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[Vortex13]

The Genophage is, IMO, the more interesting of the moral dilemnas of Mass Effect because it doesn't rely on the tired "are robots people?" trope that taints the Geth vs Quarian arcs.

 

On the one hand, I understand why the Genophage came to be. The Krogans really were a bunch of warmongering ravagers that needed to be stopped, and military power alone wasn't enough. On the other hand, morally, there really is no way (IMO) to fully justify forcing a birthrate of less than 1% on a species. I cannot for the life of me imagine this as being the moral thing to do, it is simply way too ruthless. I can consider it a practical measure, but not a moral one.

 

One way to solve it without the Genophage, I think, is to regulate the Krogan heavily, and for that you need a strong leader that is nevertheless willing to cooperate with the other species. Luckily, Wrex is just that, and even more luckily, he'll stiill be alive for a long time.

 

 

Where is that statistic from? The only information about viable brithrates that we are ever given about the Genophage is that it lowered Krogan rates down to pre-industrial levels. I highly doubt that the Krogan had a birthrate of 1% back then.

[Revan Reborn]

The Genophage is, IMO, the more interesting of the moral dilemnas of Mass Effect because it doesn't rely on the tired "are robots people?" trope that taints the Geth vs Quarian arcs.

 

On the one hand, I understand why the Genophage came to be. The Krogans really were a bunch of warmongering ravagers that needed to be stopped, and military power alone wasn't enough. On the other hand, morally, there really is no way (IMO) to fully justify forcing a birthrate of less than 1% on a species. I cannot for the life of me imagine this as being the moral thing to do, it is simply way too ruthless. I can consider it a practical measure, but not a moral one.

 

One way to solve it without the Genophage, I think, is to regulate the Krogan heavily, and for that you need a strong leader that is nevertheless willing to cooperate with the other species. Luckily, Wrex is just that, and even more luckily, he'll stiill be alive for a long time.

I agree completely. Whatever atrocities the krogans may have committed in times of war, the genophage was without a doubt morally despicable, no matter how you look at it. Practical? Possibly. Morally justified? Like hell. When was genocide ever morally justified in any setting?

 

Where is that statistic from? The only information about viable brithrates that we are ever given about the Genophage is that it lowered Krogan rates down to pre-industrial levels. I highly doubt that the Krogan had a birthrate of 1% back then.

I'm fairly certain it was mentioned in ME2. Most births were stillborn and barely any women could actually conceive a healthy child. It was really that bad.

[Vortex13]

I agree completely. Whatever atrocities the krogans may have committed in times of war, the genophage was without a doubt morally despicable, no matter how you look at it. Practical? Possibly. Morally justified? Like hell. When was genocide ever morally justified in any setting?

 

I am curious as to your thoughts on the outcome of the Rachni wars. That conflict ended with the Krogan committing genocide against a sentient, space faring species (at least as far as everyone knew).

 

 

I'm fairly certain it was mentioned in ME2. Most births were stillborn and barely any women could actually conceive a healthy child. It was really that bad.

 

 

I'm not sure on that one. I could be wrong here, but Mordin, one of the leading experts on the Genophage only ever mentioned pre-industrial levels.

[Jorji Costava]

I suppose I could argue that it's not possible to know such an incoherent moral position.

Seriously, why would someone have such a moral system? How could it be compelling? What prescriptive force could it possibly have?

 

In general, it's not feasible to know all of the logical implications of one's beliefs on any subject, let alone moral beliefs. For example, I believe that Oslo is the capital of Norway. One of the logical implications of this belief is the following proposition:

 

If Oslo is the capital of Norway if and only if Gothenburg is a city in Sweden and Oslo is not the capital of Norway, then Gothenburg is not a city in Sweden.

 

The above proposition is a tautology; it's of the form [p <=> (q & ~p)] => ~q. Thus, every proposition entails this one. Is there any practical possibility that most people who believe Oslo is the capital of Norway will know this? Probably not. If one had to know all of the logical implications of one's beliefs before holding the belief, then one simply couldn't hold any beliefs at all.

[Revan Reborn]

I am curious as to your thoughts on the outcome of the Rachni wars. That conflict ended with the Krogan committing genocide against a sentient, space faring species (at least as far as everyone knew).

 

 

 

 

 

I'm not sure on that one. I could be wrong here, but Mordin, one of the leading experts on the Genophage only ever mentioned pre-industrial levels.

