Alignment thread - True Neutrality

[Demonspell]

In my world, I tell my players that they need to be very careful with their alignment. Because I view alignment as a matter of perspective. What one person believes is good another could consider evil, where another sees Chaos someone else might call it Lawful. It’s all a matter of perspective.
I explain it this way to my experience players, just because a person is a Drow doesn’t mean they don’t abide by the law. The laws of their society are different and may appear to be chaotic, but to a Drow they make sense and are Lawful. Just because you don’t agree with their policies or society doesn’t make them inherently unlawful. They simply have different laws with they follow. Those laws may seem harsh, and evil to you, but to the Drow is make their society stronger and are for the Good of Drow society.
In other words, a Drow Priest may be Lawful Good in his own society, but viewed from the lenses of another society he may be Chaotic Evil. Also, a Lawful Good Paladin in a human society may be considered Chaotic Evil by Drow terms. While there is no way I would expect Paladin to attempt follow Drow laws, I think my players should understand that alignment is in the eye of the beholder.

 

[Celebrim]

While there is no way I would expect Paladin to attempt follow Drow laws, I think my players should understand that alignment is in the eye of the beholder.

Earlier in the thread we talked about how DMs often bring their alignment biases to the table in subtle ways, and then even without meaning to punish players for violating them.

This would be a case in point. The moral relativism you are presenting here is congruent to the ideas behind the Chaotic Neutral philosophy - all meaning is created and personal, everything is relative, you can't judge what another believes, the only way to be true is to be true to yourself, nothing has absolute value, and so forth. Without really meaning to, you've essentially said, "If your character isn't Chaotic Neutral, then fundamentally he's just wrong about what he believes." If you play a character with moral absolutist beliefs, who says something like, "Human sacrifice is wrong. Slavery is wrong. Rape is wrong. This is true not just for me, but for everyone everywhere all the time.", then you are inherently both foolish and wrong and the universe is going to punish you for it because the master of that universe has decreed otherwise.

 

[MechaTarrasque]

Procedural arguments are rarely as ugly as philosophical ones, but they can still get ugly. I could see an archon thinking "I like the eldarin and guardinals, they are good people, but too many souls try to be NG or CG and fail. I'm not saying the NG/CG approaches should be abandoned, but they should only be encouraged for those who can actually successfully accomplish them. The steady hand of LG should be the dominant type of Good, and our thorough methodology can determine who should get to hear about NG or CG options." That isn't a big deal for a hound archon to think, but if he gets promoted enough, that could be a source of conflict when he is a throne archon.....

Nothing about that line of thought means that Good Outsider A thinks the other kinds of good outsiders are not good, just not effective.

 

[Demonspell]

Earlier in the thread we talked about how DMs often bring their alignment biases to the table in subtle ways, and then even without meaning to punish players for violating them.

I never punish my players, I react to their actions, and nothing more.

This would be a case in point. The moral relativism you are presenting here is congruent to the ideas behind the Chaotic Neutral philosophy - all meaning is created and personal, everything is relative,…

I agree with this; however,…

you can't judge what another believes,…

You certainly can judge another’s beliefs, and you should expect them to judge yours.

…the only way to be true is to be true to yourself,…

I totally agree, the only way to uphold your alignment is to be true to your character’s beliefs.

…nothing has absolute value, and so forth.

I totally disagree with this statement. Everything has absolute value based on the perception of the individual viewing it.

Without really meaning to, you've essentially said, "If your character isn't Chaotic Neutral, then fundamentally he's just wrong about what he believes."

No, I have told my players to be true to their character’s beliefs, and understand that not everyone holds your beliefs. Just because one society has a different perspective doesn’t mean that society is lawless, and evil, it’s only lawless from your perspective and those drow believe you are lawless and evil.

If you play a character with moral absolutist beliefs, who says something like, "Human sacrifice is wrong. Slavery is wrong. Rape is wrong. This is true not just for me, but for everyone everywhere all the time.", then you are inherently both foolish and wrong and the universe is going to punish you for it because the master of that universe has decreed otherwise.

Not really, they aren’t foolish or wrong, they are correct from their perspective. Others may not agree with them, and that is OK, because the master of the universe has decreed that is the way it should be. Finally, the universe will only punish or reward them based on how they attempt to enforce their beliefs on others. If they choose not to force the drow to change their ways, the Drow, the universe (and its master) really don't care; however, if they decide to ram their beliefs down the throat of the drow and end their human sacrificial, slave mongering, rape enforcing ways, then the Drow may have a problem with it, but the universe (and its master) really won’t give one iota of concern.

 

[Balesir]

I think that one thing Appendix IV of the AD&D PHB got right, which has since gone in the wrong direction, is the absence of a true neutral outer plane (and the corresponding prohibition on clerics being true neutral).

