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Completely agree with you Sir Pseudonymous. Moral Relativism makes works because no one has any right to claim they are any more right than any one else.

Yes it's a negative way to look at life
Yes it's destructive to society to live that way
And While I completely agree with it I don't think society should be ruled by it.

Just because it isn't useful doesn't make it wrong.

As you already said sometimse we don't need what is correct. For society to function we need to find boundaries that are accepted by the majority.

I follow my own morals and the law as well as moral relativism, I just know that my views are no more right than any others.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:

Melissia wrote:

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:The problem is Moral Relativism is ultimately right.

Pretty much the entire philosophical field of study known as Ethics disagrees.

They're as a much a joke as the rest of formal philosophy is.

Without philosophy we would not have had science.

So.
Lots of things which we have now proved pointless led to important discoveries.

4M2A wrote:So.
Lots of things which we have now proved pointless led to important discoveries.

Philosophy also led to democracy (and other important concepts such as the social contract), economics, sociology, psychology, and plenty of other things which are beneficial to mankind.

Philosophy is simply the rational investigations of questions about our world, our existence, knowledge, ethics... in essence, science is a form of philosophy focused on the physical. But we are not purely physical creatures, so the non-physical studies have an important purpose.

Philosphy about the world around us is of use.

Almost all of the philophy about morals is speculation and biased opinions. I don't how anything can been seen a stupid in an area that is mainly speculation.

4M2A wrote:Almost all of the philophy about morals is speculation and biased opinions.

So I take it you haven't actually studied any of it?

At a low level I have. I also spend large amounts of my time discussing it with friends who are taking it further. While i'm not an expert philosphy is one of my bigger interests.

Laodamia wrote:

davij wrote:Insane to you, they probabily made perfect sense to hitler and other Nazi's.

I can't understand why lots of people do things, but it probably makes perfect sense to them.

Fair enough for the "nazi morality" example, but it does not apply to the situation of (most) chaos worshippers and daemons. They definitely do evil things because even them would agree that their actions are only driven by madness and an insane desire to inflict pain. They don't think they are doing something right, they think they are doing something evil, selfish and unjustified, and that's why they are doing it.
If a daemon thought killing imperials might be bettering the galaxy, he would immediately stop doing it, because daemons find much relish in doing evil! It makes them feel powerful and beyond the reach of humanity's "justice".

You cannot even apply moral relativism to Chaotic reasoning.

Not neccessarily, are there not seek to plenty of "corrupted" inquisitors that try to use chaos for the greater good of man? Are there not thousands of traitor marines that think worshipping the chaos gods is the one true way to save humanity? Are there not untold millions of out cast mutants that have turned to the chaos gods as an uncaring emporer orders their annihiliation?

Of course, there are the just as many types who use chaos for their own personal gain.

As to Daemons, well, we are but food to them- to be consumed and and to entertain, we may as well be headlice. You are applying human notions to daemons, which is like comparing human behaviour to that of sharks. If a shark eats a man does that make the shark evil?

M

davij wrote:Not neccessarily, are there not seek to plenty of "corrupted" inquisitors that try to use chaos for the greater good of man

Define "plenty". Radicals are definitely the minority, a very small one.

Mind you, this is balanced out by a bit of Nietzschian reasoning-- those few that do turn radical tend to be the oldest and most connected Inquisitors. "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

davij wrote:
As to Daemons, well, we are but food to them- to be consumed and and to entertain, we may as well be headlice. You are applying human notions to daemons, which is like comparing human behaviour to that of sharks. If a shark eats a man does that make the shark evil?

But sharks are not created by your worst fears into another hellish dimension. Nor is their sole purpose in life to experiment 9487 different manners to kill you by inflicting as much pain as possible.

If a shark attacks you, he will do so because it is hungry and that it needs to eat you to survive. If it manages to kill you, it will do so ruthlessly and efficiently, without waisting any time in torturing you.

A daemon will torture you to death and laugh at your face while you agonize.

Right, Daemons aren't animals. They're manifestations of human emotions, and primarily the negative ones that are so strong in this galaxy wherein there is only war.

As a side thought, the Emperor is/was 40k's Ubermensch.

4M2A wrote:Completely agree with you Sir Pseudonymous. Moral Relativism makes works because no one has any right to claim they are any more right than any one else.

Yes it's a negative way to look at life
Yes it's destructive to society to live that way
And While I completely agree with it I don't think society should be ruled by it.

Just because it isn't useful doesn't make it wrong.

As you already said sometimse we don't need what is correct. For society to function we need to find boundaries that are accepted by the majority.

I follow my own morals and the law as well as moral relativism, I just know that my views are no more right than any others.

