D&D General Muscular Neutrality (thought experiment)

[Umbran]

Gravity doesn't influence in the moral quandaries of interaction.

Oh? "Should I shove him off the cliff?" is a moral quandry because of gravity. Without gravity, the question has no moral valence.

But in any case, in Gygaxian alignment, issues of how much personal choice you get are matters of Law/Chaos, not Good or Evil.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Depends. How are you implementing the "better universe"? Are you sharing your pacifist ways by force, or are you allowing people to choose them on their own free will? Is your "better universe" the best for everyone, or just for yourself and likeminded individuals?

If an individual has good intentions but implements them in a bad way, it still counts as "evil" in my book.

One possible direction to take it is that there is no better universe, and that the only way to prevent suffering is to destroy all creatures who feel it.

Not without their consent. Not by force. But, as the creature feels suffering, you give them the option: to not be, anymore. A choice they can make. A way out. A way that they never have to suffer again. And maybe you even offer to that creature to be like you. To go around the world, telling people how to remove themselves from reality. No, we don't force you. But if the multiverse just keeps existing and just keeps being horrible, and as a matter of cosmic law cannot be made better...why wouldn't you get out of it?

If the multiverse must include suffering, then the way to minimize suffering is to softly, gently, deliberately, destroy the multiverse, by opting in.

When existence is suffering, and can't be made different, then existence itself is the problem.

I wonder if whatever life-forms that exist when the heat-death of the universe is imminent will have a perspective like this. No, we can't make it better. No, nobody will be left. No, we can't continue this project. All we can do is say goodbye.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Hmm.

If the whole point of Creation is to allow choice, then what force or concept creates a delineation between a "good" choice and an "evil" choice?

Well, the point is to allow creativity, which requires the freedom to choose. Good and Evil choices still exist.

A universe in which the only choices are between preferences like "red or green" obviously wouldn't be true "free will", free will has to exist to allow consequent choices between "good" and "evil".

If you reduce the universe to merely being a choice between those two, sure. The One's messengers do not claim that that is what it is. Frankly I'm not sure how you got the idea that it would be literally all of reality has only one choice that ever matters? The One's messengers (They almost never contact anyone directly) are going for something like a certain quote from Thus Spake Zarathustra, which I learned from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri: "Companions the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators the creator seeks—those who write new values on new tablets. Companions the creator seeks, and fellow harvesters; for everything about him is ripe for the harvest." Now, this isn't a perfect fit because the One does want believers. But They only want believers who do so willingly, fully retaining their ability to choose how and when and where to do what they wish to do. Anything less would defeat the purpose; They (rather, Their messengers) claim They can create whatever They want, so if they wanted perfect automaton droids who never thought anything They didn't put there, They could! But the One (allegedly) did not do that because They want freely thinking beings, who enrich existence through their exercise of free choice, even though that means some of them will choose to do evil things.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

But isn't that exact perspective we would expect a cosmological force of "Good" to have?

No?

I believe IRL in a cosmological Good that would not do that. It's kind of essential that that is not part of His nature.

I would expect a "muscular neutrality" to be the forces focused on maximizing "local weal" and minimizing "local woe", and not willing to wrestle with the bigger picture.

Careful what you mean by this. Are you using "local" in the geographic sense, or the mathematical sense?

A "local maximum" is a part of a function that is higher than any points within a nearby area. A "global maximum" is not a maximum for all of Earth; it is the actually highest point the function ever touches. As an example, sin(x)/x has infinitely many local maxima at every point where x=nπ, where n is an integer (0, ±1, ±2, etc.) But its global maximum is at x=0.

In order to go from the maximum at x=π to the higher maximum at x=0, you must pass through part of the function that is negative. If we view the Y axis as measuring the goodness and evilness of the universe, then this movement would require that we intentionally make the universe MUCH more evil before we can make it maximally good. There are plenty of cosmological Good forces that would never condone this.

"Muscular neutrality" struggles with the trolley problem, "cosmological good" is focused on eliminating trollies and the forces that put people in front of them.

The trolley problem is irrelevant to my point. I'm talking about how in order to maximize good for all people, you would have to harm a hell of a lot of people to get there, which would be Evil. Most cosmological Good forces are not willing to do blatantly evil things (mind control, coercion, murder, extortion, eugenics, etc.) even if those things would truly provably make the world objectively better
...and it's usually not the case that that is a truly proven result of these actions.

 

[Zeromaru X]

But does any individual truly have perfect agency?

