trevelyan1983 said:
Nice strawman. It's good that you're moving away from murder into slavery, but a little less hyperbole would be appreciated. Maybe you'll even work your way down to littering or jaywalking.
Where's the hyperbole?
If you create something that is dependent on you for survival then you are responsible for it. If you neglect that responsibility and it dies, then you are responsible for that and it's murder. Just like if you have kids and stop feeding them, then you are guilty of murder if they die of starvation.
If you force an intelligent creature to do what you want and serve you regardless of its wishes, then it is slavery.
Considering I started this entire line of conversation to point out where there are moral issues with familiars, I'm not seeing the Strawman here. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you were proposing a Familiar deciding it would rather BE DEAD than serve a particular person was committing suicide. I merely was stating that for that to happen, it must REALLY not want to do what is being demanded of it. So really it has a choice between dying or slavery. Neither are good options and both are something the master is forcing upon it.
Now sure, there's the potential for healthy relationships between a master and familiar. That's not what I brought up for discussion though. Furthermore, when you create a sentient being you are not going to know what sort of relationship you are going to have with it. Maybe it will be like Megaman and Dr. Light. Or maybe it will be like Evangeline and Chachamaru (where the being decided she wanted to go live with and serve someone else).
Let's take that Chachamaru example for a closer look. If Evangeline had decided to force Chachamaru to stay and serve, then how is that not slavery? If Chachamaru, left with no other options, had decided to die rather than do that, then how does that get Evangeline off the hook, ethically speaking? (It doesn't get Evangeline off the hook legally either, for what it is worth).
We could do a similar examination with Nanoha and Raising Heart (RH). If RH had decided to go by to Yuuno and Nanoha stopped RH from doing that and forced it to serve her, then how would that not be slavery? The same if we go with canon RH and have Yuuno forcing it to back to serve him.
trevelyan1983 said:
Familiars are traditionally a contractual obligation between informed, consenting beings. I see where you're coming from, in that a created familiar doesn't necessarily have a free choice in the matter, if their survival is dependant on their service. That's getting into a murky area of ethics.
It can get murky even with a contract. I'm not sure that fundamentally changes anything. Especially if the being needs the contract to survive. But yes, we were talking about beings someone creates.
It isn't like forcing someone to do a lot of stuff they find horrible is ok just because you have a service agreement. Nor does having such an agreement make it ok to
terminate your employee. If they need prana to survive then any agreement is going to be under duress.
Magical Contracts and needing Prana to live doesn't get people off the ethical hook. It actually makes it far easier to get in ethical trouble. It makes it far, far harder to cut ties with others and places a much heavier burden on the Prana Source / Master.
trevelyan1983 said:
I guess the choices for those who are ethically and morally inclined are; non-sapient created familiars, sapient non-created familiars, or sapient created familiars with whom negotiation takes place.
Or sapient familiars that have a way to supply their own prana. Or sapient familiars where the creator accepts the responsibilities in creating them -- neither is a good idea for amateurs though.
Non-sentient familiars that are more like animals still raise potential issues akin to animal abuse and the like too.
trevelyan1983 said:
Or, y'know, be a traditional asshat magus and not give a fuck about the entire issue - they care little enough for people and volition in the traditional definition, let alone the non-traditional kind.
It's a given the average Magus is something of a monster. I was just pointing out how it can come up with familiars.
Anyhow, the point of me bringing this up is that you are likely going to have players who haven't given this a second thought and wind up in a terrible situation because of it. It can be used as an idea for subplots and the like.
nick012000 said:
Intelligent familiars are slaves? I guess someone forgot to tell that to pretty much
every Servant ever!
This is an issue that FS/N does not overlook. Did you somehow miss all the Servants that are pissed off about their masters? Lancer (wrt to Kotomine), Caster (wrt her Original Master), and Rider (wrt Shinji) in FS/N alone are the clearest examples. They all get forced to do stuff against their will.