Alignment myths?

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Hopefully, the gentle viewer understands that my take on alignment is selected to make alignment functional and get around the icky non-conclusive arguments.

Totally noted.

However, even here, you can see how a non-complicated hypothetical is being used.

Take one of the doozies (kill a baby to save the world, etc.), and it's ever so much worse.

 

[delericho]

Failing to do good is not, in and of itself, evil. Could he have checked for the kid, yelled TIMBRE, cut down the tree in another direction? Sure. But failing to do so is not evil, no matter what consequences the action has. Tragic accidents happen every day, with no "fault" assigned -- and you need to *choose* to be evil to be evil. Evil isn't something you can slip into, it's a deliberate intention you make. Same with good.

I agree with your principle (failure to do good is not evil), but disagree with your specific example. It is generally accepted that before logging an area there is a certain amount of due diligence that should be done to ensure the area is safe and clear, to ensure that the woodsman himself is working in safe conditions, and so on.

By failing to do this, the woodsman is gaining a benefit to himself (it's quicker) at the expense of others (the child who is slain). This moves it beyond a simple accident to negligence, IMO, and shifts it from being merely Neutral to being actively Evil.

Edit: this presupposes, of course, that the woodsman has the wit and wisdom to realise that he should be doing the due diligence. If he's truly incompetent, he gets off the hook from an alignment perspective. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I think there's a "law of unexpected consequences" that has to apply.

Further Edit: Actually, on further reflection, the above about the logger being required to check the area and so on... is dead wrong. Inaction is neutral, and so Kamikaze Midget is right. The question of whether cutting down the tree is Evil or not would come down to this: did the logger cut down the tree because he wanted the tree cut down (and the death was just an unfortunate side-effect), or did the logger want the child dead, and cut the tree down as the means to achieve that?

 

[Raloc]

We can go even further, and say that the wood from that tree ends up being made into a bow that later is used to assassinate the king. Obviously, the woodsman, the merchant who sold the wood, the bowyer who made the bow, and the farmer who grew food that the assassin ate all committed an Evil act because their actions contributed to that assassination, since their intentions don't matter.


It's absurd.

The example can be extended indefinitely too. Just consider if the assassin had killed some inventor who would have gone on to create a vaccine of some sort (saving some large amount of lives). In the model that many are advocating, the assassin, the merchant, the bowyer, the farmer and the woodsman are ALL responsible for the deaths of everyone the inventor would have saved with his vaccine. There are endless such examples, and the ridiculousness of the assertion that actors should be responsible for all consequences (i.e., especially those beyond their control) becomes more apparent.

Judging the morality of an act by its consequences would default everyone to 100% evil, since they would all be guilty of being negligent in preventing every evil consequence (in the entire universe, or cosmology). Unless one's PCs are deities, using this model of alignment is as equally as absurd as the logic behind it.

 

[Psion]

I think you are making a straw man argument out of Hussar's position. Hussar posited that in this case the remorse came about only because the act was evil and the woodcutter was good.

And followed it up with "why would anyone care if the act was morally neutral"?

I'll leave Hussar to clarify if he wishes, but I think you are softening his stance from as-represented.

Pardon me, you are right. I just got tired of writing 'evil' and substituted something along the lines of 'a great evil'. Read it as that.

I hope you perceive that, for the purposes of my stance as defined in this thread, the distinction is important.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. Evil is so far as I'm concerned the absence of good in the actions of beings possessing a will. It remains evil whether or not anyone judges it evil.

I'm not sure how to clarify in a way that is useful other than to reveal that when discussing actions, we are looking at different lines in the merriam-webster for what defines "evil".

Let's take that as a given and move on.

I wish you'd stop with the amatuer psychology and the pointless allegations... It is a blanket argument having no bearing on this, and it doesn't get us anywhere.

Indeed and I apologize. Suffice it to say that you perceived some assertion that was just a statement that I hoped would highlight that my stance is not equivalent to Hussar's. You now claim you never claimed it was, so let us move on again...

I don't think that that is true. Hussar wrote in the original post:

Hmmm. In that case, a later post implied something different to me, and he is not in accordance with the RAW, which uses the words "intentionally commit an evil act."

 

[ruleslawyer]

Many, and I dare say most, of the worlds extant ethical systems have no problem with stating that probably 99.99999% of people have committed evil acts and multiple evil acts to boot. In fact, some of the most common ones claim that everyone has committed sufficient evil acts to be worthy of death. As Shakespeare said (I paraphrase), "Do not give someone only what they deserve, for if we only get what we deserve, which of us will escape a hanging?"

