This thread brings up one of the things that annoys me about the alignment system. People seem to put Lawful Good up there on a pedestal as 'ultimate good' while Chaotic Evil goes down as 'ultimate evil'. Not only does it malign the importance of the 'middle alignments', it holds the two 'outer alignments' too high up on the pedestal. Or perhaps this annoys me more because I played a Paladin for 20 years and the expectations placed upon the class are simply unrealistic.
Ok, so, you're Lawful and you're Good and you're technically a spec-ops style character behind enemy lines in a time of war. I'll ignore the Lizardfolk's alignment for this exercise because it doesn't enter into the equasion. As far as I see it, as a Lawful character, you take your duty to your King, country and church very seriously. As a Good character, you believe that laws should be just and honest and you should live and work for the greater good within the laws.
As a commando behind enemy lines, you're in a unique position. There are no laws that govern your actions in that situation. Your enemies are foreign nationals, if they have a nation to call home at all. You have no duty to them at all. The only duty you have is to filfil your orders as impeccably as you can as handed down by your commanding officer. If your commanding officer gives you an order you don't like, you lodge a formal protest. If your officer tells you to do it anyway, you do it, no matter what it is. Because if you disobey the order, under battlefield conditions, you die on the spot. (ever wonder why officers keep those little handguns?)
The other duty you have is to your friends, though generally your friends will be citizens of the same country as you, this might not be true for your adventuring party. However, your unit is who you count on to keep you alive. And in turn, they rely on you to save their butts when they're on fire. Conversely, the Lizardman is the enemy. He or she, and his friends, wouldn't hesitate to kill you in combat. He also has intel that could be of use, since he either works for the bad guy who wants to blow up the world or would stop you from stopping the bad guy. Both ways, he is in direct opposition to your duty.
How far will a Lawful Good person go to fulfil his duty to King, Church, Country and Friends? He will obviously not wantonly rape and pillage the countryside, even as a soldier, and would frown upon such activities committed in his presence. But, if he's not an officer he has no legal power to stop it. A commanding officer can hold his underlings responsible for their actions with the ultimate power: death if they refuse, maybe courtmartial. If you aren't their commanding officer and it desturbs you, it's your duty to report the incident to your commanding officer and leave it up to them to decide what action should be taken.
Commandos have one other problem: legally, they don't exist. You can't courtmartial someone for war crimes when you're not admitting that any operation even took place involving people who were never there. You also don't question the methods of people who save the world, or at least part of it.
So, the specific moral dilemma of the character. Your friends are in prison and it's your duty to break them out. You, your unit and the prisoners are on your side. Everyone else is an enemy or hostile non-com. The captured lizardfolk is an enemy soldier with intel that could be invaluable to your cause. For starters, I wouldn't have blamed even a Paladin for using torture to retrieve the information if he didn't squeal, you're not the girl scouts, you have a duty to your King and your friends. Failure is not an option.
But, ok, that doesn't matter. The Lizardfolk squeals because you were too squeamish to kill him after he blabbed. Congratz, you just put your mission in serious jeopardy even if you'd knocked him out afterwards and failed to do everything in your power to succeed in your mission. After all, once you rescue the prisoners, you have to escape, so you need to deny the enemy all the intel about your group that you possibly can for as long as possible. It's bad enough that they'll notice the prisoners are gone once you break them out. All the Warlock has really done is the correct thing in the situation.
Is it 'good' to torture and kill prisoners, no. Is it justifiable? No. But you have to do it if you want to succeed. Morally, you can't allow bad people to do bad things to your friends when it is in your power to stop it. When failure is not an option, sometimes you have to do things that aren't moral when they are necessary. This doesn't make you as evil as the bad guys who sacrifice babies and want to end the world. I'd argue that it doesn't make you evil at all.
Some may argue that this is 'morality of convenience'. In answer to that, I say that there's such a thing as being too heavenly minded to be of any earthly use. Turning the other cheek when someone does something evil to you might be good but allowing someone to do something evil to someone else when you have the power to stop it makes you just as evil as the tormentor. I'm also not advocating meaningless violence, there should always be a specific and logical purpose when a Lawful Good character uses violence as a tool to further his aims.