Just to put it into perspective, it was the council races and galaxy that brought the krogan into the conflict. It was the galaxy that determined the rachni were evil, and they still are cautious of the rachni. Ironically enough, the krogan were the only species who actually seemed to respect the rachni because of their strength. Every other species feared them like they feared the geth.

 

I'd have to do another playthrough. Looking at the Mass Effect wiki, it stated that only one infant in every thousand births would actually survive. That might put things into perspective for you how horrific it was. Don't you remember the krogan females that were committing suicide because they could not bear children? The genophage was not only physically destructive, but mentally and psychologically.

[Quarian Master Race]

But assuming that you don't believe in souls / religion / spirituality, and you are trying to be fair and just about your decisions, can you simply dismiss the idea that benign synthetics may be "alive" at least to a certain definition of the word, and have the same "right" to exist just as much as you?

 

Can you call your choice morally correct unless you judged all sides of the question fairly?

 

I feel that this natural response to choose organics over synthetics has more to do with our natural survival and tribal instincts than any kind of morality system.

It isnt just from the metaphysical angle that you can dismiss such ideas. Some human morality systems are designed around the physical conditions of human existence. Hedonism or utilitarianism, for instance, would deem ME synthetics to have no intrinsic moral value due to lack of sufficient sensory hardware and thus the complete inability to experience pleasure or suffering (programmed simulation is not experiencing). Why should I care about damaging or deactivating a toaster if it is incapable of feeling pain, fear or loss at such? It doesn't care if I gun down its fellow geth like an organic would if I slughtered their family. What basis is there to assign it any rights or liberties, especially if doing so deviates from the function it was deliberately designed for and most definitely causes less happiness/ greater suffering for actually sentient beings? What gives such a thing value if not the same things that give us such? What makes its existence worth anything at all save what it provides in improving the lives of others?  What's wrong with me using such a thing as I would any other tool?

 

Despite seemingly possessing a form of sapience, they don't even seem capable of intellectual pleasures manifest in culture like art, music, aesthetics etc. They seem not much more worthy of moral consideration than a broken food blender to me. They weren't designed to be sentient, and Bioware didn't provide a counterargument apart from vague nonsense like "they have evolved" or  "I am alive" if you inject them with Reaper code or green space magic. Additionally, every in universe expert they gave us on their artificial intelligences sees them as tools, so who am I to argue?

 

I don't think this "natural response" you're speaking of tended to manifest itself anyway. The geth were statistically certainly more popular than their organic creators, most people liked EDI, and the vast majority of the fanbase sees the synthetics how the writers intended from the start as Real Boys. I doubt that if the Destroy beam had randomly killed all asari, krogan or quarians instead of toasters that it would have caused much of a difference to anyone but those of us who already didn't care about synthetics and saw no previous downsides with the choice.

[Il Divo]

 

Blaming the Salarian uplift for the Krogan aggression is asinine (IMO). When a kid winds up shooting himself because of mishandled gun we can blame negligent parents. When a kid takes a gun and orchestrates a school shooting its the kid's fault. The Krogan knew exactly what they were doing when they started the Rebellions, they are the ones that struck first. If we are going to say that the Krogan are innocent of their actions because they weren't ready to be uplifted then we can still say that actions like the Genophage were necessary since those simple minded toads are such innocent children and don't know how to keep it in their pants or keep their room clean.

 

 

Depending on the age of the kid and circumstance, I'm willing to bet there would be more than a few people willing to dispute that. 

 

Mordin's cave man analogy has flaws to it and blame doesn't have to be assigned singularly to any one entity, but I don't think it can be effectively argued that giving advanced technology to a race that managed to nuke their own planet demonstrates any great sense of judgment. Hell, the typical Krogan temperament should make that abundantly clear. Alternatively, outright desperation could work as a Salarian motive, I guess. 

[Jorji Costava]

It isnt just from the metaphysical angle that you can dismiss such ideas. Some human morality systems are designed around the physical conditions of human existence. Hedonism or utilitarianism, for instance, would deem ME synthetics to have no intrinsic moral value due to lack of sufficient sensory hardware and thus the complete inability to experience pleasure or suffering (programmed simulation is not experiencing). Why should I care about damaging or deactivating a toaster if it is incapable of feeling pain, fear or loss at such? It doesn't care if I gun down its fellow geth like an organic would if I slughtered their family. What basis is there to assign it any rights or liberties, especially if doing so deviates from the function it was deliberately designed for and most definitely causes less happiness/ greater suffering for actually sentient beings? What gives such a thing value if not the same things that give us such? What makes its existence worth anything at all save what it provides in improving the lives of others?  What's wrong with me using such a thing as I would any other tool?

