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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Asha'man" data-source="post: 5009222" data-attributes="member: 52424">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."  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.  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.)   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.   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.  I largely agree with this.  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.  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.</blockquote>

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