I don't understand what "good" and "evil" mean here. Upthread you described them as labels that express arbitrary codes.The PC can view it as good, or as evil, or as something restoring the balance, or as an edict of order, or as something she is doing to express her personal desires and nothing else, or whatever.
If they're arbitrary, why would someone care about them?
Where does this belief prevail? Who regards evil as a valid life choice? Given that, as was discussed upthread, the majority of the multiverse - including perhaps the majority of fiends - labels evil fiends as evil rather than good, it seems that the prevailing view is that evil is not a valid life choice, and rather than it is evil.Not everyone is content with the prevailing belief that evil is a valid life choice.
But any RPG anywhere, anytime can have a character who thinks that vengeance is a universal principle. The real world contains such people, just as it contains people who think that the need for vengeance is personal to them, and it also contains people who think that vengeance is wrong. And all sorts of other attitudes about vengeance besides.What's important for PS is that, if the player wants to use this as a central character hook, the vengeance isn't just her personal vendetta, but a principle that extends beyond her circumstances, a conviction that defines how she views the multiverse, a belief about how the rest of reality should be.
I'm not getting a sense of what permission it is that Planescape grants that otherwise is lacking.
This is another bit that puzzles me. The PC's story starts out as a principled quest for vengeance, but then becomes a quest to change other people's minds. I don't get that transition.And if such a character's story is a success, whatever her alignment, she will be seen as a person who exercised justice, an exemplar of that ideal that others should strive to achieve, and thus create a world that her vengeance has objectively made more just -- whatever triggered her vengeance will not be something others seek to do, as the belief in justice that permeates the multiverse after the PC's actions are complete creates a more just reality.
But in any event, if I wanted to change NPCs' minds I could do that too, without using Planescape.
It also reactivates the question - if "justice" is arbitrary, why is it better to have many people regard what one did as just, than few? What does this show, other than that one was able to change minds?
I also don't follow the word "objectively", given that in your previous posts you have said that "good", "evil" etc in Planescape are subjective and arbitrary.
I don't really understand this other than as a manifestation of a type of megalomania, perhaps also tinged with a denial of reality. It seems to be taking something that makes sense - "I want the world to have less evil in it, and more goodness" - and transmute it into something that makes less sense - "And I want to do this not by changing the world, but by changing other people's beliefs about the world."They want to define the possibility space of belief, to have the multiverse actually work according to their understanding of how it does or should work, to have no dissent or competing beliefs that threaten their own.
I don't see the rational motivation.
That depends.The arguments are available to anyone, PS just presents a starting-state in the setting where that amnizu's arguments about torture being the truth of existence aren't prevalent.
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Our Mercykiller might believe that torture, as a element of punishment, fits Justice, and further defines Justice as Good, and so might find that amnizu to be an ally for her cause! OR she might believe that torture is something that is never justified, and so perpetrators are always further from the Justice she defines as Good, and so might want to slay/convert that amnizu. One thing's for sure: it would be an interesting scene to play through!
I think a scene in which someone tries to persuade someone that torture, which that person has hitherto regarded as morally impermissible, is in fact permissible, might be interesting. (Or tasteless. Or distressing. It would depend a bit on context. You seem oddly cavalier about this, given your very strongly moralised response upthread to my post about the theme of slavery in 4e.) But this sort of argument takes it for granted that what is good is something independent of human whim, and is an object of cognition - the argument consists in pointing the interlocutor to features of torture, and aspects of goodness, which relate in ways that the interlocutor has hitherto failed to notice.
But I don't see how this connects to "belief determines what's good".
Following on from what I wrote immediately above, what I am missing is the nature of the challenge.It furthermore presumes that your definition of the right thing is not challenged
If the challenge takes the form of other people running moral arguments, then the whole idea of "good is dictated by belief" seems to have been abandoned. We're back into the common-sense world of evaluative arguments made by pointing to features of conduct, and features of value, which connect in ways that someone has failed to notice or has mistakenly denied.
But if the nature of the challenge is that the PC's opponent go out into the world trying to change minds, then the challenge isn't a moral chalenge at all. It's a procedural challenge - can I stop them rendering my conduct evil, before I get to do it. (I'm still not really sure what that would matter, but that's a reiteration of a point that I've already set out above.)
This second interpretation of the challenge at hand fits with my broader conception of Planescape, as having the function of transforming moral challenges into procedural challenges, so as to blunt the metagame, "real life" dimensions of ingame situations and turn them into more classical D&D "can the PCs overcome the obstacles" situations.
Your counterexamples seem to take as a premise that all these choices will raise issues of weakness of will - ie a clash between acknowledged duty and the dictates of self-interest. Weakness of will is an interesting phenomenon, but I think is not the only moral challenge, perhaps not even the most important one. I also think weakness of will is a very frail chassis on which to build chalenges in an RPG, because in an RPG the player's self-interest is not at stake.So by that definition, it is an easy choice to, say, offer your child up as a sacrifice to Moloch because you believe it is right to do so. Or to obey a suicidal command from your superior because you believe that this something that is right. Your definition takes for granted the concept that doing the right thing -- the thing you believe in -- is the same as doing the easy thing.
