Elder-Basilisk
First Post
Kamikaze Midget said:
Hmmm. I figured that there were quite a few people out there who run detect evil as detect [Evil] and manage to have nuanced campaigns. I would maintain, however, that it's not because of the way you run detect [Evil] but in spite of it which is why I said that such an interpretation doesn't encourage such rather than that it precludes it.
That's a fair question. Here's my answer: because everyone that is evil does not deserve death in this world.
Hear me out. In the modern world, there are lots of things that many people think of as evil--for instance, lying, wife-beating (or husband beating if the Guest/Minelli reports are true; we just don't talk about it because it would be humiliating for most men to admit), Enron style creative accounting, pushing drugs, etc. However very few people believe that such activity merits the death penalty. There are a lot of other things that people believe to be very evil--pushing hard drugs to children, rape, child molestation, murder, etc--but that, in most cases, do not merit the death penalty in our legal system (although that we watch movies where vigilante heros kill such individuals indicates that many of us don't think it would really be far out of line). In much of the western world, it is the considered judgement of the elites that nothing deserves death--although in many countries which have abolished the death penalty, majorities of the public disagree. So, in most of the modern world, our ideas of justice--a topic profoundly connected with good and evil--maintain that most villains do not deserve to die. A paladin who went around killing even villains indiscriminately would be acting unjustly.
Most of us, however, are willing to suspend at least some of our modern sensibilities when we play D&D however. (As someone who thinks that so-called modern sensibilities blind us to moral reality, that's one of the things that draws me to D&D). It largely takes place in a pseudomedieval world after all. (Although it's generally modernized to one degree or another). So what about ancient ideas of justice, good, and evil? Most of them provide for people to be evil without deserving death as well. In the Bible's long list of things that are evil and that make people evil, there are quite a few for which death was not the mandated penalty. A thief, for instance, was routinely portrayed as evil yet the penalty for theft was to repay seven times the stolen amount rather than death. Denying strangers hospitality was evil but generally was not cause for death. A man who killed a thief would have been guilty of injustice. (Assuming he wasn't defending himself). Before David became king of Israel, one of the people he protected refused him hospitality and, when David was persuaded not to kill him, the Bible portrays him as being turned from a wrong intent to right.
So, generally, most people who believe in evil believe and have believed that it's quite possible for a man to be genuinely evil and still not deserve to die in this world. That's even true of those people who thought execution appropriate in situations that would horrify most of us in this modern era. (I doubt many DMs would be comfortable with paladins executing people for blasphemy, adultery, or false prophecy, yet most of those were often considered capital crimes in the ancient world). If those many of us now think too harsh to be Good thought that all evil didn't deserve death at the hands of their fellow men, I can't see who would defend the standard that all who are evil do deserve to die. There's no present or historical standard of good and justice I'm aware of under which that would be just.
One other reason why a good character who detects evil might not smite it--and this is part consequential argument and, I think, part natural law--is that human society could not function if all evil people were killed.
Assuming the D&D distribution of alignments, roughly 25-30% of the general human population is evil aligned. In some areas this would be more, in others less. And people change alignments during their lives (IRL peoples outlook and behavior is a very dynamic thing with good people being tempted and falling and then being redeemed (or not) and evil people sometimes reforming and then sometimes returning to their former life; I would think, a D&D world would emulate this if it shoots for verisimilitude). Consequently, in any two given years, the roster of the good 25-30% and the evil 25-30% will be subtly but significantly different. I would guess that maybe 30-50% of D&D PCs and NPCs may have been evilly aligned at one point in their lives. So, if everyone who radiates evil is killed, that would consistently destroy 30-50% of the population.
Not only that, but since new people are born and people who weren't evil before become evil, the anti-evil pogrom could never end. It could not be a one time extermination because evil would come back. Worse yet, I can't imagine any such Inquisition that wouldn't foster a climate of fear and paranoia that would probably be effective in encouraging people to evil. (This is a key difference between the idea of Detect+smite on a society-wide level and the religious idea of a final judgement that condemns all the wicked and leaves the righteous (or the redeemed depending upon whether it's Christian, Islamic, or Jewish eschatology) to inherity paradise. In the scenario of the final judgement, the choice of righteousness or perdition has been made once and for all so there's no chance of the good being corrupted after the judgement. In that scenario, the world has also come to an end so there are no new people who might choose evil coming into the world. The judgement is also infallible--something Detect Evil is emphatically not. And the wicked are generally considered to have had opportunity to repent and to have refused it--something the detect+smite scenario does not meaningfully offer. Although there are superficial similarities between Detect+Smite and the idea of a final judgement, I don't think you can call the idea of the last judgement to bat for Detect+Smite).
