The elder scrolls: Mages guild is evil?

[Nitnam]

I have recently been playing daggerfall and started doing tasks for the mages guild and I have to say I have to question whether the mages guild is truly the "good guys" that they want you to believe they are and this goes toward the later games too. First in one quest they send you to assonate a guild member just because he doesn't follow their rules and strays into unsanctioned practices". Several simular cases where in morrowind where they send you to kill people who don't follow their rules. and one more case in Morrowind where if the person doesn't join them then they must die. This same thing was the main point of the mages guild main quest in Oblivion where the necromancers where the target just because they didn't follow their rules. It may be argued that necromancers are evil and that necromancy corrupts the mind but all true lore people and followers of all the game know that necromancy is a lot more of a gray area.

[Rily]

Another thing that leads me to believe that the mages guild is evil is their experiments. I have had several times through different games had to put down experiments that had gotten out of hand and in the most recent case the subject told me it'd rather die than go back to the laboratory to be experimented on. Is this evil? some may think not. Another thing that isn't exactly evil but could be considered it is that the mages guild has a huge monopoly on its services and services that only it can offer for nothing else comes close. One last thing to state is that the founder of the mages guild himself left the guild after it had become something that he didn't want it to.

[Messenger]

Then again with all of the above mentioned it could all be due to the over sized ego of most wizards to begin with. or maybe it isn't just necromancy that corrupts the soul but maybe magic in general no matter what type corrupts a person just some corrupt people faster than other types. Neither the mages Guild nor Necromancers are evil. Actually many Necromancers were member off the guilds until Hannibal Taven became the Archmage.

[Cruzz]

Actually, no despite what the MG wants you to think, they did force known practitioners out or forced them to conform. It is even mentioned in .The Black Arts on Trial" that Traven sent knights of the lamp to arrest Ulliceta gra-Kogg just for being a necromancer. The scientists who work for the pharmaceuticals do pretty horrific things to animals. Drugs companies won’t invest in certain medicines if don't see any market potential, often condemning many people to die.

[Pierson]

I don't think the Mages Guild is evil. Maybe they can be seen more like a bureaucracy that's gotten set in its ways; making it harder for citizens of Tamriel to learn magicka, for example. Look at the hoops they make the player character jump through in Oblivion in order to join. I think the necromancers qualify as evil. Suppose you lived in Tamriel, would you want your loved ones to possibly be the raw materials for some necromancer? It's a sickening thought. Humans deserve respect, including their remains.

[Abenaki]

Otherwise, criminal corpses were happily donated to the necromancers. It's a win-win situation. Allows nobles to have an effective deterrent, not have to spend money to dispose of their corpse unless you live in any other state or origin, they probably just toss everything in the river, and gives necromancers a steady resource of often young and in-shape bodies to experiment and study with. That depends on whether you define a lump of inanimate raw materials as a person or not. If anything, the soul before entering the Dreamsleeve is what the person is after death, and then the Dreamsleeve pretty well obliterates it anyway.