Is using a machine to make people good and compassionate against their will evil?

An addendum to this: if it's just influencing their actions rather than making them want and decide things differently it shifts over to evil a good deal. Identify death and permanent mind domination probably pings poorly.

>Brainwash everyone
>Everyone is good, compassionate, willingly gives to their community, worships a good God, doesn't question properly ordained moral and governmental authority
>Everyone is pious, gentle, happy, and communal. Crime and unemployment no longer exist.
>On the other hand, hobbies, non-religious music and art, and other self-expression and individuality is now gone
Is this a world you would want to exist in?

I guarantee that guy doesn't define 'good' the way normal people do. Just look at his eyes.

>On the other hand, hobbies, non-religious music and art, and other self-expression and individuality is now gone
Why would that be the case?
I don't think that music, art, other acts of self-expression are inherently evil.

Yes.

Yes, stripping creatures of free will is evil.

Yes.
Also yes.

Would a villain you're going to have to kill(due to how dangerous or irredeemable they are. Literally made out of evil) for the sake of your people bad?

If not, than how would this machine be evil because of it restricting behaviors instead of having to kill said villain?

Sounds good to me.
Individuality is overrated.

>Muddy grey morality

Yep.

This

If people have individuality, they have opinions. And opinions lead to questioning our flawless and moral government, which leads to Evil. Better to cut it out at the root and make sure to pre emptively prevent the wandering hand that leads to evil.

>Is taxation enforced with a monopoly on legitimate violence evil if the funds are used for public hospitals and other social services?

Shoo. Back to the Gulch with you.

You realize what you are advocating for right?

Free will is the greatest good, so this machine is the greatest of evils.

Just use your head to decide right from wrong, same as you do every day in the real world. You don't need a roleplaying game to dictate these things to you.

Only if you are color blind. More like miriads of moral systems on a multi-dimensiomal spectrum.

Our government is obviously moral and good and just, since it is staffed by people brainwashed to be good and just. Disagreeing with our government is therefore to disagree with justice and good and is therefore Evil. We want to prevent Evil. Therefore, we must prevent anyone from disagreeing with our government, by force and brainwashing if need be, to maximize the amount of Good in the world. Our society is perfect, citizen. Unhappiness is a sign of an evil heart. Good people are happy.

Morality is extremely simple.

It’s utilitarianism but with freedom as the utility.

Kill a mass murder who removes people’s freedom = good
Build a well so people can do other things than worry about water = good.

Happiness is a chemical, freedom is not.

Freedom is worth far more than happiness and this system neglects that.

If they're criminals, it's as evil as sequestrating them or killing them.

Yeah but individuality isn’t the root of all people, it’s in human nature itself.

The only solution is a global suicide pact

Sounds like its time to define Good and Evil for the machine to adjust for.

No, the obviously correct solution is to place all minds into a Dyson sphere and let them do whatever they want in VR.

This is actually a fairly good analogy.
>We feel that you're not doing enough for the poor.
>We're going to take your money and give it to them via food and housing programs.

You talking about a magical creature made out of pure evil? Well obviously it isn't a sentient creature, but already a magical robot so yeah changing its will is fine. Though it might be an overall safer call just to kill it.

>Be Lawful evil Warlock
>Find a way to make my patorn Chaotic evil Lawful Good
>Proceed with the plan
>He screams against it and swears revenge
>mfw

"Well demon you made a deal with the devil and you lost hahahahahha"

What?

I think he's saying death and imprisonment also remove free will.

Is he that retarded to equate killing someone / imprisoning them to mind control?

At least you know you are in a bad spot with those.

If you are brainwashed imprisionment is a joy. Which is 1000% times worse.

Following your programming without any capability of free will is not good or evil.

It just makes you a machine.

...

I could see death being roughly equal to mind rape.

Imprisonment generally less so, unless it's oubliette tier. Imprisonment as a punishment is usually temporary.

>I could see death being roughly equal to mind rape.

Who cares?

