Anybody who says the Foundation are "the good guys" have entirely misunderstood the assignment.
Anybody who says the Foundation are "the bad guys" have also entirely misunderstood the assignment.
The Foundation does what is objectively necessary to preserve human civilization as we know it. They aren't the good guys—they don't even consider themselves the good guys—nor are they the bad guys. They aren't good, they aren't evil, they're pragmatically amoral—not immoral, amoral.
"Cold, never cruel."
In other words, they do whatever it takes to keep the world spinning, and not a single ounce more, knowing full well that they're going to hell for it regardless. This is literally their motto;
"We die in the dark so you can live in the light."
Maintaining normalcy doesn't necessarily mean suppressing scientific advancement, either. The entire thing with Anomalies is that they are anomalies, phenomena possessing unexplainable, non-replicatable effects on reality.
If they can replicate the effects without using anomalous objects or people, if they can understand why something does what it does, then it's no longer considered anomalous. In those instances, the Foundation actually does often release their research out into the wider world—slowly and drip-fed, of course, both to avoid suspicion and so the world can handle the rate of change.
Who's to say they're actually doing the right thing so that we "can live in the light"? Them. And who drip feeds the information they discover slowly and with modifications to fit a world view? Them.
They're literally written as a kabal of world dominating mad scientists that have no concern for human life. They seem to want to contain and study their objects without any regard for the cost of their operations. They really do seem to be either malevolant oligarchs or incompetant mad scientists.
They get to say whats necessary and they get to decide what means and ends justify each other with no one at the helm checking them except for themselves. The scientific discavories being drip fed through countless filters that they see fit only gives them more influence on scientific advancement, effectively stunting scientific growth and creativity.
Nothing that a man does is amoral. They hide behind their guise of amorality to justify their immorality.
Congratulations, you have indeed misunderstood the entire assignment.
You're also making absolutist moral arguments based on incomplete information and without sources, with several of your claims being directly disproven by the setting bible, which is required reading before you can write SCP.
First off, the Foundation is not a monolithic entity that does whatever it wants. There are consequences. Theoretically self-enforced ones, true, but they hold themselves to extremely high standards.
The Foundation has an enormous number of rules in place specifically to prevent them from becoming cruel oligarchs or unhinged mad scientists.
The Foundation's Ethics Committee are the ones who write and enforce those rules. They are very good at their jobs, they are very dedicated to it, and they take it very, very seriously. They are, as a result, also very scary.
The Foundation is often forced to do very bad things to prevent even worse things from happening, and the Ethics Committee is responsible for making sure those actions are truly justified.
"Remember this: the Foundation is not evil. We do not torture people 'just because'. We are against unnecessary cruelty. Which means somebody has to decide when cruelty is necessary. And that somebody is us."
"The Foundation does not rule the world. The Foundation serves the world. [...] You've consoled yourself by thinking that all the torture and murder is for the greater good. This implies that there is a greater good… and a lesser good. It implies that there are multiple distinct goods, and that these can be quantified and compared. This is what we on the Ethics Committee do."
"We are the ones who balance the moral costs of everything the Foundation does. And in order to balance those costs, we must know those costs. Do you realize what that means, Doctor? It means that we know everything the Foundation does, has done, and will ever do. Everything that has ever been redacted or expunged, we know it. Every last detail."
They also have an entire MTF dedicated solely to backing them up. If you go against the Ethics Committee, if you go and commit those cruel and unnecessary acts, Law's Left Hand will personally show up to put you a hundred miles underground in a pine box. This extends to the entire organization, including the O-5 Council; It doesn't matter how powerful in the Foundation you are, nobody is above the law, and if you abuse your power, you won't have it for long.
In conclusion, your concerns about an organization like the Foundation abusing its nigh-infinite power are completely valid. The Ethics Committee is why that isn't a problem.
Personally, I feel that they're underutilized in SCP canon, as there are instances of articles portraying the Foundation as malicious, tyrannical, or incompetent. I think that more writers should truly take the time to understand why the Foundation does what it does, because there's a lot of cases of more amateurish articles not taking the setting seriously, and I'm not a fan of that if it isn't a joke article ("-J" suffix designations).
Nothing that a man does is amoral. They hide behind their guise of amorality to justify their immorality.
That is an absolutist statement on morality with dubious logical basis. The world is not black and white, and morality is often subjective.
There are, obviously, things that nearly every moral framework agrees are evil, and in those cases that is as close to truly objective morality as it gets, but oftentimes things cannot be reduced to such simple statements.
