D&D General Muscular Neutrality (thought experiment)

[lall]

Then you are a slave to yourself, and nobody else. Have fun with that.

No, I chose to be subservient to a dominating influence. I was not the originator nor a proponent of Moronville’s alignment definitions.

 

[Hriston]

Per MW, a slave is “someone or something that is completely subservient to a dominating person or influence.”

Look at the first three definitions. Examples of definition four given are “slave to fashion/technology”, “slaves of liquidity” (speaking about markets), and “slaves to the clock”. You can speak in a similar way of someone being a “slave to altruism”. That doesn’t support your argument that such “slavery” is somehow antithetical to the tenets of a good alignment.

 

[lall]

One can be a slave and be good, but one shouldn’t have to be a slave to be good.

 

[Mind of tempest]

One can be a slave and be good, but one shouldn’t have to be a slave to be good.

Alturism is not slavery; it just is not.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Going back to the quote from Maxperson above, I'd say that if what we defeated what we call Evil in a fictional setting, this would establish a new standard for what is Evil out of what was formerly considered Neutral, and likewise the requirements for being called Good would rise, some of what was formerly Good now considered Neutral. To people living under the paradigm of the old "Evil", this would look like everyone is good, but to its contemporaries there would still be perceptible differences separating the new Good from the new Neutral and Evil.

I don't at all agree that this would be true. Having ever-rising standards means the standards are impossible to meet. That's not acceptable. I, as someone who aspires to be as Good as I can be, could never abide by this "welp, you haven't met your Good quota for the Era of the Wombat, it's Inquisition time!"

If you have truly defeated absolutely everything one would call Evil, in such a way that it genuinely can't come back (something I find extremely implausible, but I'll allow it for the sake of argument), then Good says, "Awesome. We can now be focused just on developing things, we no longer need to worry about putting out fires anymore." By definition, you've already eliminated Evil in a way that it can't come back, so...it can't come back. That would be wonderful in Good's eyes, because it would make a lot of things much, much simpler. It might still maintain a token or minimalist good-protection-force just in case an outside-context-problem arises that reignites wickedness.

See, for example, the Age of Legends in the Wheel of Time books; the Aes Sedai did not become a progressively more and more and more and more draconian secret police force hunting down every possible strain of wickedness, they instead focused on furthering the heights of human achievement. And then, when the Dark One's influence returned, the Aes Sedai became both the greatest defenders of Good...and the greatest enemies of Good, because the Darklords were all former powerful Aes Sedai themselves (not least because channelers are so much easier to tempt than non-channelers, what with their ability to use the highly addictive True Power that comes from the Dark One himself.) The Aes Sedai had functionally become a body of scholars, diplomats, and civil engineers, with their military training becoming almost totally defunct until it was revived in the period between the unsealing of the Bore and the rise of the Dark One's proxy armies. And Rand, late in the series, even speculates on how the Age of Legends was fundamentally unsustainable anyway; it hadn't so much eliminated evil as suppressed it under a benevolent but totalitarian regime...and that totalitarianism would eventually be its undoing. In other words, the Good would fall away and be replaced with purely man-made Evil, even if the Dark One was never allowed to leak into the world.

Now, if you want to say that some settings would work the way you describe--sure! That's a perfectly valid choice, but I think it's specifically valid because it's the creeping corruption of Law, not Good somehow becoming a bad thing over time. That is, at first, resisting Evil is merely a matter of getting everyone on board with not doing the absolutely awful things, but once everyone no longer does those things, Law sneaks in and starts whispering "you should make people behave this way, so they don't stray". And that specific thing is the first seed of Lawful Evil whispering sweet temptations to those who aspire to be Good.

 

[Peter BOSCO'S]

Without Muscular Neutrality you could get Krynn before the Cataclysm. With Divination spells and cross planetary gates powerful people on Greyhawk might well know about what happened to Krynn. This might cause them to conclude that they have to stop good from getting all powerful, so that Greyhawk's Gods don't cause a Cataclysm in the Flaness. This could result in Muscular Neutrality.

 

[Autumnal]

Iall is apparently enslaved by the idea they must not related to an ideas in anyway that someone influenced by Objectivism might call being enslaved.

 

[Bohandas]

In a nutshell, good needs evil. First of all, good has no definition without evil to compare it to.

That's ridiculous. That's like saying that there can't be light without darkness

 

[Clint_L]

That's ridiculous. That's like saying that there can't be light without darkness

Well, light is just visible radiation. Darkness is not really anything, just an absence of visible radiation. So, conceptually speaking, the definition of light is sort of meaningless without darkness - light is literally visible radiation in the darkness.

Which is relevant to this discussion, since neither good nor evil are meaningful concepts without context, either. And I don't think any definition of "good" is meaningful without a definition of "not good" with which to compare it (or "evil"/"not evil").

 

[Mind of tempest]

That's ridiculous. That's like saying that there can't be light without darkness

light makes a shadow when matter is present.
the idea of good needs the idea of evil to function as a concept, but the reality of good does not need evil beyond the idea of it to function.