My guess is that you believe that too, and you are missing the critical point. If someone says, "Greater love has no man than this, that he gives his life for his friends.", you don't quibble. What you are really saying is someone should not be sacrificed for someone else's personal gain, and well LG believes that just fine. But a soldier gives his life for the safety of another, and a parent will lay down their life for the safety of another. And a commander sends soldiers into battle, knowing that some will die, in order that others might be safe.
And to an LG person, that's not desirable. Sacrifice for a greater cause? Perhaps. Sacrifice for another person? No, you are de-valuing yourself.
This is supported in game. The Athar in Planescape play with this idea a bit, via the idea that devotion to a god is never a Good thing, even if it's for a Good god. You are more valuable than that. Respect for life means self-respect. Sacrifice violates your own value, and should never be expected or required.
In a world where there must be soldiers who risk their lives, a Good person believes that a soldier's duty should not be to their king. Their duty could be to the people of their kingdom, perhaps through the method of the king. To the greater idea of peace and harmony. But the king is not more valuable than the soldier.
LG might believe that the kingdom as a whole - its order, its compassion, its role as a beacon for peace in the world - is more valuable than the individual soldier. If the kingdom is up to their standards. A CG person might believe that the entire idea of a "soldier" is dehumanizing - a kingdom is not something to be loyal to, it's something to dissolve. An NG person might believe that a soldier could be committed to the greater cause, but shouldn't, like, give up
too much for it. Put the mask on yourself before you put it on your king, buddy.
In the Athar perspective, the god is not more valuable than the worshiper. If you value peace and harmony, the Athar would argue that the gods are demonstrably WORSE for achieving that than mortals without the gods, what with all the divine wars and disputes. This can also apply to kings and emperors, who are not exactly known for peaceful interactions with other kings or emperors.
So yes, my guess is that you to believe "it's OK that one person is hurt, in exchange for another person's safety."
You are clearly making a Chaotic critique of Lawful Good, and not a Good critique of it. I think a critique from the vantage of Good is possible, but only if we know more about society than we are given in the problem.
Real people don't have alignments. D&D characters do.
Why not? Does the peasant not think so? Read the introductory passage of Beowulf, where it talks about the consequences of not having a good strong king to keep the peace and establish justice in the land. Do you think the peasant thinks the king only oppresses him? You are critiquing the situation from a very modern very Chaotic perspective.
Modern people are giving D&D characters alignments. It's a fantasy RPG. Questioning the need for a "strong king" is anti-monarchal, but it's not inherently anti-order or anti-structure.
This is nonsense. Poverty is the natural state of man. It's only through great effort that either an individual or a community digs its way out of it. For the great majority of human history, the great majority of humanity struggled to meet basic needs of subsistence. That the community didn't have the charity to help the poor is only one of many possibilities why there might be poverty in society.
This isn't true, historically, in reality. So I wouldn't assume it to be true in our fantasy RPG.
Again, this is very much a Chaotic critique of Law and not a Good critique of it. Chaotics may be right that Law is just a moral relative thing, not worthy of respect in and of itself, but that's not a critique of Law from the vantage of Good but from the vantage of Chaotic. Every Chaotic agrees with the passage I just quoted, whether good or not. You may be right that the highest good and the most moral ethic is Chaotic Good, but I'm not really here to quibble over who is right, just put all the labels on correctly.
"Lawful" is bigger than civil law, is bigger than any particular social structure. Kings and codes and merchants and money are all choices. Fantasy protagonists can certainly see different possible choices (and influence their societies to make better ones!).
Spoken by someone who has never seen a civil war. Don't judge order to harshly until you've really seen its absence.
No, spoken by someone who is playing a fantasy RPG, where we only have to deal with civil wars if we want to.
