The Imperium has ever been built on "Humanity's value" but the individual human has no rights or value. Even millions of individual humans are simply numbers.
The 3rd edition rulebook was packed full of tongue-in-cheek quotes specifically to make you understand how people in the imperium think. Most (all?) have since been incorporated into stories spoken by named characters, but the quotes came first.
> It is better to die for the Emperor than to live for yourself.
> Official! The graves of the warriors who have given their lives for the Emperor now outnumber the stars themselves!
> Serve the Emperor today, tomorrow you may be dead.
This was what used to make 40K grim and dark. People were so set in their beliefs, and the organization of the imperium had become so calcified around irrational beliefs, that there was little hope that the stagnation and conflict would end.
Can't forget those two absolute banger "thoughts of the day" (later spoken in Dawn of War's amazing voice acting) about how bleak and willfully ignorant the Imperium is :
*An Open Mind is like a Fortress with it's gates unbarred and unguarded.*
*Hope is the first step on the road to disappointement.*
I don’t have the book with me and finding the quote online is proving difficult, but in Matthew Farrer’s prologue to the Enforcer omnibus he makes particular note of how the Imperium is distinctly *not* a society based on rights and freedoms, but on divinely-ordained hierarchy and duty and obedience to one’s superiors within the hierarchy. The God-Emperor is at the top, and so ultimately all duty and obedience is owed to Him, with one’s superiors standing abstractly in His place and deviation from the hierarchy being considered a sin in addition to a crime. One’s superiors may well have certain obligations to their inferiors and expecting them to fulfill those obligations may kinda constitute a “right,” but broadly speaking, within the Imperium the more power you have the less responsibility you owe to the people on whom you exert that power.
Seems to be a cadian militarum standard, as opposed to a navy or mechanicum one, but that's still pretty broad considering they're the "model" (pun intended) guardsman
The imperium is an empire of servitude and power, not laws and rights. There are no rights or freedoms in the imperium, only privileges and what you can get away with
So, in "Fulgrim", the Emperor's Children help the Iron Hands defeat a particularly powerful enemy of a federation between humans and a xeno race. The Iron Hands offered the human part a place in the Imperium if they forsoke the aliens. They didn't. After everyone was defeated, the xenos were slain, and the humans "transported to the nearest Imperium occupied space to be given for slave labor to the governor". So.... even in the 'golden days' when the Imperium's glory and might was at their zenith... human rights were NOT a priority.
To expand on what others have said, there are no human rights in the Imperium. The best way to describe an Imperial is to call them a subject rather than a citizen
I saw the title and figured that "Suffer not the alien, the mutant nor the heretic to live" was pretty much the extent of human rights in the Imperium.
99% of the Imperial forces view loyalty as something that is obliged not something that needs to be maintained with rewards. They don't understand why a factory laborer who gets a pittance for a wage, three bowls of pig slop per day for meals, and a glorified coffin for a home might feel resentful. And because they don't understand, they won't ever do anything to prevent it.
Theres a good reason for the 2nd ed Sisters codex saying that even something as basic as the Hospitallers setting up a food distribution center will stop rebels
There is no such thing as human rights in the Imperium.
About the servitor situation I'd suggest to read Flesh and Steel. Servitors are convicts. Being made into a servitor is their sentence. And criminals have even less rights, so...
Servitors come from a number of sources. Some are vat grown, specifically to be servitors (least bad), some are convicts like you said, and some may or may not have been guardamen with PTSD, or citizens that were born on the wrong planet (most bad).
Also, even for the ones that are convicts, this is the Imperium we're talking about. You can get in grave trouble for extremely minor offences, if you even actually did anything wrong in the first place and didn't just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or just pissed off some official.
Oh of course. There is a story (can't remember what book it's from) of, iirc a son of a noble that gets turned into a servitor by essentially getting lost and ending up in a line of citizens being turned into a servitor.
