August 12, 2013 11:52 PM EDT
And a stopped clock is right twice a day.
At best they are tools. If the Black Sacrament was somehow replaced by the Death Note, and it allowed anyone in Tamriel to kill anyone else by performing the ritual and burning the required amount of money... the result would be an amoral weapon that can only be used to kill people. Such a ritual might not be evil itself per se but it would still be dangerous and potentially destructive to any sort of civilization. If some rich jackoff somewhere can anonymously kill the Emperor by spending X million septims worth of gems, or kill any other person he wants with a proportionately smaller cost, how could you expect a society to function?
That example assumes the Black Sacrement was a perfectly efficient and emotionless force of magic. The Dark Brotherhood as we know it are made up of assassins who are all at best flawed people and at worse psychotic and unrepentant murderers. Hell, they often have to kill innocent bystanders in order to get at their real target.
Finally, I think lore has it that the victims of the Dark Brotherhood are automatically deprived of their normal afterlives due to their connection to Sithis. So they are by definition worse in an ethical sense than than an equally skilled group of assassins would be. Heck, I'm pretty sure condemning your victims immoral souls to annihilation is even worse than condemning them to whatever torments Molag Bal does... I mean, if a bunch of vampires became assassins and in turn turned all their victims into vampires before sacrificing them to Molag Bal... the result would be incredibly evil but at least their victims would have an afterlife of sorts.
So yeah, I'm saying the Dark Brotherhood is evil and to those who say that they are "neutral" ... well that just means that it is a morally neutral act to kill members of the Dark Brotherhood. They're like vicious dogs, they like ripping into people and its a pretty instinctive reaction to either fear them or want them dead... unless you're the guy who sics them on other people in which case you see them as useful tools.