Are any in-game atrocities even relevant versus a hive?

[Talanic]

So, was just rampantly speculating the other night when it occurred to me that certain actions taken against the members of a hive mind don't have nearly the moral implications they do when taken against a non-hive civilization.

Blow up a Hive colony with Terror Bombing? They shouldn't care about it beyond the fact that they're inconvenienced, and honestly - so long as only members of the Hive died - neither should anyone else. After all, you didn't kill a single civilian of their species - because there is no such thing.

Slavery is kind of moot because they won't survive outside the hive anyway, but that also makes purging basically irrelevant. They're already dying. I'm assuming right now that conquering their entire species causes them to waste away, but it would be amazing if you could effectively capture the hive locus, allowing you to have an entire hive as a single subject with many appendages within your empire.

So many questions!

 

[Nirmara]

If it is morally wrong to kill ants just for the sake of it, killing members of an advance hive mind should be considered immoral too. After all, as long as you are using the "living' or "sentience" criteria, Hive-mind members should still be considered as moral persons. In game, we can expect xenophiles to care about it, even if it to a lesser degree.

As for subduing an hive mind, you should be able to vassalize hive minds so it's quite close to subjugating it.

 

[henzington]

I would say its still wrong because its the equivalent of cutting off someone's hand. Sure it isn't as bad as killing the person but it still is a terrible.

 

[Chirs]

i would even consider it worse, since all "individuals" in the hive mind are one and the same, even going as far as being psionically connected, who is to say that inflicting pain upon one of them doesnt inflict pain upon the whole aswell?

 

[Milten]

i would even consider it worse, since all "individuals" in the hive mind are one and the same, even going as far as being psionically connected, who is to say that inflicting pain upon one of them doesnt inflict pain upon the whole aswell?

Wouldn't it be in a pain constantly then? I mean, if there are billions of them, every second some drone would be stubbing it's toe.

 

[Mouthwash]

I think they should let us do full bombardment on hivemind worlds regardless of policy.

 

[forfor]

So, was just rampantly speculating the other night when it occurred to me that certain actions taken against the members of a hive mind don't have nearly the moral implications they do when taken against a non-hive civilization.

Blow up a Hive colony with Terror Bombing? They shouldn't care about it beyond the fact that they're inconvenienced, and honestly - so long as only members of the Hive died - neither should anyone else. After all, you didn't kill a single civilian of their species - because there is no such thing.

Slavery is kind of moot because they won't survive outside the hive anyway, but that also makes purging basically irrelevant. They're already dying. I'm assuming right now that conquering their entire species causes them to waste away, but it would be amazing if you could effectively capture the hive locus, allowing you to have an entire hive as a single subject with many appendages within your empire.

So many questions!

It's worth mentioning that you could probably vassalize/protectorate them, which is somewhat similar to outright conquest.

 

[AndragonLea]

While it wouldn't be wrong in the "Oh jesus, the humanity!" sense, it's still the equivalent of cutting off a piece of that hive entities body. Each drone is, in essence, a piece of the hive mind and killing it is like severing one of (admittedly many) limbs.

There is of course an implied loss in importance for killing there - I doubt a hivemind would sweat what would be a small atrocity such as a bomb landing on a housing section, for example.

But when a pop dies to terror bombing, you're talking potential billions of drones - that's a sizeable percentage of the hivemind in early game and still a relevant loss later on.
Depending on how that hivemind works, you might have permanenty lowered its processing capability and/or removed knowledge by killing the drones or clusters that contained said knowledge.
That's like saying "would cutting off someones toe even matter if it would eventually grow back?" and the answer to that is yes. You're still causing injury.

I'd say if at all possible the penalty for killing hivemind pops should be cut to a tenth for both the hivemind and any who witness what would otherwise be an atrocity - as nobody actually died. But there should by no means be no penalty at all, or else the hivemind empires would become the punching-bags of the galaxy, vulnerable to enemies just wholesale purging several systems and the rest of the galaxy shrugging it off because they're only drones.

 

[Surimi]

People seem to have assumed that the hive mind is hierarchical (that there is some kind of conscious leader who imposes their will onto mindless drones). In that case, yeah, it wouldn't matter if you kill some drones. We'll make more. However, the creative vision for the hive mind here actually seems to be a collective consciousness. Each individual forms a part of the greater whole. Thus, killing individuals within the hive mind diminishes the hive as a whole. It's not even like cutting off someone's hand so much as cutting out a part of someone's brain.

Also, the things we emotionally react to are often things which represent the possibility of harm to ourselves. Indiscriminate killing of drones represents the possibility that the hive mind could die. The hive mind itself may recover fairly easily, but emotionally such an experience could be deeply traumatising in the same way being reminded of our own death is traumatising to us even if we're not in immediate danger. If anything, it seems like a hive mind could very easily have far more reason to care about mass killing of its species. As individuals we have ways to ignore or shrug off bad things happening to "other people". In a hive mind, there are no other people.

So no, I would say that it's totally appropriate for indiscriminate killing of hive mind pops to produce negative relations with the hive mind itself. As for others, well, the hive mind pops still resemble individuals. It's not unreasonable for the act of indiscriminately murdering things which look like individuals to evoke a certain discomfort in things which are individuals. "Anything which can be done to a rat can be done to a human being", and all that.