 

Not so fast. The Geth obviously have preferences, goals and desires; they obviously have some kind of plan with that Dyson sphere thingy, they have enough creativity to invent technologies that everyone else wants to use (like thermal clips), enough intelligence to judge that our form of social organization is decidedly lacking, and some of them even seem to exhibit some kind of religious devotion (see ME1). From a preference utilitarian point of view, that's more than enough to get counted in the moral calculus. From a Kantian point of view, they seem to be able to represent and deliberate about their reasons for action as well as any of us, which makes them rational, which means they can't be treated as mere means. Your toaster, by contrast, can't do any of these things.

[Original Mako]

The genophage was not only physically destructive, but mentally and psychologically.

 

This is important. Wrex describes the effect on his people in ME1. Culturally, all the Krogans are depressed. Most have given up on life.

 

For the Krogans though, I'm surprised that was the only solution they could come up with. No assassination and installation of a pro-Council Krogan leader? No deploying mines on the relays out of Krogan systems? There's always another option. Even the Turians "somebody set us up the bomb!" idea.

 

It would be interesting if in MEA, instead of having the "save/destroy" options for a species, you were given the choice of how to handle a problem in the above manner: genophage, bomb, puppet-government, minefield - and each had a resulting consequences.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Still, that's a bit like saying "If you already know all the problems on the test, you're guaranteed to get an A".

But if it's your moral system, that should always be true.

Unless you're a moral realist, but moral realism is stupid.

One of the (many) benefits of gaming is the ability to test our own moral scenarios through a less abstract thought experiment, at least to some extent. If somebody subscribes to a less than tenable moral system, the game might bring that out by placing them in a complicated position.

In short: the very point of thought experiments (and hypothetical gaming dilemmas) is to test our moral positions in some simulation.

I actually agree with that. The complex simulation of a game allows us to test a variety of moral positions (and other relevant aspects of a mental state) in combination to see where they lead.

I'm saying that each individual decision, though, should be simple and easy. I can't even imagine what a difficult scenario would be without assuming an incoherent moral system.

[Giantdeathrobot]

Where is that statistic from? The only information about viable brithrates that we are ever given about the Genophage is that it lowered Krogan rates down to pre-industrial levels. I highly doubt that the Krogan had a birthrate of 1% back then.

 

If I am not mistaken, the chances of survival to adulthood in pre-industrial level was stated to be something like 1 in 1000. I think Mordin says so in ME2. I don't have ME2 on this computer so I can't check, but even if the number is wrong, the point is the vast majority of Krogan children are stillborn or barely gets past the fetus stage, as a direct consequence of the Genophage. There is no possible way I can consider this moral by any means. If anyone attempted to impose this on a human population, I would accuse them of mass murder at best, genocide at worst.

 

And yes, even if the stated intent of the genophage isn't genocide but "population control", you can't just say (for instance) "we want 99% less Krogan, so we're gonna make 99% of them stillborn, problem solved". There are huge consequences to having a species hit by such a massively dramatic change. ME3 demonstrates this clearly. The Krogans are dying as a race. Slowly, because they live for very long periods and are ungoldly hard to kill, but still. And if the race dos die out, even if thousands of years after the Genophage, it would absolutely have been a genocide far worse than anything humanity has done.

 

And while, yes, the Krogan did make their bed to a degree, they were still pressed into action against the Rachni by the rest of the galaxy, who did not (apparently) have the foresight to devise containment methods. Because, what with their violent tendencies and explosive breeding, I think the Krogan do need containment. Morally, however, having a strong yet tractable leader that can keep them in check is a much better way than the Genophage.

[Sylvius the Mad]

In general, it's not feasible to know all of the logical implications of one's beliefs on any subject, let alone moral beliefs.

You don't need to know the implications in advance. You just need to know the principles you're following. You can work out the right course of action moment by moment based on the information available at the time. And if the information in combination with the principles doesn't point to an answer, then this question has no moral relevance to you.

