I explained in my post right above yours why the Railroad needed to be destroyed, but there is a part I could expand on.

With the destruction of the Institute, many of the surviving synth would flee to the Railroad for help. Now, however, it wouldn't be coursers that come looking for them. Instead it would be knights and paladins from the Brotherhood. The Railroad would keep doing what it was before, only now it's enemy would be the Brotherhood. It's also not u reasonably to think that after the destruction of most of the synths, the more zealous and extreme elements of the Railroad would take out their anger on the Brotherhood.

From the Brotherhood's perspective, this group is already working contrary to their objectives. After they destroy the Institute the Railroad would become an absolute thorn in their side, seeking to subvert or sabotage everything they do. Wiping them out first means it's not only easier to catch the synths, but you also don't have to deal with all that other stuff.

Synths aren't predisposed to murder; a community that could have a killer synth could have a killer anyone else.

A war that happened only because of the Brotherhood's predilection for murder, then. I also have no idea how one could call the Railroad insurgents; they're not rebelling against anyone.

So, for "the sake of argument," you're ignoring one of the most fundamental points of contention, that synth brains are insufficiently structurally or procedurally different from human brains to demonstrate that humans have free will and synths don't? That doesn't leave much of an argument.

I find this endlessly hilarious, as that was not an unquestionable opinion at the time. Many serious scientific arguments were made that black people didn't count as people. They were [censored], true, as are the arguments about gen 3 synths. Previous synth generations, on the other hand, appear to be just human-shaped robots, some of which might qualify as sapient enough to be people, but I'm not sure whether they have the programming capacity for it. Not even every Mr. Handy model has the same level of intelligence, so earlier gen synths might vary just as much.

I think that the Institute can offer a better future to the Commonwealth than the Brotherhood can, if allied with the Minutemen, for two reasons. For one thing, the Institute is much more mobile, able to summon reinforcements anywhere at anytime, and can engage in much more rapid response. Secondly, I believe the negative aspects of the Institute will be easier to fix than those of the Brotherhood, because the Institute is selfish and pragmatic where the Brotherhood is zealous and ideological. The Institute doesn't much care how things are done as long as they get done, so a Director with a strong moral compass and an equally strong ability to create solutions can tweak their path enough for things to improve. I think the Institute's most lacking trait is a sense of perspective anyway, which a Commonwealth-dwelling Director would provide.

The first thing Desdemona says when the Prydwen arrives is that the RR must kill the Brotherhood.

Huh, the sole reason that Synth is in that Community is the Railroad, therefore ANY act they commit is on the Railroad's record (so to speak), the fact that anybody could be a killer doesn't absolve the Railroad of responsibility for the way they are risking human lives and placing them below their cause of Gen-3 Synth freedom.

If I push someone and they fall into traffic, the fact that they could have fallen into traffic without my intervention or someone else could have pushed them doesn't absolve me of blame. My actions still led to to event, intentional or not.....and in the Railroads case, they know Safehouses are attacked (putting those settlers at risk) and they know Synths apparently can go loco leading to civilian deaths.

Again this is only true if you consider a synthetic 'person' alive, constantly claiming this doesn't make it true. Its an interesting discussion in and of itself, but until you can convince people that Gen-3 Synths are people you reduce the validity of your position every time you make the argument that the Brotherhood is committing murder when they 'kill' a Synth.

The are rebelling against the Institute, in effect they are acting as foreign fighters in an internal dispute since they are actively fighting and dying in a conflict with the Institute.

That's absurd. The only way the Railroad could be held responsible is if the synth displayed murderous raidery tendencies beforehand and was then released, as opposed to going bad later. To use your anology, it's like someone following you crossing the street and being hit by an invisible/inaudible car.

No, their capacity for sapience and emotion makes it true. And your anology only works if British/American forces supporting the Free French would be considered insurgents.

Falsifying something to the point that it's believable doesn't make it factual.

Kindly prove that it's falsified.

Just a side note on that, OP. Shaun is diagnosed with cancer and has accepted the fact that he will die. It's now normal that he thinks more about his legacy (the Institute) than his life, whatever's left of it. This is what he's doing. Hard to tell how he was before he had cancer. This changes people. I don't remember if he states it also in the game but I believe his cancer is why he unfroze Nate/Nora, in the hopes to see them. Maybe he says it but I don't remember...

Kindly prove that it isn't.

This is why the previous person brought up the Chinese room experiment. Unless you can look directly into their minds, you have no evidence that they are not just outputting responses based on a complex set of instructions.

You're just making an assumption that it is real.

if they had free will, a command code could not turn them off. a machine couldn't delete and replace their memories.

nick and glory both readily admit that synths aren't people.