 

[Mouthwash]

But it still wouldn't bother humanitarian observers as much, I would think.

 

[Surimi]

But it still wouldn't bother humanitarian observers as much, I would think.

Why would it bother them less than if another individual species was being subject to the same treatment?

After all, those awful reptilians aren't really people, are they?

As individuals we can rationalise just about anything provided it's not actually happening to us. I don't know if the game should really be making judgements about when it's reasonable to feel moral revulsion about genocide.

 

[AndragonLea]

The game doesn't really tell you why the reaction is bad though, so different ethics can be butthurt for different reasons.

Even xenophobes can be angry about it for the simple reason that what happened to that scum could happen to them - no altruism or empathy required.

 

[Sheriff Godwin Law]

Maybe, I'd be on board with them tweaking the diplomatic reaction to a bit less when committed against the Hive. But if they don't that's fine too.

You see, to the Hivemind you are the bug. You're like a locust, or some other seasonal invasive species capable of inflicting alot of damage but not really capable of thought. He's a galaxy spanning consciousness, your weak little mind is barely able to control a single body, and completely incapable of truly understanding the needs of your people.

So maybe, once you've established yourself to be a highly dangerous non-sentient, the Hive becomes hostile in ways very similar to if you had committed an atrocity against individuals.

 

[Digrus]

You are here talking about the Hive Mind, if killing billions of its drones is Justifiable or not.
Meanwhile I'm like this

 

[Talanic]

The thread has gotten a little off of my point - not unexpected considering how sleep-deprived I was when I wrote the original post.

In a large fleet action with tons of battleships, it's entirely possible that a million or more crew die without long-range diplomatic repercussions. Why nobody counts killing those fleets as an atrocity is easy: those were all warriors, sent to battle deliberately. The people of their empire may mourn them, or build monuments, or celebrate because their people are reaching Space Valhalla, but they're not going to hold a grudge over the fact that a battle occurred between two combatant sides.

But if the winning fleet then heads to the loser's world and drops a full bombardment, you've got a terror bombing going on. That, people get angry about. You're blowing up civilians - not even necessarily trying to hit them instead of military targets, but killing noncombatants nonetheless.

Except if you're waging a defensive war against a Hive Mind.

My point is not about the intrinsic value of one, a hundred or a million drones' lives. My point is that most atrocities are atrocities because they're committed against civilians. And there are no civilians in a Hive Mind. If the Hive declared war on you, it means that the meanest newly hatched larva might rank - at worst - as military support staff. Every worker on the planet is - in effect - a military engineer. In a very real way, every one of them participated in every single battle.

Remember, we're not talking about eusocial insects. Those form the basis of our concept of a hive mind, but the drones there simply live for the good of the queen so the queen can reproduce. No, the Hive Mind species is primally psionic; there is only one person who makes up the entire species, one will with billions of appendages. If the Hive is at war with you, all of its drones are part of that war effort in one way or another. Maybe they're fighting. Maybe they're building war machines. Maybe they're prepping brooders to lay eggs on your corpses.

But none of them are dissenting. None of them were drafted. None of them are in the war against their will.

 

[terrycloth]

If it is morally wrong to kill ants just for the sake of it, killing members of an advance hive mind should be considered immoral too.

So in other words, it's totally fine? No one cares if you kill ants.

 

[Emraldis]

So in other words, it's totally fine? No one cares if you kill ants.

I mean, if you start killing them for fun, I might care, but that's probably less to do with the wellbeing of the ants, and moreso with your mental health...

 

[Talanic]

So in other words, it's totally fine? No one cares if you kill ants.

There's a limit.

If someone's wiping out a number of ant colonies that are damaging their yard and sending ants into their house? No big deal.

If a kid is stomping ants, honestly that's not a big deal either.

If a kid (or an adult, for that matter) is capturing ants, then experimenting with how long he can keep them alive as he shaves bits off of them, seeing how much pain he can inflict...well, I wouldn't let that kid play with my cats.

 

[A Cat]

That's an interesting question! Each "drone" has to actually have near human mental capability. They are capable of doing research and stuff. So to a Hive Mind killing drones would be like cutting out bits of its brain! Awful! But to a human it probably seems like you're just killing a fairly mindless automaton. You certainly aren't killing a person! I seriously doubt they would see it as an atrocity compared to actually murdering a bunch of people.

But I think we're all forgetting the perspective of the Hive Mind. Hive Minds aren't going to kill drones. They actually subsume them. They are likely to view any slaughter of drones as a spiteful, hateful, purposeless crime against Hive Mind Kind. And the ones doing this don't have intelligence much above that of a drone. Hive Minds probably would view drone slaughter as an atrocity. But this also leads to a third question: what do hive minds think about regular atrocities? Its very possible that a Hive Mind views, the individualist species sub-Hive. I mean an individual to a hive mind is as a single cell to a individual They don't set up preserves for non-Hive Mind pops or anything like that.

 

[artemis667]

i would even consider it worse, since all "individuals" in the hive mind are one and the same, even going as far as being psionically connected, who is to say that inflicting pain upon one of them doesnt inflict pain upon the whole aswell?

You mean "better"