I bow to your old-rule-fu! It didn't take long, though, for the plane of "Concordant Opposition" to turn up; it was there by Deities and Demigods (1980).

To explain this thought, I am going to elaborate a bit on some of my comments about why I think the outer planes, especially in the Planescape-y form, cause problems for the alignment framework.

As typically presented (beginning especially with MotP, and with Planescape being the high water mark for this approach), the outer planes are the epitmoe of each alignment. But, as I've already posted this produces incoherence. If the Seven Heavens is really a place where social order ensures that everyone's wellbeing is achieved, then CG people - who likewise aspire to universal wellbeing - have no reason for preferring CG to LG. Unless, of course, the "wellbeing" that CG aspire to is different from that which the LG aspire to - but then "good" has a different meaning in the context of different alignments, which also undermines the coherence of the system.

But a way of trying to make sense of the outer planes is to focus on their description (PHB p 120) as being "the source of alignment (religious/philosophical/ethical ideals)". This suggests that what characterises the Seven Heavens is not that it is a place where perfect social order generates universal wellbeing, but rather that it is the home of those "powerful beings" whose LG convictions are as strong as such convictions can get.

Thinking of the outer planes as defined by the convictions of their inhabitants, rather than as exemplars of the social realities over which adherents of different alignments are disputing, means that we aren't obliged to think of every alignment conviction being correct. Which avoids the incoherence mentioned above, where CG are meant to think that LG people's conviction that order will cause wellbeing is wrong, yet also have the counterexample of the Seven Heavens staring them in the face.

OK, now I'm going to quibble with your description of the Planescape-style planes here, a bit, because I see it rather differently.

You see each outer plane as "proving" that the alignment conviction represented is correct; and I have little doubt that this is what the devotees of that alignment want us to think. But with a little thought I think it's obvious that this is based on an immense assumption - that everyone thinks alike.

I first noticed this with Kant's Categorical Imperative. It works fabulously well as long as everyone realises how true it is and follows it as a maxim. But it says precisely nothing about what to do if someone simply chooses to ignore it. (Actually, I have immense regard for the value of Kant for what he does say, but I am under no illusion that what he says is complete in itself).

The Outer Planes are similar. What the Seven Heavens "prove" is that everyone feels well off and everything works perfectly if everyone is happy to follow the rules and contribute to the common weal. Well, duh! The "secret" of the Mount Celestia's success is that they don't let "undesirable" elements in! It's only when you see the metaphysical barbed wire and angel-manned machinegun towers keeping the "riff-raff" out that the flaws in its system start to become apparent.

Likewise, the Hells "prove" that it only ever pays to try to cheat and scheme and never trust the other guy as long as everyone in the vicinity is out for number one and totally ruthless about it. The outer planes are less "proof" of their alignment views and more self-fulfilling prophecies, as I see them. Each rests upon some very strong, but often unstated, assumptions, in the absence of which things get far more "messy" and unclear. Each works perfectly... as long as the assumptions it's built on are (made to be) true.

But if the outer planes are about convictions, then it makes sense that there is no outer plane of true neutrality, because true neutrality - as least as characterised in the passages I quoted above - is defined by the belief that conviction, and the intentional action to which it gives rise, can only be a source of disharmony and disruption to a natural reality that is already as good as it can be.

And I think that Planescape gets it right here, too. True Neutral is no more infallible or unitary than any of the other alignments - perhaps less so. It is full of folks who, having realised the fallacy of the other, "outer" alignments are looking for something else - an alternative that rests on more plausible assumptions. An alternative that doesn't require that everyone "think alike". Hence the Factions.

As a final aside, I think the idea that Chaotic Evil only really works if everyone "thinks alike" (and thus no goodie-bodies gang up to mess with the "natural" order of things) is quite amusing.

 

[Lanefan]

I totally agree, the only way to uphold your alignment is to be true to your character’s beliefs.

This is true...

Everything has absolute value based on the perception of the individual viewing it.

...but this, depending on how alignments function in a particular game, might not be.

There's two ways of doing it (and some middle ground between; here I'll just look at the ends):
1. Alignment is all relative to the viewer, as you say; what's Good to a Drow might be Evil to a Human, and so on.
2. Alignment is a universal absolute regardless of one's own point of view; certain actions, attitudes, etc. are universally defined as Evil (or Good or whatever) no matter who has or does them. So a party of Drow who might view themselves as Good will still waste their time casting Detect Good on each other as there's none present to be found, but if they cast Detect Evil they'll all pull.

Lan-"and problems always arise when players holding view 1 are at the same table with players holding view 2"-efan

 

[GMMichael]

I just stopped in to see what Lanefan had to say. I ended up reading some other posts, and quickly realized that alignment threads will continue to wander in circles until you begin the thread with definitions that everyone can agree on.

