Sure, and although I largely agree with you I still have a disconnect between why should the "killing" involved in blood magic affect your "soul" anymore than it does the mage down the street who makes heads explode on a regular basis, or hell, even the team's sammy who has a distrubing habit of whispering sweet nothings to his weapons.

I didn't say it does.

Now, there MAY be something about opening up a conduit to dark energies of mana akin to the dissonance in the Matrix... but that's another story.

Aye but then we get back to the question of why should Blood Magic be considered "evil". Dark Mana is an interesting theory but I don't recall anything that has suggested that the Mana gathered through the blood is tainted.

Evil is one of two things, really:

1) It is a subjective categorization of relative morality.

2) It is a coloquial metaphor for the antithesis of life.

As the antithesis of life, you can't be clearer - Blood Magic is inherently Evil.

I have no interest in arguing the morality of the issue; Morality is either a societal imposition or a personal frame of behavioral reference. In the first case, the game says so; in the second, that's up to you and your character. There is really no point in arguing either, is there?

Agreed, but the problem that I have is the double standard when people try to apply the standard to blood magic but not regular ol' murder, or even worse, claiming that the former is somehow worse than the latter.

It's a recurring idea in Shadowrun that runners try to justify their actions by clinging to a code of honor (it's the origin of the whole street samurai trope, after all- you shoot people in the face for money, but because you've read some bushido philosophy, you can lie to yourself that you're better than the average thrill ganger).

The taboo on blood magic may be an arcane subsection of this, at least for people who are not aware of what it really does in regards to the mana cycle.

Blood magic is kinda.. iffy. I'd really only use it if you were using a sword-and-board style character. Swing at someone, off them, next IP blast the next bloke with a fireball. If you could center with it I'd probably use it more.

Of course they do...such rationalization is pretty essential to staying sane.

Re blood magic: Even psychotic killers have standards. And squick points.

What about Blood Fetishes from Digital Grimoire?
Yeah, they're illegal, but even non-Bloodmages can use them...



Most of my characters will make rationalizations along those lines.
However, from an outgame perspective, i find the justification of these ethics doubtful in many cases.

This applies especially to the taboo against blood magic.
If i slash people anyway with my weapon focus, why shouldn't i use this to power spells?
Stabbing people in the first place is much more evil to me, so if my character already resorts to such means, why not utilize the secondary effects from this?

Well, probably because learning such techniques usually involves dealing with metaplanar monstrosities that make even the most hardened street criminal look harmless.
If this part wasn't involved, some of my PCs wouldn't have problems with learning blood magic (even though it would be of little use to my existing characters, who aren't proficient in close combat if they're mages).

Honestly, I think that Blood Magic itself is neutral, but it gets its' bad reputation from three sources.

1) Societal bias/general squick.
2) A great PR campaign by the opposition.
3) The big one is that there doesn't appear to be an independent learning path for any sane mage. This goes a lot into the nature of magic and belief, but the general line of thought seems to be that no decent person should really seriously contemplate this topic for any length of time. If you do, the process of delving into how the very processes of life and death can be exploited to grant you power changes you. By the time you've learned enough about the whole process (and made mistakes) on your own, you're not really who you were anymore. Now, this can be avoided by having someone who already knows Sacrificing teach you, but since most people don't go for it to begin with this likely means your would-be mentor has driven himself crazy to learn.

Point 3 above is supported by the fact that self-initiates aren't allowed to learn Sacrificing. In prior editions I believe this was stated a little more clearly as 'no sane magician.' Short version, it's not so much the MAGIC as the mages who use it. Especially since the first glimpses of it seen by the general public were all psychopaths who would probably have been found in a Room Full of Crazy had their megacorp not kept them on a tight leash.

I don't really buy the theory that there aren't independant paths to learning Blood Magic given the nature of Sixth World Magic, virtually every culture has myths and beliefs about the mystical power hidden in blood, and I personally think that the manner in which drain works would tend to renforce those paths of research.