What I'm saying is that Moral Relativism is, for all intents and purposes, the closest thing to objective truth we have when it comes to ethics. It is, however, completely useless as a system, because it's not a system. Moral Relativism is a reminder that there is no natural authority standing behind any moral system. Morality is a social construct, which depends on a social contract to mean anything. If you violate that contract, nothing happens beyond what may be enforced by other individuals. Lightning doesn't strike you down for murder, or theft, or canceling Firefly.

Melissia wrote:

4M2A wrote:So.
Lots of things which we have now proved pointless led to important discoveries.

Philosophy also led to democracy (and other important concepts such as the social contract), economics, sociology, psychology, and plenty of other things which are beneficial to mankind.

Philosophy is simply the rational investigations of questions about our world, our existence, knowledge, ethics... in essence, science is a form of philosophy focused on the physical. But we are not purely physical creatures, so the non-physical studies have an important purpose.

We're long since past the point where general philosophy was important. Now it's just masturbatory armchair musing crossed with history. It is science without the empiricism.

Melissia wrote:

davij wrote:Not neccessarily, are there not seek to plenty of "corrupted" inquisitors that try to use chaos for the greater good of man

Define "plenty". Radicals are definitely the minority, a very small one.

Mind you, this is balanced out by a bit of Nietzschian reasoning-- those few that do turn radical tend to be the oldest and most connected Inquisitors. "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

That's not Nietzschian reasoning, that's just referencing a famous, ominous Nietzsche quote...

We also don't know how common radical inquisitors are. We can safely assume that the extreme radicals, the sort that use daemonhosts or smuggle psykers and xenos artifacts to further a hunt for the location of a dead eldar craftworld that's moving like a space hulk, are few and far between, but there appears to be no shortage of the sort willing to use dubious methods to accomplish their goals, like allowing lesser heretics to go unmolested in the hopes that they may lead to heretics that are actually dangerous, rather than just stupid (Amberly Vail even takes the time to mock the so-called "heretics" who base their philosophy on contemporary popular culture villains as not being worth the time of even the local arbites in the footnotes (or perhaps in character in the story as a whole, I can't recall which), if I recall correctly), or dealing with the less unstable xenos, like Craftworld Seers.

Laodamia wrote:

davij wrote:
As to Daemons, well, we are but food to them- to be consumed and and to entertain, we may as well be headlice. You are applying human notions to daemons, which is like comparing human behaviour to that of sharks. If a shark eats a man does that make the shark evil?

But sharks are not created by your worst fears into another hellish dimension. Nor is their sole purpose in life to experiment 9487 different manners to kill you by inflicting as much pain as possible.

If a shark attacks you, he will do so because it is hungry and that it needs to eat you to survive. If it manages to kill you, it will do so ruthlessly and efficiently, without waisting any time in torturing you.

A daemon will torture you to death and laugh at your face while you agonize.

Minor correction: the shark is even more innocent than that. If it attacks you, it's because it thought you were a seal, being an effectively mindless fish and all; most sharks ostensibly dislike humans as a food source, and frequently just swim away after realizing their mistake (of course, by that point it's probably too late for you, since it only realizes its mistake after taking a bite and discovering that you don't taste like a seal).

mrsmith wrote:

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:

mrsmith wrote:since it seems that the only way to destroy chaos would be to destory the Imperium, ultimately siding with Chaos so it may destroy itself would be the right thing to do.

or at least thats how i read the fluff.

Destroying all life, everywhere, would theoretically end Chaos. Chaos far predates humanity, and its gods don't care the slightest for what goes within this Galaxy, though lesser daemons might. Even wiping out all life in the Milky Way probably wouldn't end Chaos, as it would also be fed by the life in other galaxies. Painting it as "it's all humanity's fault for existing" is just MOAR GRIMDARKS someone threw in for some reason or another.

many races, maybe even most, don't have a presence in the warp though, so those could thrive. Plus Humans have an unusually high affect on the warp for some reason.

how do the gods not care? it seems the only way they can grow in power is to cause as much disorder as they can in the real world.

The Tau are the only soulless race we know of, aside from the robot necrons and the mindless tyranid swarms.

The gods are above it all. There is nothing worthy of their interest because of the sheer scale of things. It is their followers, including the daemons, who meddle in mortal affairs to try to be outrageous enough to draw the attention of their patron god.

biccat wrote:

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:But it is better for preserving the scale of the comparison.

But it isn't scale we're talking about, it is morality of the relative positions.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:You're just taking two things which resemble the Imperium, and trying to imply that one of them is Chaos and the other is the Imperium.

I'm not sure why you see this as wrong. I'm making an analogy between two opposing yet morally dubious governments to illustrate that neither is "good".

