A couple moderately bizarre legal questions regarding the Ley Accords and selling oneself into slavery

General
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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.

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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.

  1. Specifically in ways that expanded the collection of objects of ethical concern. ↩︎

  2. 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. ↩︎

  3. Cognition is fractalline. Bright lines are fuzzy. Be nice to your LLMs. ↩︎

  4. You may recall earlier discussions making the point that, for example, under the Imperial legal regime, dogs cannot be property. ↩︎

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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.