I use the evil baker as an example in homage to the very villainous baker who has a bit part in Sagiro's story hour.
However, I think your post misses the banality of evil that I was trying to allude to. It may well be that the baker, who would never beat a child himself, none-the-less uses the city's laws on zoning to force all the charity food sources to move outside the city walls so that they don't reduce the demand for his bread. And perhaps he blackmailed the city councillors to prevent passage of a measure requiring every baker to bake a certain percentage of cheap loaves so that the poor had affordable food. (Leave aside, for the moment, the economic merits of the baker's position--he's not arguing against the law because it's possilby bad public policy that hurts the poor more than it helps them (which it may or may not be in the context of the rest of the city's laws and restrictions on trade); he's blackmailing councillors for the sake of greed). He's a greedy, ambitious baker who is quite willing to hurt anyone who gets in his way even though he does so indirectly. If he got blood on his hands, the sworn masters of the Baker's guild would close down his bakery and his ambitions would be unfulfilled.
And, of course, he has a lifestyle to support and habits to feed so when the chief priest of the town offers him money to take the "respectable businessman" part in the rent-a-mob he wants to put together to force the governer to execute an innocent man (the baker, of course, knows that he's innocent, even though he pretends that there's doubt--"ain't nobody innocent" he says to himself in order to rationalize his deeds), he agrees and performs his task enthusiastically.
And later, when the movement started by said innocent man won't die down, it sparks pangs of guilt in the baker--now a part of the council himself by virtue of his position in the baker's guild--and he ruthlessly suppresses them by voting for the most vicious punishments on the followers of this new way in order to extirpate the reminder of his guilt.
An evil baker? Surely.
But did the baker beat his wife? Encourage the worship of Erythnul? Sacrifice his children to Molech? No. Did he do anything that any legal system would punish with death. Probably not. And yet, he was the same person throughout that short capsule description of his life--as evil at the beginning as at the end. At no point in his career is the baker EVIL (TM) and yet he's evil through and through.
Evil is often quite ordinary. It's often quite sympathetic. (Indeed, I would argue that it's the natural state of humanity). And I think the game becomes much more interesting when the non-trademarked evil shows an aura in the spell.
The Souljourner said:
Damn those evil bakers! Only bloodshed will put an end to their sourdough tyranny!
Seriously, though, Detect Evil detects creatures whose alignment is evil. Period.
Same with the rest of them, respectively.
D&D is a game in which morality is absolute. You're either good, evil, or neither. A baker isn't going to show up as evil unless his kitchen helpers are actually child slaves that he beats nightly just for the fun of it. Evil is evil. If you show up on the spell, you're a Bad Person™.
-The Souljourner
