i maintain that evil does not exist.

what is evil? is killing evil? is killing someone who killed someone else evil? is killing someone who wants to die evil? 'evil' is that which hurts us, and it is mearly a tool to help us cope with our inability to control our surroundings. evil is an excuse, an explanation for why things went wrong. there is no evil in nature: lots of killing, stealing, [censored].. and none of it is evil, its all a fact of life.

was dagoth evil? certainly not. he was a power hungry, manipulative murder. and yet nerevar was the same, and your character also.

Helton: mind if i steal your metaphor next CHIM thread around?

Dagoth Ur is not evil, nor good. In my opinion, if any of the tribunal had been in his shoes, they would have done the same thing, or maybe even worse.

But either way, He got his ass handed to him on a silver platter by me and every one else in this forum.

Lawl. Seriously

Go for it but it's a pretty old idea. I don't know what the general consensus is now but for a long while it was that ES broke the fourth wall and a select few characters had an inkling that they were in a video game. Mine is only just slightly different from that.

You come accusing me of intellectual posing and you go right off the bat making a rather silly assumption. The person who I am refering to was Iosif Vissarionovich Jugashvili. But good job looking rather silly.

All the people in your head are still you so it is still your free will. Semantics isn't philosophy. Also the importance isn't the right to something but the form of the intent.

Ah, clearly a more relevant and less trite example.



This response doesn't really jive with what I've said. The issue in question is whether they have free will, whether they should have free will, and whether it is wrong to take it away from them. Not whether I do and, in response to that, my so called "free will" in this case would be token at best. I'm comatose. Not making a whole lot of decisions.



Dagoth Ur's intent, then? What do you think it was? And:



Which is it? Are we discussing the method, or the intent?

Flattery will get you everything.



Here's the problem. There is no "them". It is just you and you have free will. How can you be comatose while you make decisions? We're not talking about pretend land.



One proceeds the other so both.

There is no God in TES, meaning God doesn't come into it at all. We're discussing within the context of the TES universe, so if you don't "get into that whole thing" it's showing a lack of understanding (it's not against forum rules to talk about TES gods (or lack thereof))...

Yes, we are.

RE: Daggoth Ur's intentions


Daggoth Ur's intentions are actually rather benign, if not benevolent. His METHOD is what is the problem. Daggoth Ur wants the mundus to reach its conclusion--- That is to say, he wants everyone to wake up, rather than half-living and being reborn all the time in the mortal coil of infinity.

Daggoth Ur wants to purge the N'Wah from Morrowind-- (This can be interpreted as the age old elven mantra of "Gotta kill all those MAN-Things that keep the dragon tied up and asleep!") and he also wants to reconnect all the living dunmer with the Divine. He was going to accomplish this task using Corprus disease, and his own divine will, along with the new anumidium, the akulahan.

In short, Daggoth Ur wanted what all stereotypical megolomaniac elves want-- He wants the mundus to terminate its endless ruminations, and to return all elf-kind to the divine roster. (With himself in a personal seat of power and adoration at the center.)



You can find this viewpoint many many times over if you look for it, especially in the obscure texts sections of the imperial library.

Now then-- Considering that the only way for this to happen is to destroy the current creation, it can well be said that Daggoth Ur wants to "Destroy the world"-- but, is that really a bad thing?

Right right right.

Well, I couldn't use those gods since there are two different groups, and I don't know if any one of them is considered the one who 'created' Tamriel, who would be the best one to decide what is right and wrong, right?

Why don't you make a guess who 'created' Tamriel?

And F.Y.I., the creator of the world does NOT always dictate what is right and wrong.

No we're not. You were talking about "what if one of my alter egos takes over does it have free will?" That is non sense. That is still YOU doing things. There are no other people in you so your "alter egos" have free will also.

Now back to the topic, I think Dagoth Ur was evil because he sought to take away free will.

I can't tell if you're intentionally being dense or not, but you're obviously not getting what I'm saying. Why would I bring up some [censored] metaphor if it didn't have pertinence to the discussion?

If my alter-egos took over, dissolved my consciousness, sent me into a comatose state, and then proceeded to create their own alter-egos all inside of my head, then nothing they do matters. They aren't making real decisions. We're talking about pretend land.

Clearly I agree with you, it's a silly question whether they have free will or not -- they don't, they can't, it's roundabout language -- they don't really exist. Which means there is no free will to take away from them. They're mental illness, unhealth, and they need to be brought back together under a single consciousness so that I can wake the [censored] up. That isn't evil.

Hey don't get mad at me, you're the one using the [censored] example as you call it. No one said anybody else was evil other then Dagoth Ur. You're the one that brought up alter egos for no reason. Intellectual posing was it?

:facepalm:

That's not just genocide - that's mundicide ...

It's one thing for the hero to want to kill all the monsters and another thing to look at the destruction of an entire world.

