Why are undead evil? Why does necromancy get such a bad rap?

Why are undead always evil? Necromancy is not evil: it includes healing and resurrection! How many stories portray ghosts or vampires as sympathetic? Zombies and skeletons are supposed to lack the free will necessary for moral judgment in the first place. Making undead inherently evil is redundant when you have fiends. I take a morally grey approach, using other sources to derive alignment rather than undeath itself.

A simple cosmological explanation for why some undead are evil and others are not would be that the undead shares the alignment of their animating force. That animating force may be their soul, a fiend, an elemental, or some other spirit. A society of non-evil necromancers, for example, would bind benign spirits into their zombies so they do not become a menace when uncontrolled. Fiends, on the other hand, would probably enjoy sending their fellows to possess as many corpses as possible.

Why is creating undead evil? Positive and negative energy are a common explanation brought up to explain why undead are evil, but this is also illogical. Positive and negative energy do not exist in 5e, being replaced by radiant and necrotic damage. These have nothing to do with healing or with alignment.

Another common argument is that creating undead enslaves the soul of the body raised. This is not stated anywhere in the spells for creating undead. Furthermore, the revive undead spell (which is from 3e and does not currently exist in 5e to my knowledge) shares the same restriction as revivification spells: the soul of the target must be free and willing to return. It makes no sense for revive undead to share that restriction but not animate dead, create undead, etc. I must assume that spells which create undead do not summon and bind the original soul of the corpse, at least not against its will.

Corpse desecration is the only reasonable argument and I agree that property rights should be respected. Even so, I can easily imagine a society where a person or their surviving family could donate their body after death in exchange for money. The donor could use that money for themselves or they could give to their family after death as some kind of death insurance. I am sure fantasy lawyers could develop something.

Making undead morally grey also opens the possibility for non-violent interactions with the undead. For example, you could have societies where the ruling class is undead without being a stereotypical evil empire out to exterminate all life. They could even be heroic in their own way. Undead player characters could be an option equally valid to living constructs.

Relevant Links:

• Mythic Monday: Hellish Ghosts and Demonic Vampires
• Mythic Monday: More Hellish Spirits and Demonic Corpses
• My Undead are Different | Terminally Incoherent
• My Wizards are Different | Terminally Incoherent
• The Morality of Necromancy: Black and Gray
• Undead and Souls – the d20 way | Emergence Campaign Weblog
• Necromancy? Evil? Why?! | Kentusrpg smart-assing D&D 5e
• CRB : An (Un)Death in the Family - Creative Repository Blog - blogger
• There's Something About Undead – Blog ... - Campaign Mastery