I do as I would rather not be killed or mindraped, thank you very much.

Yeah, they are awful. What is there to gain from ranking them?

If mind rape is worse then death, then people might see death as a suitable punishment for a crime, but not mind rape. Or vice versa.

Too bad, you're Evil and oppose the government, so we will take you in, teach you the errors of your ways, break your evil, sinful will, and make you a loyal God-loving citizen who would never commit Evil. God loves you, Citizen. Don't you love God back?

No. Turning bad people into good is a boom to the world and for them.

The problem however is determining that good really is good, but in a setting where good is objective there's no such problem.

You fucked up, you commited a crime, we don't care about how evil you think your punishement is.
Don't want to be turned into a mind raped citizen who can't do evil? Then don't do evil in the first place.
It's the same justification for imprisonment or the death row.

the road to hell is paved with good intentions

...so?

What are you even rambling about?

If you stop to think, it's just more useful:
> Kill criminal and nothing happens. Damage he caused still remains.
> Imprison criminal, he constantly eat resources. He may change and become a productive member of society or keep leeching and hurting it.
> Brainwash criminal, he instantly start working to fix his damages. No additional resources needed.
Of course that wouldn't fix the emotional damage of his actions, but he would work to compensate the finantial damages he caused.

>implying these threads don't work only because everyone defines Good and Evil personally and without consultation, and then argues from that platform without discussing the fundamentals

What kind of Mongolian barbeque internet forum do you think you're on?

I'm pretty sure if "Everyone is pious, gentle, happy, and communal", then they would be less likely to put absolute authority in a religion or deity for how they go about living. They would be less strict about such things, more understanding of differences, less insistent on conformity, though conformity of some kinds would still happen among those who seek it.

While pain and suffering can encourage the creation of beautiful and meaningful art, it's when people have time, energy, and freedom to devote to such things that they come about, and when they share it with each other it multiplies the quality, variety, and abundance of art. The internet has shown that much.

Such a change in people would drive society into a hard left and because they aren't competing except in friendly games, and everyone is looking out for and caring for each other, they would push for a socialist society. Whatever government exists will be very much for the people, but the people would be for it as well.

Better question:
could this machine be used in a complicated scheme to manipulate the soul market by artificially inflating the value of low-value souls?
Note that this may lead to a sub-prime soul lone bubble but if you plan for it you can probably turn that to your advantage too.

>Sub prime soul bubble
>Bankrupt Hell by artificially inflating the value of low-value souls and encouraging risky soul contracts by distributing risk until the system collapses in on itself and ruins Hellish economics
Get this man a Bishophric.

Even further you could purposefully devalue souls with investments in vices and brothels and "entertainers" with succubuses and incubuses. While you're at it you might as well gain an extra revenue stream by abusing methods for harvesting liquid pain and whatever the opposite thing from pleasure is called, pleasure/pain can also be converted through spells.

>Freedom is worth far more than happiness
You must be American.

The problem with this plan is that you can't print more souls (or you could, but the process is 9 months + however many years it takes for a soul to properly become 'low-value'). If the Devil is a savvy businessman, he can trim his sails and wait you out, while making a killing when the soul economy rebounds and he gained a huge precentage of the souls for a fraction of the cost.

No, there is an entire paladin archetype where they place Geases on monsters to force them to be good.

>make people good and compassionate
not
>make people do good and compassionate things
It doesn't remove their choices, it just changes what choices they're inclined to make.

I'd say that's a semantic difference. You are taking away their choice about whether or not to be good and compassionate, and in a way that is different from the normal pressures society places on people to act a certain way. They cannot choose to not do good and compassionate things, because you have prevented them from choosing to not be good and compassionate.

which opens up the whole can of worms about whether you can be good if you have no choice to be evil, and that's a thing

pic unrelated

>They cannot choose to not do good and compassionate things, because you have prevented them from choosing to not be good and compassionate.
They are perfectly capable of choosing to be evil, but why would they, they're good and compassionate.

