And? You, [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] and [MENTION=85555]Bedrockgames[/MENTION] are all saying that it makes sense, in such circumstances, for the character to assert that the "cosmological forces of good" have made an error. I don't see how that is coherent, given the premise that such a force exists, and that the character has been acted upon it (by losing paladinhood or changing alignment).
Are you now saying that it doesn't make sense, at least in cases of heinousness (whatever exactly that means in this context), for the character to contest the judgement of the cosmological force in question? In that case you're agreeing with me, aren't you?
Do you realise that this is hugely contentious?
Two of the most historically famous theorists of respect for life and the right to life - Locke and Kant - believe that capital punishment can be permitted and even mandatory. Kant, in particular, argues that the only way to respect the rationality of both victim and murderer is to execute the murder for murdering the victim.
The general trend of modern opinion (important elements within the US notwithstanding) is in favour of abolition, but I'm not 100% sure that modern opinion, grounded in a doctrine of universal human rights, is the best way to make sense of the moral requirements that we want to think of a paladin living up to. It's certainly not the only way.
Most paladins engage in conduct that roughly approximates to warfare rather than to execution. The two most obvious moral frameworks for analysing warfare are the paradigm of defensive violence (which is where most of the contemporary literature is focused) and consent.
Killing a perpetrator of wrongdoing in self-defence or defence of others is not disrespecting that person's life, on most non-pacifist accounts of self-defence: it is justly preventing their wrongful threat to the lives of others. (And it is a serious analytical error, in my view, to equate killing in self-defence with retributivist killing as by way of execution.)
But the consent model, which had more currency in pre-modern times (where the paladin lives as an archetype) is actually more interesting, I think, in the context of D&D. If an orc or hobgoblin or bandit has chosen to make himself (less often, at least in published D&D sources, herself) a warrior, then meeting him/her in open combat is honouring that choice, and hence honouring that person's disposition of his/her life, even if the upshot is that s/he dies. (If you read the Chretien de Troyes Arthur stories, you can see this ethos expressed as if it was quite ordinary.)
Just on this point: this is roughly the justification for the Allied invasion of Germany during WWII - that the only way to defend against the organised military violence of Germany and its allies was to invade Germany. Part of this included entering the houses (or at least barracks/fortresses) of some Germans and killing them.
Now there's a reason that, in all the modern literature on morally permissible defensive military violence, WWII is treated as the paradigm case: there are very few people (to be honest, I don't think I've met anyone who wasn't a principled pacifist who took this line) prepared to argue that defensive violence extending to the invasion of Germany was not morally permissible in those circumstances. But the logic of the argument is asserted by many people for many other wars, both prior to and subsequent to WWII.
That's not to say that I don't think some version of a pacifist paladin is not viable. I don't think thoroughgoing pacifism would be feasible, because a paladin is by definition a warrior. But a paladin who is pledged never to take a life - and so who primarily fights demons and undead, and who - if forced to fight living enemies - defeats them non-lethally - would in my view be easily viable and quite interesting. (I have GMed a paladin in a RM game who inclined very much in that direction.) If a player wants to play that character - and here I think we are in agreement - I don't see how it improves the gaming experience for the GM to say "In this gameworld the objective cosmological force of good is a Kantian retributivist, and so if you won't kill evildoers then you are chaotic and/or non-good and hence can't be a paladin."
This could easily go into non-rules-compliant territory, but I'll try and be careful.
You are saying that "A will facilitate the goal G" entails "A is right", provided that someone actually has goal G. And you seem to be asserting this entaliment for all values of A and G.
Here are two standard counterexamples - I mention them not so much to launch a debate about them, but to check whether you are really committed to what you seem to be saying.
Suppose that G = "kill all babies". And suppose that A = "club them at birth". Then we get "Clubbing all babies at birth will facilitate the goal of killing all the babies". As is notorious, there have been people over the course of human history how have had the goal of killing (at least some of) the babies. Are you really saying that it is therefore right to club those babies at birth? Most theories of right action would think that G is subject to some external constraint on moral permissibility before it can ground the rightness of a facilitating action.
Now, suppose that G = "increase the food supply". And suppose that A = "eat the bodies of the human dead". Then we get "Eating the bodies of the human dead would facilitate an increase in the food supply". Plenty of people, quite properly, pursue as a goal an increase of the food supply. But are you really saying that it follows from that goal that eating the bodies of the human dead would be right action? Many, if not most, theories of right action would think that even if G is a morally permissible (or obligatory) goal, there are nevertheless external constraints on the moral permissibility of actions which will facilitate that goal.
In the context of D&D, I would expect a character, who affirmed as a principle of right action that it is sufficient for an action to be right that it facilitate some goal to which s/he is committed, as a non-paladin. Because that person has no guiding principle other than desire. Using the language of the SRD, that person looks like s/he is either NE or CE:
A neutral evil villain does whatever she can get away with. She is out for herself, pure and simple. . . A chaotic evil character does whatever his greed, hatred, and lust for destruction drive him to do.
