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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9363816" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm pretty sure that a majority of real-world mainstream English-language moral philosophers (the one's you find in philosophy departments) are moral objectivists. This is mostly because defending some sort of subjectivist, relativist or expressivist position requires overcoming some challenging technical objections that come mostly out of philosophy of language.But these objectivists wouldn't have any easier time making sense of the ring of power being "made of evil" than any one else. The point about being "made of evil" isn't that it requires conceiving of morality as objective: it's that it requires treating a property of desires, actions and consequences - which is probably a type of supervenient property and possibly an abstract one - as if it was a concrete material constituent of an object.JRRT doesn't generate this problem, because he doesn't posit that the ring is made of evil. It is made of metal. But it has a will, which is the imbued will of its master and creator. And a will is the sort of thing that can be evil, in virtue of the things that it aims at. Stormbringer is similar, as best I understand it.In D&D, what makes a demon evil is not its material constitution but its will. Whether that will can be changed, say by a profound example of mercy, is a further question.</blockquote>