Which has everything to do with the scale at hand. "A and B are two sides of the same coin" does not follow from "X and Y were both bad, and both superficially resemble A". If we are to compare two things, for the purposes of providing a more tangible example of A and B, then the two things should match each other in scale roughly relative to the relation between A and B.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:While the Imperium may end up looking not unlike the Soviets or Nazis in the end, Chaos is to the Imperium what the Axis powers were to the Allies.

But they aren't. The Allies were fighting to restore self-government to the invaded nations while the Axis were trying to expand their hold. It is in Eastern Europe where we see two expansionist powers vying for domination.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:The Allies were willing to slaughter civilians by the tens of thousands to further their objectives.

No, they were willing to 'slaughter civilians' to defeat an enemy. Again, it is in Eastern Europe where we see domestic murder, not in Western Europe. It was the USSR who used mass infantry WWI tactics, the Western powers used military technology where possible to avoid deaths. Further, when the Western powers conquered a city, they didn't purge it of dissidents and institute a puppet government, that was the Eastern ally.

The supposed philosophical goals of the two sides are completely irrelevant when one wants to look at their actions. The Allies carpet bombed civilian populations with incendiaries, and ultimately with one of the most horrifying terror weapons ever created. This killed civilians by the tens of thousands. This served their strategic purposes, so they did it despite its brutality. This is worse in the context and scale of that conflict than the Imperium torching worlds given over to chaos, genestealers, or tyranids, and you could doubtlessly find any number of far greater sacrifices (in the scale of things) made than the golden throne requires. The Axis powers expended massive amounts of resources rounding up and slaughtering civilians for entirely insane reasons, which is kind of equivalent in spirit to Chaos cultists sacrificing themselves to summon daemons to kill everyone, only less insane (that's right, Chaos cultists make Nazis look sane).

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:Scaled up to 40K levels, in a galaxy with quadrillions of humans, and existential threats coming from every direction, what the Imperium does is less brutal than what the Allies did (as in, hurts a smaller percentage of the population, to accomplish more), while what Chaos does is every bit as self-defeating, insane, and utterly pointless as what the Axis did.

I draw a line between casualties of war and self-imposed purging, and I think most people would as well. The deaths caused by attacks on population centers were done for the purpose of defeating an enemy, in the Imperium it is done for purposes of control (and blood sacrifice to a dead god).

A world given over to Chaos, or infested with genestealer cults beyond what may be excised, or lost to the Tyranids is no longer "their own people". A revolt on an agriworld means billions starve to death on a hiveworld. As for the golden throne: how many industrial accidents do you suppose there were in American industry during WWII? I assure you that such is a percent of the population of Earth many millions of times in excess of the percentage of the human population claimed by the golden throne. And, to reiterate an earlier point, if Chaos cultists sacrificed only one percent of their population per year, they would have to number less than twenty five billion to claim fewer lives numerically than the golden throne does, out of a total human population in the quadrillions at the very least, to ignore the crucial difference that the golden throne keeps the Emperor able to operate the Astronomicon, without which many hundreds of trillions would starve to death, if they weren't devoured or slaughtered by xenos incursions and Chaos worshipers first, while Chaos cultists sacrifice to summon insane daemons to kill everyone.

You may think I'm drawing a clear moral line between democracy and the tyranny of socialism, and that's because I am. People in the Soviet Union and IoM are/were no more free than those in Nazi Germany or the Chaos Worlds. All live(d) under evil.

Edit: isn't the forum software supposed to append a double post to the first one?

Sir Pseudonymous why are you defending Chaos?
Imperium is evil in some ways, but Chaos is definitely evil.
I can't see what is this debate about?
Why defend evil?

Brother Coa wrote:Sir Pseudonymous why are you defending Chaos?
Imperium is evil in some ways, but Chaos is definitely evil.
I can't see what is this debate about?
Why defend evil?

Because it's a fictional universe where good and bad isn't as clear cut

Pilau Rice wrote:

Brother Coa wrote:Sir Pseudonymous why are you defending Chaos?
Imperium is evil in some ways, but Chaos is definitely evil.
I can't see what is this debate about?
Why defend evil?

Because it's a fictional universe where good and bad isn't as clear cut

I see. Well in that case the most evil thing in 40k are the Necrons. No free will, no soul, just command of their gods to destroy every living thing in the galaxy. Including plants and even microbes. Now what is good about them?

Yup.

Brother Coa wrote:

Pilau Rice wrote:

Brother Coa wrote:Sir Pseudonymous why are you defending Chaos?
Imperium is evil in some ways, but Chaos is definitely evil.
I can't see what is this debate about?
Why defend evil?