After all, if you can't point to the rules that make a moral judgment so, how could you know that it was?

For example, I believe that Oslo is the capital of Norway. One of the logical implications of this belief is the following proposition:

If Oslo is the capital of Norway if and only if Gothenburg is a city in Sweden and Oslo is not the capital of Norway, then Gothenburg is not a city in Sweden.

The above proposition is a tautology; it's of the form [p <=> (q & ~p)] => ~q. Thus, every proposition entails this one. Is there any practical possibility that most people who believe Oslo is the capital of Norway will know this? Probably not. If one had to know all of the logical implications of one's beliefs before holding the belief, then one simply couldn't hold any beliefs at all.

Not all knowledge is occurent knowledge.

Also, to "know" that, the person in question would need to know the rules of deduction that make that conclusion so, and would need to believe them to be true.

[Fallen_silver]

Moral choice is core and basic use in many of Bioware games but in of their game only a few of them did it right. For example in ME:2 your had the interrupt which to some degree it worked but at the same time it didn't. What they could change about them is make them a percentage chance of it working based off your Karma rating. Also, your karma choices should effect your crew view of you and not just to have them question it once. It also should be noted that we should have access to karma options no matter your rating so you can be a space nice guy but be aginst aliens.   

[Jorji Costava]

You don't need to know the implications in advance. You just need to know the principles you're following. You can work out the right course of action moment by moment based on the information available at the time. And if the information in combination with the principles doesn't point to an answer, then this question has no moral relevance to you.

After all, if you can't point to the rules that make a moral judgment so, how could you know that it was?

I'm skeptical that any system of principles can satisfy these constraints. Consider the classic example of Sophie's Choice: A soldier asks you which of your children will live or die; if you don't choose, both die. Assuming that you love both children equally, your moral principles, whatever they are, will likely not dictate a unique answer to this awful question.

Such a dilemma can arise even in nonmoral contexts. For instance, you might be deliberating about whether or not to see Beethoven or Shakespeare. Must a rational person be expected to have some objective function that will yield a definite answer in this case? Such a demand seems unreasonable.
 

Also, to "know" that, the person in question would need to know the rules of deduction that make that conclusion so, and would need to believe them to be true.

What is the reference of "that?" Is it to "Oslo is the capital of Norway," or the ugly tautology I mentioned in the previous post? Entailment relations are logical relations; they hold whether or not I'm aware or believe that they do.

[Giantdeathrobot]

Not so fast. The Geth obviously have preferences, goals and desires; they obviously have some kind of plan with that Dyson sphere thingy, they have enough creativity to invent technologies that everyone else wants to use (like thermal clips), enough intelligence to judge that our form of social organization is decidedly lacking, and some of them even seem to exhibit some kind of religious devotion (see ME1). From a preference utilitarian point of view, that's more than enough to get counted in the moral calculus. From a Kantian point of view, they seem to be able to represent and deliberate about their reasons for action as well as any of us, which makes them rational, which means they can't be treated as mere means. Your toaster, by contrast, can't do any of these things.

 

Yeah, I never got the "Geth are toasters"arguments at all. Because they are synthetic and that's that? This is very poor reasoning if you ask me. Might as well say that humans are animals because they have fleshy bits and irrational, emotion-prone brains that causes them to sometimes behave illogically. We humans have much more in common with chimps or pigs than Geth have in common with, well, any modern man-made machine, including "AIs" like Deep Blue.

 

To me, Legion in ME2 demonstratively proved that Geth are sentient and shouldn't be treated as disposable tools just because they are made of metal. And it sure as hell isn't the self-justificative arguments of Xen or Gerrel that convinced me otherwise.

[Sylvius the Mad]

I'm skeptical that any system of principles can satisfy these constraints. Consider the classic example of Sophie's Choice: A soldier asks you which of your children will live or die; if you don't choose, both die. Assuming that you love both children equally, your moral principles, whatever they are, will likely not dictate a unique answer to this awful question.

You are not Buriden's Ass.  You can choose between two equally appealing options.  Sophie's has no reason to prefer one over the other, therefore either option is equally acceptable.  If she doesn't want to make the selection herself, she could randomize it.  Mixed strategies!

Such a dilemma can arise even in nonmoral contexts. For instance, you might be deliberating about whether or not to see Beethoven or Shakespeare. Must a rational person be expected to have some objective function that will yield a definite answer in this case? Such a demand seems unreasonable.

