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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MrMyth" data-source="post: 5008342" data-attributes="member: 61155">Ok, I think this has captured what I've been trying to say far more precisely than I could manage. Celebrim, you seem to be going out of your way to avoid addressing my actual point, and focusing on tiny nuances and semantics instead. So I'm not sure how much point there is in continuing my end of the discussion here, but I'll try to give it one more go, as clearly as I can:  janx said that "Good is restricted from doing certain things, and encouraged to do others." You countered that the same is true for evil. This is where I disagree. For a good person, violating their moral code either means that they have changed their nature, or that - as you note - they were never truly good to begin with. A person who spends their life on charity, healing, and other good deeds - but one day decides to murder an innocent (either because they have always wanted to, or because they don't believe the innocent is a 'person', or because they suddenly snap for whatever reason) is not a good person.  Evil is not bound to a moral code to 'do harm'. They are willing to do harm, and may even enjoy it, but doing good does not negate the evil they do. They are not restricted in the same way, nor is there a specific 'code of evil' they are encouraged to follow. An assassin can help people for genuinely altruistic reasons - he can genuinely like his waitress and want to tip her well, he can genuinely want to save people from an orc raid, even if he would be perfectly willing to kill those people later if paid the right price. Doing so might make him a more likeable bad guy than a truly heartless assassin, and it certainly makes him less evil than one - but he is still evil nonetheless.  You seem to be denying the existence of such a possible figure - that there cannot exist a well-developed character that isn't a one-dimensional being devoted to either good or evil. I'm not sure why - my point isn't that all figures have to be complicated like this. Just that they can exist, and thus disprove your claim about the 'code of evil'.  I think there really is a fundamental disagreement here over the concepts of alignment, so I'm not sure if we'll be able to come to any agreement. You say that an honorable man who considers elves as less than people and will gladly murder elven children in cold blood isn't an evil man. He is simply "a good man who does evil". I'm just not sure where the difference is. For me, a figure that murders innocent is evil. He might have good qualities, but that doesn't make him a good man.  Basically, I see the requirement to be 'good' as much more stringent than the requirement to be evil. To be good, you have to both do good things and avoid doing evil things. But to be evil, all you have to be capable of is doing evil - you can still do good without 'ceasing' to be evil. Someone who does both good and evil is evil, rather than neutral - neutrality would be someone who does neither good nor evil.  Saying that someone who is evil is somehow committed to a 'code of cruelty' remains a fundamentally silly statement. Being an assassin doesn't mean one can't be compassionate or generous to people other than their victims, nor does it mean that acts of compassion or generosity - or freely saving innocent lives even as he takes them - somehow intrinsically 'cancels out' the evil he does.</blockquote>

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