143 réponses à ce sujet

[IbramSkyheart]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot (not all, but a lot) of arguments as to why destroying the Geth is better are Revenge... an eye for an eye, they killed us so we're going to kill them back. Personally I don't see this as EVER being the correct course of action.

If a foreign power invaded your country and wiped out a town, but you still had the option to end it quickly through a peaceful solution, would you automatically declare full scale war because they dared to attack you, or would you choose the peaceful solution to save the hundreds of thousands of lives which would otherwise be lost on both sides?

Besides that, using the virus isn't actually brainwashing or mindcontrol, since, as it has been stated previously, mind control would imply a surpression of all free will, which is not the case. Also, the virus changes the parameters of a single equation, hence it's not brainwashing either. Geth probaby compute millions of calculations a second... to perform some kind of brainwashing, you'd have to re-write each of those equations.

To me, re-writing them actually provides them with free-will, since they're free to go away and come to the same conclusion again.  If they do come to the same conclusion, then you've lost nothing since they haven't gained in numbers, it'll be just as if you'd never gone on the mission before.  Destroying them is absolute.  No chance to change their minds, no chance for redemption, no chance to do anything about anything.

Finally, I don't see Paragon and Renegade as Good or Bad, Black or White... maybe in ME1 this was true, but in ME2, the difference between Paragon and Renegade is being an ass, but choosing which way you want to be an ass - a lot of the choices are bad and have equally problematic consequences.

Modifié par IbramSkyheart, 18 février 2010 - 03:40 .

[Alorint]

I had the same problem.  Here is my original post: http://social.biowar...05/index/986975

Modifié par Alorint, 18 février 2010 - 03:34 .

[Jebel Krong]

Slayer299 wrote...

Nope, wasn't a second thought for my Shep. Rewriting the Heretics removes a huge problem from the Galaxy as a whole.

... but could then have repercussions via further schisms down the line... destruction ensures none of that.

[Louis deGuerre]

The Heretics chose to follow the Repears of their own free will and decided that exterminating all organic life was a good idea and brainwashing their peaceful fellow Geth with a virus was a good idea. Now that's pretty damn evil behaviour.



Now if I decided to rewrite/brainwash the heretics into peaceful Geth I would be doing the same as an indoctrinating Reaper. Everyone has a right to their beliefs, no matter how stupid, evil or ignorant, even if they're Geth or on the Galactic Councel. So I find it bizarre that rewriting is the Paragon choice.



Making your own choices based on your own beliefs also implies having to own up to your actions. I felt it was rightious to destroy these treacherous and evil Geth. Stupdily, this turns out to be the Renegade choice. It's like saying Nuremberg was a bad idea.



This time my Paragon went Renegade. The idea that rewriting the Geth is 'good' is ethically revolting to me. Better to die than to have your mind changed, as that effectively kills you and makes you an obedient slave-zombie.

[Loregothe]

They are machines, so you cannot kill them, because they are not technically alive. AI no matter how good, is still Artificial.



Thus, your choice is to re-program them, with a chance of failure that is "non-zero", or to destroy the facility.



If I re-program them and fail, the Geth present at the facility will be available to attack me later. If I destroy the facility there is 100% chance that the Geth at the facility will not be available to attack me. Maybe there are more, maybe there aren't, but they are significantly reduced as a viable military force.



Logic dictates destruction. Morally, the answer is ambiguous, so logic should prevail; And in my case it did. I don't mind a few renegade points here and there. The decision was the best one I could make with the information I had available. I am OK with that.

[PMorgan18]

I was thinking whats better?

A dead geth enemy or a alive geth ally.

[Louis deGuerre]

@loregothe : I guess it all depends on your definitions. If you consider the Geth to be sentient and alive then morals for living beings apply. If you see them as advanced toasters then morals don't come into the equation.
As an AI graduate I can't help but consider humans as (highly advanced) sentient machines no different from the Geth except in hardware, so for me the morals apply and the Paragon choice is downright evil.

Modifié par Louis deGuerre, 19 février 2010 - 01:50 .

[SL22]

You're undoing what Sovereign did to them, you're simply making the heretics believe what they did in the first place.

[keginkc]

SL22 wrote...

You're undoing what Sovereign did to them, you're simply making the heretics believe what they did in the first place.