There's two ways of doing it (and some middle ground between; here I'll just look at the ends):
1. Alignment is all relative to the viewer, as you say; what's Good to a Drow might be Evil to a Human, and so on.
2. Alignment is a universal absolute regardless of one's own point of view

I'll +1 this, but my personal preference is to use a middle ground point: alignment is all relative to the god you worship.

Stew on that.

For OP:

true neutrality is the view that all such belief and aspiration is misguided, because human action is incapable of improving upon the natural order, which is already maximally harmonious, and will only lead to suffering if not kept in check. So the true neutral doesn't oppose the LG person because they think there is something wrong with human wellbeing, or that the aspirations of the CE person are worth upholding; rather, the true neutral opposes the LG because they think the LG person has a misguided optimism about the feasibility of deliberate action to improve wellbeing, which if given its head will only lead to disharmony and hence to suffering.

This definition starts off great, but wanders into rough territory. First, suffering is natural, so I'm not seeing it as a big motivator for True Neutrals. Second, if this type of True Neutral imposes his will as you've explained above, then by your earlier definitions, he's acting in a Chaotic Good way. Which would make him...CG?

I suspect that the only way an intelligent creature can be TN is to actually be the seeker of balance. Logical conclusion: the checklist-user. For an intelligent creature to be more passive than that is to be more selfish, while unintelligent creatures should be TN by default since the poles, good, evil, law, and chaos, are just the ideas of intelligent creatures anyway.

 

[pemerton]

I view true neutral as basically unaligned. You just don't believe in good, evil, law and chaos strongly enough to push yourself down one or more of those paths.

I view the balance aspect of true neutral is impossible. There's just no way a mortal can possible understand law, chaos, good and evil enough to accomplish that. How many little old ladies do you have to help across the road in order to balance out a murder?

This is a clear statement of the "TN as incoherent" interpretation that I am trying to contest in the OP.

As I said in the OP, I don't think that "balance", in this context, means introducing good into the world to counterbalance evil, or vice versa. It means reducing or eliminating the disturbances introduced into nature by intentional, aspirational action. It means contesting the actions of the LG, which - in the opinion of the TN person - aren't actually capable of realising good outcomes.

to go more by your definition here, the Neutral plane might otherwise be known as the Plane of Apathy.

I don't think apathy is the right description. Quietism would be better - it is not that the TN person doesn't care, but rather that s/he is sceptical about the capacity of intentional action to produce anything but unhappy results.

It's not a big stretch to say that if mortals can be Neutral then so can one or more gods (hell, a Neutral mortal may have ascended to the divine and simply kept its alignment through the process); and that those gods can support Clerics. Based on this, and thinking the Druidic alignment restriction was absurd for a huge laundry list of reasons, I long ago (as in, over 30 years ago) opened both classes up to being any alignment. I also followed our crew's lead in reskinning Druids to Nature Clerics who mechanically work just like other Clerics only with a different spell list and (sometimes) different deities.

I think this raises bigger questions about whether "the world of D&D" is meant to be generic, or particular. I see it as quite particular, and I see this particularity as also expressed via the alignment system.

Clerics, for instance, aren't just priests. They are militant religious types whose outlook and capabilities broadly reflects a quasi-mediaeval stereotype of the warrior-saint: undead and demons flee in their presence, they can call down blessings and curses, and they have power over serpents. Anti-clerics, on the other hand, do less healing but more cursing, and command the undead and demons. This set-up in turn presupposes a particular sort of cosmological set-up: gods of light, civilisation etc vs "gods" of death, destruction, corruption etc.

Druids, by way of contrast, are quietistic, naturalist types who believe that human intervention (and the intervention of the divinities that humans serve) introduces destructive imbalance into the world.

If one moves away from this underlying setting assumption, to include gods with the druidic outlook, and to make clerics and druids just special instances of the generic category "priests" - and by 2nd ed AD&D the move in this direction is basically complete - then personally I don't see the point of retaining the cleric spell lists, the alignment system, the rules for turning undead, etc, in their classic form. (Eg once things head in this direction, it makes sense to ask why animating the dead is evil at all, why good clerics need to be cautious about casting cause wounds spells, etc; because all those classic features of the rules system for clerics rest on setting assumptions that have been departed from.)

unintelligent creatures should be TN by default since the poles, good, evil, law, and chaos, are just the ideas of intelligent creatures anyway.

This was touched on upthread by [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION].

I think that, in the framing of TN that I am trying to articulate, it makes sense for animals and other natural creatures (which in D&D might include griffons, hippocampi etc) to be neutral: they are incapable of the sort of nature-defying intentional action that the TN regards as a source of disruption.

I think labelling automata and unintelligent undead (golems, skeletons, zombies etc) as TN makes less sense in this framework, as they are per se contrary to the natural order. I think it would makes more sense for them to have no alignment, just as most inanimate objects lack alignment altogether.

