Detect Evil

[Hypersmurf]

... but I can't think of any "law" that still allows you to harm people and get away with it.

Well, for example:

Chester
You can only shoot a Welsh person with a bow and arrow inside the city walls and after midnight.

Hereford
You may not shoot a Welsh person on Sunday with a longbow in the Cathedral Close.

York
Excluding Sundays, it is perfectly legal to shoot a Scotsman with a bow and arrow.

Are they both evil?

It depends on balance.

Someone who sits in a bubble their whole life, and exerts no influence on the world, and thinks about cardboard, say, is neutral.

Someone who sits in a bubble their whole life, and exerts no influence on the world, but spends every moment dreaming about cutting up puppies with blunt razors, boiling orphans alive, raping young girls, and poisoning the city wells is, in my opinion, evil. Even though he hasn't taken any of those actions, the thoughts are evil, and there is no good in his life to balance them.

Someone who has the same fantasies, but who spends his time doing unpaid charity work, feeding the orphans he's dreaming of boiling alive, and who is a kind and loving husband and father... well, he's probably fairly frustrated, but on balance, he's likely not evil-aligned. Given that "actions speak louder than words" (or thoughts), he's perhaps even good-aligned.

So I suspect Jeffrey Dahmer is evil. I suspect Brian Ebbers is probably evil... but I don't know enough about the rest of his life to know where the balance lies. He might be a neutral person who's inflicted a lot of deliberate evil, but who has also performed enough good that his alignment has not shifted.

-Hyp.

 

[Hypersmurf]

We're not talking about the law. We're talking about evil.

"Okay, officers: He's evil. Arrest him."

We are talking about the law.

What are they arresting him for? Being evil isn't against the law. You can't arrest someone for something that isn't a crime.

-Hyp.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

Players are going to smite anyone with an evil alignment regardless. So unlike, as you say, where they get into a heated moral debate "well, yea he's evil, but *how* evil", I've never seen that happen. It's usually "yep, he's evil, he needs to die." My version is a lot more subjective, because in terms of PCs, it only works on evil clerics.

Not in my experience.

Even a DM who lets you get away with this can easily play mindgames on you, and distract you away from your goals.

I play a Paladin in one campaign. I do not look for fights where I do not know what I am getting into. Frex, killing a random person with a smidge evil taint can get the party hunted by the victim's Neutral family members. I take my vows too seriously to take actions that may cause much more chaos than it will do good.

 

[jgsugden]

"Okay, officers: He's evil. Arrest him."

We are talking about the law.

What are they arresting him for? Being evil isn't against the law. You can't arrest someone for something that isn't a crime.

-Hyp.

Sure you can. You just have to fabricate some evidence of a real crime.

Seriously, though, your argument that being evil isn't a crime holds little water because we have nothing that can detect 'evil' in people. If we did have something that detected evil (in the D&D/melodrama sense of evil), it is not beyond reason that people detecting as 'evil' would be hunted down.

For instance, if we define evil as a trait that indicates that the person *will* (not might, but will) do heinous acts in the future unless stopped and we had a way to detect evil, we would probably take steps to stop the evil person before they acted. Police take action all the time to stop somebody from breaking a law before they actually do anything against the law.

I could go on about this subject all night, but I'll let it lie. Far too theoretical to worry about today ...

 

[MerakSpielman]

On the other hand, I think it would be interesting to make a D&D kingdom where it was illegal to be evil. A paladin/cleric run theocracy, for instance. Detect evil is routinely cast on all visitors, and evil people are sent to the "Inquisition" for testing (to make sure there's no trickery, like Misdirection spells, that is getting them to arrest a non-evil person) and "cleansing" (become good, repent your evil ways, or die). Such a kingdom had great adventure potential - especially if the ruling cleric/paladin caste has been infiltrated by evil people with the approprate items and spells to throw off the ubiquitious detections. These infiltrators would be manipulating the theocracy to condem innocent good people to death, despite the safeguards.

 

[Epametheus]

If 1/3rd of humanity is Good, 1/3rd is Neutral, and the final 3rd is Evil, could the first 2/3rds really try to exteriminate the last 1/3rd without joining the last 1/3rd? Trying to imprison and exterminate random citizens because of how they "ping" on a spell is evil in of itself, one would think.

