Is it wrong to animate dead?

In the past I’ve posted long dissertations on the morality of the undead and the shadowfell. In general, I have felt that the morality would vary by campaign setting and GM discretion.

Another idea I had involved a different take on the afterlife. In my post on the cosmology of my head-canon setting, I said most people who die pass to the shadowfell rather than the outer planes. When revived, their soul likewise returns from there. The shadowfell serves as the mythological underworld and occult spirit world.

To explain why people in-setting have such a visceral reaction to the undead, I decided to adopt a model of the soul based on real world mythology. Rather than being totally disconnected from their bodies, the dead retain a connection to their bodies. They can essentially scry using this connection, even interact with their living relatives without leaving the shadowfell. In extreme cases, they can enter and reanimate their own corpses, such as to defend their tomb from robbers or help protect the necroscope. Temporal parameters vary from manifestation to manifestation.

So, among other things, the spell speak with dead actually communicates with the soul of the deceased and not just an impression. Even if the soul is far away enjoying (or not) their afterlife, this operates like a long-distance phone call. This also explains why societies, as in real life, develop complex practices regarding mourning the dead even long after the funeral: the dead benefit from such treatment, like consuming offerings, being guardian angels, etc. 

The reason why animating the dead, at least without their consent anyway (they can give consent, or have reason to animate themselves a la BoED’s deathless), is so taboo is because the dead know it and may become upset with such treatment. To prevent the dead from rebelling, you have to enslave their soul too even if it isn’t providing the animating force. (This opens a lot of plot hooks too, such as a lost soul begging you to kill the vampire demon animating their corpse.)

So you can only have good necromancers if they have a positive social rapport with the dead. Otherwise it’s no different from enslavement. That said, there are definitely societies with state-sanctioned necromancy where people sell their corpses as slaves. Even though the dead are aware of what going on, they’re still dead. Backbreaking labor loses most of its unpleasantry when your body no longer feels pain or thirst.

That’s the gist of it. I might explore this further in future posts, but I don’t know if I find it interesting enough at present. I had enough of a headache trying to make sense of the many inconsistent ways that soul loss is handled.