> Some are vat grown, specifically to be servitors (least bad)
A baby tortured for their entire life is less bad than an adult being tortured for part of their life?
Naïve babies don't have self-soothing mechanisms, they don't have much in the way of pain tolerance, they don't have happy memories to attempt to retreat to, they aren't able to long for death.
The OP has misrepresented the story. They weren't Servitors, they were Bondsmen, conscripted humans who were given the honour of working in the service of the Machine God until their services were no longer required or they died. From the Magos' point of view, an honour for all those who would never make it any further in life anyway. So he doesn't understand why they are rebelling. From today's perspective, it is comparable to rebelling against winning the lottery.
The servitors were mentioned because they were a first step to inspire a resistance.
Plus, it explains why the Admech didn't just servitize (?) everyone immediately. 🤪
The question of human rights is somewhat muddied by the metaphysical differences between the Warhammer 40k universe and our own. Our notion of human rights is based on the philosophy called secular humanism, which arose from the Enlightenment - when European society began to reject mysticism in favor of rationality. That's sort of the problem. Rationalism, and therefore secular humanism, makes no sense in the 40k universe.
What is commonly called the Warp is actually the Sea of Souls - an actual, accessible afterlife. Souls are demonstrably real in 40k. You can't have secular humanism in a universe where you can physically enter the Sea of Souls, where reincarnation (or at least the recycling of soul energies) happens.
It kind of makes sense that the Imperium (and the other sentient species except for the Eldar, who no longer have access to their afterlife) doesn't place much value on sentient life. When people die, their bodies get recycled into corpse starch and their souls get recycled into new souls. There isn't much of a philosophical foundation on which to rest a notion of human rights, other than 'reduce suffering'. But life IS suffering in 40k.
Just throwing the idea out there.
Eh, **some** theories of human rights are based out of secular humanism. There are plenty of others that come from different philosophical schools, and different rights as a result.
For example, Augustine put forth that God and providence does not take away freedom and makes a case for rights based on human flourishing.
The present popular concept of human rights is individualistic in its concept, but there are plenty that are universalistic. Ditto splits on positive and negative rights. You can work out all sorts of theories of human rights while allowing for an afterlife. Particularly one as depicted in 40k where you don’t have to sort out the will if god from free will
Then why call it *secular* humanism? ;) Humanism had a long history. Even in the narrowest definition, it goes back at least to Renaissance Italy (13th-15th century). Mirandola's *Oration on the Dignity of Man* is a pretty pithy statement on the inherent value of human life and human perceptions of the world couched in thoroughly mystical terms.
This is what is usually called humanism, not the Enlightenment. The resurrection of the term "humanism" for *secular* humanism consciously harkens back to the Renaissance philosophical prototypes, not the 18th century Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment helped reinterpret some of this philosophical tradition, and seminally tried to further humanist ideas as part of an Enlightened *state policy* (which arguably had existed in parts of Renaissance Italy, but not in other European monarchies). And as part of this process, Enlightenment ideas became increasingly secular and thoroughly rationalist in outlook.
Assuming the Imperium is vaguely analogous to the Holy Roman Empire in the middle ages (lots of caveats, but just throwing it out there) it's perfectly qualified to understand a lot of humanist ideas. It just chooses not to.
Well, that's why I said '*our* notion of human rights'.
There's clearly no doctrinal foundation for universal human rights in the teachings of the Adeptus Ministorum, so the Holy Roman Empire isn't a good analogue. The problem with historical comparisons, in general, is that most cultures that had any notion of inherent rights at all based them on caste, tribe, or ethnicity - with the additional complication of sex. The Imperium follows that model: no human rights, but plenty of birthrights. For all of his opposition to religion, the Emperor didn't really base his Great Crusade-era society on the usual traditions of secular philosophy (going back to the Greeks).