We've allowed Detect Evil to pick up anyone with an evil alignment in my groups. Even our paladins aren't dumb enough to go into paladinbot mode.

Evil can be evil without being bloody. Ebbers is a practitioner of white-collar crime.

White collar crime is actually is a pretty good example of high-end lawful evil -- people who do pretty much whatever they want (generally non-violent, though), and can get away with it because their wealth and influence. White-collar crime is fairly widespread, but someone actually getting nailed for it is rather rare.

A psychotic killer would be Chaotic Neutral (if he's just being driven to do it) or Chaotic Evil (if he sincerely enjoys it).

 

[Coredump]

But you guys are thinking about it from a 20th century 'innocent until proven guilty' mindset. The outlaw actions because we *can't know* evil. But in the D&D world, they *do* know evil, and can detect it before it kills all the kids and eats their parents.

Same as seeing a demon in the middle of town. Do you wait until it actually starts doing evil things? Or do you just take it down. You *know* it is evil. you *know* it will start hurting/killing, so you take it out.

The same would apply to people. You *know* he is evil, you *know* he will be doing evil deeds, either already has, or will if given the chance.


Damn, what was the name of the Tom Cruise movie....



edit: Okay, this made more sense before I realized there were two pages to this topic. Sorry, I was replying to the comments from the bottom of page one.

 

[der_kluge]

Well,
Chester
You can only shoot a Welsh person with a bow and arrow inside the city walls and after midnight.

Hereford
You may not shoot a Welsh person on Sunday with a longbow in the Cathedral Close.

York
Excluding Sundays, it is perfectly legal to shoot a Scotsman with a bow and arrow.

Well, ok, barring laws that have no meaning any more!

It depends on balance.

Someone who sits in a bubble their whole life, and exerts no influence on the world, and thinks about cardboard, say, is neutral.

Someone who sits in a bubble their whole life, and exerts no influence on the world, but spends every moment dreaming about cutting up puppies with blunt razors, boiling orphans alive, raping young girls, and poisoning the city wells is, in my opinion, evil. Even though he hasn't taken any of those actions, the thoughts are evil, and there is no good in his life to balance them.

Someone who has the same fantasies, but who spends his time doing unpaid charity work, feeding the orphans he's dreaming of boiling alive, and who is a kind and loving husband and father... well, he's probably fairly frustrated, but on balance, he's likely not evil-aligned. Given that "actions speak louder than words" (or thoughts), he's perhaps even good-aligned.
-Hyp.

See, here's the rub. If a guy sits in a bubble "all his life", it implies that he was born in this thing (perhaps magically, who knows). And if, while in this bubble, he has nothing but evil thoughts, in my view of the world that's [evil], not just evil. In the way that demons and devils are [evil]. If this person in the bubble can't *not* think about evil things, that's [evil] in my book.

 

[der_kluge]

"Okay, officers: He's evil. Arrest him."

We are talking about the law.

What are they arresting him for? Being evil isn't against the law. You can't arrest someone for something that isn't a crime.

-Hyp.

See, I see the typical D&D world as being more of a good/evil kind of place, whereas our world is more of a law/chaos kind of place. You either follow the law or you don't. I would wager that very few people (as a percentage) in our world are truly evil. But, a whole ton of people break the law all the time.

My point is that if the society were ran by "good" people, and not "lawful" people, a theocracy, for example, then it would be against the "law" to be evil, because the only law of the law would be that you have to be good. I mean, if you've got clerics enforcing the laws, then that's what you'd have. Iran, for example - a church state.

 

[der_kluge]

But you guys are thinking about it from a 20th century 'innocent until proven guilty' mindset. The outlaw actions because we *can't know* evil. But in the D&D world, they *do* know evil, and can detect it before it kills all the kids and eats their parents.

Same as seeing a demon in the middle of town. Do you wait until it actually starts doing evil things? Or do you just take it down. You *know* it is evil. you *know* it will start hurting/killing, so you take it out.

The same would apply to people. You *know* he is evil, you *know* he will be doing evil deeds, either already has, or will if given the chance.


Damn, what was the name of the Tom Cruise movie....



edit: Okay, this made more sense before I realized there were two pages to this topic. Sorry, I was replying to the comments from the bottom of page one.

The Minority Report. It would be exactly like that. You'd have clerics running around casting this spell and apprehending people that showed up as evil.