Maybe you meant your counter-examples to instead raise issues of conflicts of vaue: between sacrifice to Moloch and duty to child; between obedience to one's superior and a duty not to kill oneself. But upthread, and in the post to which I'm replying, you've argued (or, at least, have seemed to me to argue) that conflicts of value are trivial to resolve and raise no interesting issues. That's a view that I happen to think is radically mistaken, but given that you seem to be advocating it, I assume that that is not what you intend by your counterexamples.
This is incredibly simplistic. I don't see how it relates to either real world moral debate and uncertainty, nor to the way that serious fiction engages with such matters.Just as I said, that it is not clear if an action is good or evil. To kill a man who wants to die and who you believe deserves to die, or not and not be a murder, is to choose between two things largely regarded as morally good: either I am not a murderer (which is a virtuous thing!), or I kill someone who deserves it and is asking for it (another virtuous thing!). I cannot have them both, but both are virtuous things, so either choice I make, I am the Good Guy.pemerton said:I have no idea, then, what you mean by "ambiguous morality".
In The Quiet American - * SPOILERS FOLLOW* - Fowler learns that Pyle is negotiating with a "third force" - neither French nor Vietnamese nationalist - to try to resolve the colonial war without the Communists taking control. The third force is a renegade general. Pyle provides the general with explosives, which he then uses to blow up a public square. Fowler and Pyle are present when the explosion happens, and Fowler is horrified both by the killings, and also by Pyle's woefully inadequate response (he complains about the blood on his shoes). Fowler therefore sends a message to the Communists, telling them when and where they can catch Pyle unawares, and Pyle is duly assassinated. And as a consequence of Pyle's death, Phuong, who had left Fowler for Pyle, returns to Fowler.
To say that choosing between friendship (staying loyal to Fowler) and justice + public welfare (betraying Fowler and thereby trying to mitigate the future harm he might cause) is an easy choice, because both values are good, strikes me as ludicrous. In the abstract, both are values. In this concrete situation, what is the right choice? Is Fowler an evil man - someone who betrayed his friend to the Communists just so he could get his girlfriend back? - or is Fowler a hero, who did a hard thing (betraying his friend) in order to secure a greater good (preventing more carnage)?
I don't know if you actually read the post that I linked to - here is the link again. In this episode of play, three PCs were interrogating a prisoner, and in order to extract information tricked her into thinking that a fourth PC - the fighter/cleric of Moradin - would intercede on her behalf with the local ruler to stop her being executed. Unfortunately for this plan, the fighter/cleric then arrived on the scene before the other PCs had been able to finish their interrogation and summarily execute the prisoner. Which gave the prisoner the opportunity to say that a promise had been made, in his name, to intercede on her behalf. The other PCs couldn't really deny this, because they could hardly say that they had manipulated the prisoner in a fashion that the fighter/cleric wouldn't approve of!
The player of the fighter/cleric, therefore, in playing his PC, had to choose between honouring the promise made on his behalf by his manipulative, less-than-fully-honouable comrades - thereby granting the prisoner clemency he believed she did not deserve - or alternatively betraying the promise and letting her be executed. He chose the first option. But does this make him a good peson - someone who kept his word, despite the temptation to betray it and exact the justice that he desired? Or does it make him an evil person, who allowed someone who deserved death to escape her just deserts simply out of a moral vanity, an unwillingness to allow a stain on his personal honour?
(For clarity - I'm not suggesting that my game, either in this case let alone in general, has the depth of Graham Greene. The comparison to Greene is simply for the purpose of elucidating one typical structure of moral dilemma in fiction.)
I don't see how this is any different to what I described.All you have done, in your example, is to move from a conflict of abstract values to a conflict of actual, concrete, elements of the situation. Two values are in conflict, but the choice of which one to pursue is uncertain because of the consequences that would ensue. That is inherent in many moral dilemmas, though it is not exhaustive of moral dilemmas. For instance, both in The Quiet American and in the situation I described, there are also questins around purity of motive (is Fowler motivated by altruism, or a desire to have Phuong return to him? is the fighter/cleric motivated by a genuine sense of honour, or mere moral vanity?)"Shades of grey" means, to me, that the choices are between two things where it is not clear if any of them are really virtuous at all. I don't kill him, so I'm not a murder, BUT he also kills a bunch of neighborhood children and I could have prevented that, and now I need to deal with explaining to the grieving parents why I made the choice I did and do I lose faith in "thou shall not kill," or do I stick to that belief in the face of the grief it is causing? Can I really be said to be a virtuous person? Or I kill him, BUT, he was some sort of cult leader and now his cult members are going around spreading terror in the streets, and I could have prevented that, and maybe there was some other way, and now I need to deal with all those poor people with the horrible burns and the orphaned children who have seen horrible things and do I lose faith in my convictions to kill those who deserve it, or do I stick to the belief, seeing the consequences of my actions on the haggard faces of the refugees from my town?
The aesthetic this trucks in isn't interested so much in my decision to kill him or not, but rather my decision to keep my convictions or not in the face of the disaster they're causing.
If you'd read the post to which I linked, you would have seen these concrete elements in the situation that I was talking about. The idea that whichever choice the player made "I am the Good Guy" is, frankly, ridiculous. It doesn't remotely capture the stakes or actua experience of play.
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