Quote Originally Posted by Dikatis View Post
I mean, yeah. It's a double-standard. But at the same time, what about it?....But I don't really see how it pertains to the topic of the thread since, again, this topic came up because people are debating the moral quandary of the Endless.
Let me try to express the connective tissue a bit more clearly. I'm going to be pretty methodical, as I want to try to make sure I show my work and don't skip any steps.

When you see a boar, you judge it to be an animal. When you see a Midlander, you judge it to be a person. You treat these two things differently based on that judgment.

Assuming you aren't simply operating on habit or instinct, you probably have reasons for why you judge a boar to be an animal while you judge a Midlander to be a person. They are similar in ways, but they are also different in ways, and you have identified some of those differences to be meaningful enough to warrant a difference in judgment (which includes a difference in rights and treatment).

And of course, there are other labels you can apply via judgment as well. A flower is a plant, which is a living thing with less rights than an animal. A rock on the ground is an object, which has even fewer rights than a plant. A robot...what do we judge a robot as? It seems to depend on certain factors...

So, what does this have to do with the Endless?

The Endless are a new thing to us. So what should we judge them to be? Are they a person? Are they an animal? Are they even alive?

As readers of this fictional story, we're going to be taking into consideration the things we learn about the Endless to help us decide what judgment feels appropriate. The process is much the same as with the boar and the Midlander, it's just that we're not accustomed to doing it with the Endless.*

So when Oolong says "people passing judgement on others and their lives for their own selfish benefit are the bad guys", they seem to be overlooking the fact that they have already judged the Endless. For the Endless to deserve better treatment than an animal or a rock suggests that Oolong has already judged the Endless to be something akin to "people". This is the most important judgment in the entire process, and it is not being taken into consideration.

And we need to take it into consideration if we want to have a constructive dialogue, because it's fundamental to the discussions of the Endless. When readers of Dawntrail discuss the Endless, a major source of disagreement comes from the fact that different readers have judged the Endless to warrant different classifications. Some feel they are robots, some feel they are people, some feel they are more akin to ghosts, etc. And this difference of interpretation seems to be the focus of the majority of the discussion on the Endless. As long as we can discuss it constructively, that's great.

But when we simply assume our judgment is right and dismiss those of others, or if we fail to even realize that all of us are judging the Endless, then we won't be able to have a productive discussion.


*And notably, the characters in the story are going through the same process, and it's possible that they'll come to different conclusions than we do due to the subjective nature of this judgment.