(...)
The basic idea is that there is really no difference between your thought life, your words, and your actions. They are all various ways you behave in a real sense and the modes and patterns of one inevitably influence the other. Thinking is not not a form of behaving even if it is hidden. So, if you change your actions you'd tend to pull your thoughts with it. If you change your thoughts, you tend to pull your actions with them. They are intrinsicly interconnected as who you are. The way that you entertain thoughts and emotions is who you are.
If you were transparent, if someone could see inside you, the fundamental ugliness or beauty of your thoughts would be revealed. Your actions are merely a reflection of this inner true nature. We don't look into a cup and see manure and slime and say, "The cup is clean.", just because the outside is polished. It is the same way with people. What comes pouring out of them is inevitably what's really inside them.
(...)
I'm struggling to communicate here in part because I'm being forced to jump back and forth between Good as D&D describes it, and Good as I see it. In D&D people are 'good' or 'evil'. As I see it, the concept of a literal 'good person' is ridiculous and self-evidently silly. But I'm forced to use the term both because people speak in that way in our consensus culture - 'he is a good person' - and because D&D describes things in that way. But as I use the term 'good person' only means 'relatively less depraved' and 'evil person' only means 'relatively more depraved'.
It's a pretty bleak outlook that can say "the concept of a literal 'good person' is ridiculous and self-evidently silly."
Silly, of all things. Say that such a person has not existed or will never exist, all right, but to say that the concept that a person could be good is ridiculous shows a misanthropy that leaves me sick.
Further, I find the notion to that there is no significant difference between thoughts and actions to be insidious and either wrongheaded or deliberately cruel, useful for nothing except inducing unwarranted guilt. Yes, thoughts are a type of behaviour in the strictest sense, but thoughts aren't equivalent to actions. The differences are obvious and important: Actions (including speech) affect your environment. As you said upthread, they are irreversible. Thoughts, on the other hand, are purely manipulations of hypotheticals, ephemeral and reversible. If you think "Oh, I hate that person, I want to gouge his eyes out with a drill", but go on to greet him politely (although probably somewhat stiffly) instead, then the important thing isn't that you
wanted to gouge his eyes out with a drill, but that you didn't do so
. You had the notion, possibly you considered it, and you discarded it. (If you like the notion so much that you continue to dwell on it and create elaborate drill-related torture fantasies, that's probably less than mentally healthy, but it's still not
evil. You haven't
done anything.)
Now I imagine an ideal person wouldn't consider "ugly" notions at all, but since everyone unavoidably does, I think it is much better to commend those who exercise self-control than to talk about "relatively less depraved."
I've discussed elsewhere what I believe alignment to be in this context, and what I suggested is that its not a shorthand for personality or even how someone behaves all the time, but rather for how they tend to behave when under pressure, when stressed, and when they must make a hard choice.
This, I think, makes very good sense. Nobody behaves all the time in a perfectly consistent way, and plenty of personality traits are unrelated to alignment.
So, someone challenged me when I said that there could be a murderer who was 'good', and said that was nonsense. But I didn't say that to excuse murder or lighten it in any way. It's hard to discuss this without grabbing some really contriversial real world examples, but I have no real problem with believing that there might be people who murder innocents without being fundamentally depraved (and hense, under my definition 'good people'). That's why considered the question of how the murderer behaves when they discover for themselves that they have actually committed murder so fundamental to determining 'good' or 'evil'. The question becomes, once your ignorance is removed, what do you do about it? The person challenged me with 'What if there was a good person who murdered evils because he thought they weren't people', and I responded with, "Well, what if there was a good person who murdered orcs because he thought they weren't people?" and that's not at all a hypothetical. It's meant to point out the many of our most heroic PC's are probably not that much better off than the 'evil elf child murdering person' of the example, and yet we want to insist that they are 'good'.
Personally I think that anyone who's willing to actually murder (as opposed to kill in self-defense or defence of others) probably lacks the requisite compassion to be Good in a D&D context. I say probably, because D&D can feature quite extreme and unusual circumstances. They could definitely be Neutral, though. And this is kind of a quibble in any case.
I agree with most of what you say here.
The thing about your orc counterexample, though, is that it is in a sense a hypothetical anyway, because in D&D, it can vary from game to game whether evil monsters are, in fact, considered "people". Now in my campaign, orcs are just another type of humanoid, and PCs who go around indiscriminately killing them 'because they're orcs' have to face up to that rather quickly (and will tend to end up Evil), but in other games, that might not be the case. (The most extreme case I have seen was a game where Orcs were magically bred soldier-slaves to the Church of Orcus. Always Evil. No hostages, no quarter, no negotiation.)
Now, I am an absolutist, so I agree that murder is evil whether you know it is evil or not, but that's not what I've been talking about. What I've been talking about is in a sense how you feel about doing evil. Does it bother you? Do you try to resist or avoid it? Do you feel remorse when you do wrong? That's really the only thing that divides the 'good person' from the 'bad person'.
(...)
I don't agree with this. In the context of D&D, the difference between Good and Evil is one of profoundly different worldviews, and it is eminently possible not to do evil. A Good person wouldn't publicly humiliate a co-worker who didn't do his job properly, because it would be cruel. An Evil person in the same situation, who would, doesn't think "this is cruel but who cares", he thinks "If I don't put him down and show these other people what happens if you fail me, I look weak." And an evil person who was on the receiving end of the humiliation, if he's not a hypocrite, isn't upset because you humiliated him -he recognises that he'd have done the same to you- but he's upset because you found him out. Which is the good (small g) and which is the bad person depends on the alignment of the observer. Only the case of a person who upholds a Good worldview but has committed deeds that he feels are significantly Evil, or the other way around, coincides with what you state above. Such a person will likely feel quite wretched, and self-identify as a "sinner" or "weakling". In such a case, their reaction and further actions determines whether their alignment changes or not.