Because it's a fictional universe where good and bad isn't as clear cut

I see. Well in that case the most evil thing in 40k are the Necrons. No free will, no soul, just command of their gods to destroy every living thing in the galaxy. Including plants and even microbes. Now what is good about them?

Are you arguing that the C'tan are evil? Or the Necrons themselves?

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:We also don't know how common radical inquisitors are.

One person's radical is the next person's puritan, but generally speaking puritans outnumber the radicals, according to Dark Heresy. I say this because radicalism is punishable, and if the majority of Inquisitors were Radical that wouldn't be the case.

Brother Coa wrote:Sir Pseudonymous why are you defending Chaos?
Imperium is evil in some ways, but Chaos is definitely evil.
I can't see what is this debate about?
Why defend evil?

What? My posts have revolved entirely around attacking arguments that Chaos isn't worse than the Imperium. The only thing I defended was the idea of Moral Relativism, while also denouncing it as unusable as a system despite its truth, and denouncing Chaos as being beyond redemption through it. Chaos is not a moral system: it's a state of gibbering, suicidal insanity, and thus it cannot be argued that Moral Relativism applies to it.

Emperors Faithful wrote:

Brother Coa wrote:

Pilau Rice wrote:

Brother Coa wrote:Sir Pseudonymous why are you defending Chaos?
Imperium is evil in some ways, but Chaos is definitely evil.
I can't see what is this debate about?
Why defend evil?

Because it's a fictional universe where good and bad isn't as clear cut

I see. Well in that case the most evil thing in 40k are the Necrons. No free will, no soul, just command of their gods to destroy every living thing in the galaxy. Including plants and even microbes. Now what is good about them?

Are you arguing that the C'tan are evil? Or the Necrons themselves?

The C'tan are gods who don't care about their worshippers . Most would probably call them evil. They might be defended as "such a concept doesn't apply to them" but somehow I feel that is a bit of a cop-out.

It is a cop out. One that's been used for the better part of 3000 years.

However the Necrons themselves can be pretty mindless depending on how many times they've been put back together. Sooner or later they'd have the morality of a servitor.

Yes, it is quite a popular cop-out

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:Which has everything to do with the scale at hand. "A and B are two sides of the same coin" does not follow from "X and Y were both bad, and both superficially resemble A". If we are to compare two things, for the purposes of providing a more tangible example of A and B, then the two things should match each other in scale roughly relative to the relation between A and B.

Again, I have no idea what you're talking about. The scale of the conflict has absolutely nothing to do with the analogy.

A is like X. B is like Y. Therefore, A is to B as X is to Y.

In my example, I describe the relationship between the Imperium and Chaos and Soviets and Nazis. Both Soviets and Nazis have more in common with the IoM or Chaos than either IoM or Chaos has with the Allies as a whole. Scale is completely irrelevant.

However, I invite you to please explain your rationale further if I've misconstrued something.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:The supposed philosophical goals of the two sides are completely irrelevant when one wants to look at their actions. The Allies carpet bombed civilian populations with incendiaries, and ultimately with one of the most horrifying terror weapons ever created. This killed civilians by the tens of thousands. This served their strategic purposes, so they did it despite its brutality. This is worse in the context and scale of that conflict than the Imperium torching worlds given over to chaos, genestealers, or tyranids, and you could doubtlessly find any number of far greater sacrifices (in the scale of things) made than the golden throne requires. The Axis powers expended massive amounts of resources rounding up and slaughtering civilians for entirely insane reasons, which is kind of equivalent in spirit to Chaos cultists sacrificing themselves to summon daemons to kill everyone, only less insane (that's right, Chaos cultists make Nazis look sane).

Philosophical goals are very relevent, because it's how we give context to actions, and understand why those actions were done. Killing someone in self defense is moral, while killing someone in cold blood is immoral. The results are the same, but the motivations are very different, which leads to a different moral conclusion.

You cannot distant actions from morality to argue that the actions are morally equivalent. Either morality matters (and we can label evil) or it doesn't (and Chaos is no worse than the IoM).

Finally, the key difference between the IoM and the Allied bombing of cities is that the IoM has options not available during WWII. The Allies took out cities because that was the only way to destroy industrial production that benefitted the enemy. Today, we use precision guided missiles. Further, the Allies were fighting an enemy that responded to such tactics. The IoM not only has less violent means, they are fighting an enemy immune to genocide (and benefits from it).