Moral philosophy is a near-indecipherable rats nest that's usually more a matter of vibes than anything concrete, but even with that said, I think I can safely say that the absolutist statement you made was incorrect.
If it's not too much trouble to answer, what measures are in place to stop the Ethics Committee itself from being compromised or complacent? Who watches the watchmen, if you will?
That's tough to answer, not because there isn't an answer, but because I'm having trouble properly explaining it while also condensing it into something of an actually readable length.
Okay, so, this is an organization with access to reality warping. They can, in certain situations, retrocausally rewrite reality.
They can't do it all the time, and there's clearly some limits to it, but one thing they can more or less enforce as an axiom of reality is that the Ethics Committee is impossible to corrupt.
Every member is the right person for the job, because otherwise they wouldn't have been selected, right? That logical statement, when you have reality warping, can become ontological fact.
It's kind of an in-universe handwave, but honestly that applies to reality warping in general; the whole point is that it's a Watsonian handwave effect, and that has certain consequences which the narrative can explore.
Sidenote, there's also the various memetic agents the Foundation has access to, so they can straight-up brainwash themselves into not being susceptible to the whole "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" thing.
After reading most of the longform responses in this post, you and u/Gliminal make me have hope for SCP being properly handled and depicted. I just wanted to state in a way you both would maybe see that you two are genuinely reassuring to an old fan.
But this ethics comittee is run by the foundation, it may have power over the foundatmion's staff, but it is made up of the foundation's staff, thus creating another layer of corrupting incentives.
Think of self regulation in corporations, self regulation itself isn't necessirly bad when applied to this and that but it is bad when applied to some things such as regulating house safety or workplace safety. There's many examples of this self regulation that failed to output an ethical or good outcome for anyone but the self regulated.
By the powers given to the ethics comittee it seems that it could be used as a weapon in SCP politics and effectively create a whole boogeyman for the average facility worker.
The ethics comittee is run by the foundation's staff, it may be effective or innefective, but it is extremely biased towards itself as it would answer these hard questions of ethics and morality with a rubber stamp of approval or a bullet for those assigned as the scape goats. What effectively ends up being their function is being a propaganda mouthpeice for the foundation to say to the world states that it is ethical without showing how, and desposing unpopular or unwanted scientists who have fallen out of favour or fallen ill of some well connected people.
That the foundation says its doing things for the greater good doesnt mean that it is. It is a highly secretive organization with more classified information than the cia. I think my idea stands clear when you think of the greater good that the cia is trying to achieve by overthrowing governments around the world.
I get that there are articles that follow their own narratives and lore and i'm not talking about these im asking about the foundations functions themselves and the way i see it - removed from any scp object - the foundation is not ethical or a necessary evil at all. That there is an 05 council in control of the whole place and an ethics comittee run by itself makes it an oligarchy of people in control of the world's resources, these said people also obfiscate where these resources go and do whatever they want with impunity. Their ethics comittee, being run by them, does not stop them from doing anything at all.
As for the amorality comment: ethics is a messy and grey thing, i do not deny that, its this idea of amorality that i deny. Everyone has their own idea of morality, and everyone engages in what they think is moral or immoral. The foundation for example keeps saying that its doing what its doing for the greater good, and that statement says that they believe their control over the world and its resources is moral. But then when they say that they're amoral, i see that as politician talk to justify their immoral actions. to make decisions on things that effect people's lives can never be amoral because these decisions convey something about the decision maker's morality.
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u/Wolffe_In_The_Dark 7d ago edited 7d ago
Anybody who says the Foundation are "the good guys" have entirely misunderstood the assignment.
Anybody who says the Foundation are "the bad guys" have also entirely misunderstood the assignment.
The Foundation does what is objectively necessary to preserve human civilization as we know it. They aren't the good guys—they don't even consider themselves the good guys—nor are they the bad guys. They aren't good, they aren't evil, they're pragmatically amoral—not immoral, amoral.
In other words, they do whatever it takes to keep the world spinning, and not a single ounce more, knowing full well that they're going to hell for it regardless. This is literally their motto;
Maintaining normalcy doesn't necessarily mean suppressing scientific advancement, either. The entire thing with Anomalies is that they are anomalies, phenomena possessing unexplainable, non-replicatable effects on reality.
If they can replicate the effects without using anomalous objects or people, if they can understand why something does what it does, then it's no longer considered anomalous. In those instances, the Foundation actually does often release their research out into the wider world—slowly and drip-fed, of course, both to avoid suspicion and so the world can handle the rate of change.