chooses not to - to instead return to work where he tortures people to death on a daily basis.

And it's not like liquid pain extracting is indirect or anything. He's not filling in paperwork that sends people to it (which would still be some amount of evil), he's the one actually pushing the buttons. The fact that the machine has a nice clean exterior and the blood goes in a drain doesn't make it a less evil process.

This is, again, perceptual flaw morality in action. A "pain extractor" is a fictional concept that's hard to visualize, and beating the shit out of people with a crowbar is easy to visualize, so the first one is seen as "not as bad". But no, it really isn't better, at least not by the definition of "pain extractor" on this very thread.

[hyzmarca]

And it's not like liquid pain extracting is indirect or anything. He's not filling in paperwork that sends people to it (which would still be some amount of evil), he's the one actually pushing the buttons. The fact that the machine has a nice clean exterior and the blood goes in a drain doesn't make it a less evil process.

This is, again, perceptual flaw morality in action. A "pain extractor" is a fictional concept that's hard to visualize, and beating the shit out of people with a crowbar is easy to visualize, so the first one is seen as "not as bad". But no, it really isn't better, at least not by the definition of "pain extractor" on this very thread.

A pain extractor probably wouldn't have a blood drain, because that sort of torture is inefficient. It kills the victim way too fast. What you really want is something that directly stimulates the pain receptors without causing any actual physical damage. That can let you inflict as much agony as you want, up until the point that the victim becomes desensitized to it.

No. If you're going to build a magical pain extractor you really want it to be more like the Agony booth. Ideally, it would cause no lasting physical harm, as this would allow you to get the maximum amount of pain out of the victim without risking premature death.

That doesn't make it any better, of course.

[Prak]

As far as the agency bit, I clearly need to become a better communicator because what I was actually trying to get at here had more to do with the agency of the victim then the agency of the perpetrator. Basically, I don't think killing a rabbit and killing a person is morally equivalent and for reasons that go beyond "Does it look like me? Y/N." As far as the agency of demons go, I actually don't think it changes things that much. If they have a choice in the matter and continue to do demon things, than they're vile shitstains that I can't fault a culture for at least imprisoning. If they can't control themselves, then they are basically like someone who is mentally disturbed but incredibly violent--I pity them, but just letting them wander around wearing people as hats is still way irresponsible and morally repugnant.

I was specifically talking about comparative agency. So fine, we don't give a shit about moral agency, just the agency of action. We're still on "Devils see us as rabbits," and "people care cause they're people."

This is an incredible, fundamentally stupid way to look at things.

All I mean is that it's actually incredibly hard to blame fiends for the evil they do. Fiends are composed of evil plane-stuff. They become fiends because they did evil as people before, but devil, at least, are not the people that they were. Basically they work on karmic reincarnation- you do evil in life, die, show up on the shores of Hell, get put on a rack, have all your memories and personhood ripped out of you. Next thing you know, well, sort of, you're a Lemure, and you're forced to do evil, otherwise you get tortured. Lemures, being mindless, truly have no choice, so eventually they get promoted to a Nupperibo, which are barely intelligent (4), and continue to do evil, until they're promoted to Spined Devil and finally are actually kind of sort of almost human-like in intelligence (8). This is the first point at which I'd say they really have much choice, but they have two forms and who knows how many years or decades or centuries of "Do evil, or we take you to the rack" indoctrinated into them. Plus they've been shown that the more evil they do, the more power and intelligence they get. It's barely a choice at that point.

As to "Sigil prevents devils from dragging defectors back" Well... they don't have to. I'm actually pretty sure the devils can just grab a defector and drag him off to some nice little 2 bed 1 bath in which they've set up all the torture horrors of hell right there in Sigil.

Also, still maintain that Pain Extractor Operator is not as bad as "I'm going to kill people cause they have no foreskin." ...unless the PEO only uses jews, I guess.

[Username17]

All I mean is that it's actually incredibly hard to blame fiends for the evil they do.

And this is still a fundamentally confused and stupid way of looking at things.

You're acting as if something has to have a real moral choice with a genuine chance of having ever made a different moral choice in order to get blamed. And that's stupid. Because it's very likely that we live in a universe in which the kinds of choices you are talking about do not and cannot exist. For anyone.

Everyone is a product of their environment and everyone is going to end up having only a single history. That's just reality. Whether they ever could have made a different choice is unknowable because ultimately they will only have one past and thus only one set of choices for their perceived dilemmas.

If you think "Free Will" is required for the assignment of blame, then you're Fated to be very unhappy and have a constantly thwarted sense of justice. Because Free Will is an inconsequential and thus unprovable postulate that probably doesn't exist and certainly doesn't matter.

-Username17

[Prak]

Frank, I may not be as vocal as Count, but I think it's possible for people here to tell that, yeah, I am unhappy. For a variety of reasons.

However, if there is no free will, then literally nothing matters.