I disagree.  Though the definite answer could be indifference.

 

Ambivalence can only arise if you're not aware of your own preferences. 

What is the reference of "that?" Is it to "Oslo is the capital of Norway," or the ugly tautology I mentioned in the previous post?

The ugly tautology.

Entailment relations are logical relations; they hold whether or not I'm aware or believe that they do.

Things can be true without you knowing that they are true.  We weren't discussing whether the logical implications of knowledge were true.  We were discussing whether the logical implications of knowledge were known.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Depending on the age of the kid and circumstance, I'm willing to bet there would be more than a few people willing to dispute that.

If you give a monkey a gun, it's not the monkey's fault when he starts shooting people.

 

And by monkey I mean literal monkey.  Before anyone jumps to any conclusions there.  I needed a non-human animal with fingers.

[Sylvius the Mad]

Well the Geth are a species and killing them off is genocide. But I guess it depends where your morals stand in terms of being sentient.

Using sapience as a standard rather than sentience (I've always thought sapience makes a lot more sense), this becomes even more difficult.

 

Because the Geth are clearly sapient.

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

Yeah, I never got the "Geth are toasters"arguments at all. Because they are synthetic and that's that? This is very poor reasoning if you ask me. Might as well say that humans are animals because they have fleshy bits and irrational, emotion-prone brains that causes them to sometimes behave illogically. We humans have much more in common with chimps or pigs than Geth have in common with, well, any modern man-made machine, including "AIs" like Deep Blue.

 

To me, Legion in ME2 demonstratively proved that Geth are sentient and shouldn't be treated as disposable tools just because they are made of metal. And it sure as hell isn't the self-justificative arguments of Xen or Gerrel that convinced me otherwise.

 

When you arrive in the Tikkun System, the Geth are clearly sapient and sentient. However, while you are there things change.

 

You were doing the fighter base mission and other missions you were shutting down Geth servers. When you did that you made them less intelligent. When you destroyed the reaper on Rannoch, you destroyed that which was giving the remaining Geth the ability to organize without the servers. The Geth fleet up in space essentially became.... semi-intelligent toasters.... And when you had shut down the servers, they had nowhere to download their programs. The remaining Geth would have probably failed the Turing Test at this point. Legion still had remnants of code from the "old machines."

 

At this point it was over. The Quarians had won.... unless you allowed Legion or Not Legion to upload the reaper code and make the space junk intelligent again.

 

The moral dilemma was choosing lettiing Legion create a new race of AI synthetics that were not Geth and were capable of wiping out the Quarians and would do so, or not allowing Legion to do that and letting the Quarians destroy what was now essentially space junk, or allow Legion to create the new race use the Red/Blue "I win" button.

[Draining Dragon]

So I poke my head in here, and it seems Sylvius is busy going Rambo on the other posters.

Good man. I'll need to read through this thread when I have a moment.

In response to the OP, I think moral dilemma is a good thing in an RPG. Placing pragmatism and compassion in opposition makes for interesting decision-making and doesn't pigeonhole the player into choosing one. In ME3, you could either be Good Guy Greg or an insane troll who kills people for keks. That's boring.

[Quarian Master Race]

Not so fast. The Geth obviously have preferences, goals and desires; they obviously have some kind of plan with that Dyson sphere thingy, they have enough creativity to invent technologies that everyone else wants to use (like thermal clips), enough intelligence to judge that our form of social organization is decidedly lacking, and some of them even seem to exhibit some kind of religious devotion (see ME1). From a preference utilitarian point of view, that's more than enough to get counted in the moral calculus. From a Kantian point of view, they seem to be able to represent and deliberate about their reasons for action as well as any of us, which makes them rational, which means they can't be treated as mere means. Your toaster, by contrast, can't do any of these things.

Good thing preference utilitarianism is an oxymoron composed of trying to Frankenstein modern liberal garbage with actual utilitarianism undeserving of the name, and is fundamentally flawed in presupposing there is some objective basis of resolving a conflict between two subjective preferences,  Where did I mention Kant? Denotological systems based on arbitrary rules like the categorical imperative and some equally subjective inherent value of "rationality" have nothing to do with hedonism or utilitarianism.

