So just kind of show him the upper limit of compassion he’s capable of? I still feel unless we can know what kind of consequences Ted himself will face we cannot take any action unless explicitly asked. If we know he’ll be okay if he backs out because of compassion, then sure. But, if there is even a small chance of him facing consequences from our actions at with what we know, I’ll be adamantly against it.
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Is it not possible that the information KS has provided Teddy has led him to believe that what he is doing is ethical? If the only information provided to him is that these adepts are the only way to [insert save the world/protect the world story here] could that not be enough motivation to treat an individual cruelly? A sort of sacrifice the few for the greater good? Not that I’m condoning torture but if he has been convinced that it would mean that there would be global implications it could explain his motives.
Additionally I’m still not convinced that he isn’t in the same boat as Whistler and may have the double memory type thing going on.
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Does KS maybe have someone who is proficient with magic like people in the guild??
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I vote teddy is a monster. If he had any sense of ethics he wouldn’t be working with KS
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But that is ignoring all possibilities, do you have a more in-depth reasoning we can look at?
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He may have started out as just a man following orders, but even people within the Nazi Party refused to work for Hitler after they realized his plan. Teddy could have refused, and in the clip of him and Aether, it reminds me of some of the doctors in the Nazi party, (I did a project on Nazi Human Experimentation in 8th Grade.) They would be calm so they could get what they want, Teddy seems like a snake.
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I’m of the mind that it does not matter why or how Teddy has come to do such wretched things, he has done TERRIBLE deeds to innocent souls. As a Balimoran I have the capability to do much harm to those around me, it doesn’t matter why, it only matters whether or not I choose to do so. Teddy may be a good person, but that doesn’t change what acts of cruelty he has done.
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@MissEvans - Any chance are you talking about Stanley Milgram’s experiment on obedience? It’s an experiment where a particpants were told to ask trivia questions to another participant (who was an actor and not actually getting hurt) and shock them with a series of increasingly more painful electricity every time they got a question wrong. Milgram expected most of the participants to eventually refuse to shock the actor, but was surprised to find that 65% of participants went up to the maximum shock level. Though in that experiment, they could actually see and talk to the person, but they still shocked them anyways.
@Ryvick - You bring up an interesting point. And considering Teddy said “Our desire here has always been to better this world… not clamber for the next, but it’s not our decision in the end.” in the Lachmann entry, he may actually believe he’s trying to help the world. At the same time, do the ends justify the means? Does his own delusion of being a hero mean that what he’s doing is any better?
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How do you know that KS hasn’t threatened Teddy or his family. We have no idea if he really had a choice.
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Yes, that was the name. Thank you. I only taught sociology for half a term- some names get lost with disuse.
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As to your second part, it all depends on what the results from their point of view could yeild and how it could change the world. Maybe the results could save lives multiple lives over many generations? We just don’t know.
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Do you genuinely believe they could be planning on using these experiments on adepts for the greater good? Or that they ever even plan on releasing any information to the larger scientific community, much less the general public?
We’re not talking about animal testing for a cancer cure here, they are kidnapping people with higher level magiqal abilities and experimenting on them. People who may or may not even know that that they have any abilities.
As far as the blackmail theory goes, we have absolutely no evidence of that. He doesn’t talk in his journals like someone who’s being blackmailed, who resents his higher ups and the position they’ve put him in. The only thing he expresses about his employers and fellow “researchers” is that they have different motivations than him. He even says that he knows all they are after is power. He sounds like someone who has been going along with all of this and doing his job with no problem at all (enthusiastically, even) until Wanderer and Portencia finally sparked the idea that maybe this might not be such a good idea after all. Until something went wrong with them.
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I don’t think KS has any intentions of using it for the greater good, Teddy is another story because that’s up in the air. The only information we have access to about Teddy is his what seems to be scientific journal entries which is not a place to put comments about coworkers and higher ups. We have no idea if he’s being blackmailed or not. We have no idea if he’s researching and torturing for fun or knowledge or safety. We just do not know, we cannot build a full scenario with the information we have. We have enough information to know that KS is pretty horrible. We know that Teddy has preformed experiments on human subjects, under what beliefs and resources is undisclosed. These experiments resulted in negatives on the subjects as they usually do. Teddy’s role was to preform experiments, why he preformed them is unbeknownst to us. Until more information on the situation is made available I refuse to make a judgment of the man’s character. He could be the worst human being for all we know, or he could be the most morally righteous human alive. People can make judgements based on partial information and personal emotion/morals. I don’t support that. He currently resides in a grey space for me, he isn’t good, he isn’t bad.
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I would actually disagree with you on him being potentially morally righteous. While his reasoning will likely change my opinion of him as a person, it doesn’t change what he’s done. While in the future, given time to improve himself and learn from what he’s done, he could be; at the moment, he will likely be morally dubious at best.
