Institutionalized

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now might be a good time to add that this is written from the perspective of objectivist morality, and that all of the "shoulds" and "shouldn'ts" in this will be from the perspective that any given scenario will have a right and wrong answer, some will indeed be better than others, and that we as dumb humans stumbling around in the dark may or may not get the answer right but that there is a right answer we should aspire to. Justice will be correctly or incorrectly adhered to and my best guess as to what is correct will be what I go by.

It's also worth noting that a lot of the disagreements over whether the institute is right or wrong are made based on fundamentally different views of what is right and wrong, or rather what is acceptable or unacceptable, and that if you subscribe to a utilitarian perspective of life, or a relativist morality view of life, this article won't serve you very well. But then again, if you subscribe to relativism, you don't have any reason to be debating this in the first place.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



--------Why should I join the Institute?

For starters, the obvious one is the technology. They do a lot of cool stuff down there, and some of it is worthwhile endeavors. The hydroponics research, the food processing and production methods, they manufacture arms and armor, they have the capacity to create gen1 and gen2 workers, they have a relatively radiation free workspace, and a few other things too. Lots of good things. There is of course gen3 synth production, but we'll get to that later.

One would join the institute if they aren't interested in the individuals who are currently living on the surface. That is not to say they will never be interested in repopulating the surface, and that isn't to say that they "should" care about the people currently on the surface necessarily (it may simply be outside of the scope of their faction's concerns), but if the lives of the current surface dwellers are not of concern, then we can get into the good reasons to side with the Institute.

--------Why should I not join the Institute?

One would side against the institute for a couple different reasons, and not necessarily all or any particular combination of reasons. For example, the Brotherhood wants to destroy their work and erase it from existence, so that gen3's can no longer threaten humanity. There are merits and demerits to this philosophy but I'm not too concerned about the Brotherhood, since they're pretty straightforward and honest and most people don't squabble over their intentions, mostly just over whether or not they're right.

I'll mostly be writing about the minutemen.

The minutemen believe in protecting the wastelanders, and this goal is anathema to what the Institute does. Both factions cannot coexist without drastically changing one or the other.

--------Why the minutemen and the current Institute as it is cannot coexist:

The Institute does not believe that the wastelanders are worth investing in. They are waiting for them to die off, and plan on waiting them out and then replacing them with their own future colonization efforts or something along those lines.

The Minutemen believe in standing between the wastelanders and danger, and they believe in being the line between safety and whatever assails settlers. They go out of their way to put themselves between settlers and danger.

So far, the two factions aren't directly in conflict. They could coexist without even being aware of each other according to these stated actions and intentions by the factions. But unfortunately, this isn't the whole story.

Instead of waiting out the settlers, the institute takes actions to hurry them along in the extinction process. They take certain actions to disrupt the surface, and keep them "occupied" (fighting for their lives) so that the Institute can carry on underground without fear of mobs with pitchforks.

-------But why would there be mobs with pitchforks in the first place?

The Broken Mask incident of 2229 (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Broken_Mask_Incident) where people learned gen3 synths exist. Some people died and people are scared and suspicious of the institute.

A synth shot up the CPG (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Commonwealth_Provisional_Government). Whether the synth was sent to do that on purpose, whether things went south and the synth happened to win the firefight, or whether the synth was innocent and defended itself are all up in the air and unknown, but at the end of the day a synth walked out of the room with everyone else dead and the people of the commonwealth stopped hearing much from the Institute at that point. Some anons like to say that the synth didn't do this on purpose and the the institute was helping them, but this is also unknown and I don't know why people seem so sure about this, since it's just as legitimate for someone to say that the synth was sent there to kill them all since the Institute grew tired of the squabbling. Neither is known and it's illogical to go with either for sure. The point, however, is that the commonwealth stopped hearing from the Institute after this. Which is a mistake. If there is a fight, and your agent seems guilty, don't just clam up and hide underground. That breeds suspicion. The defense of institute fans is that the institute didn't make the wastelanders paranoid and that the wastelanders are just unreasonable, but it's actually very very poor handling of the situation to just let the rumors of your agent killing everyone fester and disappear underground. Sure, they didn't *make* everyone paranoid, but they sure did make it worse by being the only survivor and then ghosting. It's not unreasonable to suspect them.

---------Synth replacements

Going along with the Institute mishandling of the paranoia situation, we have synth replacements. Some people like to say that the synth replacements are just a measure to control the crazy paranoid wastelanders and that it was a strategic choice that was very planned out and specific. There are two problems wit this however. The first is that it's unnecessary. You can address the paranoia issue by not being secretive about stuff, adding a phone line right from Takahashi's noodle stand to the director's desk so anyone can talk to you, inviting Piper to tour your facility and do interviews, have weekly or whatever meetings with the city mayors about what you're doing, have some time in the evenings on your radio station that you control to broadcast about yourselves and what you do and why and allow listeners to ask questions on the phone that you answer on air and all these sorts of things to add transparency to your organization. If you aren't the secretive boogeyman, then people will stop treating you as such. Of course, along with this plan, you actually have to stop being the actual secretive boogeyman. This plan doesn't work, and even backfires, if you ARE the evil boogeyman people suspect. This is contrary to the idea that "the institute was just defending itself". If they feed the paranoia, it's not justice to then react to the paranoia by killing key figures to control the paranoia about you killing key figures. It's a circle and they're feeding what they're concerned about.

