Modern Morality vs Game Setting

So this isn't even a case of modern vs setting ideas of right and wrong. The different cultures within that setting have different ideas. Which then asks the question, for a group like the scions what is their value system and how do they apply it. Based off their actions it looks like...

Killing prisoners bad. Interrogation okay.
Killing non-combatants bad. Killing combatants okay. Killing combatants after they yell "time out I want to talk" unthinkable. A sin most foul that can never be committed in a cut scene ever.
Slavery they just turn a blind eye too. Forced combat for prisoners they turn a blind eye too. They will not do these things themselves, but they will not fight against them.

It seems like the Scions just want to save everyone, pass no judgement on any society, except if you summon a primal we will stop you. But not permanently stop you. Just kill the god and give surprised pikachu face when you summon it again 10 minutes later.

Since it doesn't seem like it's been brought up so far (I think?), there's also a part in the EW Melee Role Quests that has this issue; where it basically feels like you as the WoL/leader of the melee role squad are specifically being tasked with.. prying information out of someone and are directly made to choose which specific method to use. Given the tone of the quest/moment, it was certainly intended to be taken as comedy but it still felt weird to me personally.

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Originally Posted by KariTheFox

Slavery is a weird one in the setting because we see it referenced a lot, but rarely see it in practice. Ul'dah seems to practice some kind of debt-based slavery as punishment for crimes, and you can become a gladiatorial slave as a way to pay off you debts too. Limsa regards slavery as illegal and Yellowjackets root it out when they can, but pirates do participate in some kind of black market slave trade (where are the slaves being taken is unclear).

Garlemald seems to have slaves, though it is interesting that the practice appears to be kept away from people in the ordinary core. Provincial Governors appear to employ slaves, but in Garlemald proper the only slaves were tucked away in Cerulea Ingens and put to work there.

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The pirates in Sastasha keep at least some of them for themselves. If you poke around the dungeon a bit, you'll notice that the random NPCs in there are all women, are kept in a cell when not needed, and some have... let's say interesting speech bubbles: https://i.imgur.com/3NP8qxc.png. The enemies in there also have a line of aggro dialogue to take the women alive. As a side note, they seem to have very specific tastes because all the women are either Mi'qote or Lalafells.

There's also a FATE chain in, I want to say South Shroud, about a Coeurl King who basically has a harem of slaves he keeps in check with blackmail. I think the postmoogle quests had one dedicated to that as well.

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Originally Posted by Waliel

The pirates in Sastasha keep at least some of them for themselves. If you poke around the dungeon a bit, you'll notice that the random NPCs in there are all women, are kept in a cell when not needed, and some have... let's say interesting speech bubbles: https://i.imgur.com/3NP8qxc.png. The enemies in there also have a line of aggro dialogue to take the women alive. As a side note, they seem to have very specific tastes because all the women are either Mi'qote or Lalafells.

There's also a FATE chain in, I want to say South Shroud, about a Coeurl King who basically has a harem of slaves he keeps in check with blackmail. I think the postmoogle quests had one dedicated to that as well.

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the moogle quest did and it even shows he emotionally and mentally manipulates them to keep them in his harem but making them feel he is the only one who will accept them.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

See, when I saw this thread topic, I thought we were gonna be talking about slavery. You know, the thing that confirmably exists in multiple nations we've visited (I've counted at least four, more if you count 'Garlemald' and 'Garlemald-occupied nations' separately).

Something we have to remember is that the game setting is not 21st century Earth, and does not share its morality. It's very nebulous exactly what level of comparative development the game world is in, since over the course of the game we see nations based on things ranging from 19th century Japan, Crusades-era Vatican City, to a 17th century mythical city, to a mashup of the Roman Empire, Nazi Germany and Cold War Eastern Europe. But all that can really be confirmed is that FFXIV's world hasn't caught up to us. That's just fine for a story, but it does mean that they haven't gotten to modern cultural mores like 'completely outlawing outright slave trading' and 'completely understanding that torture is bad'.

They're getting there, though. Limsa is several centuries ahead of the curve in recognition of the sins of colonialism.

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I think a lot of people miss this point alot because it is common for people to place the morality of our world over the morality of a alternate world to a point it is almost expect by certain people that a game world follows the same morality laws as our own world.

However, we should never place our world's morality laws into another world because standards of that world maybe far different from our own.

It is actually part of FF14 story itself that different cultures have different morality laws which often leads to the conflict WoL gets involves in. Where one culture may see something as wrong, another may see it as right. We face this alot in the storyline and of course it does trigger certain people when the culture of a specific group clash with our world's belief of right and wrong. However, that is part of the reason why we should never place our own world's standards of right and wrong too much into this game since the culture of that civilization maybe have clashing beliefs with our own world's beliefs.

At the sametime it is important to be aware of our own world's beliefs because the different beliefs of right and wrong in each civilization is a reflection of our world's past cultures. It shows how different things were back then compared to what the standard of right and wrong is now. Not to mention learn to understand why the culture was like that is also important since what they define as right and wrong may have been the result of who was in power, religion, social norms of that time, and acts of self survival during a harsher times.

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Originally Posted by EdwinLi

I think a lot of people miss this point alot because it is common for people to place the morality of our world over the morality of a alternate world to a point it is almost expect by certain people that a game world follows the same morality laws as our own world.

However, we should never place our world's morality laws into another world because standards of that world maybe far different from our own.

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Personally my basic rule of interpretation is such: if the characters themselves express opinions that match our present day morality, then it should be safe to assume that in that situation, their morality matches ours.

Hence the debates back in Stormblood-era about whether something counted as a "war crime" was, to me, rather irrelevant, because the characters treated the incidents as atrocities beyond the "normal" conduct of war by their reckoning. In certain cases (eg the attack on Specula Imperatoris), even the "enemy soldiers" consider the attack to be unconscionable, so it's not just the Eorzean Alliance being unused to war.

The same applies to outright piracy (already considered a major nuisance by the other city-states, and recently outlawed by Limsa Lominsa themselves), banditry (dealing with them is a routine matter for adventurers in general, not just us), slavery (every slaver is depicted as either having to skirt the law via loopholes, or ignoring the law entirely, which means it's considered a bad thing by society), and unsanctioned/unprovoked murder (as seen in the ALC questlines).

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Originally Posted by YianKutku

Personally my basic rule of interpretation is such: if the characters themselves express opinions that match our present day morality, then it should be safe to assume that in that situation, their morality matches ours.

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Is this my chance to shill Star Trek again? No? Pretty please?

From a spec-fic perspective, nobody really writes cultures wildly divergent from modern moralities unless there is some desire to explore that divergence. POV characters will generally stick pretty closely to a modern perspective by virtue of being, say, spacefarers from Earth, a "modern" human" displaced in time, or even just uncommonly well-read. In FFXIV, we have enlightened scholars form Sharlayan (there's an obvious "yikes" there but I'll ignore it). Even back in ARR, Y'shtola was serving really modern takes on colonialism, to a colonial pirate queen.

So yes, it is rather silly to try and defend cultural attitudes that aren't even defended in the setting. Eorzea (and now Etheirys) may be a weird moral mashup of 18th-, 19th-, and early 20th-century quandaries, but the setting has only ever been used as a way to reflect on how we got where we are today.