Several politicians within the Galactic Alliance get together to talk about Uplifts and similar beings. They begin a campaign to make it illegal to create them. Why? It should never be legal to create a cogniscent for the express purpose of enslaving and abusing them. All cogniscents have rights after all. They further were trying to get freed the many Uplifts that were currently living as property owned by others instead of being free. -- DaniAndShali
True evil, a wise man once wrote, starts with treating people as things. Their un-personhood can either be a matter of philosophy, or as complicated as being created as a product. Since classification as a species is the ability to make more lifeforms with the same physical and mental attributes, the creation of Uplifts skates around laws against creating intelligent species strictly for servitude.
Augments, on the other hand, are trained and programmed to be intelligent only in specific directions. They are created infertile, often cloned, and specifically tailored as assistant creations. They were never made to be slaves. Uplifts are elevated to full cogniscents, and are never rendered infertile by their gengineers. Thus, their own children are used against them as a lever to guarantee subservience. This is considered blackmail, ransom, and illegal.
Unfortunately, those facts do not stop the immoral. Uplifts are always being created somewhere. The morally impoverished will always want power over some creature in their immediate vicinity. Mistreated pets will inevitably strike back. Mistreated people can think forward enough to fear even worse treatment than the current situation.
Evil may generally start by treating people as things. It takes a special kind of evil to set out to create people that were made to be things. First - to have the monetary resources to pay for something of the ilk. Second - the determination to persist in looking for someone capable of creating Uplifts to demand. Third - the mental fortitude to continue treating a cogniscent life form as property despite them begging to be treated otherwise.
There is no such thing as this being a slippery slope. There are no links in this chain of progress that could be mistaken for a misstep. There is no way to accidentally create an Uplift. They are created from extant, infant animals, not gengineered from zygotes and grown from there.
Thus, creating Uplifts is illegal in Alliance space. This is a good thing. However, there are still the Edge territories, where anything can be legal for the correct amount of funding. For every group of rogues and misfits taking a stand against Uplifts, there are the immoral who escape them for far too long.
The CRC does not publicly endorse the actions of said bands of rogues or misfits, but they have been known to slip them some funding on the side. Neither does the CRC applaud any and all instances of such immoral people being suspended for public display in a state of significant undress with all possible evidence adhered painfully to their exposed skin. They disavow any and all instances wherein shipments of extremely painful adhesives may be sent to such bands. They deny all knowledge of handy guides to where such evidence could be adhered, to which cogniscents, and what their favourite hangouts might be.
The CRC can't be everywhere, nor can they police everything. They certainly make sure that they're minutes too late to prevent the very public humiliation of such morally bankrupt souls. Oddly enough, they're always on time for the therapy and rehabilitation of the Uplifts.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / MarcinSl1987]
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