D&D 5E The Multiverse is back....

[Nivenus]

Gygax divided "morality" (Good-Evil) and "Ethics" (Law-Chaos). This is muddy, since the words mean the same thing, one is Latin (Mos-Mores) the other is Greek (Ethos). Both mean the set of habits and behaviors of a given person.

Actually, the distinction is hardly unique to D&D.

Again, I think we're getting off topic though.

 

[Imaro]

While the book does not use the word "metaphysical," it is pretty clear that it is, in fact, speaking of Devils in ontological terms. They *are* Lawful Evil, by essence, in their being. These are metaphysical terms.

My point was that it was not in fact stated in the book and shouldn't have been presented like it was.


Edit: @Parmandur ... Upon further thought I also disagree that the essence of something is defined purely in metaphysical terms... part of the essence of being a canine is non-retractable claws, if it does not have non-retractable claws it is not a canine... yet that's not metaphysical in nature. So no I don't agree that the only interpretation is that a fiend having to be LE must be a metaphysical trait, why couldn't it be a biological one, a magically inserted one or even trained into less powerful fiends by more powerful ones. I think the book purposefully leaves it open and that while a metaphysical explanation is certainly viable, it shouldn't be assumed.

 

[Aldarc]

My point was that it was not in fact stated in the book and shouldn't have been presented like it was.

"Alignment is an essential part of the nature of celestials and fiends" (PHB, p.122). It's not good/evil/law/chaos as metaphysical forces that are, but alignment itself. How could the intrinsic connection between planes, alignment, outsiders, etc. be anything but a metaphysical reality? How could thought shaping the planes be anything but a metaphysical reality? One of the big selling points people were saying about Planescape is that it reflects how philosophy, thoughts, and opinions shift the planes around and change reality? How is that not a metaphysical premise?

 

[Imaro]

From the Monster Manual...

Fiends are creatures of wickedness that are native to the Lower Planes. A few are the servants of deities but many more labor under the leadership of archdevils and demon princes. Evil priests and mages sometimes summon fiends to the material world to do their bidding. If an evil celestial is a rarity , a good fiend is almost inconceivable...

So apparently having a "good" fiend and an evil celestial is extremely rare but not impossible. I'll also note that there is no mention of fiends being intrinsically restricted to a particular alignment in the alignment section of the MM or in the Devil section of the MM. SO I'm going to assume since the MM is the definitive word on monsters that it is correct and the PHB is wrong or the PoV most PC's would have.

EDIT... or it's a case of alternative lore, which [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] should appreciate...

 

[Parmandur]

Okay, might be a terminology gap here: the word "essential" is in reference to a thing's being. Metaphysics is the philosophical consideration of being. When a statement is made in regards to something's essence, that's metaphysical. Humans are noted as being not tied to any of the alignments in essence, but Devils are.

 

[pemerton]

part of the essence of being a canine is non-retractable claws, if it does not have non-retractable claws it is not a canine... yet that's not metaphysical in nature.

A significant number, I would guess the majority, of contemporary English-speaking philosophers disagree with you: for classic treatments see Kripke, Naming and Necessity and Putnam, "The Meaning of 'Meaning'".

If essence wasn't metaphysical then what would it be? The best-known alternative answer is that it would be conventional - a matter of classificatory practices. But this approach (the best known version probably being in Quine, Word and Object) has unhappy implications for the philosophy of science, probably best brought out in Putnam's "Dreaming and Depth Grammar".

 

[pemerton]

the categories do work well enough as a loose system for identifying personalities of different PC's

I haven't responded to this upthread, but thought I might comment now.

I generally agree - LG = reliable stand-up person, CG = knockabout, good-hearted rascally person, LE = sneering manipulative person, CE = wild and brutal person. But as you say, those are personality types. They're not a framework for moral evaluation. Assuming a conventional moral framework, we can order them in terms of how virtuous those persons are, from LG the most to CE the least, with CG and LE sitting in the middle. Much as 4e does it. (It's no surprise that 4e takes a conventional outlook.)

Moorcock never asserts that goodness and leanings towards law or chaos can't exist

I didn't say otherwise.

My point is that Moorcock does not think that the extent to which something is lawful or chaotic has no bearing on its degree of goodness or evil. Whereas the D&D alignment system is committed to the (absurd) notion that the two so-called axes are independent of one another.

to be fully chaotic and fully good is an impossibility in D&D

neutral evil characters (at their most extreme) are generally held as most evil, not chaotic evil ones.

Devils are an "ideal" form of lawful evil (and evil lawfulness); they are the representation of everything oppressive about law and everything tyrannical about evil. They are not a perfect representation of complete, unadulterated evil or of complete and total law. A devil's lawfulness actually limits their capacity for complete evil and their tendency towards evil limits the degree to which they can be lawful. The same is true of a demon in respect to its relationship to chaos and evil or an archon in respect to its relation to law and good.

These claims have no canonical basis in the D&D texts I'm familiar with (eg Gygax's AD&D and the character alignment graph; the d20 SRD definitions of alignment).