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:A world given over to Chaos, or infested with genestealer cults beyond what may be excised, or lost to the Tyranids is no longer "their own people". A revolt on an agriworld means billions starve to death on a hiveworld. As for the golden throne: how many industrial accidents do you suppose there were in American industry during WWII? I assure you that such is a percent of the population of Earth many millions of times in excess of the percentage of the human population claimed by the golden throne. And, to reiterate an earlier point, if Chaos cultists sacrificed only one percent of their population per year, they would have to number less than twenty five billion to claim fewer lives numerically than the golden throne does, out of a total human population in the quadrillions at the very least, to ignore the crucial difference that the golden throne keeps the Emperor able to operate the Astronomicon, without which many hundreds of trillions would starve to death, if they weren't devoured or slaughtered by xenos incursions and Chaos worshipers first, while Chaos cultists sacrifice to summon insane daemons to kill everyone

If the IoM only used their weapons to take out chaos worlds, you would have a point. But the IG and SM are also used to take out worlds that no longer conform to the Imperial Truth. Any opposition that might threaten the IoM's supremacy is brutally repressed. The IoM wants to rule ALL of the galaxy and will not tolerate the existence of other races, or other human enclaves outside of their command.

Your Ag World revolt argument is merely an argument in defense of slavery to the needs of another. Free people do not need imperial overlords to form a functioning society, it is only in a command economy (like the IoM or USSR) where systemic starvation is a problem. In a free economy, food is delivered and sold based on demand, not based on a mandate. If the Hive World is producing valuable goods, a revolt on an Ag world will only slightly distort the food market, and it will stabilize when production is increased to take advantage of the higher demand. In a command economy, people starve.

Finally, industrial accidents are completely irrelevant to the deliberate taking of a human life to support another. The sacrifices to the Golden Throne are not freely given or risked (as industrial accidents come from an assumption of risk).

Would the Nazi grnocide have been acceptable if the deaths were necessary to support Hitler's life?

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:

biccat wrote:

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:Which has everything to do with the scale at hand. "A and B are two sides of the same coin" does not follow from "X and Y were both bad, and both superficially resemble A". If we are to compare two things, for the purposes of providing a more tangible example of A and B, then the two things should match each other in scale roughly relative to the relation between A and B.

Again, I have no idea what you're talking about. The scale of the conflict has absolutely nothing to do with the analogy.

A is like X. B is like Y. Therefore, A is to B as X is to Y.

In my example, I describe the relationship between the Imperium and Chaos and Soviets and Nazis. Both Soviets and Nazis have more in common with the IoM or Chaos than either IoM or Chaos has with the Allies as a whole. Scale is completely irrelevant.

However, I invite you to please explain your rationale further if I've misconstrued something.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:The supposed philosophical goals of the two sides are completely irrelevant when one wants to look at their actions. The Allies carpet bombed civilian populations with incendiaries, and ultimately with one of the most horrifying terror weapons ever created. This killed civilians by the tens of thousands. This served their strategic purposes, so they did it despite its brutality. This is worse in the context and scale of that conflict than the Imperium torching worlds given over to chaos, genestealers, or tyranids, and you could doubtlessly find any number of far greater sacrifices (in the scale of things) made than the golden throne requires. The Axis powers expended massive amounts of resources rounding up and slaughtering civilians for entirely insane reasons, which is kind of equivalent in spirit to Chaos cultists sacrificing themselves to summon daemons to kill everyone, only less insane (that's right, Chaos cultists make Nazis look sane).

Philosophical goals are very relevent, because it's how we give context to actions, and understand why those actions were done. Killing someone in self defense is moral, while killing someone in cold blood is immoral. The results are the same, but the motivations are very different, which leads to a different moral conclusion.

You cannot distant actions from morality to argue that the actions are morally equivalent. Either morality matters (and we can label evil) or it doesn't (and Chaos is no worse than the IoM).

But the relation between the Imperium and Chaos isn't remotely like the relation between the Nazis and the Soviets. The Imperium acts to preserve humanity from the predations of Xenos and Daemons, as well as from the catastrophic collapse that results when people stop working to keep society running. Chaos acts towards no particular goal, aside from the advancement or satiation of whatever petty actor you happen to be looking at at the moment, with a healthy dose of insanity and daemons thrown into the mix.

While the Soviets had better reasons for what they did than the Nazis, the difference is not nearly so great as that between "harm the insignificant few to save the many" and "KiLl EvErYoNe AnD eAt ThEm FoR dAeMoN mAsTer!"

Finally, the key difference between the IoM and the Allied bombing of cities is that the IoM has options not available during WWII. The Allies took out cities because that was the only way to destroy industrial production that benefitted the enemy. Today, we use precision guided missiles. Further, the Allies were fighting an enemy that responded to such tactics. The IoM not only has less violent means, they are fighting an enemy immune to genocide (and benefits from it).