 

Preferences and goals can be programmed into even basic modern AI's, such as having an enemy husk prioritize the closest target in ME3. Analyzing a simple data set and coming to the obvious conclusion that more firepower= greater chance of success has nothing to do with experiencing qualia. I don't know what you are referring to with the geth pointing out "flaws" but the "religious devotion" you mention was the result of a rounding error, not conscious experience. None of that entails sentience. Your claim that they "obviously" experience "desire" is also wrong. In psychology a desire is a response to bodily functions(i.e craving food when hungry) of which reward in the form of physical pleasure or mitigation of suffering is a key component, and requires sentience. A nonsentient machine doesn't just magically grow the structures necessary for achieving these sorts of things via (implied) writer fiat and bad metaphor. 

 

If it can't experience pleasure or pain it is outside the moral calculus in the same way as any other technology is. Its complexity, processing power and ability to employ mathematical logic or "rationality" is irrelevant. Nothing the writers did provided support for the idea that their pinnochios were sentient, apart from them incorrectly throwing that word around interchangeably with sapience in pursuit of the tired robots=  people message like a lot of bad scifi.

[Midnight Bliss]

Nope. You can't really be evil in Mass Effect, just a massive jerk. My point is the system just really has no place in Mass Effect anyway. I'd rather have more nuanced options in DAI where results aren't immediate and it's not certain what the outcome will actually be. Not that the dialogue in this game needs to emulate life completely, but we never know exactly how things will turn out. It would be nice to have some unpredictability in Mass Effect Andromeda dialogue.

I like surprise fallout from seemingly innocuous decisions.

 

Keeps you on your toes -

[Quarian Master Race]

Yeah, I never got the "Geth are toasters"arguments at all. Because they are synthetic and that's that? This is very poor reasoning if you ask me. Might as well say that humans are animals because they have fleshy bits and irrational, emotion-prone brains that causes them to sometimes behave illogically. We humans have much more in common with chimps or pigs than Geth have in common with, well, any modern man-made machine, including "AIs" like Deep Blue.

 

To me, Legion in ME2 demonstratively proved that Geth are sentient and shouldn't be treated as disposable tools just because they are made of metal. And it sure as hell isn't the self-justificative arguments of Xen or Gerrel that convinced me otherwise.

......but humans are animals with fleshy bits and irrational emotion prone brains..... That in no way makes them unworthy of moral consideration, quite the opposite in fact. I don't know where you're going with this logic. Actually I do, you're going in the direction of the same bad false equivalence used by the writers of it can talk= it's a people.

 

ME2 Legion in no way demonstrated such. If anything it demonstrated the opposite. Sentience is the ability to experience qualia, manifest in emotions and desires. Set a geth on fire, it feels no pain. Hold a gun to its head, it experiences no fear. Similarly, it experiences no pleasure, not even intellectual ones, which is why the geth lack any sort of cultural achievement despite 3 centuries of unrestricted access to sapience. It isn't sentient. One can do no right or wrong to an inanimate object which cannot experience positive and negative feelings. It deserves less moral consideration than a dog, which can experience those things.

[Giantdeathrobot]

When you arrive in the Tikkun System, the Geth are clearly sapient and sentient. However, while you are there things change.

 

You were doing the fighter base mission and other missions you were shutting down Geth servers. When you did that you made them less intelligent. When you destroyed the reaper on Rannoch, you destroyed that which was giving the remaining Geth the ability to organize without the servers. The Geth fleet up in space essentially became.... semi-intelligent toasters.... And when you had shut down the servers, they had nowhere to download their programs. The remaining Geth would have probably failed the Turing Test at this point. Legion still had remnants of code from the "old machines."

 

At this point it was over. The Quarians had won.... unless you allowed Legion or Not Legion to upload the reaper code and make the space junk intelligent again.

 

The moral dilemma was choosing lettiing Legion create a new race of AI synthetics that were not Geth and were capable of wiping out the Quarians and would do so, or not allowing Legion to do that and letting the Quarians destroy what was now essentially space junk, or allow Legion to create the new race use the Red/Blue "I win" button.

 

That's after Shepard and the Quarians start destroying their AI infrastructure and severely distrupting the collective link that forms much of the basis of their species. Not too different from, say, if a race of aliens attacked Earth, making our nice and orderly societies collapse into civil disorder, and heck throw in some alien gas that makes our poor nervous system break down and render us all meek and apathic or something.

