Celebrim
Legend
I don't mind a setting where "this particular kobold is evil," the part I don't like is "all kobolds are evil."
I think I understand why, but it's really bizarre. If you are willing to concede the possibility of the statement "this kobold is evil" and thus imply objective morality, then the statement "all kobolds are evil" is an obvious possibility. And if you are not going to say that there is an objective morality, if you are going to say it's just a social construct or something, then you can't really say "this kobold is evil" The best you can say is "this kobold is my enemy", but you then still would concede the possibility of "all kobolds are my enemy" and you couldn't using the idea of morality as a social construct condemn that statement.
Can we at least concede that your objection to it just contextual to the real world and common immoralities that we see in it? Because I'm perfectly OK with that, it's just I feel like you are trying really really hard to pretend there is more to it than that.
Well that, and it's just lazy storytelling. "If it's a goblin, it's automatically our enemy and we respond accordingly."
There is nothing lazy about that at all, or least we cannot infer from the above whether the story telling is lazy or not. I've dealt with this idea that objective morality leads to lazy storytelling at greater length above, but it's a (to use a word you like) ridiculous assertion. Nothing is more obvious than people with all sorts of philosophies can be very gifted story tellers, and you can read them and go, "You know, I don't agree with what X says, but wow can they write!" I have that experience all the time, and I'm terrified of anyone that claims otherwise.
Ironically perhaps, both of us agree to allow goblin PC's and even non-evil goblin PC's. I have a massive backstory about how the goblins came to be mostly evil that I won't go into here, but suffice to say that though Maglubiyet is a vile monster he also has a bit of a point. And fundamentally it comes down to a question of, "Do you believe you can correct injustice through injustice?" or "Do you believe the ends justify the means?" Because if you do, maybe Maglubiyet seems like a hero to you, doing the only logical thing he could do to restore paradise.
When I start talking about things that are so alien and un-human that they don't/can't understand these concepts, or lack the free will to choose between doing the right thing and doing the wrong thing, I would say they are Unaligned.
That feels self-contradictory to me. You're asserting that things get more and more evil until at some point they get so evil they become unaligned. Lucifer, since you bring him up, would be insulted and if he was capable of any other feeling than hatred, would hate more on the basis of that claim.
The only difference between an angel and a devil in my campaign, for example, is ideology: devils are fallen angels, the cultists who sided with Lucifer to overthrow Heaven, and failed. Devils chose evil, they weren't born into it.
As a personal matter, I really wish that either people would not take any aspect of real-world religion and put it into their fiction, or if they are going to name drop and use someone's real beliefs in their fiction that they would at least investigate the orthodox beliefs and thinking and treat the material respectfully. While it is true that demons have chosen evil, it's also true that they have lost the capacity to choose anything else. The idea here is that they aren't like the humans of HPL's conception who are unable to correlate all the contents of their minds and as such they don't have that human advantage of ignorance and frailty that partially protects them from their choices. If they make a choice, it is because they have fully correlated the contents of their mind made it irreversibly and irrevocably. But that doesn't make them less evil, as you would have it. That makes them more evil.
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