D&D General Muscular Neutrality (thought experiment)

[lall]

There's no such thing as forcing someone to be altruistic. Altruism is defined by the intent of the person helping others. If someone is forced to help others without a choice, they have no agency and thus no intent, selfless or otherwise.

In my system, one is incentivized to be LG. Not only will your LG neighbor not murder you, they won’t lie to you or scream in your face. If the definition of LG includes altruism, someone (whoever defined LG as including altruism and/or those in support of that definition) wants me (just a guy crying to mind my own business) to be a slave. Who do I have to help and how often? Who benefits from my unpaid assistance? If I sit on my hands, others will label me some other alignment, tarnishing my reputation. To be the perceived best neighbor, I have to enter into voluntary slavery.

 

[Clint_L]

It is, though? Last time I read my books, the evil gods reward those who serve them. The punishment and eternal torment is for those who failed them.

But, no, it isn't a good thing to kill someone using as excuse that you're offering they "salvation". That kind of backward philosophy is what the Conquistadores used as a excuse justify the genocide of the indigenous peoples of America.

Conquistadores and other colonizers almost inevitably justify their actions as being good, and typically precisely because they are bringing spiritual salvation, material improvements, or both to the ignorant locals. There were and are serious debates about the ethical implications of having the key to eternal salvation, whether that implies a moral duty to spread the faith, and what means are acceptable.

Note those folks who ring your doorbell every now and then to share some good news. That's the most benign version of the same phenomenon.

But what does that look like in a world where various afterlives are demonstrably real? That's where the real world analogy falls down, because in D&D land, you typically don't need to rely on faith. Choosing an afterlife is like choosing where you want to emigrate to. Forever. Or, in this case, choosing where you think others should go.

So if you're a paladin serving Bahamat, and you come across a people who are devoted to Tiamat, isn't it your moral duty to correct them, so that they can have the best eternal life possible? If not, why not?

And if you have a choice between eternal Antarctica and eternal Tahiti, why would you pick Antarctica?

 

[Steampunkette]

And if you have a choice between eternal Antarctica and eternal Tahiti, why would you pick Antarctica?

THIS is the one that always gets me when it comes to evil characters in fantasy settings: They KNOW they're going to hell. Outright. There's no question about where they're going to and they actively make their choice every day of the week.

Can such a person be "Redeemed" and go to heaven instead? Or because it's an active choice rather than disbelief or making mistakes are they ultimately irredeemable by choice?

If they -are- irredeemable by choice, -why- are they doing it? What possible benefit do you gain by choosing to go to the worst pit in the universe for eternal torture?

And the only answer that really works, because of how evil is defined, is: They're getting something out of it.

They're ABSOLUTELY ranking up past "Lemure" for their hellscape journey. They're making the willful decision to be the worst people possible in the hopes of committing enough sins before they die to become a Pit Fiend or Balor or whatever. And by killing them before they reach their goal, you're condemning them to be Bone devils or Ice devils or some other lesser level of demon or devil or whatever, to reduce the maximum amount of potential evil in the universe...

But not actually removing any evil that already exists.

Also really helps to make evil characters proactively evil! It's a race to kick as many puppies as possible before some paladin beheads you and sends you down to the pit into a lower demon form where you're not in a place to be the eternal bully to everyone beneath you.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

The key difference is exactly that, with a further distinction that having eternal afterlife and life makes one afterlife the thing that matter, and life a transient, childhood like state which doesn't really matter at all. When we played cops and robbers, it didn't matter when a child said "boom, you're dead". Because we just fell down, said "argh!" and five seconds later, we'd rise again and resume playing. That's exactly what death amount to in this scenario, with the added twist that your behaviour determines where you finally get. Better not fail that test! Morality would certainly develop very differently, with consideration for life being much lesser than they would be naturally. In the context of the OP's stipulation, Good implies concern for life, so it would be a dictate of the Good gods to force people to live their life to their natural end, because it's the Good gods preference, not because it's "real-world good" not to kill (= relocate to a better place) people.

(Muscular Neutral could posit they oppose Good not on the basis on being bloodthirsty monster, but because they want the liberty to end lives too miserable to be lived, aka euthanasia, without being sent to metaphysical Antarctica for that).