At the start of creation the et'Ada were given a choice - did they want to try the new thing in th eGrey Maybe? It may not have turned out as they envisioned, but they had a choice. Here Dagoth Ur is engaged in taking away everyone's choices but his own - Whether you are a supporter/fan of either Order or Chaos YES that is a very bad thing = naughty Weird!

Also Dagoth Ur is busy turning people in to what they believe to be monsters - YES that is a bad thing , etc from their point of view ...

Alternatively throw out the concepts of good and bad, refuse to admit that anything is bad, and then nothing is bad. Oops - that also destroys choice because it eliminates a very important basis for thought. Follow that road too far and you mentally flatline.

Cease to look at this as a mere intellectual exercise unconnected to anything and look at the whole from the inside ... and you may find that designating certain things as shades of evil is a very useful way to look at them. Hopefully without totally leaving the ES tradition of shades of grey behind.

Tamriel is not a purely Good-Evil scenario - but there is both good and evil in there - denial does not eliminate it.

Oh, I disagree. Evil is very much real. I'm planning to write a story (not TES fan fiction so I won't post it in this forum) where I will make one character truly evil. And everyone will adore him.

Personally, I divide cruelty from evil. Cruelty is contagious, while evil is self-sustaining. A person is cruel if someone was cruel to them before so now they drown their own pain in the pain of others. Ah, but evil... That has a special place in my pantheon. It has a very specific purpose, not just self-replication as cruelty apparently does.

The way I see it there are only three possible reasons why your responses could so consistently miss the mark:

1. You're baiting me.
2. You have no reading comprehension skills at all.
3. You lack a rudimentary understanding of ES cosmology.

Not much I can do in any case, so I'm going to stop wasting my time. I really would like to have this discussion right now but I don't think you're the person to have it with.

oh, do define evil. everything that is 'evil' is also potentially 'good,' or at the very least accepted and natural. cruelty is a more tangiable and realistic concept i supose, but even then it is subjective and potentially false.

dagoth ur wants to liberate people. is that bad?

besides, dagoth ur never had his own free will to begin with: everything that happened is set forth in prophesy. nerevar had to be murdered and come back to murder dagoth ur, just as a cheetah has to murder a gazelle.

Or 4, what you said is non sense that only makes sense to you. As for baiting were you not the one insulting me with your first post accusing me of "intellectual posing"?

I'd prefer it if you and all the people in your head would stop annoying me all together with your utter lack of civility.

ImmortalBlood,

Helton's role-playing argument made perfect sense, at least to me. It revolved around the concept of free will, and, to a lesser extent, the nature of the universe (since the concept of multiple schizophrenic personalities is the Godhead). It is obvious that Helton has free will, and it is also obvious that his characters do not have free will (being that they are a part of his personality). What if those characters awake and develop their own sense of identity however, as the denizens of Nirn have? Would Helton's control over them be considered as evil, as he is essentially robbing them of their own newly-developed free will?

The concept of alternate schizophrenic personalities is therefore completely relevant to a theological/metaphysical discussion of the elder scrolls, although i do concede that its relevance to the topic at hand requires some extrapolation.

I, likewise, see no "utter lack of civility" in the posts of Helton. They were not always completely nice, but if my short time in the Lore forum has taught me anything it is that Lore is a 'touchy' subject. If someone is incapable to understand, either by their own will or by some loss of meaning between communication, it can at times be frustrating.

I do not believe that Dagoth Ur is/was evil. His motives, when taken at their core, were not much different than those of the Tribunal, Talos, and most of the Mer races. His motives were not entirely acceptable by the society of Nirn or the culture of the western developed world (I believe that his methods and motivations would be more acceptable in 3rd world cultures to whom the concepts of oppression are more familiar), but that does not make him evil incarnate.

Older than music,
Ayaan-Si

I see Dogsbody closing this thread in the near future.

Simply, judged by our defenition of Good and Evil, YES he is Evil. Good motives behind any violance are not good enough to justify the siad violance. Therefore, he is evil for causing needless violance. Granted we can debate the needless part if we want. But thats just how it is.

Also, and I am pushing it here, but there is no such thing as good or evil in TES universe; just a bunch of actions with reaction and consequences. So Dagoth Ur is nor Good not Evil if looked at by the TES morality measuring stick. Debate mr on this if you must, but this is my opinion and I am not changing it.

Please never do. :celebration:

I understood that concept as well but it had no relevance because we can not construct a point on "well what if?" You can't trump the point I made with "what if" concerning free will. His personalities DO have free will because they are HIM. You can not seperate yourself from yourself. I personally don't see what is so touchy about the subject. I guess some put too much weight in it? I don't know, it's just a game for me. "What if those characters awake" but they don't awaken because they aren't their own people. They are all one.

Perhaps complete lack of civilty was a bit strong but in his first sentence to me he insults me. I think it could be done away with.

the people in tes are their own people even though they encompass the godhead. thats kinda the whole point. O_o