None of this is terrifically clear, but there is at least a hint that a CE character will act out of weakness of will (greed, hatred, lust) even when that will not facilitate his/her own goals, so perhaps NE is the best fit. (In my view, this also shows how reading the actual descriptors casts serious doubt on the introductory claim that "Each alignment represents a broad range of personality types". That characterisation of CE seems to depict a very particular sort of personality: someone with wanton appetites and no ability or desire to control them.)
A long way upthread I explained why I regard the L/C axis as (i) secondary, and (ii) incoherent. Probably the main reason it is incoherent is that it tells us that individualists like the American constitutional founders are chaotic, even though they are among the most important theorists and advocates of the rules of law. Another reason that it is incoherent is that a LG person is meant to be able to coherently assert both (i) that a CG person is fully good (eg Detect Good gives a maximum positive readout) while (ii) denying that a CG person's behaviour is free from moral criticism.
To avoid doubt: none of the above says anything about B/X alignment or Moorcock. Two teams, one aiming at a certain conception of order and the other at a certain conception of chaos, is not incoherent. But L/C as an axis in 9-point alignment has basically nothing in common with B/X or Moorcock. For instance, Law and Chaos don't label "objective moral forces" on the Moorcockian account; they are simply labels for teams of gods/immortals. (This is also relevant to [MENTION=6701124]Cadence[/MENTION]'s remodelling of PF alignment along the line of cosmological "teams".)
That's because I don't care very much about it, for the following reasons.
If a GM judges every action that every player ever has his/her PC take as "neutral", and therefore irrelevant to the adjudication of mechanical alignment, then s/he may as well not be using mechanical alignment - in which case the claim that it is improving the gaming experience seems not to have been made out. In order to see how alignment might improve the gaming experience, I'm trying to understand and analyse cases where it has an effect on the gaming experience ("affecting" being a necessary condition of "improving"). (If I am playing a D&D game in which mechanical alignment is in play, I typically choose LN as my alignment: experience has taught me that few GMs are going to tell me that I'm being "too good" or "too evil" and therefore have to change alignment, and provided my character is played as crazy or wild the GM is unlikely to say that I'm not lawful enough. But this isn't a case of mechanical alignment "improving the gaming experience". It's a case of me finding a way to sidestep the alignment mechanics, at least as I have found them to be generally applied.)
But now that you draw my attention to neutrality, isn't a good (or evil) character who keeps doing neutral rather than good things going to change alignment to neutral? Which is still testable via Detect X spells and/or Know Alignment. So the character is still in the same position of not being able to rationally contest the judgement of the "objective cosmological forces", given the irrefutable metaphysical evidence.
Doesn't the second part of this sentence pretty much negate the first part? Given that doing neutral acts tend to make you neutral over time (doesn't it? if not, how does anyone's alignment ever change to neutral - only by doing evil acts?), the paladin better be careful about doing too many neutral acts.
Which also implies that eating breakfast or tying up one's shoelaces is not a neutral act. Nor a non-neutral act. It would seem to have no alignment significance at all.
Or perhaps a neutral act is simply an act having no alignment significance - in which case I find it hard to believe that executing a person is a neutral act, as surely a deliberate killing is not an act that can have no alignment significance!
Your post here is why I regard these detours via "vast swathes of neutrality" and "the many shades of grey" as, ultimately, red herrings.
If everything is neutral or shades of grey, such that the GM never makes a call on alignment, then how is the mechanic improving the gaming experience? It seems that the game would be identical without it.
On the other hand, if the reason the GM never makes a call is because the players know what the boundaries are and stick within him, then we have the "confining" effect that [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] mentioned upthread, plus the second-guessing of evaluative judgement and of expressive responses that I mentioned upthread.
And of course these features become only more prominent once the players start pushing the boundaries and the GM has to start making calls. And if the GM doesn't and won't make those calls, for whatever reason, then once again we seem, for functional purposes at least, not to be using mechanical alignment.
Huh? This is a non-sequitur. Neither I nor [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] have asserted that the "objective cosmological forces" get to dictate the beliefs of others. (A fortiori we have not asserted that any PC gets to do so, unless using mind control magic.) But "objective cosmological forces", if they do exist, do get to dictate what would count as a true belief: if it is objectively cosmologically evil to wantonly kill a helpless, unarmed person then someone who does so has acted evilly whatever s/he believes about the moral nature of his/her action. And in circumstances where these cosmological truths manifest themselves via eminently detectable changes to a person, such as loss of paladinhood or a change in answer to Detect X or Know Alignment, the "objective cosmological forces" also get to dictate the scope of reasonable belief for others. That is, they tell others what they should believe, or - to use a synonymous English expression, which is the one Hussar used - they tell others what to believe.
None of this should be shocking. It's roughly what "objective" means (as opposed to, say, "subjective" or "relative"). If those cosmological forces are objective, then they are constraints on truth, and if their objectivity manifests itself then they are constraints on rational belief also. Conversely, if they are not constraints on truth and on rational belief, then they are not objective!
Is this your attempt to argue that, in fact, people aren't individuals worthy of dignity and respect?
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