The importance of moralty itself would be questionable. When playing cops and robbers, the child aren't evil for playing robbers. Children aren't villains because they pick robber, in a world where life is a temporary, near insignificant time compared to eternity, Evil and Good could be Red and Blue, arbitrary and ultimately unimportant denomination for gods, the only things mattering being if you get to the Good Place in the end.

The existence of afterlives really creates lots of conundrums.

If Good gods grant Tahiti and Evil gods grant Antarctica, which is a classical proposition of monotheistic religion, the message is clear, one is clearly incentivized to serve the Good gods, because it would be ludicrous to pick Antarctica. In a monotheistic setting, it's OK because it incentivize to follow the rules set by the (only) God and societies' rules which align exactly (because noone want to go to Antarctica). In a polytheistic system common to D&D settings, the Evil gods would very quickly lack any follower except fools. And Good servant would be very unkind not to help fools to achieve the better outcome. If small faults would lead to be considered one of the False, and denied Tahiti, then actually killing people before they can sin is certainly something that would be logical, and even charitable to do.

If both Good and Evil gods grant their own Polynesian island, then, since life doesn't matter, the only thing that matter is how one adheres to the tenet of the god of his choosing (or the god he's raised into), irrespective of morality. It gives a very different meaning to Good and Evil. So for example, there is often a discussion about whether it's sensible to have an intelligent species that is aligned "always Evil". If being Evil and partaking in murder of an innocent, for example, was a sure way to get to their particular Tahiti), and "not illing an innocent" was mean being sent to Antarctica, then I'd say that they would be under great pressure to kill innocent. Which shed a very different light on their "always... alignment". Few of us would refuse to shoot an innocent if we had a gun pressed against our head (most of us will claim they wouldn't, because they are comfortably typing on their keyboard in the safety of their own home, I guess...) So unless the Good gods accepted the conversion (and sent to Tahiti) people who would convert after leaving an Evil life, basically everyone baptized into an Evil god would be under extraordinary duress to act Evil. Acting like this would be basically "eternal self-preservation". And if Good gods accepted conversion, then the paladin converting the evil baddie in the aforementioned scenario would be righteous (saving a soul by getting it to Tahiti WHILE removing a person that would otherwise need to be Evil). Even if it's a baby.

The existence of an afterlife would totally change the definition of Good and Evil to the point that alignmnet-Good and alignmnet-Evil are just tags to determine if one gets additional damage when hit by a Smite Evil spell, rather than the conventional sense of these words.

There are other possibilities, like both Good and Evil gods granting Antarctica -- all huuman races would probably try to unite and research heavily in arcane magic to get hold on a local variant of the Karsus' avatar spell and replace those oppresive gods -- an interesting setting to play in.


If Good gods granted Antarctica and Evil gods granted Tahiti, then it would need to be the epitome of altruism to be altruist. Not only would one get nothing from their kindness -- thatt's the concept of altruism -- they'd on top of that forfeit their immortal soul.

 

[Epic Meepo]

In my system, one is incentivized to be LG. Not only will your LG neighbor not murder you, they won’t lie to you or scream in your face. If the definition of LG includes altruism, someone (whoever defined LG as including altruism and/or those in support of that definition) wants me (just a guy crying to mind my own business) to be a slave. Who do I have to help and how often? Who benefits from my unpaid assistance? If I sit on my hands, others will label me some other alignment, tarnishing my reputation. To be the perceived best neighbor, I have to enter into voluntary slavery.

If one wants a reputation for helping others, one has to help others. That isn't slavery. That's someone willfully setting a goal and actively pursuing it. One could just as easy decide the benefit of a good reputation isn't worth the effort involved in building a reputation and willingly choose not to pursue that goal.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

If one wants a reputation for helping others, one has to help others. That isn't slavery. That's someone willfully setting a goal and actively pursuing it. One could just as easy decide the benefit of a good reputation isn't worth the effort involved in building a reputation and willingly choose not to pursue that goal.

