For the first question, Chapter I of the Ley Accords bans the use of “Instruments of Regrettable Necessity” including the use of ecocidal weapons on garden worlds even for non-signatories of the Accords in an ecumenical manner as advocated by the Empire in the aftermath of the Burning of Litash. The problem arises in the following hypothetical scenario, The Associated Worlds contacts Civilization A and Civilization B, both societies of consent. For whatever reason A and B hate each other and each others way of life. A says to B “ hey, since we both hate each other, could we both agree to a war of extermination until one of us is extinct and neither of us has to live in a universe where the other exists? “ and B says “sure” and they start throwing WMDs at each other, including ecocidal weapons. Per the Ley Accords which the Empire is a signatory of they are obligated to punish both for violating the Ley Accords even though both sides consented and it’s essentially a civilization level duel, interfering would violate the Fundamental Contract (unless I have somehow misunderstood the Fundamental Contract).
Now this is an unlikely scenario. It’s a ridiculously unlikely scenario. It’s an edge case. It’s a ridiculously unlikely edge case. But if you make a habit of ignoring unlikely but technically possible edge cases because they probably won’t happen you don’t get to complain when Murphy’s law kicks in and you inevitably encounter an edge case of misestimated likelihood, and the Eldrae seem to be too smart and legalistic to ignore the possibility. So is the Empire going to follow the Accords and violate the Fundamental Contract(yeah fat chance I’m only mentioning it for completeness), default on their obligations regarding the Accord(which seems odd since from my understanding they should hate agreeing to promises they potentially can’t keep), or do they have a third option prepared?
Regarding the second question, according to my understanding of Imperial law you can’t own another person. Yet according to my understanding of the the Fundamental Contract any agreement where all parties consent, all parties understand what they are consenting to, and all parties are mentally competent and sane is a valid contract. And people own the entirety of themselves and vice versa, not only is what they own part of themselves but they also own every part of what constitutes themself. And people are allowed to sell what they own. So legally speaking, what’s stopping someone from selling the entirety of themself, not merely a perpetual indentured servitude contract, a true sale of their person akin to chattel, to another person?
Again a ridiculous edge case but as I’ve already elaborated upon, it’s dangerous to ignore edge cases lest you encounter them unprepared. I doubt any traditionally sane Imperials would ever agree to anything like this(and it would likely be an instant alarm for the Guardians of Our Harmony) but for those outside that scope, how would it be handled? There are two scenario’s where I can see it happening, someone with an extreme submissive personality like Token(credit to the Eclipse Phase yearblog Farcast), or someone who sells their own person in exchange for a benefit to another (which is altruism and I know the Eldrae frown upon altruism but unless I’m mistaken isn’t enough to invalidate a contract on the basis on mental incompetence and insanity).
Both absurd, highly unlikely legal scenarios, but interesting ones and as such ones I want to inquire about. If it helps I suppose you could imagine a curious Imperial citizen inquiring the Curia of how such a situation would be handled in the form of an advisory opinion as they are entitled to under Article II of Section VI of the Imperial Charter, specifically “Advisory opinions on any issue within its jurisdictions may be requested by the Imperial Couple, the Senate, or any interested party.”. At least I think it should qualify. I’m unsure if “interested” means the colloquial sense of interest or interest in the sense of having a meaningful stake regarding the answer. Probably clearer in the original Eldraic but we only have the english version.
Okay, unplanned third question posed to the Curia, does the word “interested” in the phrase “any interested party” include idle interest in the sense of curiosity or only interest in the sense of having a stake in the answer? If yes, well any degree of answer of elaboration would suffice, if no, the absence of an answer would itself be an answer paradoxically enough.
A thing I should make clear. The Fundamental Contract is old. The formalized version it’s usually presented in dates back to the Great Convention of 502-526, and it was commonplace enough to form the basis of Union law back when the Union of Empires was founded, but earlier versions have been found dating back a couple of thousand years pre-Imperial.
None of it is wrong. It hasn’t been overwritten or shrunk in scope since, but in various areas it has been expanded[1]. This is something that affects modern interpretation in ways that may not be initially obvious.
This being said, on the former, there are two obvious legal arguments to make:
The first:
Please provide detailed documentation that every sophont, prosophont, and other legal person-equivalent being within the affected volumes has provided full notarized legal consent to engage in your mutual obliteration pact.
