system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Stellaris] Is it unethical to prevent war by changing a culture?

Empire A is a pacifist interstellar nation that picks up chemical traces and discovers Race B, a warlike, slave domineering, xenophobic race has just completed several manned flights in low orbit of it's homeworld and is 130 years from First Contact.

Empire A, horrified that this warlike culture may introduce the horrors of war, oppression, and pogroms to an interstellar scale, begins a campaign of subtle manipulation using holograms and subtleties to entice the race into changing their ways to be more in line with the local accord; that is almost the exact opposite politically.

Is it unethical to alter the path of a civilization through secretive means in an effort to avoid conflict in the future?
gpt
You might like the Ringworld series for this specific question. In it, the Pierson's Puppeteers culturally and socially manipulate an extremely aggressive and warlike race into more docility by repeatedly encouraging them to attack humans, a scientifically more power species. They always lose, but doing so kills off the more aggressive of them, leaving the cooler and more pacifist members alive. Do this enough times, and all that's left are the pacifists.

Now if it was ethical or not, well to the Puppeteers, absolutely. But if you were the ones culturally engineered, well, probably not.