Now, human society has endured losses on that scale in the past but they have generally been very traumatic events for those societies--World War I, World War II, the black plague in medieval/early modern europe, etc all had very significant effects upon the development of civilization. In fact, given that population growth is rarely that high, killing 50% of people when they radiate evil might even lead to consistent negative population growth. That would mean that, concerns about stability aside, any society that made a policy of detect&smite would not be long for the world.
For this reason, IMO, human society has generally been oriented towards creating institutions, customs, laws, rewards, and punishments to channel the energies of the evil members that they are bound to have towards goals that are beneficial to those societies, to prevent them from doing too much harm, and to punish egregious displays of evildoing so as to discourage unacceptable evil behavior. This is the theory behind the concept of the balance of powers in the US constitution, for instance. If each branch is given distinct and separate powers, even evil men are naturally inclined to resist power grabs by others and so, the founders thought, the society would be able to survive evil men in any branch of the government. Similarly, it's one of the principles behind the theories of capitalism: if the best way to gain power and wealth is to serve people and give them something they need/want at a price they like, then evil people drawn to wealth and power will be able to pursue their goals and actually benefit society. (In order for it to work, there needs to be enforcement of laws that make the harmful shortcuts to those goals (fraud, graft, extortion, price fixing, etc) less desirable than the beneficial means and arriving at that system is a very difficult--and maybe impossible--goal but that's the theory). In fact, although I think he's wrong, Immanuel Kant was so taken with the idea of a good social system chanelling the energies of the evil towards the good of the society that he reportedly claimed that, if you could get the social contract right, you could have a perfect society populated exclusively by devils.
So, it's not just impractical to exterminate evil people, they can actually be a beneficial (or at least functional) part of society--although not as beneficial as they'd be if they weren't evil. The paladin who does his Detect/Smite routine isn't necessarily doing his society any favors. In fact, to make a consequentialist argument, it's almost certain that such action would not lead to the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
But what if it's not a societal policy? What if it's just a lone vigilante paladin righting wrongs? That brings its own set of complications. The lone vigilante may right individual wrongs and eliminate some egregiously bad people. (However, right there, we're talking about killing particular evil people--those who are especially harmful to society--rather than evil people in general). However, such actions inevitably weaken the social institutions that are supposed to bring justice to everyone. They may weaken institutions slowly and imperceptibly but they do weaken them. And, when those institutions are weakened, the bonds of tradition, custom, social pressure, institutions and law that serve to channel the energies of most evil people towards more-or-less productive ends are weakened. As are the pressures that encourage neutral people to stay away from evil and that serve to tell good people that evil is not the road to success. (After all, the premise of the system is to make evil people act like good people in order to succeed; if they get the idea that they can work the system, maybe they will succeed which would weaken the society further). The lone vigilante must weigh his actions carefully to ensure that they are doing more good than harm. Detect+smite is not weighing the consequences carefully. And any individual who pursued that route would not be doing society any favors.
There is one other reason why it's not Good: the likely effect upon the people who are doing the killing.
For individuals, to take my earlier argument using current and received ideas about justice, the killer would be acting unjustly. It's not good to act unjustly and, if one makes a habit of it, is likely to lead to other types of injustice. To my mind, Detect+smite is probably the one of the early steps in the road to being a blackguard. (Again, the Warcraft III story of Arthos comes to mind).
For society, any system implemented in order to exterminate evil people would require unchecked power and mechanisms that would be likely to attract evil people to it. It would also render good and neutral people who were a part of it vulnerable to temptation--if the actions they took in its name weren't inherently corrupting. And it would only take a few individuals abusing the system to eliminate enemies or seize property to turn the so-called tool of Good into a tool of oppression. It would not be a good thing. And it would be unlikely to remain a Good thing for very long.
Glad to hear you've got an open mind. And an interesting conversation to be sure.
