Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6187317" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm confused.  How does that depart from modern standards of morality?  Isn't that the expectation of honorable behavior by both parties?   Or are you simply saying that modern people lack morals?   What did either party do that would not be approvable under conventional moral understanding today?I suppose, but your example is unconvincing.   An example I find somewhat more convincing from my recent campaign is that the PC intervened in an argument between a local craftsman and a foreign merchant when the local discovered that the servants accompanying the man were in fact his slaves.  The foreign merchantly passionately argued that his slave owning was moral on the grounds of his ethical treatment of his slaves, and further that his society was ultimately more honorable and just than the local one where slaveholding was illegal.  The situation was complicated by the fact that the slaves themselves seemed to agree with their master - but of course there was no way of really being sure that at some level it was cohersion.   The local craftsman argued that it was even more abhorrent that a person's identity could be suppressed to the point that the identified with their owner than it would have been had the slave been in state of rebellion, to which the foreign merchant replied astoundingly how could it possibly be more moral to mistreat ones slaves than it was to treat them well.In this case, a seemingly very moral person (in fact he is 'lawful good') believes that slave holding is not inherently evil, merely subject to evils in the absence of what he'd consider honor but that this doesn't codemn the holding of slaves as an institution because all institutions are similarly subject to evil in the absence of honorable rulers and customs.  The question becomes, "Is he right or wrong in his beliefs?"   The local craftsman held the somewhat more modern conception that slave holding is an inherent evil in and of itself; regardless of the conditions surrounding the institution slavery was in and of itself one of the greatest possible evils.  But again, how do you go about proving this assumption to someone who does not have your assumptions?   Being truly honorable and good, if it could be shown that slave holding was a great evil in and of itself, the foreign merchant would have readily changed his ways but you can't exactly 'detect evil' on an relationship, an idea, or an institution.I would like to think my own campaign worlds manners and customs are radically different than those of the modern world, but I've never really thought that morality within the world was different than our own.   I can hardly imagine what a universe would be like with different morality than our own and where right and wrong and justice and injustice were differently defined.</blockquote>

Verification