Ok, so, you're Lawful and you're Good and you're technically a spec-ops style character behind enemy lines in a time of war. I'll ignore the Lizardfolk's alignment for this exercise because it doesn't enter into the equasion. As far as I see it, as a Lawful character, you take your duty to your King, country and church very seriously. As a Good character, you believe that laws should be just and honest and you should live and work for the greater good within the laws.
As a commando behind enemy lines, you're in a unique position. There are no laws that govern your actions in that situation. Your enemies are foreign nationals, if they have a nation to call home at all. You have no duty to them at all. The only duty you have is to filfil your orders as impeccably as you can as handed down by your commanding officer. If your commanding officer gives you an order you don't like, you lodge a formal protest. If your officer tells you to do it anyway, you do it, no matter what it is. Because if you disobey the order, under battlefield conditions, you die on the spot. (ever wonder why officers keep those little handguns?)
The other duty you have is to your friends, though generally your friends will be citizens of the same country as you, this might not be true for your adventuring party. However, your unit is who you count on to keep you alive. And in turn, they rely on you to save their butts when they're on fire. Conversely, the Lizardman is the enemy. He or she, and his friends, wouldn't hesitate to kill you in combat. He also has intel that could be of use, since he either works for the bad guy who wants to blow up the world or would stop you from stopping the bad guy. Both ways, he is in direct opposition to your duty.
How far will a Lawful Good person go to fulfil his duty to King, Church, Country and Friends? He will obviously not wantonly rape and pillage the countryside, even as a soldier, and would frown upon such activities committed in his presence. But, if he's not an officer he has no legal power to stop it. A commanding officer can hold his underlings responsible for their actions with the ultimate power: death if they refuse, maybe courtmartial. If you aren't their commanding officer and it desturbs you, it's your duty to report the incident to your commanding officer and leave it up to them to decide what action should be taken.
Commandos have one other problem: legally, they don't exist. You can't courtmartial someone for war crimes when you're not admitting that any operation even took place involving people who were never there. You also don't question the methods of people who save the world, or at least part of it.
So, the specific moral dilemma of the character. Your friends are in prison and it's your duty to break them out. You, your unit and the prisoners are on your side. Everyone else is an enemy or hostile non-com. The captured lizardfolk is an enemy soldier with intel that could be invaluable to your cause. For starters, I wouldn't have blamed even a Paladin for using torture to retrieve the information if he didn't squeal, you're not the girl scouts, you have a duty to your King and your friends. Failure is not an option.
But, ok, that doesn't matter. The Lizardfolk squeals because you were too squeamish to kill him after he blabbed. Congratz, you just put your mission in serious jeopardy even if you'd knocked him out afterwards and failed to do everything in your power to succeed in your mission. After all, once you rescue the prisoners, you have to escape, so you need to deny the enemy all the intel about your group that you possibly can for as long as possible. It's bad enough that they'll notice the prisoners are gone once you break them out. All the Warlock has really done is the correct thing in the situation.
Is it 'good' to torture and kill prisoners, no. Is it justifiable? No. But you have to do it if you want to succeed. Morally, you can't allow bad people to do bad things to your friends when it is in your power to stop it. When failure is not an option, sometimes you have to do things that aren't moral when they are necessary. This doesn't make you as evil as the bad guys who sacrifice babies and want to end the world. I'd argue that it doesn't make you evil at all.
Some may argue that this is 'morality of convenience'. In answer to that, I say that there's such a thing as being too heavenly minded to be of any earthly use. Turning the other cheek when someone does something evil to you might be good but allowing someone to do something evil to someone else when you have the power to stop it makes you just as evil as the tormentor. I'm also not advocating meaningless violence, there should always be a specific and logical purpose when a Lawful Good character uses violence as a tool to further his aims.
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Dehumanizing an enemy to make brutality acceptable has a fine historical tradition (as does implying that ethical treatment precludes justice), but that will never make it ethically sound.
