Oh, they said to do it a certain way so it applied to every single person that was killed in their rushed massacre of tens of thousands of people. Riiiiiiight. "Make it quick and painless" is a nice movie trope to sterilize death. Unless you can find me the lore passage that then says "and so they went into the city and painlessly dispatched with a single blow every man, woman, and child as they slept with not a single one waking up or feeling a thing" it's just a line to make their actions more palatable at the time. There's no point in having a discussion about the morality of the scenario if you're going to essentially equate murdering civilians with stepping on ants. Why should I care about people becoming undead if I don't care about them being stabbed, slashed, and bludgeoned with weapons?
Id go as far to make the real life comparisons as
Culling of strat : i am legend beginning : covid
All three have their own take on how to deal with a spreading disease; the possibility of spread as the disease becomes worse (zombies are literally the worst outcome to a disease i can imagine) and given how i am legend plays out originating in a city, im sure if such were in the real world NYC would've been bombed before people started arguing for the possibility of technology curing people.
I don't think you know what most of those words mean otherwise you'd have recognized the irony before hitting "post".
Anyway, since it seems you're incapable of having a reasonable discussion I guess we can just say that in a makebelieve world where civilian casualties don't really matter if you say "quick painless death", then I can't say I'm at all bothered by letting them turn into undead ghouls either. Their pain is inconsequential one way or the other since they're nothing but a literary device to move main characters along a set story path.
It's not bending reality because we're not talking about reality. It's a fabricated scenario to make an atrocity seem rational. Arthas wasn't in the right because he wasn't written to be the rational good guy. There is no scenario where he decides to save some of the city and the rest turn and ravage the countryside because that's not what was written. No matter how reasonable he tries to make it sound, we're not supposed to support Arthas in his massacre of civilians.
The whole point of the discussion (which you can't seem to wrap your head around) was to explore whether a moral argument could be made, which is impossible to make if you want to adhere to the idea that civilian lives don't matter if you kill them with one hit.
If the ends justify the means, then we are all doomed. That was the problem. The endgame would have been the killing of them all for turning into the undead. By purging the city, he ensured there would be no (living) survivors, nobody could 'resist' the plague somehow, no 'miracles' could happen. He sealed their fates and took away whatever time they may have had left.
In no scenario would that have been okay.
"Torturing someone is not an evil thing to do if it is done for good reasons" by Varodoc
"You sit in OG/SW waiting on a Mythic+ queue" by Altmer <- Oh, the pearls in this forum...
"They sort of did this Dragonriding, which ushered in the Dracthyr race." by Teriz <- the BS some people reach for their narratives...
That poster has also been trying to rationalize it by turning it into an equation. No, they don't think civilian lives have much weight if they're killed under the guise of "quick and painless". It's meant to a be a textbook example of the best intentions being used to excuse the unforgivable. As soon as you start weighing lives and make unilateral decisions for how people SHOULD die, you've stopped thinking of them as people.
If you want to go by how it's presented in lore, it was the wrong move. Uther and Jaina made the right call, something backed up by other characters who were afforded more hindsight than those who were there.
If you want to try and frame it in a more real world sense as other posters have then it was still the wrong move, and would have been EVEN MORE horrible than the simplified way it's presented in the story.
Last edited by Adamas102; 2021-03-24 at 05:42 PM.
From our perspective not. he was not wrong. we saw the whole picture. The scourge etc. Yes they could have checked who was infected. But the change for a lot of them to be scourge to be was high. And if arthas could have fought them off. It would have been 2 late. Its like cutting of some good parts of your body to stop the gangreen from taking your whole body part.
Even in both the dungeon and wc3 its shown people are allready sick or becoming undead.
From their point of view ( uther etc). He could have waited and cured them. But they did not know how bad it could get.
My guess is this would have happend:
- if they waited: the whole city would have turned undead. and seeing as it was a large city. It would have broken out and turned into a big wave of undead.
- if they try to heal and check who was sick: people would have gone crazy in a panic. And the above would still happen.
It was a lose/lose situation every way you cut it.
But why was he wrong according to some players... simple horde need someone to blame in the alliance to be bad too.
He wasn't wrong. That doesn't mean he was right though. To quote paladins from DnD, you don't take the lesser evil (Happens in the Witcher too), so he wasn't really justified in killing so many people, from a moral standpoint even if in heartless calculations, it was the sensible thing to do.
It's an interesting dilemma because he wasn't wrong... but he was also very wrong.
I added a line right before you quoted me:
It's meant to a be a textbook example of the best intentions being used to excuse the unforgivable. As soon as you start weighing lives and make unilateral decisions for how people SHOULD die, you've stopped thinking of them as people.
It's an entirely selfish action to make that decision for someone else. But it makes for a great anti-villain motivation. They believe they're right, that there is no other way, and so they abuse their power and impose their will on their victims.
He should have locked the gates and let the grain-eating degenerates die off.
Nah. An analogy doesn't have to be on par. My analogy was referring to how you can't know someone ate the tainted grain, so you [insert action here]. Likewise, with a real-life pandemic in our world, we did the same: we locked down and implemented mask requirements, regardless of if you have or don't have it. Since covid doesn't turn you into the rabid undead, it's comparatively tame.
In the case of Stratholme, as I said more than once through the thread, Arthas had no choice but to slaughter the city. Those that were infected weren't just going to die, they were going to rise up and join the enemy. Every single person who died would be a potential enemy combatant they'd have to fight later, only much stronger than your average human, elf, gnome, or dwarf. Although he didn't know Mal'Ganis was going to show up to claim them, he knew that he had no way to fight this otherwise. There was no time for masks or for quarantines.
This is also similar to the Train Trolley question. To me, the right answer is the one that leads to the least suffering. Do you kill your friend (or the one person, depends on the version), or do you kill the five people on the other track? You kill your friend to save the five. Arthas was trying to kill the one (Stratholme) to save the five (everywhere else).
Would they die? They were undead as a result, and the scourge has shown a tendency not to just die off.