No, they don't, and the "obliterate everything from orbit" option is only used when a planet cannot be recovered, due to daemonic incursions, genestealer infestation that's progressed too far to root out, or when the planet is swarming with tyranids and everyone is either dead or about to be eaten alive and used to fuel the hive fleet on to the next planet full of many billions of innocents. Normal Chaos cults are just rounded up by hand, usually with the minimum collateral damage necessary to prevent their escape. Likewise peasant revolts, if they don't manage to remove the governor in one fell swoop and return to loyally serving the Imperium and their fellow man, are put down by sending in soldiers to shoot the rioters, not by obliterating the valuable planet.

Your Ag World revolt argument is merely an argument in defense of slavery to the needs of another. Free people do not need imperial overlords to form a functioning society, it is only in a command economy (like the IoM or USSR) where systemic starvation is a problem. In a free economy, food is delivered and sold based on demand, not based on a mandate. If the Hive World is producing valuable goods, a revolt on an Ag world will only slightly distort the food market, and it will stabilize when production is increased to take advantage of the higher demand. In a command economy, people starve.

The Soviet Union, a horribly, horribly mismanaged country, led by madmen and thugs, and following a critically flawed Anarchist philosophy, still managed to go from an agricultural backwater devastated by the most brutal war that has ever been seen to the second most powerful nation on Earth, with all the world arrayed against them, while being narrowly beaten out by a pseudo-capitalist (the "pseudo" part comes in due to government actions to prevent the sort of starvation and collapse you're claiming Capitalism prevents (and which, ironically, Adam Smith himself supported: "When the regulation, therefore, is in support of the workman, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.")) nation that started with an established, intact industrial infrastructure and the entire world hailing them as heroes.

And of course the Imperium, most notably, is not actually a command economy. They don't care what you do, or how you do it (as long as it doesn't involve Xenos or Daemons), so long as you pay the rather light taxes demanded of worlds. Agriworlds pay in food, which gets dumped on traders on hiveworlds, while hiveworlds perform simple manufacturing and bureaucratic work, and provide about .1% of their population for the Guard under the most dire of conditions.

Finally, industrial accidents are completely irrelevant to the deliberate taking of a human life to support another. The sacrifices to the Golden Throne are not freely given or risked (as industrial accidents come from an assumption of risk).

Would the Nazi grnocide have been acceptable if the deaths were necessary to support Hitler's life?

The golden throne claims less than a billionth of a percent of the human population, all taken from the weakest and most unstable psykers, who tend to explode in torrents of warpfire and daemons, in order to keep the Astronomicon running, which enables interstellar travel, which stops hundreds of trillions from starving to death on hive worlds, and enables troops to react to Xenos incursions and Chaos uprisings. To put this into perspective with the real world, that's like putting down a single rabid dog to cure cancer, the energy crisis, aids, global warming, and general geopolitical strife.

Minor correction: the shark is even more innocent than that. If it attacks you, it's because it thought you were a seal, being an effectively mindless fish and all; most sharks ostensibly dislike humans as a food source, and frequently just swim away after realizing their mistake (of course, by that point it's probably too late for you, since it only realizes its mistake after taking a bite and discovering that you don't taste like a seal).

Right the shark was definatley a bad example, the point I failed to make was, we are as humans judging the unhuman as humans. How can something be evil for doing what it is created for. Your riught, daemons are manifestations of raw emotion human emotion, so therfore are humans evil? Can we humanity as a species as wholly evil? From a daemons PoV, if it indeed really has one, is that it is doing what it is supposed to be doing, what is meant to do; it has no concept of good nor evil, only what it feels it has to do.

The same could be said of Orks. Are orks evil when they kill each other for dominance? By human standards, yes, to an orks pov it is a rational, and everyday occurence.

As to the NAzi's, to my pov, what they did was wrong, no excuses. But, I'm pretty certain that for many Nazi's what they were doing was for the greater good and that they felt they were doing the right thing, eliminating the jewish "threat" and that to a Nazi's PoV they were in fact the good guys. Remember, it is the victors that write the history books, if we had been brought up in the third reich we would probably have a very different opinion of Hitler.

EDIT: the point I'm actually arguing is that, for all it's faults, I don't think the Imperium is evil...but I don't se how chaos can be labelled evil, except from a hume viewpoint, (But not always!)

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:But the relation between the Imperium and Chaos isn't remotely like the relation between the Nazis and the Soviets. The Imperium acts to preserve humanity from the predations of Xenos and Daemons, as well as from the catastrophic collapse that results when people stop working to keep society running. Chaos acts towards no particular goal, aside from the advancement or satiation of whatever petty actor you happen to be looking at at the moment, with a healthy dose of insanity and daemons thrown into the mix.

