*Spoilers* Anyone feel joining Emet would have been better

[Lurina]

Which I guess brings us to this (since I ran out of characters, lol):

The "Venat's actions are morally unjustifiable" argument has to rest on a central pillar of the third sacrifice being of non-sapient life. It is the difference between Venat being a raging enviromentalist extremist and her attempting to prevent her own people from committing genocide.

A lot of people's arguments here seem to frame the situation as binary. Either the Ancients weren't doing a sufficiently bad thing and so Venat wasn't justified, or that they were and she was.

I think you're missing what actually predicates redheadturk's opinion, which is the idea that both can be wrong at the same time. Even if the Ancients were about to overrule the agency of a bunch of innocent beings, that doesn't per-se make an action to prevent this morally justifiable if it also involves the same evil, which it implicitly does - obviously not every Ancient on the planet would have had a say in the conflict at all. What about the children? What about the ones living far away in the New World, who are referenced in Amaurot? Or hell, even for the ones who did want to do the sacrifice, is it acceptable match violence with violence at such a scale?

To bring it back to the real world, very few people would find destroying modern society an acceptable answer to its inherent evils. Overturning an established order, even for the better, often has a cost in suffering even greater than the problem it hopes to resolve. You can't boil it down to just saying, 'it's doing something wrong, so it must be stopped'.