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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8562397" data-attributes="member: 6790260">As stated in my (much) earlier post, I reject this notion. Laws sometimes need to be changed. Laws are not perfect, but (by definition) strive toward some goal or purpose. A law which fails to achieve its purpose is a poor law; a law that actively harms its intended purpose is outright bad. Both poor laws and bad laws not only can be replaced, but necessarily must be replaced, if one is to be truly committed to the cause of Law; it would be irrational to desire law and yet support poor or bad(/self-contradictory) laws.The Lawful Good person says that the only admissible laws are those which support Good. If a law fails to sufficiently support Good, it must be modified until it does sufficiently support Good. (There may be some laws permitted to continue to exist that do not truly do anything to help Good nor hamper Evil; these are more conventions than anything else, and are particularly important to monitor, should they prove to fall short in either aspect in the future.) All laws, even those currently held to sufficiently support Good, must be regularly evaluated to make sure they continue to support Good, as one cannot simply presume that past laws remain perfectly effective forever.There will, unfortunately, be cases where reform is either genuinely impossible (e.g., no law which permits any form of slavery is compatible with Good, no matter how much reform you may apply to it). In these circumstances, outright removal is the only option. Should efforts to remove these irredeemable laws be met with resistance, it may even prove necessary to revolt against authorities attempting to uphold and enforce wicked laws. Such revolt is never something to be entered into lightly--revolt necessarily brings with it all sorts of dangers and potential evils--but if the choice is between submitting to broken laws (that is, either actively or passively evil/anti-good laws, noting that "evil" and "anti-good" are not precisely equivalent) and correcting the law so that it conforms to the only acceptable goals or purposes laws may have, correcting the law is always the correct choice even by a purely Lawful adjudication, so long as Good is held to be the only acceptable goal or purpose laws may have.A Lawful alignment does not mean slavish devotion and abandonment of rationality, unless you are trying to portray Lawful as exclusively irrational and degenerate. This is part of the problem with how the Law/Chaos axis is understood by many. Chaos is a garbage non-alignment that permits people to do whatever they want whenever they want with no limit. It's totally cool for a Chaotic Good character to always obey the rules, play by a pretty clear moral code that prevents them from doing things they would really like to be able to do, and always keep their promises and never tell lies because "well that's just what they always felt like doing." Meanwhile, anyone with a Lawful bent is characterized as an idiot incapable of re-evaluating, unable to consider consequences and absolutely incapable of deviating from previously chosen methods even in the face of irrefutable and damning evidence that they are simply, totally wrong.It is this very thing that is why I consider alignment as it currently exists such a frustrating and useless tool. It is so goddamn hard to get people to even make Chaos something that isn't an utterly useless "anything goes" faux-"alignment," and infuriatingly EVEN HARDER to get people to consider a Lawful alignment that admits even the barest possibility that laws should be beholden to evaluative standards and subject to reform, replacement, or removal should they be judged wanting.</blockquote>

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