That isn't really how evidence works. By any test of sapience that we have, they'll be considered sapient. As for the functions of their brains, human brains are chemistry and physics, just like synth brains. From all the empirical evidence we can gather, they're sapient, and any attempt to claim that they aren't is merely an argument from incredulity.

You say that as though humans can't also be programmed, or lose their memories. The methods are just cruder with current technology.

The Synths are reprogrammed with new memories By the Railroad, placed in human communities by the Railroad and then have the potential (and have in past) to become Raiders and go violently loco.....the Railroad is responsible for the personality the Synth possesses and probably also problems with that reprogramming may lead to the violent events when the occasional one goes loco.

Placing Synths in a location with a human population, knowing that your safehouse probably will be attacked is knowingly risking the lives of humans.

I have to assume that you simply will not ascribe any future event to Railroad.

No that is an opinion, lots of Robots show the same emotions and several are running businesses without being consider sapient or indeed sentient, we have had several sentient AI with no claims of equal rights. Simply claiming Sapience doesn't make it true and even if true, we have killed sapient and sentient creatures of all types, shapes and sizes I don't see Gen-3 as that important, their only real relevance is their infiltration of human communities both by the Institute and the Railroad, remove the threat of the Institute and stop the Railroad from forcing unwitting people into their conflict and the Synth can establish there own communities......at that point they may have a claim about persecution, not when they are putting others in danger for their own ends.

I'm using the modern anology the Institute is a tyrannical government and the Railroad are foreign fighters injecting themselves into an internal conflict....but for the Institute's kidnapping, Synth replacements, actual murder and human experimentation, along with the Railroad use of the human population as shields and unwitting hosts the Commonwealth and elsewhere wouldn't be involved with the Synths attempts to gain freedom.

Hasn't there been a grand total of one synth that became a raider? I'm sure the Institute is looking into it.

And if you put the blame on the Railroad for placing safehouses there, I assume you put a higher level of blame on the Brotherhood for actually attacking those safehouses with nearby civilians?

Will they pass tests of sapience that I mentioned above? Then they can be considered such, yes. And synths attempting to live free and not attacking anyone else are not, in fact, putting anyone in danger.

They can't be programmed and they can't be turned off with a command and loss of their memories requires heavy trauma.

What, you don't think they could be programmed? I daresay that someone could kidnap you and, with the right techniques, program you to like them to a certain extent, not to mention various applications of hypnosis and post-hypnotic suggestions. And "heavy trauma" is exactly what I meant when I said "cruder methods."

However much blame the Railroad takes for bringing synths into the vicinity of civilians, where they might be threatened by frickin' laser beams, the Brotherhood takes more for actually introducing those frickin' laser beams into reality.

Also, you have no idea how many humans were killed by said synth, especially since the raider gang predated him.

They act like humans in every other respect, I see no reason why they wouldn't.

Actually, she does, or I should say, did in my latest playthrough. I am not really certain what triggered it this time, but soon after I joined the Railroad, I popped into Railroad Headquarters and heard her giving a speech to her staff, in which she mentioned that they all knew that the Brotherhood would kill all the synths and that Tinker Tom was in the planning stages of an operation called Red Glare, but for the time being people needed to stay focused on helping synths escape from the Institute.

So we are ignoring the fact that is actually a battle between the Institute and the Railroad that the Brotherhood gatecrashed.

Right back to you as we have no idea how many he personally killed and how many his gang killed.......and but for the Railroad every one he killed wouldn't have been killed by him.

When that gets to be the criteria for judging Sapience you might have a point.

Please don't take this the wrong way; unlike most RR fans I don't know you to make [censored] up on the fly, but since they're gonna quote you I really need a source or screenshot or something

The Brotherhood would receive no blame if the Brotherhood wasn't there.

If it wasn't for the Railroad, the gang might never have been wiped out at all, instead of being targeted by the Institute.

Coursers were 100% loyal, only Gen-3 have been shown to have the ability to appear sentient, many synths are fine living under the Institute and praise Father. Sorry, but the Synths still get blame, not all were unwilling slaves.

And thus you attempt to put collective blame on the entirety of the synth populace?

That's unlikely since you would have to put some blame on the Railroad, which apparently is impossible.

Uh huh, and all those human deaths needed to rise to the top of Raider gang don't matter.

Okay and if the discussion of the Synths and the Railroad evokes the Holocaust for you then you've got bigger problems than writing crap like that on a game forum.

Even getting past the whole use of words like slaves, murder etc to describe a machine.......every human abducted, replacement, murdered etc was committed at the hands of a Synth, now I blame the owners of those machines but still expecting the human victims of Institute actions to see a difference between the Synths actually committing the acts and the mythical scientists that they don't even know exist is more than a little perplexing.