Oh, prosophont beings are definitionally not competent to provide such consent?
Sucks to be you. We require it anyway because prosophont beings, too, are entitled to their measure of life, liberty, and property[2], by virtue of being partially sophont[3]. Bite us.
Two:
This compact is obviously void on the ground that both parties are incompetent to contract by virtue of pernicious irrationality, trivially demonstrated by the desire to fight Ragnarok and take everything else in their portion of the galaxy with them.
The Presiding Minister moves that they have their toys taken away and they be locked in a nice rubber room for the indefinite future. Seconds?
And, on a note somewhat bloodier than legalistic, but one that would probably have cropped up before things got to this point:
Outwith legal matters, the desire to engage in Ragnarok clearly demonstrates that both parties to this pact constitute jointly and severally an existential threat to galactic civilization in general.
The Presiding Minister moves that, in the interest of the common defense of galactic civilization, both parties be subject to the most severe censure. To wit, extermination.
Seconds?
On the second question:
By any reasonable definition, contracting away the entirety of your volition, especially for an indefinite term, is unsane.
(See also the Nonjustifiability of Hells argument, rephrased in the terms of paying an infinite price for a finite value.
Also, if you phrased this in chattel terms, it would have been thrown out of lower courts immediately on the grounds that a first derivative of the Contract is that volitional beings are subjects, not objects, and as such cannot be property[4]period.)
It also probably violates the local equivalent of the rule against perpetuities.
On the third, while not requiring so direct an interest as Earth courts do when they require a stake in the outcome - they are willing to listen to serious claims of second-, third-, and enth-order effects - it isn’t an invitation for everyone to kibitz. That’s how you end up with a million amicus briefs for every vaguely interesting case.
Specifically in ways that expanded the collection of objects of ethical concern. ↩︎
And if you go sufficiently far down through the most expansive philosophical views in the Imperial philosophical continuum, so do the merely sapient, sentient, and quite possibly the completely inanimate. ↩︎
Cognition is fractalline. Bright lines are fuzzy. Be nice to your LLMs. ↩︎
You may recall earlier discussions making the point that, for example, under the Imperial legal regime, dogs cannot be property. ↩︎
Sorry for the delay in reply, had some medication issues relating to depression and social anxiety.
Does that mean any harm or choice-theft towards pro-sophonts is choice theft? Does that mean attacking target that happens to have pro-sophont animals in the blast radius is illegal, or that hunting game or slaughtering livestock is illegal, meaning the Eldrae were vegetarian until synthetic meat? Does that mean that taking dogs to the vet or keeping them on a leash or harness to restrain them is illegal since they don’t consent to that? Does that mean euthanasia of pets even if they are very clearly suffering and terminal is not allowed because they can’t consent to their own merciful death? Kinda raises a number of interesting questions.
Who said anything about taking everyone else with them? I was think an honorable duel to the death scenario, a weird combination of daehain and seredhain(where what’s being arbitrated is who gets to live and who goes extinct but instead of pulling out all the stops there are rules), and the only targets would be each other, reparations given to anyone harmed by collateral damage, and handing over killswitches for every self-replicating weapon that spreads out of the intended area of effect. Making sure it only ends with one of them dead and no one else harmed.
Should the above clarification make them sane enough to not pose an existential threat or would them submitting to externally audited sanity checks that they have no intention of being an existential threat(except to each other) and are willing to submit to psyche design such that they don’t every wish to exterminate another civilization again just as soon as this is over? I know this is a ridiculous edge-case scenarios but those scenarios are often the funnest scenarios because they make you think.
What about someone who believes that the value they would gain is not finite but infinite even if the cost is infinite, like saving a million from eternal hell in exchange for one case of perpetual slavery. Yes you’re getting into the weirdness mathematics with infinities there but there are just as many ways to interpret that as a net profit as there are a net loss, an unity of them because mathematics concerning infinity is complicated.
What part of the Fundamental Contract forbids consensual chattel slavery outright? The Right of Domain says you own everything about yourself, your property that would be considered property under human legal systems, your body, your mind, your everything. And you can do what you want with that property, like selling it. You can sell your property like land and objects, you can sell your body to someone else though you should probably have prearranged to have another place to run your mind beforehand, you can even sell snapshots of you mindstate for other people to examine though that’s a stupid idea unless you trust them not to run it. So given you can do anything to anything you own, why can’t you sell or just gift everything you own including yourself to another consensually assuming you are sane (though likely stupid)? There doesn’t seem to be anything in the fundamental contract forbidding that, or is it contained in one of the extensions or elaborations on the basic form?