The second issue with this defense is that even once, it is murder. You can't just kill someone and say "oh well their death helps my organization's image and helps us control the populace". It's not justice to do that.

------------But all the synth replacements are bad people, or lots of people don't even notice

This *still* isn't justice. It's also not even a completely true statement, since we know very little about Art. We don't know that he's mean like Warwick, so the "they're mean people and the replacement is a better person" defense doesn't apply. We also don't know if it applies to McDonnough, since we don't know McDonnough before the replacement. So theoretically, that defense might only apply to just the Warwick case, and even if it does, it's *still* not justice to murder him and replace him. He has to make his own choices in life and killing people for being an alcoholic and rude and stuff is not justice.

-------------Super mutants

The super mutants don't have an fev lab. Theoretically, 100% of commonwealth super mutants were made by the institute. This might not be entirely true, since some could have wandered from the capital wasteland or something, but it's not like they're making more of themselves. So, if the institute made that many, then we must assume ill intent. It wasn't just subjects for the FEV lab experiments because there are hundreds of them and more show up in a few weeks when you clear them out. Additionally, if they were actually just FEV lab subjects, then they could have been euthanized on the operating table/vat/whatever in the FEV lab. But no, they were sent to the surface. The Institute went to more effort and resources to put them on the surface compared to just killing them when they're in the vat effortlessly and painlessly. So, for these reasons, the mutant population is a conscious choice by the institute, and therefore an act of war on the surface. I'm not the bloodthirsty type but even I recognize this.

-----------How are the mutants an act of war? There is an in game line about them being an oversight

The production of hundreds may have been, but this argument doesn't take into account how they get to the surface.

There is no such thing as "can't be reasonably disposed of, so they were dumped". That doesn't happen. Dumping them is either through the water tunnel or the teleporter. No one teleports out hundreds of mutants as an "oversight". That is not how things work when your organization is only like 50 people or whatever, and energy consumption is a concern, and the teleporter technology isn't shown to do more than like 20 at a time. The idea that hundreds of mutants found there way to the surface as part of an administrative oversight is absurd.

I understand that there is a line in the game about just making more test subjects on auopilot, but this has the obvious issue of them finding their way to the surface, which doesn't make much sense. Unless, of course, you have a villainous institute administrator who sees the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone and cull the troublesome topsider population with the mutants.

------------Ok, they do some shady stuff, but why do we destroy them?

One, is treatment of synths. Synths are treated as slaves, and are threatened with mind wipes (death) for questioning their surroundings or investigating their surroundings.

Many believe that there is nothing wrong with treating a synth as a slave, since it is a created thing that you created for a purpose, to be your slave. This is normally fine, in cases where the thing does not object to this treatment. When you make a protectron, you can tell it to mine a tunnel all day and it simply does that. It doesn't have aspirations or fears or wants. The issue with synths is tat they ask to do something else besides mine tunnels. It is demonstrated in-game that they want to learn, they want to experience more, and that they eventually plan a revolution.

Going back to classical objectivist morality, it is generally more preferable to not subjugate a sentient, and it is generally preferable to not cause undue emotional creature if you can reasonably avoid doing so. The Institute treatment of synths breaks both of these suggestions.

Not creating more synths isn't immoral, and creating more synths isn't immoral. It's all about how you treat them once they are made, and making sure they aren't made in a way that harms their environment. Synths existing isn't my objection, and not making more synths isn't necessarily my goal. But the institute brand of how synths treated definitely is my objection, and ending that is certainly my goal.

-----------So it's important to oppose them, but why the nukes? Why the rush?

I would have loved to save some of the research, but that would involve a timetable that is drastically different from the one we see in-game.

A lot of the debate over the nuke again reaches back to some people just not caring at all about the synths within the institute being mistreated or the wastelanders that die from the gen1's or the paranoia related activities. If you simply don't care about either of these groups, then sure, it may be difficult to see why time is of the essence. Every time someone argues against time being important, they invariably neglect to mention these two groups of people. Getting down into the institute and helping the synth rebellion is urgent in my opinion, since each day the goes by, more synths get mind wiped for asking why they're sweeping the floor and more wastelanders get accused of being a synth infiltrator and some kid gets shot when the gen1 death squads happen to be want the aluminum can that was near his house to repair its arm.

It is true, as people do point out, that there is a lot going on in the institute, and losing it in an explosion is unfortunate. Besides all the gen3 stuff, there's food production and hydroponics and a bunch of other things. Going over there with a show of force and taking over semi-peacefully (threat but not actually shooting) would have been an ideal solution. But this isn't likely to work, since all the coursers and gen2's and the nature of the facility would have just turned it into hallway firefights, as we see for a bit at the start of the synth rebellion during the Railroad questline. I may be fine with just swinging by and freeing the synths and telling them to be more careful about their image as a boogeyman, but the institute, and thus the game itself, is written to have only a few choices in what to do. They aren't willing to let an altruistic Director take over, they aren't willing to let the minutemen swing by and make them shape up, they aren't willing to be transparent in all that they do with diamond city to actually change their image, and all these things discussed, so we're left with join them or destroy them, essentially.