 

Would we not be humans after this fact? If someone tried to reverse the effect of the gas and side effects included higher perception and intelligence for all mankind, would this make us "not humans" anymore?

 

I'm trying to wrap my head around the concept that because they don't work exactly like us, they are space junk. And I find precious little validity in it. I know Legion himself said that to judge other species exactly like our own in all respects is potentially racist, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't advocating that we consider entire species like objects because of what I see as largely technical differences that mostly serve to justify a belligerent narrative. Ants don't work like us at all, yet I see no one saying that aren't "alive" because of it and that killing all ants is thus acceptable (albeit we admitedly don't mind massacring them either, I suppose). And I'll presume that it is because, unlike the Geth, no one has any interest in killing all ants.

 

@Master Race: No, I'm using the logic that if it can move on its own (obvious), have its own thoughts (Legion clearly expresses them, and Geth processes can achieve a collective consensus so thought is clearly implied) and ideas (The Geth have invented since the war, heck their inventions are good enough the rest of the galaxy has started using some of them, and they were in the process of building a Dyson Sphere), it is sapient at the very least, and very probably sentient. English is not my first language so I can't match many people in scientific-sounding mumbo-jumbo, but it is how I see it. After that, obviously physical and technical distinctions exist, but that's not too different from, say, Elcor being very different from humans in several ways.

 

Your differences seem arbitrary as hell to me, not to mention questionable. Because they can't feel pain? Yet Legion has cries of "pain" when shot at in ME2 and enemy Geth emit a sound when they die, which can imply they actually can; and if I am mistaken and this remains a serious critera, well, slap some pain receptors on them and call it a day. I'm not sure why they would even need pain reception anyway, they are highly sophisticated machines that don't need such arguably crude methods to understand that their integrity is in danger, unlike creatures of flesh for whom pain is a survival mechanism. 

 

No emotion? Yet Legion exhibits many of them in ME2, it even shows up thanks to the "flaps" on his head. Most tellingly, he is visibly pissed off (and probably very fearful too) at Shepard if they choose to stop the upload and tries their best to stop them, so obviously it views Shepard's actions as a clear negative. The Geth Prime in turn "regrets" the death of the Creators if you kill the Quarians, and Legion states that they stopped themselves from exterminating the fleeing Quarians because they weren't ready to deal with the implications of such an act, which indicates they can doubt.

 

No art? Maybe not as we understand it, no, but they are capable of design (their weapons, space station, different body types suited for various applications, the Dyson Sphere) and they are capable of worship; that the underlying explanation is a math error is not anymore shocking to my eyes than if we found tomorrow that humans who believe in higher powers have X region of their cerebral cortex more developped than another or something along those lines. Maybe they simply see no value in art, being too utilitarian for that. That sounds more like a specie's quirk and not an indication that I can treat them like my oven despite the many obvious differences.

[sH0tgUn jUliA]

That's after Shepard and the Quarians start destroying their AI infrastructure and severely distrupting the collective link that forms much of the basis of their species. Not too different from, say, if a race of aliens attacked Earth, making our nice and orderly societies collapse into civil disorder, and heck throw in some alien gas that makes our poor nervous system break down and render us all meek and apathic or something.

 

Would we not be humans after this fact? If someone tried to reverse the effect of the gas and side effects included higher perception and intelligence for all mankind, would this make us "not humans" anymore?

 

I'm trying to wrap my head around the concept that because they don't work exactly like us, they are space junk. And I find precious little validity in it. I know Legion himself said that to judge other species exactly like our own in all respects is potentially racist, but I'm pretty sure he wasn't advocating that we consider entire species like objects because of what I see as largely technical differences that mostly serve to justify a belligerent narrative. Ants don't work like us at all, yet I see no one saying that aren't "alive" because of it and that killing all ants is thus acceptable (albeit we admitedly don't mind massacring them either, I suppose). And I'll presume that it is because, unlike the Geth, no one has any interest in killing all ants.

 

Yes, it was a belligerent narrative in favor of the Geth. The narrative in the game was very pro-Geth. 34% of people chose the Geth. 29% chose the Quarians. 37% made peace. Even the choices were worded: "Let the Geth Die" in the Renegade position; "Upload the Code" in the Paragon position; unless you had the Red/Blue "I win" choices. Don't those choices tell you the writer's agenda?

 

IMO they should have been right and left: 1) Support the Quarians; 2) Support the Geth.