Actually, they are. The Soviets (Imperium) seek to extend their influence across the world. They annexed nearby nations and made them vassals to Russia. Their resources were plundered and their economies were structured to benefit the Russians. Further, their expansionist philosophy excluded any rival states not under their power. The Imperium likewise doesn't tolerate non-imperial worlds. Of course, what stopped the soviet expansion was an external threat of MAD. This isn't present in the 40k-verse, so the Imperium is allowed to run unchecked (except by xenos forces, but there's no threat to their power base of Mars/Terra).

Chaos, the Nazis, are an opposing force to the IoM, because they think that their set of dictators are preferrable, not because they offer any real ideological difference. Chaos is just as possessive and expansionist as the IoM, just more rapey crazy.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:The Soviet Union, a horribly, horribly mismanaged country, led by madmen and thugs

It wasn't mismanaged, as you said, it was able to assemble a major military presence in less than 100 years (although the US was primarily agricultural pre-WWI as well). The fatal flaw of the USSR wasn't mismanagement, but management at all. In order to maintain their power, they had to kill a LOT of people, mostly by feeding supporters and starving opponents, at least when they weren't arresting/torturing/executing them. The Imperium has the same philosophy, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette. The problem is that only the very powerful get to enjoy that omelette, the rest are just eggs.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:And of course the Imperium, most notably, is not actually a command economy.

The existence of hive worlds and Agri worlds disproves this. As does the massive amounts of armaments and required industrial support.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote: in order to keep the Astronomicon running, which enables interstellar travel, which stops hundreds of trillions from starving to death on hive worlds, and enables troops to react to Xenos incursions and Chaos uprisings.

Right, eggs broken and all of that I understand the argument, but I don't accept that it is moral.

Why is it so hard to accept that the Imperium is not the shining beacon of freedom and prosperity? The fluff makes it pretty clear that the IoM is a brutal system, but the Emperor and his SM are the last defense for humanity, and the brutality is necessary in such a grimdark place.

If that is true, maybe it is hard to accept that the only way mankind can survive is through slavery and repression. Which is why I think that the IoM is evil (although maybe not as evil as Chaos).

biccat wrote:

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:But the relation between the Imperium and Chaos isn't remotely like the relation between the Nazis and the Soviets. The Imperium acts to preserve humanity from the predations of Xenos and Daemons, as well as from the catastrophic collapse that results when people stop working to keep society running. Chaos acts towards no particular goal, aside from the advancement or satiation of whatever petty actor you happen to be looking at at the moment, with a healthy dose of insanity and daemons thrown into the mix.

Actually, they are. The Soviets (Imperium) seek to extend their influence across the world. They annexed nearby nations and made them vassals to Russia. Their resources were plundered and their economies were structured to benefit the Russians. Further, their expansionist philosophy excluded any rival states not under their power. The Imperium likewise doesn't tolerate non-imperial worlds. Of course, what stopped the soviet expansion was an external threat of MAD. This isn't present in the 40k-verse, so the Imperium is allowed to run unchecked (except by xenos forces, but there's no threat to their power base of Mars/Terra).

Chaos, the Nazis, are an opposing force to the IoM, because they think that their set of dictators are preferrable, not because they offer any real ideological difference. Chaos is just as possessive and expansionist as the IoM, just more rapey crazy.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:While the Soviets had better reasons for what they did than the Nazis, the difference is not nearly so great as that between "harm the insignificant few to save the many" and "KiLl EvErYoNe AnD eAt ThEm FoR dAeMoN mAsTer!"

This is why I said that "A is like X and Y, therefore X is to Y as A is to B" doesn't work. The Imperium shares aesthetic similarities with both the Soviets and the Nazis, and some behavioral similarities with the Soviets (only without the whole "Marxism" thing). Chaos, however, doesn't resemble the Nazis to any good extent, when taken on its own. The Nazi leadership was insane, and wasted massive amounts of resources on entirely pointless, insane things, but Chaos makes them look benevolent and rational by comparison. Therefore it is disingenuous to try to paint the Imperium vs Chaos as equivalent to the Soviets vs the Nazis. If you want an accurate comparison involving the Nazis, you have to tone down the scale accordingly, which leaves the Imperium as roughly equivalent to the Allies. They did horrible things for a good cause, while the Nazis did worse things for the sake of their gibbering insanity. Even there, when scaled back up to 40K levels, the Allies end up looking worse than the Imperium, while the Nazis still look better than Chaos. That is how great a difference there is between the two factions.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:The Soviet Union, a horribly, horribly mismanaged country, led by madmen and thugs

It wasn't mismanaged, as you said, it was able to assemble a major military presence in less than 100 years (although the US was primarily agricultural pre-WWI as well). The fatal flaw of the USSR wasn't mismanagement, but management at all. In order to maintain their power, they had to kill a LOT of people, mostly by feeding supporters and starving opponents, at least when they weren't arresting/torturing/executing them. The Imperium has the same philosophy, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette. The problem is that only the very powerful get to enjoy that omelette, the rest are just eggs.