[Red_Rob]

There is a strong argument that the idea of Free Will is something humans have constructed to help us deal with the world. So really, Demons may be no different to anyone else.

Also, drinking with a "Pain still operator" because he's not personally torturing you at the moment is pretty fucked up. If I found out one of my friends had murdered some kids at some point, I wouldn't carry on hanging around with them just because they weren't my kids they murdered. At some point you have to decide what kind of person you want to associate with.

To me, the difference between evil and Evil in D&D is that evil mortal creatures are those that don't care about inflicting suffering on others to get what they want (either personal power, wealth, or even because they like they way they squirm when stabbed), whereas for Evil outsiders inflicting suffering is what they want. There is no higher goal, they just want to inflict as much suffering as possible.

[Username17]

However, if there is no free will, then literally nothing matters.

Whoa there, you just went the full crazy. Just because Free Will is an incoherent and inconsequential idea doesn't mean that meaning doesn't exist. Meaning is created by sapient beings, they can construct meaning regardless of the properties of the universe. If sapient beings can construct an iPad or a skyscraper, of course they can construct meaning. Meaning is just a story about why some event or thing matters. We can tell stories, we're pretty good at it.

You only have one history, one set of events and actions about and by you in the past. And it is wholly unknowable whether it is possible for there to be more than one set of events and actions in your future. But it is wholly known with absolute certainty that when enough time passes for the future we are talking about to become your past, that the choices at each juncture will be only one.

Justice and Meaning cannot hinge on "Free Will", because "Free Will" is not a coherent or testable idea. It's like saying that nothing can ever matter unless there are blue skinned aliens living on a planet circling a specific planet on the other end of the galaxy. Only more so. Because while the blue skinned alien postulate will definitely never ever get answered in your lifetime, it might ever get answered, and the Free Will idea never ever will because it doesn't make any difference.

The meaning of life cannot be dependent on a stupid idea that has no conceivable measurable effects and would change absolutely nothing in the observable universe if it was true or false. You get to assign whatever meaning you want to any things or events you choose. If you decide that Thursdays mean peanut butter cup lunches, then they fucking do. Free Will or Fate are not relevant in that discussion.

-Username17

[Prak]

Ok, then let me use a different word. If there is no free will, then nothing has any point.

Ok, let's visit a world without free will:
A guy gets up one day, brushes his teeth, eats his wheaties, sends his kids off to school and on the way to work, stops at a store. There, he abducts a young woman, takes her out to his car, and drives off somewhere to rape and kill her. Because he was destined to.
So, the world is written such that this perfectly normal seeming guy did something horrific. Why jail him? If he's Fated to do it, then what is served by incarcerating him? If he's Fated to rape and murder again, he will, because the world has no free will. If he's not, then he won't. The only reason for him to go to jail is that it's Fated.
So what is supposed to matter in a world without free will?


Also, without free will, how can you decide that Thursdays mean peanut butter cup lunches?

[Korgan0]

Everyone, read the following articles. It'll make everything a great deal more clear.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deter ... ausal/#Int

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deter ... ausal/#Int

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incom ... arguments/

[Mistborn]

Ok, let's visit a world without free will:
A guy gets up one day, brushes his teeth, eats his wheaties, sends his kids off to school and on the way to work, stops at a store. There, he abducts a young woman, takes her out to his car, and drives off somewhere to rape and kill her. Because he was destined to.
So, the world is written such that this perfectly normal seeming guy did something horrific. Why jail him? If he's Fated to do it, then what is served by incarcerating him? If he's Fated to rape and murder again, he will, because the world has no free will. If he's not, then he won't. The only reason for him to go to jail is that it's Fated.
So what is supposed to matter in a world without free will?

Why are you so stupid? Determinism =/= Fate. When that guy rapes and murders a young woman it's not because that was written in the stars. It's because that guy is the sort of person who rapes and murders young women.

[Grek]

Ok, let's visit a world without free will:
A guy gets up one day, brushes his teeth, eats his wheaties, sends his kids off to school and on the way to work, stops at a store. There, he abducts a young woman, takes her out to his car, and drives off somewhere to rape and kill her. Because he was destined to.
So, the world is written such that this perfectly normal seeming guy did something horrific. Why jail him? If he's Fated to do it, then what is served by incarcerating him? If he's Fated to rape and murder again, he will, because the world has no free will. If he's not, then he won't. The only reason for him to go to jail is that it's Fated.
So what is supposed to matter in a world without free will?

"Fate" does not mean that the usual rules of cause and effect don't apply. All of the usual reasons for imprisoning serial rapists still apply: To get revenge on the person that hurt your family, to punish rape because it is evil, to prevent the rapist from raping more people, because you're a demodand and are in favour of imprisoning as many people as possible, etc. In the same way that the rapist is fated to feel whatever impulses compel him to rape and be evil, other people are fated to be horrified by his evil and try to stop him.