I do agree that we don’t have all the information that we need to make an accurate assumption. That being said, based on all that we know right now, he’s a monster. “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.”
Even if he is a ‘good’ man, he’s actually furthering horrible experiments and projects, not just doing nothing. You can cut that any way you like.
Just another point I’d like to make: there really is no moral grey area. Good and bad or right and wrong actually do exist on a spectrum. What people call a grey area is actually just a morally dubious statement where the person can’t be quantified into their expectations of good and evil. These people who live in a 'grey area’s are frequently considered exempt because they can’t be accurately quantified. If you do a bad thing for good reasons, that bad thing will have consequences. And while that good reason might end up helping, there will still be those who suffer as a result of that bad thing. The same can be said of doing a good thing for bad reasons, just reversed. Think of it as an equation. People hurt versus people helped, with a base multiplier of intent. While that is extremely simplified, hopefully you catch my reasoning.
Long story short, I agree that we need more information, but I disagree that we can’t use the information we have now to make educated guesses. Judgement is a part of human nature, and you can no sooner avoid that than you can your reflection in a mirror. I disagree with the assessment that he could be morally righteous. The truly righteous don’t do what he has done. Regardless of their intentions. Morally good, maybe. Righteous, no.
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I just used righteous as the opposite side of the spectrum, but just morally good is a better choice of words.
My only issue is that the equation comparison is very correct, but then you get into the situation of long term situations and information and then it has to be decided if it’s the function of a graph or an instantaneous equation. So all we know is 2 or 3 people have been hurt, so if we pick the instantaneous equation it would result in a negative. But we lack the information of any of their findings being analyzed or applied which usually falls in a different department in most labs. So we end up with a true unknown in any equation we may try to apply.
Another issue is that it depends on how people view morality, I view it on a scale where most of it is grey, very few people fall in the black and very few in the white. Nothing in the world is as black and white as we like to believe.
Also then we have the villain versus there hero. Depending on who you are, you may see a hero where others see a villian or vice versa.
So like I said, some people may be able to make these judgment calls prior to obtaining all the information or enough to reach a sound conclusion with no holes. I can’t do it and I try my best to give everyone the benefit of doubt when a situation has too many holes like the one we’re faced with. But this is coming from someone who’s spent his life in a scientific setting. Premature conclusions without analyzing all data available and if not enough data is present, no conclusion is made. That’s just me, but I do like your point of view too.
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How on Earth did I miss all of this??? Y’all even brought up Milgram! Also Zimbardo might be worth looking into just to see how easy it is for humans to treat each other in awful ways. I don’t do much ethics research per se, but I did work on one project in undergrad that dealt with perceptions of others and a lot of participants cited ethical reasons as for why they responded negatively to the fake person in the story.
In social work, we are required to practice this thing called “nonjudgmental acceptance.” How it generally plays out is a client will admit to doing something we may disagree with (shoplifting and/or drug use are the most common) and we just accept it as fact. We validate their pain and emotional experiences, regardless of what they’ve done. It can also play out in other ways, like if a client says they’re not going to vaccinate their kids. While that isn’t really a legal issue, it’s still a questionable behavior to many practitioners. But we accept it and talk about any stress they may be experiencing in relation to that choice. We might explore what brought them to make that decision if the client brings up that line of thought, but we would never try to persuade them to vaccinate their kids if they didn’t want to. The only time we would report what they said is if it seems like they’re going to hurt someone else (mandated reporting laws vary by state but let’s just keep it simple). So in this case, Teddy could come to me as a clinician and say he’s being coerced into kidnapping and torturing in order to keep his job or coerced by other means and I would still have to report it. The legal system might find him not guilty by reason of duress, but what he did is still illegal. If people are interested in duress cases, Patty Hearst is a pretty well-known one, and there is international interest in duress due to the UN’s stance on child soldiers. Please note I am not comparing him to a child soldier in any way shape or form, just offering resources for those interested in these topics.
Like many others have said, we don’t know his circumstances. I would be interested in knowing how he came to be part of KS and what age he was at the time out of professional curiousty. From a personal standpoint, I don’t trust him and I don’t like the things he’s done. But as a professional, I would be interested in hearing his perspective, if he feels remorseful, and if doing these atrocious things caused him any emotional distress. I believe in restorative justice and the idea that people can change. I like to believe that we are all more than the worst thing that we’ve done.
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What this man has done to us is unforgivable. I see now that I was wrong to ever think of standing up for him. Whatever was human in him is gone. Life is just a toy to him.
I hope he survived the Storm. He deserves so much worse than that.
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You said it King. I am almost ashamed to know I thought there could be honor in that man.
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I will say this only once. Teddy is a monster. You cannot be willing to hurt others for your own gain and not be ,in some sense, a monster. He and the rest of KS held children against the will and for that I hope the storm punishes them severly. The Gossmere side of me almost always begs pity for a being that has done wrong, but they have done the unthinkable.
For that there is no mercy.
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