Which is more or less my point. They no longer have agency. It's like putting someone in jail and saying they have freedom of movement.

Except it's not? Their range of choices doesn't get changed, only which ones they are inclined to select.

There's no point to being good if there's no choice

...

You're saying 'inclined' but they have no evil inclinations. It's not "the machine makes people more good and more compassionate than they would be otherwise." The Machine makes them "good and compassionate against their will".

They have no inclinations to anything but Good and Compassionate responses. They have no choice to not be Good and Compassionate, because that is what has replaced their other impulses. They are, fundamentally, Good and Compassionate. They lose options because they can no longer comprehend or act on them, because those actions are not Good and Compassionate. They chose not to use the machine (note the "against their will" clause), and you overwrote that choice and put them in a position where they could no longer make similar choices.

is cutting off someone's feet (against their will) and grafting on a skateboard to the stumps so they are forced to only where they can roll evil?

Nothing in OP's one sentence blurb says they are incapable of evil. The only thing done against their will is having the machine used on them to make them good and compassionate, after that they are free to do as they will. It's just that in a surprise twist, being a good and compassionate person means you're likely to do good and compassionate things.

People have a right to be miserable

What if it's a chemist that makes a drug that will make you into a good person, but will also eventually kill you if you take it for too long? Is it good to give it to people who ask for it? Is it evil to cut them off later?

>Nothing in OP's one sentence blurb says they are incapable of evil

Except the bit where it says that they are made good. Good people do not do evil things. By making someone good against their will, you intrinsically remove their choice to be evil. Q.E.D.

That's exactly why I explained the difference between a machine that makes you more X, and a machine that makes you X. If you are more X, there exists the possibility that you still contain the antithetical Y. If you are X, by definition you cannot be Y. You are not more likely to do good, you will do good because you are now good.

They are not free to do as they will, they are free to do whatever remains within the limited structure of choices that has been forced upon them.

It's not taking a scalpel to your brain, user. Maybe you can turn evil again with enough effort, but the machine makes you less likely to want to. Is that really a bad thing? Do you think you'd hate what was done to you, after seeing how easily being GOOD comes to you afterwards?

>Good people do not do evil things.
Good people are not physically incapable of evil. They just don't do it because they aren't evil. This should not be something we need to explain.

>It's not taking a scalpel to your brain

Is it not? The specifics of the machine are not discussed. Would you feel differently if, instead of a wizard waving a magic stick when people said no, they were dragged off to a laboratory and subjected to hours of surgery and drug treatment to make them good and compassionate?

As well, whether you can turn back to being normal or not, or whether or not the new mind in your body disagrees with it's situation, is a different discussion entirely.

Thus the X and Y explanation. You are being made good and compassionate against your will, full stop. You're not being made into a good person, someone with a lot of admirable qualities who sometimes does shitty things to people because they are tired, or annoyed, or just don't like the fellow.

OP's entire hypothetical is about mind control that makes a person good and compassionate. If you become Good and Compassionate, then you will not act in a non-Good and non-Compassionate manner. You are not human, with human frailties and variance of character. You are Good and Compassionate.

Where does it say that it's ongoing mind control? you are reading things into this hypothetical that aren't there.

I'm using the term 'make' the way normal humans do, it means that something is done. I'm not reading the hypothetical to say, "it makes you good and compassionate, but only for one second and then you decide, 'nah, I'm fine' and you go back the way you were."

I'm not opposed to opening up a second discussion about whether or not you maintain the mental autonomy to decide to be evil, though, but it is a second discussion separate from but related to the morals of using the machine in the first place. If you want to throw that clause in there, go ahead.

D&D's Helm of Opposite Alignment isn't an ongoing magical compulsion, it is just a one-time 'congrats, your alignment got flipped'. This machine sounds like a version of that that is keyed to a specific alignment rather than the opposite of your current.

>Is using a machine to make people good and compassionate against their will evil?
It's an excellent way of showing that morality is bullshit and D&D alignments are double bullshit.