On the alignment graph, for instance, nothing prevents a character being in the upper left-hand corner, and therefore both maximally lawful and maximally good.

Detect evil measures the strength of evil. Nothing suggests that a vrock can't register as much evil as mezzodaemon.

Furthermore, if you read the texts of the game (eg Monster Manuals, paladin alignment descriptions, etc) there is nothing to suggest that Demogorgon or Orcus is less evil than Anthraxus. A paladin who aligns with a demon or a devil is not somehow doing a less evil thing than one who aligns with a nycadaemon.

Comparing CG to LG isn't as clear, perhaps: take a Caotic Evil and Lawful Evil character. The latter is malevolent, but lives by a consistent personal/social code; the former is a psychopath. Lawful Evil is, definitionally, less evil than Chaotic Evil.

I don't think one would have to go this way: for instance, if you wanted to run a game that emphasised the ethos of Homeric heroism, you might want to frame the CE character as at least capable of self-assertion, whereas the the LE character might be somewhat weak and insipid.

But what I do agree with in your post is that any coherent moral framework has to take some sort of stand on this. It makes no sense to say that the difference in outlook between the demon and the devil is evaluatively significant, and yet makes no contribution to the degree of goodness/evilness. (That's not to deny the possibility of non-moral dimensions of evaluation, but no one is arguing that L/C is, say , an aesthetic axis, and that paladins' hostiity to chaos is an aesthetic judgement.)

 

[Savage Wombat]

I always felt that ones belief in Good is the ideal, that you wish the best for all people, and that your Lawful/Chaoticness is in how you evaluate the methods used to attain that end. A lawful person feels that order is more important than personal liberty, and although both are nice to have, the second can be sacrificed to obtain the first. A chaotic person, vice versa.

Another interpretation - from a viewpoint outside the alignment structure (looking down as it were) LG and CG are equally "good". But from the viewpoint of the LG, he is objectively more good than the CG, because his Lawfulness brings more Goodness to everyone - and the CG person feels the same way about the LG.

 

[pemerton]

Gygax divided "morality" (Good-Evil) and "Ethics" (Law-Chaos). This is muddy, since the words mean the same thing, one is Latin (Mos-Mores) the other is Greek (Ethos). Both mean the set of habits and behaviors of a given person.

Actually, the distinction is hardly unique to D&D.

The meanings given by the web-page that Nivenus cites have no real basis either in the classical languages from which the words are derived, nor any standard English dictionary. See eg this dictionary website which gives as its opening definition of "ethics" the completely orthodox "system of moral principles".

The website Nivenus refers to contrasts social norms and personal convictions. Not only is this not a particularly canonical use of ethics vs morality, it is not really relevant to D&D either, which has no theory either of social life or of individual conscience. For instance, if a devil is, in its nature, LE - as per the quotes from the 5e rulebooks upthread - than what does it mean to talk about socialisation of it into certain norms, or to talk about its "personal compass of right and wrong"? Furthermore, it is completley normal to use the word "morality" to describe a system of social norms - eg scholars will talk without any awkwardness or hint of contradiction of "the morality of a society", meaning the set of evaluative commitments that are typical of the members of that society, and/or that are inherent in that society's modes of social organisation.

In contemporary Engish-language philosophy, "morality" is generally used to refer to the body of norms that set out our other-regarding duties. "Ethics" is often used as a synonym, but when it is not so used, it is used to encompass morality together with any other norms (eg self-regarding duties) with which compliance is necessary in order to live a good life.

It is possible to shoe-horn D&D alignment categories into this standard philosophic useage - eg "lawful" means "honouring self-regarding duties", in the way that a monk does but a disssolute bard doesn't, and "good" means "honouring other-regarding duties". The difficulty is that, in real life, the monk and the bard (assuming the bard is not dissolute simply out of weakness of will) disagree on the existence and content of self-regarding duties, and hence over whether or not "lawfulness" is a genuine evaluative category. But in 9-point alignment D&D this intellectual manoevure is not available, because both the framework of alignment and the corresponding framework of the outer planes tell us that there really is such a thing as lawfulness. So the bard has to admit both that self-regarding duties exist, while maintaining that they do not deserve to be honoured. Which makes no sense.

Law and Good ARE DIFFERENT. Otherwise, you'd have to say that Asmodeus and his Devils were shining examples of virtue... to say nothing of real-world baddies like the Nazis, who had a rigid, orderly society.

Why would I have to say that Asmodeus is a shining example of virtue? There are any number of reasons for thinking that Asmodeus and his devils in fact lack honour and self-discipline - that their surface cultivation of obedience to external norms is subverted by an underlying selfishness and penchant for manipulation. And the proper analysis of National Socialist legal practices probably falls foul of board rules, but I refer you to Lon Fuller's well-known work on the "grudge informer" cases as well as Rundle's fairly recent article in the Toronto Law Review on "The Impossibility of an Exterminatory Legality".

