Quote Originally Posted by Lurina View Post
People are not in thrall to their stated values. If I say that I love my cactus and then decide to throw it out to make room for a new chair, I haven't betrayed it, because the cactus is an unthinking object; it's only value came from my professed love in the first place. Circumstances changed and made the Ancients value the preservation of their loved ones over the star, and from a utilitarian perspective, this is fine so long as this act didn't directly engender future suffering. Considering we now know that the original sacrifices were conscious and trapped within Zodiark, it's arguably even the more moral action, EW's anti-escapism message aside.

Now, if I were talking about, say, throwing out an intelligent pet like a cat instead, this would become a bit more of an ambiguous situation. In turn, so is the Amaurot scenario itself complicated by the ambiguity of the third sacrifice. Nevertheless, the Sundering ended up de-facto obliterating all currently-extant sapient beings regardless, so in no regard can it be viewed as a lesser evil. It is - again, from a strictly utilitarian perspective - an objectively unethical act.
And yet a utilitarian perspective isn’t the only ethical view we can apply here, nor do all flavors of utilitarianism agree. If one is a positive forms of utilitarianism for example, then the preservation of life and its spread through existence would be a wholly good thing outweighing the moral negative of the Sundering.

Personally however, I find the Rawlsian just savings principle to be much more compelling. One can’t meet the sufficient threshold for a basic system of justice if everyone’s dead after all.