Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[Alchemii]

The actual "moral" problem with the Living Memory has nothing to do with us shutting it down. It's the entire system itself. When someone dies their memories and all that get uploaded into the Living Memory so they can continue to "Live on" and people can come visit them and all that, but also those little techno dodads everyone's wearing then wipes their memories of the dead. Why? If they don't believe dying is that big of a deal because they'll just get uploaded into the Living Memory, then why wipe their memories of the person? In fact, why wipe their memories of the person at all? This is where things aren't making sense, why are they wiping peoples memories of the dead in the first place? None of it makes sense, and seems to directly contradict their stated philosophy of "living on forever so long as your remembered". With the way the Living Memory is designed the living could still come visit those that have passed on, except they don't cause they have no memory of them.

[CVXIV]

The actual "moral" problem with the Living Memory has nothing to do with us shutting it down. It's the entire system itself. When someone dies their memories and all that get uploaded into the Living Memory so they can continue to "Live on" and people can come visit them and all that, but also those little techno dodads everyone's wearing then wipes their memories of the dead. Why? If they don't believe dying is that big of a deal because they'll just get uploaded into the Living Memory, then why wipe their memories of the person? In fact, why wipe their memories of the person at all? This is where things aren't making sense, why are they wiping peoples memories of the dead in the first place? None of it makes sense, and seems to directly contradict their stated philosophy of "living on forever so long as your remembered". With the way the Living Memory is designed the living could still come visit those that have passed on, except they don't cause they have no memory of them.

This is another point I was going to bring up in my long post earlier but I decided against it. To my understanding, we are the first of the living to venture there or at least that's the impression I got when we were told not to give it away.

I don't think anyone really knows about Living Memory or the fact the Endless exist.
Living Memory I assume is purely for the Endless to live out as if they were still alive and reconnect with those they lost.
While the living continue on without knowing the pain of loss until it's their time to pass on and have their memories uploaded to the cloud, as they called it.

Because it doesn't make much sense to me to wipe their memories if they could potentially visit the Endless.

[Carolingian]

The actual "moral" problem with the Living Memory has nothing to do with us shutting it down. It's the entire system itself. When someone dies their memories and all that get uploaded into the Living Memory so they can continue to "Live on" and people can come visit them and all that, but also those little techno dodads everyone's wearing then wipes their memories of the dead. Why? If they don't believe dying is that big of a deal because they'll just get uploaded into the Living Memory, then why wipe their memories of the person? In fact, why wipe their memories of the person at all? This is where things aren't making sense, why are they wiping peoples memories of the dead in the first place? None of it makes sense, and seems to directly contradict their stated philosophy of "living on forever so long as your remembered". With the way the Living Memory is designed the living could still come visit those that have passed on, except they don't cause they have no memory of them.

The whole memory wipe thing doesn't make sense in general and is probably just something the writers came up with to make the whole thing seem more evil and contrast it more clearly with the whole "you live on in our memories" message of the previous zones. I don't think it has anything to do with how Living Memory itself works (as proven by the two Otis) nor with the question whether the Endless (intelligent and self-aware as they are) should be considered alive/sentient or not.

It's just one of many instances this expansion where the weak writing lets you see the hand of the writer way too clearly.

[CKNovel]

The whole memory wipe thing doesn't make sense in general and is probably just something the writers came up with to make the whole thing seem more evil and contrast it more clearly with the whole "you live on in our memories" message of the previous zones. I don't think it has anything to do with how Living Memory itself works (as proven by the two Otis) nor with the question whether the Endless (intelligent and self-aware as they are) should be considered alive/sentient or not.

It's just one of many instances this expansion where the weak writing lets you see the hand of the writer way too clearly.

Finally, my "Akschually" moment.
It's a FF IX reference, "To be forgotten is worse than death", but also because Alexandria wanted a happy going kingdom that knows no sadness or grief.
By wiping the memory of an individual, they made them forget the loss and they don't have to go through the well known steps of grief. But if you're forgotten, does it means you truly lived?

It's not "evil" it's just classic "the road to hell is paved with good intentions".

[Alchemii]

The whole memory wipe thing doesn't make sense in general and is probably just something the writers came up with to make the whole thing seem more evil and contrast it more clearly with the whole "you live on in our memories" message of the previous zones. I don't think it has anything to do with how Living Memory itself works (as proven by the two Otis) nor with the question whether the Endless (intelligent and self-aware as they are) should be considered alive/sentient or not.

It's just one of many instances this expansion where the weak writing lets you see the hand of the writer way too clearly.

Yea, but it's a complete moral and psychological contradiction. Like everything we've been told and seen of the Alexandrians makes the memory erasing not make sense. So long as there is no explanation for why, then it not only serves no purpose, it goes in direct contradiction to the moral ideology of Sphene and the Alexandrians.

[Zakuyia]

Look ill be real.... I wasn't remotely attach to living memories so I could easily shut it off. Judge me how u see fit. IF THAT PLACE THREATENS OTHER SHARDS it has to go down. Your ok with the 1st being destroyed cause oh sympathy for that place question your own mindset. It was a blight and cursed existence that needed to be removed like the disease it is. Pretty zone tho.