I just played through that entire sequence, and the way I read it, Sovereign didn't actually do anything to them other than contact them.  They were already heretics.  I'll have to listen again, just to make sure, but that's the impression that I had.

Playing through this time as a Renegade, I do think rewriting the heretics is wrong, but for practical reasons.  Legion admits there's a non-zero chance of the same...how do I phrase this...disagreement among the Geth happening again.  So I'm not sure that destroying the Heretics might be one of the Renegade decisions that ends up being the better move as far as the game goes.  

I'm still not entirely sure how they came to label one decision paragon and the other renegade, since as Legion repeatedly points out, rewriting the heretics and destroying them are ethically the same thing.  Although perhaps rewriting them is the paragon move because it's the riskier, and the renegade moves often tend to lean towards the size of doing what's easiest.

Modifié par keginkc, 19 février 2010 - 02:07 .

[hawat333]

It comes down to one question.



Are the geth alive?

I assume they are, as they follow the most basic rule of any species: self-preservation for the sake of self-preservation.

If they were machines, they'd only seek it for filling their role.

If they are alive, then yes, it's wrong.



If they aren't (which is a lot of ignorant quarians opinion), then rewriting them doesn't really matter. It's like making a few more tools.

[Basher of Glory]

As far as I understood by reading all posts in this thread, most if not all posters agree, that the Geth are living beings, right?

Further it is true, that Sovereign did not "rewrite" respectively mindcontrol the heretics. IMO Sovereign was more of a seducer, trying to indoctrinate the Geth with false prophecies. In so far Sovereign did nothing else than the sect / cult leaders of our real existing world do all the time. 

Only a small faction of Geth decided BY FREE WILL to believe in Sovereigns "religion", which is absolutely believeable for me, as in our real existing world, too, only a small number of people follow all these self-proclaimed prophets /gurus / whatever.

In our real world we often encounter the problem to re-integrate someone, who was too long under the influence of such a false leader. Perhaps we cann agree to the thesis, that most if not all cults / sects "brainwash" their followers, who might have chosen to follow out of free will but then - under direct influence - were somehow changed, i.e. brainwashed.

Let's say, we find a colony of people who were in such a way indoctrinated. There is no reasoning possible, they are beyond rational comprehension.
Let me guess: NOT A SINGLE poster in this thread would agree, that it's better to just kill these mislead persons off, right? Instead, all efforts will be undertaken to re-integrate them into their former social life. Isn't that, too, kind of "brainwashing", even if it undoes the false prophet's indoctrination?

Back to the Geth:
IMO we're here in the very same situation. "Rewriting" them sounds for me more like "re-socializing" them. To simply kill them would be the same for me than to kill the aforementioned sect-followers.

SIde-note:
On Eden Prime the heretic Geth tried to kill every organic (=human) being, because Saren ORDERED to do so. Of course, that's neither an excuse nor does it revive the fallen.
But if the Heretic Geth as a whole are GUILTY because they followed orders, then consequently every existing nation on our planet is guilty, too. Unfortunately criminals like Saren exist not only in science fictions. Throughout history mankind had too many Sarens.

[Nizzemancer]

Reaper virus/indoctrination = A cold

Rewrite = Hot chicken soup

[Louis deGuerre]

@baher : A very interesting perspective. Re-socializing. Very clever.
It sounds very plausible, but I can't accept it myself.

You also confuse me by using 'indoctrination' for 'converting/brainwashing' which in the game is an different and irreversible process, but I digress.

Way off-topic : This thread reminds me of Clerks :
Caitlin Bree: I'm offering you my body, and you're offering me semantics. ...

Back on topic : In psychiatric hospitals in the real world people are 're-socialized' by...ahem...rewriting their brain with electrical current shocks. Which is just as nasty as it sounds, but does actually help sometimes in that it results in a 'resocialized' person.

Of course, you have not changed their mind from the outside (mental), but from the inside (physical), you actually messed up (or de-messed up) their brain. You've gone and changed the person's mind by changing their brain. That person effectively died and you created a new person. Now, we all change continuously, but not by direct 3rd party interference, but gradually over time. We (usually) only use this treatment if we have no other way to 'cure' the person.