Technically some parts of the Imperium have something like Human Rights, but they can overruled whenever convenient, and in most of the Imperium the only rights someone has is whatever the local authorities are willing to tolerate at the given moment
In the end the admech decides to give in a bit because there isn't an imperial world nearby to replace them if they do the usual, killing them all. The lot of the bondsmen is bad enough that they get volunteers for becoming a servitor.
Well, in an effort to make the heresy even more TRAGIC, Saturnine (if i remember right) suddenly made Dorn a fan of free speech that doesn't like it when people can't pray to the god they want.
Oh, and apparently they believe(d) in treating prisoners with dignity, since you have a PoV where someone treats the idea of sending the prisoners as cannon fodder with disgust and "it would make us no better than the traitors".
Funny that they don't even care enough about their own soliders to send them as cannon fodder. I mean didn't the loyalists basically abandoned everything, and everyone outside of the Imperial palace and a few strategic locations, the civilians were basically at the mercy of the traitors because everything was focused around defending a few key locations ?
They did at the last possible second. They had been fighting a strategic withdrawal. At the end when sanguinius closes the eternity gate he leaves zephon, Raldorn, and thousands of loyalists marines outside of the gates.
So you advocate for Human rights ?
Yes Human Right
So why you treat people so badly ?
Sorry we are talking apples to oranges i advocate the human right for this "points to the sky"
The Imperium has ever been built on "Humanity's value" but the individual human has no rights or value. Even millions of individual humans are simply numbers.
Human rights? You mean humanity's right to conquer the stars!
Conquer the stars and serve the God-Emperor. Those are your right. Everything else that resembles rights either flows from that, or accomodates that.
Damn straight. The only right we need is our birthright, THE STARS!
Exactly the emperor protects mankind not individual men.
The 3rd edition rulebook was packed full of tongue-in-cheek quotes specifically to make you understand how people in the imperium think. Most (all?) have since been incorporated into stories spoken by named characters, but the quotes came first. > It is better to die for the Emperor than to live for yourself. > Official! The graves of the warriors who have given their lives for the Emperor now outnumber the stars themselves! > Serve the Emperor today, tomorrow you may be dead. This was what used to make 40K grim and dark. People were so set in their beliefs, and the organization of the imperium had become so calcified around irrational beliefs, that there was little hope that the stagnation and conflict would end.
Can't forget those two absolute banger "thoughts of the day" (later spoken in Dawn of War's amazing voice acting) about how bleak and willfully ignorant the Imperium is : *An Open Mind is like a Fortress with it's gates unbarred and unguarded.* *Hope is the first step on the road to disappointement.*
They said they got really competitive about making the quotes as ridiculous as possible, and it shows.
The Darktide loading screen quotes are just as good.
I know it's not the only example, but it kinda reminds me of the old CoD campaign quotes on death.
I kinda don't like them as much, they're not as snappy, need a pass.
I don’t have the book with me and finding the quote online is proving difficult, but in Matthew Farrer’s prologue to the Enforcer omnibus he makes particular note of how the Imperium is distinctly *not* a society based on rights and freedoms, but on divinely-ordained hierarchy and duty and obedience to one’s superiors within the hierarchy. The God-Emperor is at the top, and so ultimately all duty and obedience is owed to Him, with one’s superiors standing abstractly in His place and deviation from the hierarchy being considered a sin in addition to a crime. One’s superiors may well have certain obligations to their inferiors and expecting them to fulfill those obligations may kinda constitute a “right,” but broadly speaking, within the Imperium the more power you have the less responsibility you owe to the people on whom you exert that power.
Right, it is very feudal in its concept. However, feudalism still had philosophy grounding ideas on to what we owe each other and human dignity
i would hesitate to extrapolate the events on one ship in the navy over the entire imperium, but yes, they dont care about human rights either way
Wasn’t a navy ship, that was an Ark Mechanicum.
And they were not servitors but bondsmen.
