pemerton said:
This doesn't answer the question - is constitutionalism a chaotic or a lawful value?
Allow me to begin the answer to that question with a question, "Is courage a chaotic or a lawful virtue? Is it a virtue of evil or good?" Various fantasy writers have claimed in a weak way that it was a virtue pertaining to good. But no fantasy writer has claimed that it is a virtue wholly pertaining to good or evil or law or chaos or however they split the system.
Am I to conclude that because courage cannot be described as morally good or morally evil, that this failure to adequately describe a key virtue means that the concepts of good and evil have no moral or ethical value?
My own view is that this question has no answer - that constitutionalism (one of the most important of modern political ideals) cannot be adequately described within the D&D framework.
I would tend to agree that the question has no answer, but not for the reason you assert. The codification of ideas into formal social structures is weakly lawful in as much as it encourages the rule of law, but that value is I think utterly overwhelmed by the ethical value of the ideas that those laws represent. In other words, a law is just an idea. A constitution is ultimately just some of those ideas written down. Ideas themselves are lawful compared to irrationality just as a universe by its mere existance is more lawful than a chaotic soup without physical laws, but we would not expect to be able to say that because something is an idea that lies wholly on the lawful end of the spectrum. Likewise, just because in theory a Constitution creates rule of law (assuming that it is a document that isn't merely for show and breached more than honored), doesn't mean that the social order it creates is on the more lawful end of the specturm.
And, given that it is an express feature of the US system of government to avoid rule by the mob (hence, for example, the presidential electoral college) does it therefore follow that the US system of government is lawful?
No, it follows that it is a system of comprimises. Everyone that has taken as much as high school civics knows that. Comprimises are weakly chaotic in as much as the idea of a comprimise is that there isn't one perfect truth that must be absolutely upheld, but given that we both agree that the comprimises of the US constitution are between mob rule and aristocratic rule, between democratic idealism and fear of the public, I would say that what you have is a system which is in that aspect somewhat 'nuetral'.
In which case every post-enlightenment system of government is chaotic, as they all have methods whereby the law can be lawfully ammended.
The English/American value system is rather widespread at this point, yes.
Again, I point out that this claim depends upon assuming (without argument, as far as I can see) that Lon Fuller was wrong and Hart right.
It was offered without argument because the number of things that we are debating is exponentially expanding without any real pattern or approach except to find something however tangential to argue about.
Furthermore, the National Socialist "legal system" had a wide range of methods of ammending its "laws" (indeed, this is part of what Fuller has in mind when he denies that it was not a system of law at all). Does this make it Chaotic rather than Lawful?
Ammending laws is weakly Chaotic. I don't think you can answer where the Nazi State lies on the spectrum as a whole except by extensive analysis of its various features. I don't think you can precisely answer it at all, because these things are by thier nature abstractions. That's hardly surprising nor does it render the system valueless, as no other moral and ethical system however sophisticated classifies all actions in a way that finds universal agreement either.
Fuller's point is not that Lawfulness is the best Good, as D&D sometimes seems to have it, but rather that Law of necessity tends towards Good, which D&D denies.
But someone who is Lawful Good within the D&D system would not deny it. However, there Libertarian moral philosophers out there that believe law tends toward evil and that the is states use of force to impose order on the individual is inherently undesirable even if and when it is strictly necessary. Should the D&D system take sides?
And committed to the Rule of Law. Is that a lawful or a chaotic commitment?
Rule of law is lawful in as much as further out on the chaotic end of the continium you have things like anarchy where there are no laws at all, but we would have more to say on the matter if we knew what sort of law ruled. Unless the law itself encodes a comparitively lawful mindset the system is complex. There is a continuium between law and chaos. Any real world system is likely to not lie on either end, and unless you believe that humanity has a strong prediliction toward either law or chaos (most assume humanity is nuetral) you would not expect a system on either extreme to last long.
But if the correct conclusion, then, is that the Rule of Law is a Chaotic value, I rest my case that the D&D alignment system has been refuted as an adequate framework for moral description - in this case, the refutation is by reductio ad absurdum.
Well, sure. But no one has argued that rule of law is a chaotic value. I've merely suggested that in some cases the rule of law enshrines values which are on the whole more 'chaotic' in nature in the sense of believing in change, individual preference, diversity, and so forth than not.
