arbiter1742 wrote:

As I've said, they are earnest, but are going at it in the wrong way.

Yeah, there's the rub. Being earnest does not excuse anything they are doing. It's not like they don't know they'll be killing everyone. I'm sure some of them feel a little bad about it too, but in the end, they will still put a bullet into the brain of an innocent person (figuratively and literally) who gets in the way, and torture people. I draw a line. They're bad guys.

thesmallprint wrote:

Yeah, there's the rub. Being earnest does not excuse anything they are doing. It's not like they don't know they'll be killing everyone. I'm sure some of them feel a little bad about it too, but in the end, they will still put a bullet into the brain of an innocent person (figuratively and literally) who gets in the way, and torture people. I draw a line. They're bad guys.

I never said they weren't bad people. I was just saying that, in the world of Fallout, there are no successful good organizations.

To me, there is no such thing as good or bad, dark or light, only grey. Both organisations main true goal is to save humanity and to progress it and rebuilt it. The only difference is the methods and paths they choose to achieve this. Despite the fact that bethesda pitted us against the enclave with the BoS in FO3 and the previous classic Fallouts, it does not take away the fact that they do indeed want whats best for humanity, even if it means sacrifices have to be made. Hey, but the BoS does the same thing as well. Their way of preserving humanity is by collecting and scavenging old tech and keep it for themselves. They don't really care about the community around them unless their paths intersect. They would even go as far as to allow entire towns to be raided by mutants and not blink an eye about it. "Necessary sacrifices" they said. None of them are to be considered genuinely good nor bad though. A good family loving man who does evil things to protect his family . Is he good for protecting his family or bad for doing evil things? Sometimes, we are force to do evil just to achieve good because the world is never fair. Sacrifices are needed and true and pure white knights only exist in stories. Heck, even a person doing good things may have an ulterior motive. That is what the enclave and BoS are to me. Just two different organisations trying to rebuild and restore humanity but just using different ways.

Honestly it's a hard decision. The Enclave is the former government of the USA or a part of it and have a technical advantage, but their methods are unethical in my opinion like in Fallout 3. John Henry Eden gives you the modified FEV to infect the water of Project Purity. But I was always interested in their technologies. Bradley Hercules etc. But as I said they are to unethical. The East Brotherhood of Steel try to help the people. They are not so advanced like the Enclave but fight for the right thing and that's what matters if you would ask me

zparkzter wrote:

To me, there is no such thing as good or bad, dark or light, only grey. Both organisations main true goal is to save humanity and to progress it and rebuilt it. The only difference is the methods and paths they choose to achieve this. Despite the fact that bethesda pitted us against the enclave with the BoS in FO3 and the previous classic Fallouts, it does not take away the fact that they do indeed want whats best for humanity, even if it means sacrifices have to be made. Hey, but the BoS does the same thing as well. Their way of preserving humanity is by collecting and scavenging old tech and keep it for themselves. They don't really care about the community around them unless their paths intersect. They would even go as far as to allow entire towns to be raided by mutants and not blink an eye about it. "Necessary sacrifices" they said. None of them are to be considered genuinely good nor bad though. A good family loving man who does evil things to protect his family . Is he good for protecting his family or bad for doing evil things? Sometimes, we are force to do evil just to achieve good because the world is never fair. Sacrifices are needed and true and pure white knights only exist in stories. Heck, even a person doing good things may have an ulterior motive. That is what the enclave and BoS are to me. Just two different organisations trying to rebuild and restore humanity but just using different ways.

Aha, philosophy.

I've come across this argument before: moral relativism. Thing is, every word and concept in inherently meaningless, but it given a meaning - a shifting an inconstant one, maybe - by the shared concepts we hold about them. You might as well say there is no red or green. There definitely are those two things, but other languages have different concepts for it - some polynesian people only clearly recognise red, black and white as colours, but they can still see green too. We apply those words to a shared understanding, and some people - e.g. the colourblind - can't reasily tell the difference. Similarly, some people - sociopaths - can't easily tell the difference between good and bad, and others, whose culture prioritises differently, might see the boundaries between the two as being somewhere else.

That's the thing with colours and morality. The further you get from the centre of their definition, the harder it becomes to gtell what you're looking at. Is that a bluey green or a greeny-blue? Or is it neither, and jsut looks that way because of how the light is falling?

However, the simple fact it's not always easy to tell how close soemthing is to our concept orf good or bad (or some other category such as 'necessary evil' does not mean those things don't exist.  They do not exist without people, sure, but we are people, so when we start judging things, the categories we use are important.

I am aware that my categories are drawn from my culture but are created by me. Nevertheless, it is immediately obvious to me that someone ready to kill the overwhelming majority of people to provide a better future for his own followers is doing something extremely bad. His reasons only seem altruistic if you consider the Enclave people as being of equal worth to the wastelanders, but they are not. Contrast the shoot-on-sight Enclave with their ideas of racial purity (for want of a better word) against the people of Megaton, who pretty much accepted you without a second glance. They want th purifier so they can commit genocide and in the meantime control the most precious resource in the wateland. They are about control and execution. They are bad.

The BoS are about protecting their own faction, but even those true-BoS who went to the Pitt only killed those who fought them. Those who didn't, they left alone. Someone mentioned how they might not lift a finger to save people from a mutant attack: that makes them morally complacent, not bad. It is extremely different from deliberately killing the people themselves as the Enclave would do. And the Eastern BoS are there for exactly that reason: to protect people from the super mutants. They distribute the water because it is the right thing to do, and they do it for free. They risk their lives against the mutants, and protecting the caravan, because it feels right to them. It is a good deed. It helps their image too, sure, and helps their relations, but they chose to do it because it needed doing.

The Enclave are not raiders: they do not do evil things because they enjoy it, but because it suits their goals. That makes them strategically evil (their actions are still extremely immoral; not amoral), where the raiders are malignantly evil; they will seek out people and do terrible things to them because it is wrong, and because they enjoy being cruel.

So yes, I know these are not absolute objective categories, but that does not mean they do not exist. Once you start saying good at evil do not exist, you make the raiders' rape, murder, dismemberment and cannibalism morally equivalent to rescuing a kitten. They exist; they are just not absolutes.

Edit: whoops, I killed the topic.