Ethics and the foundation

Summary:

Is the scp foundation ethical?

Ethics and the foundation

BIRDCHURCH 10 Apr 2020 16:03

I wrote the SCP foundation in a fairly negative light in one of my WIPs. If this foundation we're to exist in the real world, and the public knew about it, I can't imagine it'd survive long. You have the issue of subversive characters with access to some of the most deadly and powerful creatures, killing and abusing convicts (death row or not), imprisonment and use of various entities that may not always be of risk to the public, and an elite group of higher ups that work in the dark.

I'm new to the site and maybe I don't understand the cannon well enough, but to some extent the foundation sounds like a Mary Sue or a white knight. Then again, it'd be understandable that the site wouldn't publish their critics on their scp site (the scp wiki since its supposed to be a database). Nonetheless,the alter foundations that do challenge the SCPF are almost always written to be extremists or rampant occult religious organizations that want to rob the SCPF of their SCPs for personal gain (an easy antagonist and foil). I think the foundation is more interesting when you look at it as a morally gray group that believes they have all the answers, an organization that claims to value and protect humanity while disregarding their lower class personnel's own safety, a small group of elites willing to throw away the lives of their workers for the sake of knowledge and power (union time baby!), anyways I just think reveiwing the wax and wane of the foundations ethics is an interesting discussion and i've only really seen folks defend the SCPF's actions when discussing their morality. wait am i posting this to the right place

Re: Ethics and the foundation

ShadyFish 24 Apr 2020 19:09

I like the rank the GoI's on a sort of spectrum. The G.O.C. and the Serpent's Hand represent the extremes while the Foundation is in the middle with the CHao Insurgency as it's counterpart.

Re: Ethics and the foundation

Nagiros 10 Apr 2020 16:40

I think the foundation is more interesting when you look at it as a morally gray group that believes they have all the answers

Correct. Out of curiosity, how many recent articles have you read and how acquainted are you with the site's particular brand of canon? Whether or not the Foundation does all those unethical things is largely up the individual author headcanon — for example, sometimes they just don't use D-Class because the author doesn't like D-Class as a concept.

The Site-17 Deepwell Catalog and The Trashfire are probably good case studies for how this plays out. From both, respectively:

+ Click me

The Foundation is a global, clandestine organization with an iron grip on all media, literature, and public knowledge. They operate within a strict hierarchy of Researcher to Site Director to Overseer to ensure that humanity remains in perpetual and blissful ignorance. They will and have contained God, and no one seems to care.

The Foundation does not and cannot rule the world. No matter how ambitious their task, the Foundation is neither invincible nor omnipresent. Not everyone appreciates its actions, even those with ostensibly similar endgames. It needs to be exceedingly smart about its operations and scope, a fact burned into its collective psyche following nearly a century of struggles. Principles only get you so far before budget rears its ugly head.

Also, the only GOI nowadays that remains relatively underdeveloped is probably the Chaos Insurgency. Everyone else might be presented with significant bias in SCPs articles (by virtue of them being written by the Foundation) but tales and GOI Formats have gone a long way to flesh them out.

Last edited on 10 Apr 2020 16:40 by Nagiros Show more

Re: Ethics and the foundation

UraniumEmpire 12 Apr 2020 23:51

Answer: that depends on a) what canon you subscribe to and b) your own personal view of ethics.

As an example: The Trashfire was brought up earlier. As the person who wrote the hub, I can say with 100% personal certainty that the Foundation was not intended as ethical. Trashfire!Foundation is intended as a harsh satire of American neoliberalism and bureaucracy, the inefficient and sprawling machine that only gets a pass because it "fights for your freedom". In its best moments, the costs of tracking a serial killer come at the expense of land and labor; in its worst, well, it feeds the meat of a dead god to its employees to cut costs on food.

However, I could very easily see someone argue that even in its worst moments, the Foundation is fighting for the good of humanity in the only way it can. Like it or not, its mission necessitates mass capital acquisition and resource consumption, and sometimes you need to choose between fundamentum and funding. Who cares if they don't try to fix humanity's non-anomalous problems? Are they their brothers' keeper, or should their brothers be expected to look after themselves?

That's not even getting into some of the other works on the site. Apotheosis has them dying because they refused to redefine normalcy. Kalinin's Proposal has them working to stop humanity's brutal precursors from taking them "home". In His Own Image sees them dealing with the trauma of their mission. You could make a case for any of these being ethical, unethical, or beyond such a simple descriptor, but none of them overlap to the point where you can make a blanket statement.

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… and I'm not Robert Frost.

Re: Ethics and the foundation

Jarbatalapus 14 Apr 2020 01:49

Trashfire!Foundation is intended as a harsh satire of American neoliberalism

That's exactly how I view the Foundation. I'll have to take a look at that hub.

Re: Ethics and the foundation

BIRDCHURCH 21 Apr 2020 20:54

Yea exactly I think you could easily argue for or against the virtue of the SCPF, and narratives on the site that discuss the politics of the SCPF universe especially interest me—ill have to check out the hub you linked.

I'm really surprised this site isn't more mainstream or talked about, a lot of the stories that I've read so far could easily be described as juvenalian satire and a lot more than some quick horror short. This entire group itself (the SCPF) could be described as commentary on contemporary autocracy inmy opinion, certain folks having too much power and too little empathy. Control is definitely a theme in all this since the whole premise of an SCP is being able to control and contain powerful entities to alter the potentially world ending outcomes.

This all caught me off guard honestly because I joined the site expecting a 2010's creepypasta knockoff, chock-full of stephen king-esque (no offense king) horror stories. But i really love this communities work and the complexity of the SCPF universe deserves a lot more attention!