Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[NegativeS]

However that misses the main point of my argument: evil or not, we simply don't have neither authority nor legitimacy nor right to do as we please in Sphene's kingdom. Even if existence of Endless is in the end harmful, as long as Sphene doesn't use outside souls for her system, we have no right to intervene. What we have is the right to stop her from threatening souls outside, by force if needed. Erasing Endless within their bubble, however, is an internal affair, a decision that must be done by local legitimate authority, not by us, a hostile outside force. And if we say that we allowed ourselves do to as we please in Sphene's realm because of situation in extremis, that makes us somewhat of a war criminals, since we were targeting civilians which has no direct effect on stopping Sphene here and now.

Whether or not we had the authority to do what we did, it was the only course of action we could have taken to prevent the destruction of our world and others.

Shutting down the Terminals before Meso was just a bid to try to disrupt Sphene's interdimensional merge and take her attention away from it, but we are told very explicitly that destroying Sphene would also destroy Living Memory. This is not the case of a feud between nations--dismantling a government does not immediately destroy the nation's citizens. In fact, there is no government. This is a rogue AI that has taken onto itself the responsibility of 'preserving' the memories of the departed, through any means necessary. Were this still an actual nation, they would likely have put in significant R&D to determine an alternative to eating living souls, to prevent exactly what happened to Sphene from happening. But she didn't, because her rigid AI didn't allow her to, so she found out what happens when you threaten a population with total annihilation on a whim.

The people of Alexandria do not seem to know that the Endless exist--only that the dying are taken away for end-of-life care, and that their memories of them are taken to be stored in the 'cloud' (Even in Orgenics, the location of the Meso Terminal is classified even to the people who work there). Ergo, the Endless did not ask to become part of this rogue AI's bid to preserve the departed.