Forgive, but I believe you may be thinking of a quote by Michel de Montaigne:

"There is no man so good that if he place all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life."

 

[Celebrim]

And followed it up with "why would anyone care if the act was morally neutral"?

I'll leave Hussar to clarify if he wishes, but I think you are softening his stance from as-represented.

That's possible. Up until now I'm be operating under the assumption that Hussar position and mine were close enough to be treated as the same thing, but lets simplify this and say 'my position' so that I don't have to speak for Hussar and we don't have to argue over what someone else meant.

Hussar may have made an unfortunate turn of phrase, but mostly I think he was just being pithy. I feel that understanding of his question depends on seeing the implied condition, 'Assuming all the actors are wise and understand what they believe and what it implies, why would anyone care...'. The reason I feel this is implied is that the actions of fools and of people who don't know what they believe or what thier beliefs implies don't tell us alot about the nature of a particular system of morality (be it NG, LE, or CN or whatever). Before the action meaningfully relates to the morality system, we must make assumptions about it. Certainly there are, as I said, people who will feel remorse without cause (by which I mean, without cause under thier own system of beliefs) or who will act remorseful because they think its the right thing to do and who don't want to be blamed, and so forth. But this doesn't tell us alot about moral system except where those actions are the appropriate to the moral system.

So, returning to Hussar's rhetorical question, he ask 'Why would anyone care if the action was morally neutral?'. And the answer is I think, if the act was morally nuetral then no one who was wise would care. The good aligned person won't feel remorse because he hasn't done anything wrong. If the act is as morally neutral as flipping a coin for sport, if it is indeed mere random results, then why should a good person care whether the result was heads or tails. The neutral aligned person won't feel remorse because the act was of neutral value, and the evil person won't feel any especial glee because well there is nothing especially satisfying to an evil person about morally neutral acts.

But on the other hand, if we assume that the act is morally evil (to at least some extent) even in the absence of evil voilition (which would make the act both evil and abominable), then we see instead the expected range of emotion. The good person feels remorse. He makes restitution and is contrite. The neutral person blames the child, or the universe, and takes the steps he thinks necessary to see that the child or the universe is blamed rather than himself. The evil person finds this an unexpected delight, having not intended to do evil but managing to achieve such a spectacularly satisfying result (assuming the child isn't a friend), he delights in having killed the stupid little thing in a way that he probably won't get blamed for, he exalts in having removed the weak minded idiot from the gene pool, and otherwise secretly (or not) takes pleasure in the act. In most societies, where murder is frowned on, he publicly acts like the nuetral, but amongst truly vile companions he may lie and brag that he meant to do so to glorify his own role in the tragedy. And so forth.

All of this follows because the act is not morally neutral.

Hmmm. In that case, a later post implied something different to me, and he is not in accordance with the RAW, which uses the words "intentionally commit an evil act."

I don't have a book handy, but as I recall the RAW if the act had been intentional, the Paladin would have been stripped of status and could not have atoned for it sufficiently to restore himself to his former pure state. It's only because the evil act was unintentional that the Paladin is allowed to atone for it.

 

[Sejs]

Forgive, but I believe you may be thinking of a quote by Michel de Montaigne:

"There is no man so good that if he place all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life."

Heh, you sir are a credit to your username.

 

[Celebrim]

Forgive, but I believe you may be thinking of a quote by Michel de Montaigne:

"There is no man so good that if he place all his actions and thoughts under the scrutiny of the laws, he would not deserve hanging ten times in his life."

It is I that should ask you to be forebearing of me, since you've brought such a learned quote to the discussion whereas I have mangled with half remembered thoughts the good Bard's stanzas.

You have made a better quote than mine, and more to the point. You may be right that I was half remembering my Montaigne, but the quote that I was thinking of was from Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2 where the players have arrived at court.

"Polonius: My lord, I will use them according to their desert.

Hamlet: Odd's bodikin, man, better: use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?"

For the benefit of our reader's who don't come to English as a mother tongue, loosely translated into the modern that reads:

Polonius: "My lord, I will provide for them according to what they deserve."
Hamlet: "By God's shirt, man, better: provide for every man what they deserve, and who would escape being flogged?"

So, the Montaigne better makes the strong point I was trying to make, and for that I don't pardon you, I thank you.

 

[00Machado]

I was thinking about something to put here. More and more though, I keep coming back to a view that something that spawns this much discussion about the game takes energy away from playing it. Since we're unlikely to all agree on how it works (unlike say how we will mostly agree on how a +1 bonus works), the only options we're left with is to only somewhat agree, or even mostly disagree. And what's the point of that?