What if they're confused? What if they're under emotional strain and can't make a rational decision? Or maybe they're ignorant as to the repercussions of their choice? Or were raised in an environment that didn't teach them the consequences of wrong choices?

Is allowing someone to damn themselves, just so they have maximal agency, more good when they don't fully understand what that damnation might look like?

I think @Clint_L gave you a better answer than what I was thinking, lol

But again- this is a game. It cannot capture the complexity of humanity!

I know some people who genuinely disagree with you about this, Snarf.

 

[Zeromaru X]

One possible direction to take it is that there is no better universe, and that the only way to prevent suffering is to destroy all creatures who feel it.

But that is just one possible direction we have to take to make gymbro neutrality work. And for that we need to change how Good acts (turning it into Actually-not-so-Good), because destroying the universe to avoid suffering it's not a good thing to do.

Sure, you should leave the universe to avoid suffering, but any good doctrine espousing this belief is about transcending the universe, not destroying it. Any doctrine saying the universe should be destroyed to bring Goodness, is not actually a good doctrine.

And yes, the universe may end. But that's because it reaches its natural cycle. Or Evil, Chaos and Law destroyed it. Not because Good destroyed it.

Oh? "Should I shove him off the cliff?" is a moral quandry because of gravity.

But that is a person choosing to do an evil act. And once done, your alignment changes to "Evil", not to "Gravity".

Gravity doesn't determine what you do and the morality of it. It's not a moral "force".

the mathematical sense?

Oh, noes. Not maths. I used to be very good at them back in high school, but I had to remove that knowledge from my brain to make space for D&D lore when I became old.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I've always stayed away from neutrality as trying to achieve balance (that seems like a very specific religious belief or something rather than an alignment) and tended view true neutrality as working better when it is more about retreating from the affairs of the world

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I know some people who genuinely disagree with you about this, Snarf.

Well, if those people come around, I'll just have to ask them to sell their crazy somewhere else!

'Cuz I got enough, thank you.

 

[see]

I mean, I think it's pretty obvious that "muscular neutrality" was imported from Moorcock's setup where the victory of either Law or Chaos would destroy humanity, without anybody doing the importing thinking through how the victory of Good is intrinsically different than the victory of Law. And I observe that every defense of muscular neutrality I see winds up redefining Good into meaning something that far more naturally parses as Law (see not just this thread, but, say, Dragonlance's take on the Kingpriest), implicitly collapsing us from the 1978 nine-alignment paradigm back into the 1974 three-alignment paradigm.

Which is to say, the concept works just fine with D&D as Gygax reportedly always DMed it, but doesn't work at all with nine-sector alignment as written.

The interesting question left, I think, is whether muscular neutrality works in 1977's five-alignment D&D. If human survival/flourishing requires a balance between the cosmic forces of Law and Chaos, but the only cosmic force that is neither Lawful nor Chaotic is Neutrality, there's room for a case that the promotion of the good might require preventing the ultimate victory of (one of) the cosmic forces of Good.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Which is to say, the concept works just fine with D&D as Gygax reportedly always DMed it, but doesn't work at all with nine-sector alignment as written.

Well, keep in mind that the OP pretty explicitly says, "Don't just reject the premise."

My analysis above was, more or less, an effort to show that either (1) the premises really are just contradictory, like asking for a triangle with four sides or a married bachelor, or (2) if they aren't contradictory, the price you pay for avoiding the contradiction is simply too high for most folks. Because the whole point of the thread was specifically to do this with Good/Evil, and not take any of the easy ways out.

The interesting question left, I think, is whether muscular neutrality works in 1977's five-alignment D&D. If human survival/flourishing requires a balance between the cosmic forces of Law and Chaos, but the only cosmic force that is neither Lawful nor Chaotic is Neutrality, there's room for a case that the promotion of the good might require preventing the ultimate victory of (one of) the cosmic forces of Good.

The main issue here is that it flips the "muscular Neutral" problem on its head. Instead of them being irrational flip-floppers doing bizarre things, you start having both Good and Evil doing that. Because now Chaotic Good forces have to team up with the "muscular" Neutrals and Chaotic Evil forces in order to prevent a Horrendous Space Kablooie.

Meaning the people who love freedom and self-actualization have to team up with literal demons, serial killers, and drug lords in order to take down....folks who have done nothing wrong other than being Lawful Good, because the Universe plays pernicious games of balance and will flip the table if anyone gets too uppity. The fundamental weirdness of somebody suddenly flipping sides just because one entirely-blameless group has gotten just a little bit too powerful is still there, we've just changed who it links with.