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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1403740" data-attributes="member: 3146">Uh huh. I've heard that one before. It's the "Make the world safe for paladinbots" houserule. It creates more problems than it solves as far as paladinbots go. Now people know that if it registers, it deserves to die, not thought required.It also handily avoids the problem of having to decide that people "like us" can be evil and all of the thought provoking possibilities that that holds. If you don't want moral complexity in your game, that's one way to reduce it, but don't kid yourself that you're doing something else.Nonsense. There wouldn't be enough prisons in the world to hold all of the evil people. If you could detect evil, all you would get is a more realistic view of the human condition.And, since evil people aren't a fixed commodity, you couldn't lock them all up anyway. People are constantly moving towards good or towards evil; the guy who's chaotic neutral today may take the step that makes him chaotic evil tomorrow and the guy who's chaotic evil today may be lawful good a year from now. Locking up everyone who was evil at any given point in time is not the same as making sure every evil person is behind bars.Anyway, all this talk about detecting evil as if it were some outlandish fantasy notion ignores the fact that it's pretty easy for people who actually believe in evil to figure out what's what. I know what I think is evil. Muslims know what they think is evil. Hindus know what they think is evil. Puritans knew the people they thought to be evil, etc etc. Obviously, there were sometimes mistakes made--in this case, I'm not talking about the "there's nothing wrong with that" mistakes but rather the "he seemed like such a nice man/I'd always assumed that he was like..." kinds of mistakes--but, by and large, I suspect that such knowledge is about as accurate as Detect Evil is in a world full of cursed items, misdirection, Undetectable Alignment, Nondetection, Mind Blank, etc spells.Historically, what societies have done is attempt to structure their systems so that evil is kept within certain acceptable limits that minimize its destructive influence on society; sometimes societies have gone a step further and attempted to ensure that they are structured such that evil people have proper motivation to act for the benefit of society. That, for instance, is precisely the philosophy behind the division of powers in the US government: the greed, ambition, and pride of various officeholders will lead them to strenuously oppose the encroachment of other branches upon the powers and privileges of their own. And, this supposedly will keep any one branch of government from gathering enough power to rule tyranically. Although (IMO) overly optimistic, Immanuel Kant's claim that, if one could structure the social contract properly, one could build a perfect society populated entirely by devils is a perfect example of this priority.The idea that any human society could or would outlaw evil is ludicrous. A society that could magically detect evil would do exactly what societies that can see the mundane effects of evil (and make the obvious inferences about its perpetrators) do: make laws to keep evil within acceptable limits and attempt to structure itself so that evil motivations led to the same just and ordered end as good motivations.</blockquote>

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