I think his point is that if one NEEDS to be altruist to be Good, and that Good can achieve a total victory so that everyone is Good, THEN there is no way for him to be not-altruist in the Good the society. Which means he has no possibility to make the moral choice of not being altruist. He's effectively either brainwashed into being altruistic (and no longer being able to concieve being selfish) or forced into servitude by having no freedom not to be altruistic. If he could be allowed not to be altruist, in other words as you put it "willingly choose not to pursue that goal", then Good wouldn't have an absolute victory. Non-Good people would still abound.

The OP later corrected what "Good victory" meant, which lead me to consider that in this case, Good can't act against Evil, which could be a valid reason for Muscular Neutral to oppose Good (when they think Evil needs to be countered using methods that could involve harming and oppressing them into compliance).

Another conundrum could be that if being altruistic is the key to enter the Good afterlife (metaphysical Tahiti), and any other solution means going to metaphysical Antarctica, then people giving their riches or lives for other aren't altruistic, they are maximizing their self-interest by getting their one-way ticket to Tahiti. Which is the exact opposite of altruism. So sacrificing your life to save a fellow human would be... the epitome of selfishness.

 

[lall]

If one wants a reputation for helping others, one has to help others. That isn't slavery. That's someone willfully setting a goal and actively pursuing it. One could just as easy decide the benefit of a good reputation isn't worth the effort involved in building a reputation and willingly choose not to pursue that goal.

Don’t want a reputation for helping others. Helping others is like having a preference for the color purple or liking burritos. I just want a reputation for being a good neighbor. That shouldn’t include a mandate to enslave oneself or to like purple the best.

 

[Staffan]

Don’t want a reputation for helping others. Helping others is like having a preference for the color purple or liking burritos. I just want a reputation for being a good neighbor. That shouldn’t include a mandate to enslave oneself or to like purple the best.

Helping others (within reason) is part of being a good neighbor. You can be a tolerable neighbor without doing it, but not a good one.

 

[Shardstone]

I think an interesting spin to this I haven't seen yet is that "Good needs Evil to remind itself to be Good."

In this framework, if there is no Evil, Good becomes Evil. This is similar to Order being a dictator; however, in this framework we go more extreme and say that most sins and evils specifically appear when Good has existed for too long without anything else to define itself against. This would lead to a situation where basically life is maybe innately evil, or perhaps the primal instincts of sentient creatures end up slipping out of control eventually. This leads to a resurgence in Evil, and said Evil usually leads to a "dark age" and a lot of loss.

However, by keeping Good and Evil in balance, you can prevent the mass loss of information that comes with a dark age in exchange for "sacrificing" some of the world to Evil ever so often. It's almost like the Neutral factions here are committing force flag attacks to rile people up and prevent society from collapsing.

I don't think there's a way to make this work without he Neutral option being "Dubiously Morally Grey" and a potential villain in many people's eyes. After all, they do destroy many lives in helping Evil, even if they save more in the longrun.

 

[Steampunkette]

I think an interesting spin to this I haven't seen yet is that "Good needs Evil to remind itself to be Good."

In this framework, if there is no Evil, Good becomes Evil. This is similar to Order being a dictator; however, in this framework we go more extreme and say that most sins and evils specifically appear when Good has existed for too long without anything else to define itself against. This would lead to a situation where basically life is maybe innately evil, or perhaps the primal instincts of sentient creatures end up slipping out of control eventually. This leads to a resurgence in Evil, and said Evil usually leads to a "dark age" and a lot of loss.

However, by keeping Good and Evil in balance, you can prevent the mass loss of information that comes with a dark age in exchange for "sacrificing" some of the world to Evil ever so often. It's almost like the Neutral factions here are committing force flag attacks to rile people up and prevent society from collapsing.

I don't think there's a way to make this work without he Neutral option being "Dubiously Morally Grey" and a potential villain in many people's eyes. After all, they do destroy many lives in helping Evil, even if they save more in the longrun.

We have actually seen this repeated, many times, in the thread.

I call it "Good is secretly evil" because it relies on the idea that alllll the forces of good and alllll the good people can just stop being good and start being evil once evil is conquered and still be considered "Good, even though what they're doing is bad".