First, suffering is natural, so I'm not seeing it as a big motivator for True Neutrals. Second, if this type of True Neutral imposes his will as you've explained above, then by your earlier definitions, he's acting in a Chaotic Good way. Which would make him...CG?

On suffering: suffering is natural, but that doesn't mean its desirable. Stoics and the like don't seek out suffering - they recognise that it can't be avoided, but that doesn't mean they actively embrace it.

What is key to TN, as I am presenting it, is that they think the goal of the good-aligned to eliminate (or at least reduce) suffering by way of intentional action is doomed to failure.

I think you are right that there is a threat of overlap between TN and CG. Because one natural interpretation of the individual self-realisation at which CG aims is a type of natural law interpretation that would bear some sort of resemblance to stoicism (or perhaps epicureanism), and hence to TN as I am presenting it. I think that to maintain the distinction one has to focus on certain possible points of difference and emphasise them. For instance, CG can be seen as emphasising the importance of the individual will (and hence freedom of choice), whereas TN emphasises the inefficacy of the will (and hence the importance of subordinating choice to nature). CG also has an important other-regarding dimension - helping others achieve their own self-realisation - whereas TN would see such intervention on behalf of others as ultimately pointless, and would rely on others bringing their own behaviour into conformity with nature. In this way, CG might come to look more epicurean, while TN looks more stoic. Similar sorts of divisions exist in other, more contemporary, schools of thought where these sorts of tensions (both intellectual and practical) around nature, will, the place of human will in nature, and the limits of intentional action arise.

I bow to your old-rule-fu! It didn't take long, though, for the plane of "Concordant Opposition" to turn up; it was there by Deities and Demigods (1980).

Yes - the rot sets in early!

You see each outer plane as "proving" that the alignment conviction represented is correct; and I have little doubt that this is what the devotees of that alignment want us to think. But with a little thought I think it's obvious that this is based on an immense assumption - that everyone thinks alike.

<snip>

The outer planes are less "proof" of their alignment views and more self-fulfilling prophecies, as I see them. Each rests upon some very strong, but often unstated, assumptions, in the absence of which things get far more "messy" and unclear. Each works perfectly... as long as the assumptions it's built on are (made to be) true.

I can see the logic of this. From my point of view, this Planescape-style approach emphasises what I see as the cynical or even nihilistic tone of Planescape: starting from the premise that alignment convictions are mistaken.

In this sort of game, I don't see the point of eg making players choose an alignment for their PCs, which equates to choosing a delusion.

True Neutral is no more infallible or unitary than any of the other alignments - perhaps less so. It is full of folks who, having realised the fallacy of the other, "outer" alignments are looking for something else - an alternative that rests on more plausible assumptions. An alternative that doesn't require that everyone "think alike". Hence the Factions.

This seems consistent with what I have just stated - rather than fighting over tired delusions (alignment), the real action is in respect of some different set of ethical questions.

I also think this is consistent with the idea that alignment makes sense only against, or as part of, a broader set of setting assumptions. No one would look at the Planescape factions and think that they make sense as a way of framing ethical conflict as such, for all and any RPG and for all and any human action. I think it's equally silly to treat the alignment system in that sort of universal fashion.

 

[pemerton]

Procedural arguments are rarely as ugly as philosophical ones, but they can still get ugly. I could see an archon thinking "I like the eldarin and guardinals, they are good people, but too many souls try to be NG or CG and fail. I'm not saying the NG/CG approaches should be abandoned, but they should only be encouraged for those who can actually successfully accomplish them. The steady hand of LG should be the dominant type of Good, and our thorough methodology can determine who should get to hear about NG or CG options."

<snip>

Nothing about that line of thought means that Good Outsider A thinks the other kinds of good outsiders are not good, just not effective.

I think this is an interesting way to think about alignment conflict between (say) clerics of St Cuthbert and clerics of Tritherion.

For myself, I still have trouble projecting it onto the standard outer planar framework, though, because there is nothing about that set-up which gives any basis for the archon's belief. Eg everyone who has CG written on his/her PC sheet ends up in Olympus living a flourishing life - there is nothing that suggests any sort of tendency of the CG to fall or fail more easily than the LG.

 

[Maxperson]

This is a clear statement of the "TN as incoherent" interpretation that I am trying to contest in the OP.

As I said in the OP, I don't think that "balance", in this context, means introducing good into the world to counterbalance evil, or vice versa. It means reducing or eliminating the disturbances introduced into nature by intentional, aspirational action. It means contesting the actions of the LG, which - in the opinion of the TN person - aren't actually capable of realising good outcomes.

I don't see how it's possible for the "balance" neutral to contest the actions of the other alignments, either. How do you contest them? Which ones do you contest? The other alignments outnumber neutral balance folks by a large amount, so the balance folks can't possibly keep up.