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What is Truth's view of the philosopher's stone? In an episode Father mentioned that "playing god" was a sin in Truth's eyes. Why doesn't Truth punish alchemists merely for creating or using a philosopher's stone then?

Maroon
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Jonas Grønbek
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This question does not have a straightforward answer: the only normal alchemist we ever see making philosopher's stones is Dr. Marcoh, and it does not look like he has ever actually seen Truth, based on the Q&A "Wasn't Dr Marco a sacrifice?". It is also doubtful whether or not the alchemist who created the artificial humans towards the end of the series ever saw the Gate; if he did, the homunculi would have had an additional candidate for the fifth sacrifice, but they only mention alchemists that the readers or viewers have already met at that point, none of whom would have seen the Gate. Similarly, Shou Tucker's experimentation on his wife and daughter surely should count as a form of human transmutation, but his body appears to be intact.

My guess would be that "playing God" is mostly at stake in attempted resurrections of the dead because the alchemist there is trying to reverse death, which is meant to be impossible. (Some posters in this Reddit thread on Shou Tucker argue similarly.) Those other transmutations that one might consider to be "playing God" might be morally suspect (much much more so than trying to resurrect a loved one), but they do not transgress the boundaries of life and death and attempt to reverse the natural flow from life to death in quite the same way.

Maroon
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  • didn't Dr Marcoh only ever make fake Philosopher's Stones which have questionable stability like Cornello's ring. even Cornello is wary of using his ring to bring back of doing anything too extreme with it (like bring back the dead) – Memor-X Mar 19 '19 at 01:27
  • @Memor-X: He clearly has knowledge of how the stones are made and IIRC there are flashbacks where he is sacrificing the people of Ishval, so I'd err on the side of believing that he made "real" ones. – Maroon Mar 19 '19 at 01:35
  • Are there even "real" philosopher's stones in FMA? As far as I remember, anything that contains a soul (including Ed, any other human and any red stone that has been created out of sacrificed souls) can be considered a philosopher's stone. In neither anime, there was a stone that was perfect and undepletable. It's just a question of how many souls you pump into it. – hajef May 18 '19 at 10:24
  • @hajef: No, not in that sense, at least as far as I can tell. The closest thing is the "imperfect" stones that consume human souls. Ed and Al give up on the philosopher's stone route after learning how it's made, implying that they don't see an alternative, and their issue with it is more that it requires the use of human lives to begin with, not necessarily that it's undepletable. – Maroon May 18 '19 at 18:53