@EzekielRaiden
I am familiar with debates in moral philosophy. I work as an academic philosopher and lawyer.
It's not correct to say (or imply) that truth, beauty and life are values only on a consequentialist account: they are values for nearly all theories of value. That was my point, that Gygax's definition of good includes all the main values of typical moral outlooks: Benthamite greatest good of the greatest number; human (or, as he put it,
creature) rights; truth, beauty and life; self-actualisation.
If you want a game in which debates about which moral theory is
really correct, then D&D's alignment system is pointless and will do nothing but get in your way, because player X will assert that such-and-such is good while player Y will disagree.
But if you are happy to put those debates to one side - which mostly means letting all the participants follow their moral common sense - then the alignment system
can frame an interesting question, namely, about the relationship of particular means (ie law and chaos) to the ends of good.
This is what elves and dwarves (for instance): elves think that the dwarven penchant for tight-knit communities and rather rigid social hierarchies is a threat to the good, because of the tendency of such social arrangements to lead to the powerful pursuing their own selfish ends (and perhaps, also, those at the bottom feeling resentment and hence also pursuing selfish rather than good ends); whereas dwarves think that the lack of social organisation in elvish communities means that individuals do not get the support and social structure they need to achieve their own wellbeing and help bring about the wellbeing of others.
This actually makes sense of alignment conflict; whereas a mere preference for tight or loose social organisation does not, because the conflict can be entirely avoided by those of each preference just forming their own distinct communities! (This is also why Planescape doesn't make sense. Why should those in the Seven Heavens be bothered by those in Olympus, if they're all living well each in accordance with their preferred social arrangements?)
Now suppose a GM has read (let's say) Durkheim on Suicide, and has decided that the dwarves are right and the elves are wrong because loose social organisation leads to anomie and hence serious and widespread unhappiness. That would be an example of what I posted above, of "a particular game or campaign setting or whatever is set up so that this question about means
is already answered". In that case, as I posted, alignment once again becomes pointless.
But just as, in FRPGing, we suspend other ordinary causal judgements, so I think it makes sense to suppose that we can suspend our ordinary judgements of social causation and hold the means-end question open. Which is quite different from a game that invites us to suspend our ordinary
moral judgements and pretend that bad people are good. (That can also be done, but is quite a different and I think more demanding request for a game to make.)
I think a lot of discussion about alignment suffers from trying to relate alignment to questions in moral philosophy - which is absolutely hopeless, as is shown by the fact that no serious philosopher has ever used or taken up Gygax's categories - rather than asking
what can alignment bring to the play of the game. The idea that it can be used to foreground a dispute about means to the end of goodness (understood quite capaciously, as I've said) is an attempt to answer that particular question.