I'd need to reread the rules about it, but I'm pretty sure it happens instantaneously, but it's not a case where you can immediately return to your own alignment with a moment's willpower.

And that's the thing about it sticking. points out the brainwashing effect. You are now good, why would ever want to be or do evil? It doesn't need to constantly be overwriting you, because it overwrote you once and did so quite thoroughly.

I didn't point out any kind of brainwashing. I pointed out that being good is a rewarding thing, and once you're changed so that it's something inherent to you, something that comes easy, you wouldn't want to change back, not because you'd be morally against turning evil but because good is demonstrably better for you and everyone else, and you now care about that.

>good is demonstrably better for you and everyone else

Good and compassionate, user. Both hand in hand, and you can't say that it's always better for you to be both. Selfishness is a trait people have for a reason, and it feeds a lot of other things (like ambition) that can be better for you (at least materially and in terms of personal satisfaction on this earth) than altruism.

You do know that the yin-yang represents the balance of good and evil, right? Both must exist for the sacred balance to be upheld.

>people good and compassionate against their will evil?

You have that now, it leads to apathy. There is a different cause every day that people champion, talk about, debate, call for action, etc. But at the end of the day, nothing happens and the cause they so passionately, albeit briefly, championed is no further forward.

You do know that the taijitu isn't just a grey blob, right?

Yes, without question at least to me. Part of what makes good good and evil evil to me is the choice involved. If you remove someone's choice to be good or evil they can be neither, they're just a moral robot who is no longer capable of making any decision either way. To me anything done by such a person would have zero moral value, in the same way that if you force someone to donate to charity at gunpoint they aren't really acting on any good moral impulse or with a spirit of charity to their fellow man, they're just trying to save themselves from being shot.

The only action being taken is the immoral action of coercion.
>Not having solid goods and evils with plenty of grays in-between.
Brainlet.

Taking away a person's free will via magic or brainwashing or whatever else is inherently evil. That said, convincing them to your side is not inherently evil. That's literally just them deciding to join you based on non-magical words that you exchange with them. I'm not comically retarded enough to consider having an argument or conversation with someone in which you convince them of something to be authoritarian. If the machine itself puts them into a trance in which time feels very slow to them and some sort of magical debate spirit of a certain alignment argues with them until they either win or it becomes apparent that their differing opinions are based on a deep philosophical disagreement and they cannot be convinced, then it is perfectly fine.

>Part of what makes good good and evil evil to me is the choice involved. If you remove someone's choice to be good or evil they can be neither, they're just a moral robot who is no longer capable of making any decision either way. To me anything done by such a person would have zero moral value, in the same way that if you force someone to donate to charity at gunpoint they aren't really acting on any good moral impulse or with a spirit of charity to their fellow man, they're just trying to save themselves from being shot.
Ok, now what if you aren't actively removing their ability to choose, simply adjusting their moral compass such that they're more likely to choose one than the other?

That's a very fine line you're drawing. You're still still tampering with their free will, still disinclining them from choosing as they would wish. Using other user's earlier metaphor, you can always choose to take the bullet instead of giving to the charity, you're just never going to choose Option A.

No.

It is, however, the world that we deserve to live in. Society was a mistake.

>Ultraviolence is cool and good. Kill a buncha dudes, rape people, you'll grow out of it, boys will be boys!

Does proper education and childhood care count as "tampering with someone's free will"? Because people from broken families who don't get socialized properly tend to grow up to be fuck-ups.

Your individuality and free will are illusions shaped by your environment. Creating the kind of environment that doesn't make people dicks is cool and good.

Happiness is the one thing we value for its own sake. Freedom is worthless if we have nothing to do with it. It's like having endless possibilities, but all of them are only as good or worse than what you have now. Happiness is the one thing that can be said to be worth more than anything else in the world.

What a scathing indictment and skilful rebuttal.

Is killing a man using a machine to make people good and compassionate against their will evil?