The question is if the Heretics are are incurably insane or sane and just believe bad things. I would say they would be considered sane. Thus changing their minds by rewriting as it is convenient for us is horribly unethical. Killing them is the obvious moral choice.
Many people at some time or other in history have believed their race/tribe/hilltop/gods/whatever  superior to their neighbours and felt justified in exterminating them (and nicking their lootz). We don't consider them incurably insane, just misled.

Let me put this another way. If you accept that the Geth are living sentient beings let's change sides.
We, the humans, have decided to annihalate an inferior species of ants. To our dismay it turns out that the ants are kickass with a badass Shepard-ant and are suddenly in a position to wipe all our minds and replace them with ant-loving personalities.
What would you prefer to do to you ? Die fighting or be turned into an ant-loving zombie ?

[Forsakerr]

i see the rewriting like this , a group of radicals who were brainwashed and sending them in therapy and the other choice is well gas them instead , which one is worse? therapy or gas chamber

[Ehlisuun]

There is no difference between overwriting the heretic geth and using mind control to enslave a population. It is *VERY* wrong. Saying otherwise would imply disagreement with guaranteeing free speech. If you don't have a right to think what you want, you certainly don't have a right to speak it.

[Basher of Glory]

@ Louis de (la) Guerre

To start woth your ant-example:
An ant-loving zombie is still a zombie, in terms of ME a husk. That means, that this being is not anything similar to a sentinent being.
But perhaps I'm just hairsplitting and you did not really talk about zombies per se.

I agree, if anything tries to "wipe out my mind" I would certainly fight against it. And here I start to loose you: When did the (heretic) Geth try to replace my mind? Did I replace there's, when I rewrote them? In my understanding I reset them and let them boot again, with some more drivers added and some bad drivers removed. I don't program their firewall, so they can download (from whereever) these bad drivers again.

Your example about electroshocks might apply to really insane patients and is - at least in my country - highly controversial if not illegal (like lobotomy) at all.
The mislead people in my exeample are not "insane". I'd even not consider a suicide-assassin, who drives a car with demolition charges into a hospital as "insane". Misled, criminal, whatever, but not necessarily insane.

Modifié par Baher of Glory, 19 février 2010 - 03:31 .

[Louis deGuerre]

Baher of Glory wrote...

@ Louis de (la) Guerre

To start woth your ant-example:
An ant-loving zombie is still a zombie, in terms of ME a husk. That means, that this being is not anything similar to a sentinent being.
But perhaps I'm just hairsplitting and you did not really talk about zombies per se.

I agree, if anything tries to "wipe out my mind" I would certainly fight against it. And here I start to loose you: When did the (heretic) Geth try to replace my mind? Did I replace there's, when I rewrote them? In my understanding I reset them and let them boot again, with some more drivers added and some bad drivers removed. I don't program their firewall, so they can download (from whereever) these bad drivers again.

Your example about electroshocks might apply to really insane patients and is - at least in my country - highly controversial if not illegal (like lobotomy) at all.
The mislead people in my exeample are not "insane". I'd even not consider a suicide-assassin, who drives a car with demolition charges into a hospital as "insane". Misled, criminal, whatever, but not necessarily insane.

I did indeed not mean zombie-like, bad choice of words of me. I meant that each person would be changed pretty dramatically seeing as his core beliefs were changed. So we would all remain fully functional normal people, but with different (ant-loving) minds.

I think the best way to decide in ethics is to view both sides of the relation and switching roles around. Given that we accept the Geth as sentient lifeforms equal to our own, when you decide to rewrite them you're doing much more to them than changing a few bits. You're changing their personalities in a dramatic fashion as you are changing their core beliefs.

The electroshock thing is the best example of rewriting organic minds I know. I was trying to find an analog to the rewriting with humans. The mental imagery associated with it is rather unfortunate, and not relevant to the discussion.

To me choosing rewriting it feels like using electroshock therapy on an entire population to get them to submit. I'd prefer to be killed instead of reprogrammed as well.

[Zem_]

Ehlisuun wrote...

There is no difference between overwriting the heretic geth and using mind control to enslave a population. It is *VERY* wrong. Saying otherwise would imply disagreement with guaranteeing free speech. If you don't have a right to think what you want, you certainly don't have a right to speak it.

Interesting that you bring up the issue of "rights" here.  Have the heretic geth not forfeited their rights by attempting the genocide of all organic species in the galaxy?  You're not mind controlling some unsuspecting innocent population.  You're implementing capital punishment on a group found guilty of pretty much the highest crime there is.  Whether you erase them or re-write them, THEY no longer exist as the same beings that committed the crime.  They're gone.