[Carolingian]

I mean is anyone in XIV dead? The souls of the dead are also alive in all "perceivable ways".

The souls of the dead aren't even self-aware as far as we know. So they're obviously not alive in all "perceivable ways".

Though it would have been great if the story decided to explore that a bit more. Clearly on the Source most people consider the Soul as the most important part of being alive. When someone dies the Soul goes back to the aetherial sea, gets cleansed/stripped of its memories, and then eventually reincarnates and thus doesn't need memories to "live on". Yet on Alexandria's world they believe Memories are the core part of being alive and that they don't necessarily need the Soul part to live on.

In Shadowbringers a big part of the story was about how maybe people on the Source were wrong (or at least missing some important information) about the way we look at Astral and Umbral compared to people on the First. Could the same be true here?

That question isn't even entertained, we just instantly go to "no, they're wrong so it's fine to destroy it all". It's all so frustratingly shallow.

[SDaemon]

The souls of the dead aren't even self-aware as far as we know. So they're obviously not alive in all "perceivable ways".

We make contact and have conversations with Amon's and Asahi's souls in the Aetherial Sea.

[Turtledeluxe]

The souls of the dead aren't even self-aware as far as we know. So they're obviously not alive in all "perceivable ways".

Though it would have been great if the story decided to explore that a bit more. Clearly on the Source most people consider the Soul as the most important part of being alive. When someone dies the Soul goes back to the aetherial sea, gets cleansed/stripped of its memories, and then eventually reincarnates and thus doesn't need memories to "live on". Yet on Alexandria's world they believe Memories are the core part of being alive and that they don't necessarily need the Soul part to live on.

In Shadowbringers a big part of the story was about how maybe people on the Source were wrong (or at least missing some important information) about the way we look at Astral and Umbral compared to people on the First. Could the same be true here?

That question isn't even entertained, we just instantly go to "no, they're wrong so it's fine to destroy it all". It's all so frustratingly shallow.

I guess you didn't play SHB or EW.

It's interesting to me that you're so passionate about an ethical debate but you won't acknowledge we have interacted with several characters who are dead yet perceivably alive.

When we talk about things being alive, that indicates there's biological processes going on perpetuating that organism. As far as recreating a person, you'd need way more than just memories to do that. This is why I think the arguments around XIV are silly in nature. Maybe you all aren't aware of this, but humans can't be recreated from just memories.

What's happening in XIV is all magic and doesn't really apply anything outside a purely theoretical discussion for funsies.

And what we are left with given that, is were the protagonists, who are not real, contextually ethical in the fiction? When the Endless themselves are distinguishing from their state vs the living and several of them giving reasons to turn off the terminals (it's not just Cachiua), the limited time and resources considering the threat of Sphene, it can be argued that they did the best they could with the time, resources, and info they had. And if you're really not satisfied by that, you'd still have to admit the real villain is Cachiua. Not the the protagonists and certainly not players.

[Carolingian]

stuff

Being alive, or sentient, isn't limited to just "biological processes". At least not in a fantasy or sci-fi setting. And that's what we're talking about, we're obviously not talking about real life. It's one of the main philosophical questions and debates in most science fiction. One Dawntrail doesn't seem interested in approaching in any kind of interesting way, even though FFXIV did manage to do that before with the likes of Alpha/Omega, Gigi, and Ultima Thule. That is my main problem.

I agree that some dead people have still been shown to be sentient, mostly while they were still in the aetherial sea before their soul was fully cleansed and reincarnated. But the game has pretty much always treated messing with said aetherial sea, or at the very least the souls within it, as abhorrent because those souls are what people on the Source consider "life". It's why what happened during The Final Days is seen as extra awful because those souls aren't returned to the Aetherial Sea. Neither is Venat's for instance because her aether is completely used up. They are considered truly dead dead.

That's why I find it extra disappointing that the game doesn't treat Alexandria's belief that it is memories, not merely the soul, that makes one alive with the same kind of consideration. It would have made for an actual interesting story and philosophical question. But Dawntrail insists on remaining really shallow and just handwaving it all away (just as it did with previous big problems and ethical questions like in Mamook), making the whole section extra frustrating because we're forced to just swallow the lacklustre explanation that Cachiua (and thus the writers) give us.

And yes, if we were to consider the Endless sentient then it could easily be argued that Cachiua is a villain and the WoL is an accessory to genocide. Especially when her request to erase all Endless doesn't even make much sense when she later explains that shutting off Sphene's terminal would shut off all other terminals anyway. So why even make the request when it's seemingly inevitable when stopping Sphene?

But I'm pretty sure that's just another sign of the weak and unsubtle writing of this writing team. A particularly heavy-handed way to force in extra stakes and sacrifices without it necessarily making much sense (same reason why we can't just shut down the terminals without erasing the data). It's not unlike how the ending of Mass Effect 3 forced you to also kill all Geth and EDI if you wanted to kill the Reapers.

So it's obviously not the players who are unethical for doing what the video game tells us to do. It's the video game characters doing arguably unethical things in-universe that are waved away by weak excuses thanks to weak and shallow writing. Like the OP said: the writers wanted a certain result and they didn't really put much care or thought in how they were going to reach that result.