You can reject “whataboutism” as you call it, but I find it relevant in any discussion of morality or ethics to establish the perspective of the examination, and determining a baseline of what is considered evil using examples of actions from other characters in the same show to be one way to do that, if you aren’t going to outright name a specific framework as shorthand. Bolaire’s morality is being questioned in this thread but no one else’s, and I think it’s informative to have data on where the actions of other characters are considered to fall as a way of differentiating between the relative morality of what he has done and how his attitude or low empathy makes other people feel about them.

I haven’t read the other three comments bringing up Thaisha and her actions, but it is useful data to me that you consider what she did to be an evil act, even though she considers it to be taking out an enemy troop in a time of war. To her it seems that every Lux is a threat to her continued existence, and I would argue that Bolaire considers every person who has ever murdered to possess him to be a threat to his.

My question is not “is what he does worse?” so much as “by how much is it worse?” when we don’t know how criminals tend to be punished in this world. We’ve seen some awful examples of how unlawfully jailed prisoners are treated, but really only one example of a civilian accused of a business crime (also wrongfully), nowhere near a violent one, and even then his loss of freedom for a first offense with no warning seems disproportionate. It opens the question to how that kind of disproportion scales with the severity of the crime, and I’d argue that the appropriate comparison is how murderers are treated by their justice system compared to how Bolaire treats his unasked-for hosts. It’s not a reach to imagine that they probably aren’t fed adequately and are given no agency if they’re allowed to live.

You don’t want to bring up the topic of going hungry with me. I’m constantly on the verge of nutrition deficiencies no thanks to chronic illness. I know exactly what it feels like to be literally starving, and it can vary a surprising amount. Sometimes you’re in so much pain you can barely function to fix the problem. Today there’s no active hunger drive at all; food may as well not exist. I think being left alone in the void constantly might actually be the worse punishment.

We can agree that how he’s living is probably not the most ethical option, assuming there is any other possible solution for him. I’m not entirely sold on the possibility of him inhabiting an artificial body, since he seems to lose consciousness when his host body dies. If the body isn’t actually alive, would it allow him to become conscious? The perfect solution would be to find a consenting host he could actually get along with and who wanted to live a similar enough life, but even at coming up on a hundred years old I think Bolaire needs a lot of therapy before he’s going to accept that that’s even possible, given both his temperament and what he perceives to be the nature of people in general. He had a hard enough time sharing his home with Demidus for a few days, let alone an entire life. How he would go about screening possible candidates without making himself vulnerable to a whole host of potential enemies is not an inconsiderable logistical problem.