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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CyberSpyder" data-source="post: 1405121" data-attributes="member: 12199">My intent was not to say that everyone is multicultural and tolerant, but that even the most extremist groups of history, as long as they were even partially sane, did not believe that they were in possession of an infallible method for determining evil.  There is nothing like 'detect evil,' in human history, and so using real human laws as a guide for determining the laws about being evil is inherently misguided.Note that I did not say they would just kill everyone who turned up evil.  A tyrannical state probably would, but a modern, enlightened state would simply take steps to make them not evil, and so not a danger to others - with the awareness that it is possible for alignment to change.Most rationalization in the real world, however, is not on the order of "He's evil, but that's okay," so much as "He's not evil, he's just pragmatic," or something else of the kind.  That's the difference involved in these spells - you can't pretend that detect evil actually detects good, because it specifically detects things that are unquestionably evil, like demons.  Law and chaos is a bit stickier, but the same sort of association with the outer planes would allow the spells, again, to give certain information of a kind that people in reality simply cannot get.Going from the guidelines in the Book of Hallowed Might, what it takes for a person actually to be detected as evil is that they "Actively [enjoy] lying, stealing, and inflicting pain on others."  A stable society, quite frankly, would be foolish to let such elements go about their business like they're anyone else.So long as good and evil are alignments achieved in more or less the same way we would judge people in the real world, given perfect information, it seems fairly evident that people would advocate being [good] or good, and dislike those who were [evil] or evil.  As I said before, I think it would actually be more interesting if they were not obtained the same way - if, for instance, someone that accidentally drove a bus off a cliff and thereby killed a large number of people would suddenly detect as heavily Evil, even though it wasn't their fault.  It would give a satisfying moral ambiguity.  Most people in this thread, however, seem to think that it should be actively based on whether you like hurting people or not, in which case being good would obviously be better received than being evil.Of course, I think that's an absolutely ludicrous number - far, far too high.  Again, evil is those who actively enjoy hurting others.  I do not think that 25% of the population of the world are sadists, much less the kind of evil you get in the higher judgements, like "Will kill for the sheer pleasure of bringing pain and death to others."  That kind of evil is psychosis in the real world.  The vast majority of people, in my estimation, are good or neutral.  Compare the beginning level of being good - "Willing to help strangers on occasion."  Heck, I'd be surprised if that couldn't be said of the majority of the population.Given that it would be done to protect those who were not evil from the evil people, and given that in a good society, the intention would be to convert evil people to good, and further given that killing evil people, by the normal rules of the game, is not evil in itself - I don't think it's very likely that the social apparatus to eliminate evil would be evil in itself.The whole point is that people who are evil are far more likely, almost infinitely more likely, to act to harm others than those who are good.  If that isn't the case, if the good person is just as likely to flip out and kill a busload of nuns as the evil person, then alignment is obviously meaningless for such determinations.  However, if that is the case, then I don't think you can reasonably claim that alignment represents anything significant within the person's personality.And, of course, my argument is partially rooted in the notion that alignment can change - the point of the prison system would be finding out who is evil, taking them in, and making them good.  Sure, they might change on their own, but as long as they're wandering around evil, they're a danger to others in society.  This is closer to the approach I am advocating for alignment - that the core of a person cannot be aligned, as everyone is subject to such 'crimes of passion.'  If a person's 'outlook on life' is always overriden in the specific instance by the circumstances, then it's a meaningless way to define alignment.  Hence, alignment should be based on action, not thought.</blockquote>

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