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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3555923" data-attributes="member: 4937">There is no more pernicious confusion in 3rd edition alignment than the notion that evil represents 'selfishness' and good represents 'selflessness'.First edition put it more clearly when it said that good is 'weal' and evil is 'woe'.  Good is the alignment that heals and protects and nourishes and grows, and evil is its opposite.  Whether the destructiveness or beneficialness is happening for selfless or selfish reasons is not something necessarily addressed.  The reason that this confusion is so confusing, is that as you begin to look at law and good, you see that they are defined in much the same way.  A lawful evil type is destructive for largely selfless reasons (the good of the community, for example), and a chaotic good type is nuturing for largely selfish reasons ('what goes around comes around').   Good believes that one ought to be nourishing and protective.  Evil believes the opposite.  It believes that one ought to be destructive even when that destructiveness doesn't obviously and directly benefit you.  In the same way that we wouldn't say that someone is being good merely because they did good only when it helped them, we can't say that someone is being evil only if they are tempted to evil by its obvious gain.  The alignment that does either good or evil depending on the circumstance is moral neutrality.  Evil, like good, is an alignment of activity.With this in mind, we can rewrite the above idea as:"[The Chaotic Neutral] is not really concerned with the needs of others, but on the other hand, neither is [the Chaotic Neutral] actively seeking to do harm to others.  One will only do acts of weal or woe to another when there is an obvious and strong benefit in doing so, but there is no prefererance for either harm or healing, betrayal or forging friendships."    Alot of people take that description to be Chaotic Evil, and they are logically close, but the CE would have a strong preference for actively seeking to do harm to others for some philosophical reason (to display his might, to instill fear, to punish the weak, to prove himself, whatever), while having a strong distaste for doing the opposite (forming friendships, being charitable, etc.).With the rest of your post, I'm in agreement.</blockquote>

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