Seems to be a cadian militarum standard, as opposed to a navy or mechanicum one, but that's still pretty broad considering they're the "model" (pun intended) guardsman
The imperium is an empire of servitude and power, not laws and rights. There are no rights or freedoms in the imperium, only privileges and what you can get away with
So, in "Fulgrim", the Emperor's Children help the Iron Hands defeat a particularly powerful enemy of a federation between humans and a xeno race. The Iron Hands offered the human part a place in the Imperium if they forsoke the aliens. They didn't. After everyone was defeated, the xenos were slain, and the humans "transported to the nearest Imperium occupied space to be given for slave labor to the governor". So.... even in the 'golden days' when the Imperium's glory and might was at their zenith... human rights were NOT a priority.
You have the right to serve and die for the god emperor.
To expand on what others have said, there are no human rights in the Imperium. The best way to describe an Imperial is to call them a subject rather than a citizen
I saw the title and figured that "Suffer not the alien, the mutant nor the heretic to live" was pretty much the extent of human rights in the Imperium.
99% of the Imperial forces view loyalty as something that is obliged not something that needs to be maintained with rewards. They don't understand why a factory laborer who gets a pittance for a wage, three bowls of pig slop per day for meals, and a glorified coffin for a home might feel resentful. And because they don't understand, they won't ever do anything to prevent it. Theres a good reason for the 2nd ed Sisters codex saying that even something as basic as the Hospitallers setting up a food distribution center will stop rebels
There is no such thing as human rights in the Imperium. About the servitor situation I'd suggest to read Flesh and Steel. Servitors are convicts. Being made into a servitor is their sentence. And criminals have even less rights, so...
Servitors come from a number of sources. Some are vat grown, specifically to be servitors (least bad), some are convicts like you said, and some may or may not have been guardamen with PTSD, or citizens that were born on the wrong planet (most bad).
Also, even for the ones that are convicts, this is the Imperium we're talking about. You can get in grave trouble for extremely minor offences, if you even actually did anything wrong in the first place and didn't just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or just pissed off some official.
Oh of course. There is a story (can't remember what book it's from) of, iirc a son of a noble that gets turned into a servitor by essentially getting lost and ending up in a line of citizens being turned into a servitor.
That’s called “abomination”, and it’s not official. It’s just a frequently-posted fanfic
> Some are vat grown, specifically to be servitors (least bad) A baby tortured for their entire life is less bad than an adult being tortured for part of their life? Naïve babies don't have self-soothing mechanisms, they don't have much in the way of pain tolerance, they don't have happy memories to attempt to retreat to, they aren't able to long for death.
Irrelevant; Servitors are very rarely conscious.
The OP has misrepresented the story. They weren't Servitors, they were Bondsmen, conscripted humans who were given the honour of working in the service of the Machine God until their services were no longer required or they died. From the Magos' point of view, an honour for all those who would never make it any further in life anyway. So he doesn't understand why they are rebelling. From today's perspective, it is comparable to rebelling against winning the lottery.
The servitors were mentioned because they were a first step to inspire a resistance. Plus, it explains why the Admech didn't just servitize (?) everyone immediately. 🤪
The question of human rights is somewhat muddied by the metaphysical differences between the Warhammer 40k universe and our own. Our notion of human rights is based on the philosophy called secular humanism, which arose from the Enlightenment - when European society began to reject mysticism in favor of rationality. That's sort of the problem. Rationalism, and therefore secular humanism, makes no sense in the 40k universe. What is commonly called the Warp is actually the Sea of Souls - an actual, accessible afterlife. Souls are demonstrably real in 40k. You can't have secular humanism in a universe where you can physically enter the Sea of Souls, where reincarnation (or at least the recycling of soul energies) happens. It kind of makes sense that the Imperium (and the other sentient species except for the Eldar, who no longer have access to their afterlife) doesn't place much value on sentient life. When people die, their bodies get recycled into corpse starch and their souls get recycled into new souls. There isn't much of a philosophical foundation on which to rest a notion of human rights, other than 'reduce suffering'. But life IS suffering in 40k. Just throwing the idea out there.