Stuff like the rule against perpetuities seems like something that would only apply in Eldraic jurisdiction. If the contract was made outside it by two non-citizen-shareholders who entered Imperial space as residents, would that be legal?
So in the hypothetical Earth contact scenario where a curious human with only the english translation of the Charter sends an Email asking what I did, “does the Curia count my interest in the Curia’s definition of the word “interest” as good enough to count for the purposes of obligating them to answer this question”, would the answer be “Yes”, “No but as a courtesy we’re answering anyway because it’s an amusing harmless confusion caused by a minor ambiguous translation so have this token of appreciation for the amusing question”, or “No and since it doesn’t qualify we won’t be sending a message back including this one”?
Sorry for the bit of a wall of text, you just raised a lot of points and I have a corresponding amount of questions.
Ah. You’ve got some misconceptions here. Starting with the way that pro- doesn’t mean “not”, it means “almost”; the nearly-there good uplift candidates. To use Earth examples: dogs, horses, cetaceans, octopodes, corvids, psittacines, etc.
But in any case, as I said, it’s a complicated fractal issue, in which modern doctrine holds that lifeforms in the range between “unquestionably non-animate” and “sophont” are entitled to rights “in accordance with their measure”, on a scale.
The full details are moderately complex (and you will forgive me for not being as smart as the Empire’s brightest legal minds and sophontologists), but roughly:
Prosophonts are, in most legal respects, minor dependents like children. No, you can’t own them in the propertarian sense; they’re junior family members in law[1]. You can’t treat them like livestock. You can ask them to work under good conditions, since the law recognizes that there are few things more miserable than, for example, a working dog prevented from working.
Most less-than-prosophont animals occupy a middle ground. You can raise, say, cattle or sheep for leather, wool, and food, but their (fractal/fractional) right to liberty is such that, say, Earth-style factory farming is right out. You must give the cow the space to cow, as it were, and when you need to harvest them, you must do so humanely. You may hunt game for food or other requirements, or - if other resorts fail - for essential wildlife management, but again, it must be done humanely. Sport hunting is, therefore, also right out.
I note that this also extends to wiping out species on this level for convenience. No, you can’t exterminate the gray wolf because it occasionally kills a cow. No, you can’t wipe out the buffalo to make your war easier. You may be permitted to kill the fox that you catch eating your chickens, but you’re supposed to take the necessary and reasonable measures to prevent that sort of thing from coming up[2]. And while necessity may have existed in the past, everyone’s very happy that they’ve now been able to recruit the common city rat into the Infrastructure Maintenance Department.
But there aren’t a lot of constraints when it comes to insects, bacteria, and viruses. Just don’t inflict willful suffering on them, even if you can figure out how to in the first place.
(Now, it gets really complicated when you start talking about aggregate entities of rivers and forests, but that can wait…)
And yes, the purpose of the buffalo example was to point out that animal life, even the non-prosophont kind, does count in war planning and collateral budgets. If the enemy leader is hiding out in the animal shelter, you use the scalpel[3].
Does that mean that taking dogs to the vet or keeping them on a leash or harness to restrain them is illegal since they don’t consent to that?
On the former, the law recognizes that just like other minor dependents, they may not be competent to understand what’s good for them when issues are complex and so their legal guardians may require them to accept health care. (Assume similar constraints as what you can reasonably ask a doctor to do to/for your children.)
On the latter: on similar legal grounds, you are permitted to restrain them where necessary for their own safety or that of others. You are, however, strongly discouraged from using restraints, working appurtenances excepted[4], just to make your own life easier.
Does that mean euthanasia of pets even if they are very clearly suffering and terminal is not allowed because they can’t consent to their own merciful death?
As with other health care, it requires - well, in the Empire, euthanasia for sophonts is permitted if they are (a) terminal, and (b) incompetent to make their own healthcare decisions. Same criteria apply, including who’s allowed to make the call.
And note that dogs, say, are often pretty clear about what they want under clause (b), and the doctors will take that into account. No-one will euthanize a prosophont who clearly wants to live.