The RAW sets up this conflict from the beginning. Monopoly doesn't create structural problems like this. And I understand RPGs are different from Monopoly. My point though, is that they take the social nature of the game, which should be a strength, and squander it on what can only end up at best in agreeing to disagree, and at worst in breakdown of expectations in play, and making the whole experience less fun. In addition, they create this artificial structure of actions into categorizations. And for what? What does the play experience derive from it?

A few rule mechanics work around alignment, like detect evil, paladin's must being of a certain alignment, and so it's needed, which makes it worse. They tie a few rule mechanics to what is mostly a concept rather than a hard and fast rule, and it leaves room for 'interpretation' and ultimately disagreement, resentment, or whatever.

Alignment should be eliminated. All rules that rely on it should be rewritten to build on a not up to interpretation element of the game. For example, instead of something like protection from evil, there should be protection from outsiders, because being an outsider means the same thing to everyone playing, whereas being evil doesn't. With a minimal of effort, they can shift alignment from being something that is important to agree on (because of game play), to just a tool for play that helps describe types of personalities and decisions consistent with a person's worldview, as a sort of roleplaying helping aid, to use purely at your own discretion as a play, and that the GM doesn't have to care about at all in play.

 

[Celebrim]

There are times when it doesn't pay to entertain thoughts which seem absurd. I frequently have cause to think that the state of philosophy today would be far better if more people had followed Descartes sound observation in his mediatation that proceeding from the beginning that we can learn nothing from our sense would be profitless.

However, just as often I find that there is a good deal of profit in reexaming thoughts which are first instincts are to dismiss as absurd. For example, for the last two or three pages there have been a seemingly endless parade of posters posting variations on the theme of:

Judging the morality of an act by its consequences would default everyone to 100% evil, since they would all be guilty of being negligent in preventing every evil consequence (in the entire universe, or cosmology). Unless one's PCs are deities, using this model of alignment is as equally as absurd as the logic behind it.

Like so many alignment threads, we have been dangerously skirting religion and please lets not go there any more than we have to, but let me say that I find a certain ammount of hubris involved in such a blanket dismissal of the idea that everyone is in one (limited) fashion or the other responcible for all the evil that occurs in the world. Such a blanket dismissal dismissing the orthodox traditions of the majority of people in world history, from Judeo-Christians to Hindu to Buddists. All of them approach the problem in slightly different ways, but all of them agree on the fact that mortal man is universally or almost universally guilty and incapable of actually being good on his own. And one of the reasons that such diverse traditions agree on that is exactly this argument which is being dismissed as absurd. For much of those traditions there is widespread agreement that the nature of the universe is such that mortal man cannot escape from the evil of it in his current condition or in the current condition of the universe. The Hindu has the cycle of reincarnation, the Buddist enlightenment, and the Christian salvation by grace and while I have no desire to here go into the details of that the point is that much of humanities great intellectual traditions on the subject of ethics agree to the very thing which is here so readily being dismissed as absurd.

Now, you can believe whatever you like. It could well be that all those traditions are completely wrong, and I've no desire to discuss that here either. All I'm saying is that if so many of the worlds great ethical thinkers have thought 'absurd' things, and so many of the worlds peoples have believed 'absurd' things, and if such a view was pretty much the default way of looking at the world by almost everyone in the cultures which supposedly in part inspire your average fantasy setting, then humility ought to suggest that there is at least a possibility that it is not everyone else that is being absurd.

All of this is as much to say that if I choose to believe that in a universe of my creating 'good' people largely believe that most everything that they do has some unfortunate evil component, and that they must atone for these unwitting sins that they committed even though they didn't intend to, I think I'm on pretty solid philosophical ground and I know I'm on pretty solid ground from a stand point of recreating a less modern less anachronistic perspective.

Ok, but I suppose that's skirting the line. But, to show why its so hard to avoid mentioning the 'r' word when good and evil are under discussion, even if we speak of a non-extant religion which appears in quite a few people's campaign worlds including the published settings of WotC, namely ancient Egyptian paganism, it was the belief of 'good' people of ancient Egypt that they would be forbidden from entering paradise and given over to the devourer if the weight of thier crimes was heavier than even a feather. We could easily ask, "Which of us here has not done a feather's worth of evil?" I wouldn't stand up for that. I'd slink into the corner. And while that sounds like a harsh standard, the belief systems that drove that one to extinction believed very much the same thing only you weren't allowed the feather.