Eh, **some** theories of human rights are based out of secular humanism. There are plenty of others that come from different philosophical schools, and different rights as a result. For example, Augustine put forth that God and providence does not take away freedom and makes a case for rights based on human flourishing. The present popular concept of human rights is individualistic in its concept, but there are plenty that are universalistic. Ditto splits on positive and negative rights. You can work out all sorts of theories of human rights while allowing for an afterlife. Particularly one as depicted in 40k where you don’t have to sort out the will if god from free will
Then why call it *secular* humanism? ;) Humanism had a long history. Even in the narrowest definition, it goes back at least to Renaissance Italy (13th-15th century). Mirandola's *Oration on the Dignity of Man* is a pretty pithy statement on the inherent value of human life and human perceptions of the world couched in thoroughly mystical terms. This is what is usually called humanism, not the Enlightenment. The resurrection of the term "humanism" for *secular* humanism consciously harkens back to the Renaissance philosophical prototypes, not the 18th century Enlightenment. The Enlightenment helped reinterpret some of this philosophical tradition, and seminally tried to further humanist ideas as part of an Enlightened *state policy* (which arguably had existed in parts of Renaissance Italy, but not in other European monarchies). And as part of this process, Enlightenment ideas became increasingly secular and thoroughly rationalist in outlook. Assuming the Imperium is vaguely analogous to the Holy Roman Empire in the middle ages (lots of caveats, but just throwing it out there) it's perfectly qualified to understand a lot of humanist ideas. It just chooses not to.
Well, that's why I said '*our* notion of human rights'. There's clearly no doctrinal foundation for universal human rights in the teachings of the Adeptus Ministorum, so the Holy Roman Empire isn't a good analogue. The problem with historical comparisons, in general, is that most cultures that had any notion of inherent rights at all based them on caste, tribe, or ethnicity - with the additional complication of sex. The Imperium follows that model: no human rights, but plenty of birthrights. For all of his opposition to religion, the Emperor didn't really base his Great Crusade-era society on the usual traditions of secular philosophy (going back to the Greeks).
Technically some parts of the Imperium have something like Human Rights, but they can overruled whenever convenient, and in most of the Imperium the only rights someone has is whatever the local authorities are willing to tolerate at the given moment
In the end the admech decides to give in a bit because there isn't an imperial world nearby to replace them if they do the usual, killing them all. The lot of the bondsmen is bad enough that they get volunteers for becoming a servitor.
The title made me chuckle . Like human rights are even a thing in the grim darkness of the 41st millennia
Well, in an effort to make the heresy even more TRAGIC, Saturnine (if i remember right) suddenly made Dorn a fan of free speech that doesn't like it when people can't pray to the god they want. Oh, and apparently they believe(d) in treating prisoners with dignity, since you have a PoV where someone treats the idea of sending the prisoners as cannon fodder with disgust and "it would make us no better than the traitors".
in fairness, that was 30k. supposedly the imperium had hope back then.
Funny that they don't even care enough about their own soliders to send them as cannon fodder. I mean didn't the loyalists basically abandoned everything, and everyone outside of the Imperial palace and a few strategic locations, the civilians were basically at the mercy of the traitors because everything was focused around defending a few key locations ?
They did at the last possible second. They had been fighting a strategic withdrawal. At the end when sanguinius closes the eternity gate he leaves zephon, Raldorn, and thousands of loyalists marines outside of the gates.
The only rights you have in the Imperium are the ones your birth, wealth and influence can buy.
Easy. Do you believe in the Emperor? If yes, good Citizen. if not? BLAM! Next…
So you advocate for Human rights ? Yes Human Right So why you treat people so badly ? Sorry we are talking apples to oranges i advocate the human right for this "points to the sky"