Brainwash or Destroy (Major ME: 2 spoilers!)

I left the title of this thread deliberately vague so that even Bubba couldn't infer the topic.

So me and Mr. Carny are playing ME again, and he's leapt ahead into the endgame of ME: 2. He's obtained Legion and went ahead and did his loyalty mission, which is the crux of this topic.

You're given two options:

- Rewrite the heretic Geth

- Destroy the heretic Geth

It's one of the few times the paragon/renegade duality breaks down. Rewriting the heretic Geth is a paragon choice despite previous paragon dialogue railing against the ethics of such a choice.

Both choices are grey and grey morality. Rewriting the heretic Geth is, for me, akin to brainwashing them and removing their free will. While destroying them is... well, killing them, which is also pretty sucky.

What are your choices, guys? It's a tough choice either way. Mr. Carny advocates rewriting, while I generally think destroying is the most ethical decision.

well the heretics were tampered with by the reapers so i have no qualms about performing some error correction on them

On the one hand, Destroy seems...more ethical. Wouldn't we all rather be dead than to live as somethingwe aren't? To no one's surprise, Jack prefers this to rewrite.

On a more practical side, more Geth who are now effectively Legion = more allies for you so that plus for using that virus.

This was my reasoning for my "canon" Renegade Femshep run

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Just did Legion's Mission. A bit conflicted - unsurprised that Jack favors death over brainwashing. Me, I believe things like "Freedom" are overrated. The Heretic Geth won't even know they're different and in time, there won't actually be a difference. They'll be assimiliated wholly into Legion's camp.

That was what I thought though. I figure Shepard was more interested in having most of the powerful geth military on her side. Why destroy a perfectly good resource for no reason?

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I choose to destroy them, because in the long run it ME3 Spoiler makes it easier to achieve peace between them and the Quarian at the end of ME3. The war assets for either choice equal out if you make peace with the Geth, with one choice resulting in the geth being stronger, and the other making the Quarian stronger. A lot of my decisions like this are based on that cold calculus rather than morality.

I rewrote them because I never get rid of an asset I can still use.

Destroyed, but yeah it was a really hard one

Rewrite.

I really saw no ethical quandry here at all.

If the Geth truly have free will, then rewriting them can't override that. It would merely be the digital equivalent of anger management class. It guides them on a particular path, but that path is still theirs to take.

If they can have their free will overwritten, then they never actually had free will in the first place. Like my computer or my phone, they're carrying out set instructions dependent entirely on the code they were designed with. The code may be advanced enough to make it appear as though they were thinking on their own, but we know that they are simply following basic, deterministic programming, not truly choosing things for themselves.

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Originally Posted by Skyblade

If they can have their free will overwritten, then they never actually had free will in the first place.

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Disagreed. Free will CAN be overwritten. The process is colloquially referred to as "brainwashing". And it's what you're doing to the heretics if you rewrite them.