Golden rule. Free will is more important than life. If one must be prioritized over the other, I chose free will.
Using this power the OP posits is a destruction of my friend in a way more complete and more certain than any death. Death is a great unknown, and some possibility, however slim, that my friend could continue to exist in any form in some afterlife as him/her self is infinitely better than the cold certainty that I’ve just destroyed my friend’s mind, personality, and will in the act of preserving his/her body as my personal automoton.
Now, if we’re just talking about some fancy necromancy powers that let me resurect the body, leave the soul wherever it may be untouched, and get a mindless slave out of the bargain, yeah, I’d go with that, but as described in the OP, certainly not.
My philosophy recognizes only one unforgivable sin, and this is it.
I don’t understand this. Everybody seems to not be seeing the obvious. If the person is truly my slave, I can ORDER them to be exactly how they were. I can even order them to take no further orders from me if I’m afraid of abusing my power. Only by being the person they were before can they be totally obedient.
So what in the world is unethical about that? Why would you rather your friend die when you have the ability not only to heal, but to make them perfectly normal?
Oh, and this totally beats Allessin. We both live our normal life.
I think the idea is that you would be be a slave owner and not have magical powers. The person in question wouldn’t be able to fully function alone anymore and would need your direction.
What if this person said to you that they are willing be your slave in exchange for freedom from death at the moment? Would you seek the limits of your inner sick motherfucker?
Whatever attracted me to this person in the first place would quickly be overshadowed by the fact that he had no choice but to adore me. Blech. I want a man who’ll tell me to go to hell when I need it, or dump me should he find someone he wants to be with more. And that includes my husband!
Forget the friend. I wouldn’t want to do that to myself!
This is probably the best response I’ve seen, but would you feel guilty (to a lesser degree than enslaving them) about not saving them or would you not feel guilty at all?
The OP didn’t stipulate that you had to take advantage of the friend’s obedience. If you don’t, there’s no servitude at all.
Only the one who was dead would have lost the essence of his personhood, having transitioned from person to decaying meat. The other would at most have had to make a philosophical compromise to save someone’s life.
If the person had the same intelligence, the same sense of humor, the same aspirations, they would be equivalent to a corpse? I’m baffled.
No one living has complete freedom, but without life there is no will. While we live we all operate under constraints. But I don’t think it’s better to die because someone limits my freedom, or even worse because someone has the ability to take away my freedom.
Where are people getting this stuff? Who said anything about destroying minds and personalities? You know what does that? Death.
Plenty of people throughout history have chosen death over a lifetime of servitude, and they had more oportunity to escape their circumcstances than this hypothetical allows.
The nature of the enslavement described in the OP reduces them to an automoton. If it doesn’t read (to me) like a simple matter of them losing the ability to refuse your orders but being otherwise unchanged.
When I encounter these situations I usually go for the slavery route, since I can always change my mind and have them die at a later date. When the slaves start piling up I just do the Thunderdome thing until I’m back down to a manageable number.