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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 7998487" data-attributes="member: 59082">There are numerous angles to take when deciphering alignment, and, while the system is a bit rigid and cantankerous, it holds up pretty well to a variety of approaches and, overall, works well for the game system.That said, it doesn't exactly jive well with most schools of real-world psychology. From a psychological perspective, "evil" is more of a mental illness or deficiency. Psychopathy is a lack of empathy or any sense of the other; I would even argue that a psychopath is someone with little or no capacity to feel love. Every one of us has moments of rage or destructiveness, or losing sight of how one's actions impact others, but a psychopath is someone who lacks that capacity altogether, or at least only has it in a rudimentary form.Law vs Chaos seems more like personality types and may have some correlation with left vs. right brains, and the Meyers-Briggs system. A lawful person would be more analytical, logical, systems and judgement oriented, whereas a chaotic would be more aesthetic, individualistic and intuitive. Lawful people like rules and structures, playing within a system (e.g. rhyming poetry), while a chaotic person likes improvisation and playing outside the box (e.g. free verse).Some psychologists have found that moral development has different levels or stages to it, such as Kohlberg's system of preconventional (obedience to authority), conventional (societal conventions), and post-conventional (adherence to principles), which some have extended beyond that to a kind of quasi-mystical (or trans-personal) sense of intuitive truth and oneness, which in turn guides one's actions. It is almost like if the post-conventional abstract principles are archetypes of an underlying oneness of being that is realized in a "fourth stage."Or we could look at Gilligan's stages, which are in three as well (she was a student of Kohlberg), but she calls them egocentric, ethnocentric, and worldcentric, which correspond to selfishness, goodness, and, truth. As one develops, one's "sphere of concern" (hopefully!) transitions from self-interested, to what is best for my group, to the world. We could take this a step further and apply the Buddhist ideal of "compassion for all sentient beings" as a further development within the third stage, or even a fourth stage, as I mentioned above.So in that light, from a developmental psychological perspective, an "evil" person is someone who stalled in their moral development at essentially a toddler or young child's age. For a child it is not evil, but for an adult with adult cognition, it is far more problematic: they utilize complex cognition to manipulate and exploit others. If you buy the basic idea of Jon Ronson's book, The Psychopath Test, then the basic human problem is that civilization has largely been guided and manipulated by a small number of psychopaths, who are essentially deficient in human empathy. Interesting fodder for a campaign...</blockquote>

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