I hope it's okay for me to post this...ChrisDDickey wrote: ↑Sun Aug 12, 2018 6:58 pmSaying that "the end justifies the means", is simply admitting that you are willing to do what you recognize as being evil if you think your goal is good. That does not make your actions not evil.
The first two paragraphs where a nethermancer speaks about his discipline in the ED3 companion:
It is about having a different view on life and death altogether. By common standard the spells might look evil but the key lies in the nethermancers' acceptance of death and incorporating it into their overall theme.Many speak ill of the path I walk, the path of the Nethermancer. My colleagues and I are regarded with distaste, unease, even violent prejudice. As is the case in any such discrimination, its roots lie in ignorance. Simply because we inquire into the worlds beyond our own, we are suspected of consorting with Horrors and treated as pariahs. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Our explora-tions serve only to protect our fellow Namegivers from the ravages of the Horrors and their constructs, including the undead. Do the spells and talents we wield carry a dark tang to them, a stench of the grave? Perhaps to the clouded mind, to the Namegiver who gives credence only to his untutored feelings and flees from the blandishments of reason. But any who care to think carefully on the matter recognize the Nethermancer as a bulwark, the last line of defense between this fragile world of life and the encroaching worlds of horror and death.
People fear Nethermancers because they fear death, and Nethermancers are symbolically bound to the concept of death. But Nethermancers do not fear death, for we know it intimately. We know that it is not an impassable bar-rier, a wall between something that is good and something that is bad. Death is but a doorway, a threshold into another way of being. Life is not superior to death, nor is death superior to life. Both have their struggles, their pleasures, and their terrors. Only a fool looks upon death as anything more than another phase in the building of one’s legend.
They are dedicated to study horrors in order to eradicate them and they are not scared to use what they have learned against those they are fighting.
It is not about the end justifying the means but much more about how death and darkness become normal to those that study it intimately.
Take real life professions as an example, like grave keepers or those who embalm dead bodies and prepare them for funerals. Those are still highly stigmatised even today, and were subject to many horror stories in the past. Nobody is afraid of them anymore but many still find it weird or undesirable to work in those field.
What others are viewing as black and white, the nethermancer maybe just views as different shades of grey.
It is the black, the darkness, which they are fighting against and they are not afraid of using their knowledge to fight it.
So, if despite all this you are seeing them as evil, maybe you are not the right one to interpret their cause