That's a gross misinterpretation of history based on anti-soviet propaganda. Stalin, in particular, was a borderline slowed thug, who made a point of purging everyone competent he could find. Subsequent leaders were a little less egregious, but still didn't make it to power based on competence at leadership, but instead based on competence in winning internal political conflicts. They embarked on monumentally backwards, pointless, or otherwise critically flawed schemes, while wasting massive amounts of resources on cheap armaments to give away to guerrillas in foreign countries, and attempted to enforce a severely flawed, outdated ideology that happened to be at direct odds with what they were actually doing. They started with a devastated country, with massive losses in manpower and resources, due to WWI. After a brutal civil war, Stalin won out, and immediately purged everyone who actually knew what they were doing. Then, they were burnt to the ground again by the Nazis, before turning the tide with overwhelming numbers. Despite all these disadvantages, they still wound up second only to the US, before burning themselves out in a monumentally stupid war in Afghanistan (mostly due to the US funneling weapons and money to the resistance fighters, ironically the same ones they're fighting today) and collapsing.

Sir Pseudonymous wrote:And of course the Imperium, most notably, is not actually a command economy.

The existence of hive worlds and Agri worlds disproves this. As does the massive amounts of armaments and required industrial support.

First, the existence of hiveworlds and agriworlds no more implies a command economy than cities and farms do. Second, the vast majority of the armaments aren't even produced by the Imperium, as the Adeptus Mechanicus is entirely separate from the Imperial command structure. The Imperium is too large to control any economies; it only places taxes upon planetary governments, who are free to act however they please so long as they pay the taxes and don't traffic with Xenos or Daemons. While they nominally own all the trading vessels save for those of Rogue Traders, the day to day to management generally falls entirely into private hands (I believe the situation with real cargo ships is similar, though I'm not familiar with the matter).

Sir Pseudonymous wrote: in order to keep the Astronomicon running, which enables interstellar travel, which stops hundreds of trillions from starving to death on hive worlds, and enables troops to react to Xenos incursions and Chaos uprisings.

Right, eggs broken and all of that I understand the argument, but I don't accept that it is moral.

You left out the whole "the people who are sacrificed to it are walking bombs, who would otherwise simply be killed to spare them the horror of their inevitable death and for the safety of others" thing.

Why is it so hard to accept that the Imperium is not the shining beacon of freedom and prosperity? The fluff makes it pretty clear that the IoM is a brutal system, but the Emperor and his SM are the last defense for humanity, and the brutality is necessary in such a grimdark place.

If that is true, maybe it is hard to accept that the only way mankind can survive is through slavery and repression. Which is why I think that the IoM is evil (although maybe not as evil as Chaos).

The Imperium has exactly nothing to do with how free people are, that's a matter for local governments to determine. The Imperium only cares that the wheels keep turning as best they can. Which means shutting down local strife when it endangers the wellbeing of other worlds. If rebels successfully oust the local government, and don't try to secede from the Imperium, the Imperium doesn't care; if rebels shut down all outgoing food shipments from an agriworld and don't manage to seize power in the year(s) it takes for the Imperium to muster a response/decide to get involved, then they get brutally put down by a few regiments of the Guard; if rebels seize power, and try to secede from the Imperium, then they get brutally put down by the Guard, and a new government is put in place.

Everything the Imperium does is for the good of humanity: agriworlds have to keep churning out food or trillions die; hiveworlds have to keep paying taxes and providing recruits for the Guard, or trillions die; forgeworlds are outside the jurisdiction of the Imperium, and are more an inversion with the governing bodies of forgeworlds placing significant pressure on the Imperium to give them whatever they want; other worlds provide raw materials, or just raise the occasional Guard regiment, and the Imperium leaves them alone beyond ensuring that they don't deal with Xenos or Daemons.

no such thing as good and evil, just point of views

Brother Heinrich wrote:The Chaos Gods are selfish to be sure and those dedicated to them but I believe there are certain nuggets of 'right' amongst the renegades, for example, the Alpha Legion and the Night Lords, both legions seem to hold to the original ideal of bringing down a father who betrayed them.

The Alpha Legion sought to dethrone the Emperor in order to induce a repentant Horus to slaughter all of Humanity and cleanse the galaxy of the taint of Chaos in the process. Their goal was to sacrifice Humanity for the good of all species in the galaxy.