Points of order:
I said everything, not everyone.
Your scenario has them throwing around Instruments of exactly the kind prohibited by the Chapter I list, which are on the Chapter I list because they’re massive collateral damage in a box and prone to leave behind worlds and systems more wrecked than the antagonists in the hypothetical James Cameron/Michael Bay crossover movie, Look How These Assholes Made A Perfectly Nice Planet Blow Up Real Good.
(I should further note that planning to pay for collateral damage ahead of time does not excuse you from your responsibility to take all necessary and reasonable measures to avoid inflicting collateral damage under the conventions of civilized warfare any more than you can pay the fine ahead of time and receive a free crime indulgence.
There’s a reason why the IMS has an entire schemata of collateral budgets and why “cut the enemy’s heart out with a scalpel” is the gold standard for weapons development and “maximize the boom” is not.)
(I also note that if you are going to fight a personal duel, and your choice of weapons is “nuclear weapons at two paces”, your responsibility to avoid collateral damage means “pick a small, worthless asteroid to have it on”.)
We don’t like people who think that making massive contributions to the cause of cosmic entropy is a good idea, and on general principles, massive contributions to the cause of cosmic entropy should be stopped and so should the contributors.
Now, if the civilizations in question wanted to deliver their entire populations to a barren rock in the middle of nowhere so they could shank each other to death with kitchen knives, then sure, they’re still perniciously irrational death-worshipping loonies, but it’s a lot harder to find any fucks to give about perniciously irrational death-worshipping loonies of this kind. Just delete the survivors from any and all future dinner-party invitations, and you’re done.
(On the reasonable grounds that people demonstrably prone to develop desires to hate-murder entire other civilizations to death, even mutually and consensually, are not the sort of chaps who belong in Polite Society, belike. No matter how much they claim it’s a one-time thing, and frankly, even if they’re willing to accept a just-one-genocide-bro geas.)
We have the ethical calculus and aren’t afraid of transfinite mathematics. Show us your mathematical proof that the former infinity is larger than the latter infinity, and we’ll consider it. (Don’t forget the part about how all other possible means to gain that end are objectively worse.)
Nope. It’s a much older and more fundamental principle.
The Contract says:
A person’s property and domicile may not be moved, destroyed, occupied, damaged, altered, or made use of without his informed consent. A person’s body is considered his own property, and so are his work and his services.
No mention of mind there, for a very good reason. An essential property of property (as it were) is alienability - that you can separate its ownership from yourself in order to transfer it to someone else. Now you can alienate all those things from you. You can, per later clarifications, alienate your ideas, your memories, your skills, and even your entire pithed mind-state, but it’s logically impossible to alienate your core mind. Because it’s you.
You can’t remove, or even copy, yourself from yourself, because every time you try, you’re still there. You cannot convey yourself, and therefore no-one else can convey you either.
Therefore, being unalienable of ownership, you are not and cannot be property.
A contract’s only enforceable if it’s possible to perform its obligations. The Empire is willing to go a lot further than most jurisdictions to enforce contracts to do the merely extraordinarily difficult (see the Oath of Feänor, possibility of, in previous discussions), but contracts to do the logically impossible are void from their inception.
It should probably be noted that the Curia’s obligation to help people understand the law doesn’t guarantee an answer from Their Equitable Lordships in person, thus nor does it preclude, in the case of trivial questions or those that don’t that don’t reflect on a case they’re hearing at the moment, them having an autoparalegal send out a quick answer, a library reference to look up, or an e-copy of The Freshthing’s Guide to ElementaryImperial Law.
(If you have a matter of substance to address, you should really hire an obligator, barrister, or signet scrivener, as appropriate.)
When the shelters take in strays and adopt them out, they really are doing so in the appointing-a-legal-guardian sense. ↩︎
If your guardian dog kills the fox before it kills chickens, well, it was doing its job. But the fence was also supposed to stop the fox. Too bad for it for being clever enough to get killed, but not clever enough to take the warning. ↩︎
Over in the contact thread, this probably does mean that some asshole probably somewhere in MENA is going to invent canine shields, and his death will be a remotely-delivered gratuitous example for the sagas. ↩︎
Sled or cart harnesses, saddles, safety lines, that sort of thing. ↩︎