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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3292426" data-attributes="member: 4937">Hussar: You are painting yourself into a corner, and it started here.To put it in terms of D&D alignment, 'good' and 'evil' alignments are active philosophies.  They demand actions of the character.  The philosophy you begin to espouse here is passive, and therefore neutral.  To be a little overly simple, nuetral philosophies have only 'Thou Shalt Nots' in them.  For example, a philosophy based on the maxim, "Thou Shalt Not Do Harm" is nuetral.  In such a system, you can stand and watch someone drown so long as you didn't do anything to cause the situation.  It's the universe that is doing the drowning, and responcible for it and not you.  Some karma based systems of thought are nuetral in this way, in that they would argue that interveening in the drowning causes you to acquire as much karma as causing it does.  (Please understand, I'm not trying to condemn here, and certainly not broadly since some other karma based systems distinguish between 'good karma' and 'bad karma'.)   Good (and evil) philosophies can (and must) have both "Thou Shalts" and "Thou Shalt Nots" in them.  Good demands both that you do no harm, and that you actively try to do good - "Thou Shalt Give to thy Neighbor In Need".  You can't therefore standby and watch someone drown, even if it means risking drowning yourself.To a Nuetral, the fact that Good makes a demand on the believer to take action renders it as unjust and onerous as Evil.  Thus, you'll typically here from a Nuetral how Good and Evil taken to thier extreme are indistinguishable.  I'm not here to argue against those beliefs (even though I don't share them), since it would turn quickly into a debate on religion. I'm must trying to show how the different ethical systems map to D&D's overly simple 2D map.  I think we can all manage to agree to what the map looks like without making a normative judgement of whose right and which way the map should be oriented.</blockquote>

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