And, [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION], LG being the most good has always been the standard in D&D. I'm surprised you'd argue otherwise.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. If you mean that that fallacy was at times exhibited by Gygax and has been repeated ever since, then I agree. If you mean it's surprising that I'd argue against such rank stupidity, then well, no, it's obviously stupid - of course I will argue against it.
Before going into a deep argument why it is wrong, there is a fairly easy structural proof. By definition - including Gygax's definition - Neutral Good means a pure philosophy of good unmingled by other considerations. Thus, you could equally call Neutral Good "True Good", in the same sense that Neutrality is "True Nuetral". Lawful Good, by definition, is a mixture of the philosophy of Good with that of Lawful, and so there must always be a situation where the Lawful Good must depart from a pure Good perspective in order to accommodate lawfulness.
Now, I'm not saying that a Lawful Good person couldn't argue for the reasonableness of doing so and that Goodness required Law or was fulfilled to the greatest extent by Law or that simply as a practical matter Law was required and that good was an incomplete philosophy. Of course a Lawful Good person would argue these things. But critically, they do so because they are biased by their a Lawful Good perspective.
And basically my argument is that Gygax's ideas of what constituted Goodness were biased in a complex way by his own personal upbringing. This can be seen by the fact that at the same time Gygax was capable of both advancing the idea that Lawful Good was the most good or goodness++, and also presenting ostensibly Lawful Good figures in a derogatory and even villainous manner. This is reflective in my opinion of Gygax's own personal moral struggles.
And, every archetype for LG is among the most good of characters - Superman, King Arthur, Gawain, that sort of thing.
I would note that by and large all of those characters are creations of the same moral code.
Chaotic is selfish it its heart. It's all about the self. You can't be as good as the selfless (Lawful) by definition.
There is a fundamental flaw and misunderstanding in this statement, and that is contrasting "selfish" with "selfless".
Selflessness is in fact evil, and as evil as selfishness. Chaos is NOT about selfishness at heart, and not every thought of self is evil. Consider the statement, generally recognized by most as an axiom of good - "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." If in fact the holder of this axiom is selfless, then he doesn't care what is done to himself and so can justify doing anything to anyone else as well. The axiom called the Golden Rule is in fact self-centered. It asks the person to reflect on their own worth, and the assign to others equal worth. The self has worth and must have worth for the Gold Rule to work, and while it's easy to overvalue the self at the expense of others, to undervalue self and so subject the self to self-abuse and self-degradation or for example suicide would also be an evil. If you think about the idea of "selfishness" it cannot be the definition of evil, because that would be circular. We know self-concern to be evil and therefore selfishness when self-concern is evil.
Further, we can provide a counter example. Lawful Evil is the philosophy of evil selflessness. Lawful evil encourages its followers to sacrifice all self and all individuality for the good of the collective. The adherents of this philosophy are not selfish, but are selflessly giving themselves for the cause. By your argument they must be good, but in practice we recognize this selflessness as abhorrent. And in practice, this philosophy we know to be capable of some of the most horrific evils that the world has ever known. There are in fact sins of selflessness.
Yet at the same time, we also know of heroic figures that have sacrificed themselves selflessly for others and we call this good. So it can't be the case that either selflessness or self-centeredness alone defines evil, as in either case there is an extra factor that when added to either makes for good or evil.
Again, your claim that selflessness equals to good and self-centeredness equals to evil is an inherently Lawful Good bias. However, you can catch that bias by noting that people with a Lawful bias have a hard time arguing why Chaotic Good is good, or why Lawful Evil is evil. They tend to resort to arguing that it is almost evil or else throwing up there hands in disgust and saying it doesn't make sense and a single axis alignment system would make more sense.
My position is that Neutral Good, or True Good, considers the argument over which has more worth the collective or the individual to be entirely missing the point. A collective has no worth if the individuals that make it up don't have worth, and in fact individuals do have inherent worth as individuals irrespective of their relationship to anyone. But at the same time, the collective has great worth by being made up of individuals, and additional worth arising for the systems of relationships between the individuals that couldn't occur between isolated individuals. Thus, whenever you veer too far to either side of sacrificing the individual for the good of the collective, or sacrificing the collective for the good of the individual you've departed the path of good. And I would note that this theme is common in morality plays, and that many moral philosophies attempt to join assertions that respect the value of the self and self-judgment (dictates of ones consciousness) with sets of lawful codes that also externally review those same axioms in an attempt to provide a balance between the two.