And of course, if I take off my natural law hat and put on my existentialist hat, I can flip all the above around: self-abnegation to externally-imposed norms is bad faith, and hence unworthy of any human being. On this approach, Asmodeus is in some ways worse than a paladin - because Asmodeus exploits the bad faith of others in a cynical way, whereas the paladin is perhaps just naive (as per Weber, in "Science as a Vocation" - "the arms of the old churches are open wide" to those who cannot cope with the reality that the external world does not create or impose vaue). But in other ways the paladin is worse, because the bad faith goes all the way down, whereas at least Asmodeus recognises his own participation in structures of bad faith.

Law and Chaos HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH MORALITY... let me repeat, being a good person has nothing to do with how many laws you follow, nor does breaking a law necessarily make you evil.

You can assert this stuff, but it doesn't make it true (putting to one side that few D&Ders define "lawful" as "following laws").

For instance, the authors of the American constitution clearly thought there was an intimate connection between law, justice and social welfare. That's why they went to such pains to constitute the country as a rule-of-law republic rather than an absolutist monarchy of the style then popular in Europe.

Or, to take a completely different example, orthodox Theravadan Buddhism thinks there is a clear connection between self-discipline and wellbeing. That's what meditation is for - it is crucial to the release of the individual from sufering.

Conversely - once again moving away from various "natural law" approaches - the anarchist who maintain that "law" is a morally meaningless category, and that every human action has to be evaluated indendently of its legality, are not taking the view that lawfulness has no bearing on wellbeing. They regard reverence for law as inimical to wellbeing. Or to take a pre-modern outlook that has some affinities to the modern anarchist, namely the "heroic morality" that one finds in (say) the Homeric epics and the Norse sagas, there is a clear view that part of being a decent, worthy peson is being capable of extravagant self-assertion (which, in D&D terms, would be "chaos").

My point is that there is no real-world moral framework, no real-world systems of moral evaluation, no system of real-world normative practices, that regards matters of discipline, honour, self-cultivation, self-assertion, self-restraint (which is the function of law in a model of republican government), social stability, social order, etc as orthongal to matters of human welfare and wellbeing. Whereas 9-point alignment is committed to this ostensible independence of the two things, such that human wellbeing can be fully realised both in a framework of law (eg the Seven Heavens) and in its absence (eg Olympus).

But if this is really true - if it is really possible to fully realise human wellbeing both in the Seven Heavens and in Olympus - then choosing to live a lawful life or a chaotic life is of no greater moral significance than choosing to where a white shirt or a cream shirt (ie purely a matter of personal taste and inclination). In which case there would be no warrant for lawfuls to regard chaotics as in any way flawed, nor vice versa.

Which goes back to [MENTION=5142]Aldarc[/MENTION]'s remarks about the emphasis, in AD&D, on good/evil as the main conflict. I think this is because most playes intuitively realise that within the 9-point framework the choice between law and chaos really is nothing more than a matter of personal inclination, and hence of no moral weight. The fact that dwarves have stiff necks that irritate the flighty elves (and vice versa) is no different from the fact that when you make an appointment in Germany people are more likely to turn up on time than if you make the appointment in Argentina. Or the fact that an American film is more likely to have a sentimental ending than a Russian film. These are difference of individual and collective character, but they don't have any moral significance.

If you want to give law vs chaos moral weight - as, say, Moorcock and 4e D&D do - then you have to connect them to more fundamental notions of order and dissolution. But at that point you simply can't pretend that there is nothing to choose between them as far as human well-being is concerned. You will have to take a stand as to whether human well-being is best served by order, by dissolution, or by neither (or perhaps both). This is what Moorcock does. This is what the PCs in a 4e game have to do.

But in Planescape doing this would require denying that (at least one of) the Seven Heavens or Olympus is really a good place. Which would require departing from the alignment/planar framework as written.

 

[pemerton]

I always felt that ones belief in Good is the ideal, that you wish the best for all people, and that your Lawful/Chaoticness is in how you evaluate the methods used to attain that end. A lawful person feels that order is more important than personal liberty, and although both are nice to have, the second can be sacrificed to obtain the first. A chaotic person, vice versa.

I think this can work when you use alignment as a personality/belief shorthand, in the way that [MENTION=6780330]Parmandur[/MENTION] has described.

But it breaks down when you treat alignment as a framework for moral classification.

Because if, as the Great Wheel and the alignment graph assert, both the Seven Heavens and Olympus are fully good, then in fact the choice between order and liberty doesn't matter.

Conversely, if in fact that choice does matter, then it must be the case that either the lawfuls or the chaotics aren't achieving the good they aspire to (because they've chosen the wrong means). In which case at least one of the Seven Heavens or Olympus would not be good (although the residents of the place might mistakenly think that it is).

This is in fact how real-world moral and religious disagreement tends to play out - each side accusing the other of error in their choice of means, and/or arguing that choice of means etc has corrupted their sense of attainment of the ultimate goal - but it seems to be precluded within the Great Wheel/Planescape framework, because we're already told that both the Seven Heavens and Olympus are fully good.