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Your red-herring is very amusing yes, but you didn't actually address my question.

Why does the Emperor deserve their unthinking obedience?

 Void__Dragon wrote:
Your red-herring is very amusing yes, but you didn't actually address my question.

Why does the Emperor deserve their unthinking obedience?

Well your statement is a bit of a strawman, actually. A better question would ask why did the Emperor deserve their obedience. However, the primarchs all swore to obey the emperor and joined his crusade which was a military organization. In a military organization you are required to follow the chain of command that is a basic precept. In a military organization you are expected to remain loyal and also expect to be executed if you turn traitor. For whatever reasons each primarch had for swearing loyalty to him, once they joined and swore oaths to him, and were given the responsibility and privilege to lead their legions then they had a strong ethical committment to obey him.

Its not like the primarchs for the most part were doing things like genocide that they had qualms about. It doesnt matter so much what their initial reasons for swearing obeidence was unless they were coerced and so far we have not seen that as part of the story. I guess Angron wasnt initially given a choice but he was a fething nut job anyway.

Honestly I dont think your question is all that interesting or that their is even a need to explain someones actions to remain loyal to their word of honor. Indeed the word traitor has such a stink about it that even in the poorly written 40k books it is something that the marines have to confront. I think a major flaw in the whole Heresy plot is how easily some of the primarchs turned traitor.

It's not really a strawman if you immediately use the logic introduced in the strawman to form the core of your argument.

"Why does the Emperor deserve their unthinking obedience?"

"That's a strawman. I never said that the Emperor deserves their unthinking obedience. However in the military you are expected to obey unthinkingly so when the primarchs swore allegiance to the Emperor they owed him their unthinking obedience."

Also, I would argue that from an ethical perspective, a soldier disobeying a direct order from a superior officer because it goes against his moral code is generally considered to be more "ethical" than performing an atrocious act or one he doesn't approve of, under the guise of "just following orders".

 Void__Dragon wrote:
Your red-herring is very amusing yes, but you didn't actually address my question.

Why does the Emperor deserve their unthinking obedience?

That is a very good question. Why does Empy deserve their unthinking obedience? He madeas many bad choices as he made good choices. With Angron he managed to leave him without his warriors. With Lorgar he demanded him to kneels before him and Guilliman and much else. Then again now unthinking obedience is the only way to survive in the crapsack universe.

His mistake with Angron and Lorgar was sentimentality, they should have been put down like II and XI.

That would be very bad bossy of him, don't you agree?

But it would get gak done. This is a guy trying to wrestle the entire human race (the biggest donkey-caves in the universe) out of the darkness, and to enable our survival in a dark galaxy despite our own best efforts to destroy ourselves.

Where is that "core of boundless ambition and violence" that Grammaticus sensed when it really counted? He gave into his human sentimentality, and it almost cost him everything. Just like Horus was brought down by vanity, another all too human failing.

If you're going to be an overlord, be an overlord, don't be a bitch about it.

Had he done that then, he might have had even the loyal sons revolting against him. Think Empy and Leman Russ vs the rest.