Again, this is a controversial claim about economic and social history. I'm not persuaded it is true. There is at least a strand in Calvinist thought that holds that "charity" is wrong as it encourages the indolence of the poor. This thought also takes on Social Darwinist aspects in the second half of the nineteenth century.
So you would say that at present Social Darwinism is mainstream Western thought? Good luck, for example, running for President on those values.
Whatever the better view, I contend that it is a weakness of traditional D&D alignment that, if those at the table have different view on such matters then the game cannot proceed smoothly.
This is true of any ethical system. The 'weakness' you describe would be enherent in any system that required we classify individuals, actions, and social systems. One could well argue though, that since the conflict between good and evil is a principle feature of fantasy, that even if we avoid classifying things mechanically as being this or that, that conflict at the table of some sort is inevitable if the players conceptions of what constitutes good and evil differ significantly from the referees. A referee/storytellers understanding of good and evil generally creates some expectation of how the players are going to respond to thier 'heroic' role in the story. If the players understanding of good and evil is sufficiently different (or they feel more 'heroic' being something other than 'heroic' in the DMs mind), this is going to create friction.
But agreement on controversial matters of history, politics, sociology and morality should not be a necessary condition of smooth gameplay. It is disruptive and adds nothing.
I'm not sure agreement on any given controversial matters of history, politics, sociology, and morality are strictly necessary conditions of this debate. They have been brought in largely because they are presumed by the person who brought them in to be easier and more concrete arguments than the difficult and abstract question ('Does Chaotic Good really exist, can it really be differentiated from Nuetral Good?') that we would really like to answer.
And I happen to think that the 4e system, from what I understand of it, is more useful for the purposes of heroic fantasy, as (as far as I can tell) it does not purport to offer a total framework for all moral thought. It hives off a few categories of outlook that the genre itself defines, and leaves everyone else in the "unaligned" basket.
This is precisely why I think it less useful for the purposes of heroic fantasy. Not only does the new system not describe as interesting of a cosmology, but it doesn't seem to provide a coherent cosmology at all. As someone else had said, it would have been better off with either no system or else with two alignments 'Things to kill' and 'Things not to kill'.
To a certain extent, the fact that the older system provokes arguments is a feature and not a bug. Real world ethical systems invariably provoke lots of arguments too. If the system isn't sophisticated enough to argue about, its not a very good system.
I wouldn't know. I'm an academic lawyer and philosopher who teaches (among other things) social theory. D&D's alignment system is of no use, as far as I can see, for understanding any actual system of moral or political thought that humans have created and acted upon, nor for understanding any actual moral or political conflict or transition that humans have experienced.
If agreement without contriversy is a necessary condition for describing any actual sytem of moral or political thought that humans have created and acted upon, then no system so far devised is of any use for understanding any actual moral or political conflict.
It can't even tell me whether one of the greatest theorists of US political ideals, John Rawls, is Lawful (because he believes in order and an important role for government) or Chaotic (because he believes in individual rights).
No, but it can make you ask the question. And despite all your protests, you seem quite capable of figuring out how the buckets are labeled.
Rawls, by the way, is Chaotic. This can be seen in his movement away from the more lawful/collectivist minded political and legal theories that had arose from the Hegelian school of thought. Legal positivism in general is 'chaotic' since it makes law a human construct rather than a universal absolute, and it generally denies that there is a single system of laws which can be rationally discovered. There are however philosophers more chaotic (more 'liberal' if you will) in thier outlook than Rawls, so maybe he's all and all neutral on the axis.
I think that the endless disputes over the 1st DDG classification of pre-modern religious sytems, or the endless debates about Aztecs, are a sufficient refutation of this. Also, I don't know if you've read Inga Clendinnen's well-regarded book on the Aztecs, or Mary Midgley's writings on cultural relativism and morality, or Bernard Williams on the "relativism of distance", but the lesson I draw from these sorts of writings is that understanding and classifying cuturally and historically diverse forms of life is actually quite difficult.
I would agree. I don't think this refutes my claim that modernity is more complicated than antiquity, nor do I think I have to believe that the people of antiquity were in any way simple minded to hold that.