So for me, the question of whether the person murdered someone one time or whether they blew up and yelled at their children in irritation is a fairly minor one on some levels. There are differences. Those actions have different consequences and they tend to indicate different levels of depravity (or they might not!) and the just punishment for those crimes might or might not be different, but the relative pardonability of the crimes or the 'evil' of the crimes doesn't differ. It's not like you act a little wrathful and you only have to do this little good deed to balance it out and then it is all ok, or if you murder someone you have to do a bunch of really good deeds to make up for it. We don't get to stand here and go, 'You are a bad person and I'm a good one.', and if we do its taken us very far afield from the empathy and compassion I see as central to 'Good'.
But like with the orc example above, in D&D it doesn't seem to be that way. In D&D, actions
can cause alignment change (if you act in a way that's not in accordance with your worldview), atonement can prevent or reverse it, and the necessary atonement is generally proportionate to the transgression. Good and evil are concrete properties that moral entities can aquire just as, in our world, objects can aquire an electrical charge.
How Good/Evil/Law/Chaos match up to good/bad, again, depends on the alignment of the observer. To the LG person, the CE person is a bad person. This isn't really arguable. (It gets a little more interesting with an LE person, but only up to a point) How you treat a bad person, on the other hand, depends on your alignment. Anything from empathy to attempted rehabilitation to scorn to brutal punishment might be on the table.
But anyway, that is taking us rather far afield. My original statement was that evil is just as confined in its behavior as good - and in fact in some senses it is more confined because the 'evil emotions' are more compelling to specific sorts of actions than the 'good emotions' and because good modes of behavior are more easily broken than bad ones. I stand by that. I think that my use of the word 'code' has confused things some, because as someone pointed out, neither good nor evil is intrinsically attached to the idea of an external reviewable code. In D&D terms, Chaotic Good would reject the idea of a code as niave or worse. However, 'code' or not, there is still a standard of behavior which is required of both good and evil, and the nature of the actor if trained in one mode of behavior or the other will tend to rebel against departing from that mode of behavior.
I largely agree with this.
Frequently, in D&D I find I have to step back and impartially look at Evil and ask myself, "Why is that someone would choose evil over good? What attractive argument could be made in evil's behalf?" In our world, when appeals are made on behalf of evil, they are almost invariably said to be 'good' - very few people believe that they are 'evil'. But in the D&D world, where you can more objectively measure this, people wouldn't as often mistake themselves or what they believed for 'good' (although certainly many would), but rather they would tend to believe that Evil was the right, proper, and true way to believe. That is to say that they would believe 'Evil' (big 'e') was 'good' (small 'g') and 'Good' was 'evil' (small 'e'). There sense of right and wrong would be reversed, and they would tend to argue rather passionately (and if they were intelligent with great complexity and intellectual rigor) for what they believe was right (ei Evil). If you have a society that is say Lawful Evil, and knows itself to be, how do they justify themselves? They surely don't chuckle a maniacal laugh and say, "Muhahaha I'm evil. I worship the god of pederasty and sacrificing babies just because I love the terrific pain she inflicts on her worshipers, muhahaha."
No, people who hold evil beliefs will probably seem quite 'ordinary' and they'll believe something that rational and reasonable people could believe. They won't mostly be murderers, theives and robbers, which is why I find it funny when someone tries to 'detect evil' to discover the murderer. Because beside the fact that in my campaign the spell is likely to fail, you are also likely to find all sorts of suspects who aren't the murderer doing that. But they will be prone to, if they find that they can profit by it (and really, not many of us find ourselves in a situation where killing someone else is profitable) murder, or theivery or whatever, and most importantly they won't feel that they've done anything 'wrong' in doing so. They'll see their actions as perfectly justified, and they would do it again and they don't feel in the slightest sorry about it. But mostly, they'll manifest their evil in petty ways. It's not like you can divide the world into 'those evil murderers' and then 'good people' as if no one was evil unless they murdered someone or did some other horrible crime.
I agree with most of this, except to say that in D&D, Evil people don't need to justify themselves any more than good people do. They are justified by the existence of Bane and Bhaal, Hextor and Vecna. Evil isn't
wrong in D&D. It's just evil. Which worldview is the right one is what the Great Battle of Good and Evil is about.
As for how all of this relates to alignment, first, I hope you can understand after all of that how I find it funny when people say that they find alignment confining and incapable of representing complex and multidiminsional characters. And secondly, and more to the point of why I'm passionately writing all of this, I don't evil cool at all and I very much want to destroy that whole idea. I think that the idea of evil being cool is one that is very very much not grounded in reality and reflects someone whose primary experience with evil in a conscious way (not their real experience with evil, but their experience with things that they labeled evil) was through movies with very unrealistic and dare I say one-dimensional characters. I agree with the symbolism in Tolkien, where his villains are so utterly lame that they lack bodies or even names and are empty shells or shelless emptiness. I think that the idea of evil being cool is pernicious and destructive.
But Tolkien was a Christian, (there, I said it!) and Christians, of course, view evil as being only and completely negative (in the sense of defined by an absence). In D&D, Evil is portrayed as being positive. (in the sense of having qualities, being a "thing".)
Edit: Ninjaed like crazy. Oh well.