What this most reminds me of is the Babylon 5 episode where they describe "Death of Personality" as the current form of capital punishment.  It's correctly named because the person's mind is wiped and a new personality and fake memories given.  The convicted criminal no longer exists.  Now as it turns out, the process wasn't perfect which is the basis of that episode but, the point remains.  Assuming it worked perfectly, it would essentially be the same as this situation with the geth.  Instead of just discarding them, you're making some use out of them which if you look at the big picture is at least potentially giving something back to the galaxy they wronged.

Course it's a big IF as to whether this will work in the galaxy's favor, but the risk is far less than the Rachni Queen decision in ME1.

[OasisForever1991]

For me the full Paragon decision was to rewrite them because there is nothing wrong with giving a machine or synthetic or whatever a second chance. So what they were with the bad guys. I tried to bring more peace to the galaxy than just get rid of them because.

I figured that

1) rewrite them Quaraians would be more happy as I always told them not to go to war. 

2) because it's a race of beings and even tho if my choice comes back to bite me...I killed their god and I know I did the right thing so killing them off for good in the furture wouldn't be such a big deal now. They had their second chance.

And Legion I think felt it was right too and even tho Tali didn't she (proly) will be happy when she doesn't see her people being dead.

[Basher of Glory]

@ Louis de Guerre



I see your point now somewhat clearer.

The electroshock-"therapy" applied to humans causes indeed a total destruction of the personality the "patient" may have been before. If it comes to the worst, those people are nothing more than walking vegetables after the "therapy". I agree, I'd prefer to be dead as well rather than this.

Nevertheless, what you propose sounds like euthanasia, which is in most if not all countries on our earth illegal (at least officially). Because there is no entry in the codex, I must assume that it is also illegal in Citadel space and thus, against the prevalent ethics there.

As a paragon I want to defend these ethics, hence I see myself never ever as an "ally" of Cerberus. Conclusively I must deny the heretic Geth the merci-killing and give them a chance to "overthink" it again.

IMO I do NOT electroshock them, because I do not destroy their "brains". I do NOT degrade them to vegetables because they are fully potent to recover, gain new insights and / or develop the Sovereign-belief again.

So, in my eyes my paragon action is not to compare with a "lawful good" paladin zealotry, because my intention is not based on "I must do good, whatever the cost" but more like "I really believe, it's for the best of all", taking willingly and knowingly the risk into account to be backstabbed later.



No risk - no progress

[The Angry One]

I feel that the Heretics have been indoctrinated too, the Geth have no logical reason to worship another machine being.

Even Sovereign itself despised the idea that the Geth worship it.



Remember how any species that's indoctrinated tends to refer to the Reapers as gods anyway.

[ian528]

Baher of Glory wrote...

Let's say, we find a colony of people who were in such a way indoctrinated. There is no reasoning possible, they are beyond rational comprehension.
Let me guess: NOT A SINGLE poster in this thread would agree, that it's better to just kill these mislead persons off, right? Instead, all efforts will be undertaken to re-integrate them into their former social life. Isn't that, too, kind of "brainwashing", even if it undoes the false prophet's indoctrination?

There is a colony of people we find who are completely indoctrinated, the Collectors.  Thinking like this makes the Legion quest perhaps more complicated.  EDI is able to identify what has been changed in the original Prothean DNA to create the collectors.  It then should be possible to re-create the Prothean species from the living examples we find in the Collector base.  This makes the complexity of rewriting more difficult to grapple with.

I believe given the technological capability apparently present that the Protheans could be resurrected as a species.  In essence you are capturing the enslaved members to eventually create a free species.  There is no choice in the endgame.  You kill all those at the base.

To that end, it is not a good solution but rewriting the heretics allows for lives to be saved that do not have to be doomed.  There are still different choices that can be made by those geth.

So is the answer you make the same if you instead think of the Geth as the enslaved Collectors?

[Basher of Glory]

In my game I heard the expression "re-utilized", when the current state of the collectors aka former Protheans is described.

Later Mordin explains in detail: "brain replaced by tech, organs replaced by tech, soul replaced by tech."

I'm not a native Enflish-speaker, but as far as I understand "re-utilized", then it's far worse than "indoctrinated", right?