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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8562694" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Again, I don't see that as a problem. When that happens, you do your best to determine the correct policy and strive toward goodness. Or, in the words of better-educated men than I, "Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes..."As I said before: "...when you do encounter a problem, you pause and evaluate, doing your best to take the least-harmful, most-easily-revoked choices while you are trying to figure out how to improve your policies. Once you have done so, you must then ensure you have done what you can to provide restitution for any past errors you committed."This does not, in any way, require that one be "less Good." It instead requires that one be extremely cautious and careful, proceeding with full awareness of how serious the situation is. Any time laws change, be they the laws a single woman holds herself to, or the laws that govern entire nations, is a difficult time. Institutions may go into flux. As another better-educated man said, through the voice of one of his characters, "For even the very wise cannot see all ends." As a certain Bureaucratic Deva says of a certain Mr. Greenhilt, "He was doing what he thought was best, to the limit of his abilities—including his ability to judge what was best."Being Lawful does not absolve one of needing to exercise sound judgment. Being Lawful does not make a person into a simplistic mechanism, where an algorithm is followed. (That, incidentally, is part of the problem with your reference to Godel's Theorem: it refers to things like decision procedures and Turing machines, which can fail to do things that even a young human child can trivially achieve without such a procedure, because humans can reason beyond the limits of first-order logic.)The Neutral Good person says that the way an individual can pursue the most good is to favor neither flexibility nor consistency unnecessarily, but to employ each as much as possible, recognizing that both have their virtues and faults. The Chaotic Good person says that the way an individual can pursue the most good is to favor flexibility over consistency, because even though consistency may have virtues, the vices of excessive consistency are too significant. The Lawful Good person says the reverse, that an individual person can pursue the most good by favoring consistency, because the vices of excessive flexibility are too significant. There is no reasoning in which any of these three are refusing to do Good. Instead, each is saying, "I cannot take all possible actions that would promote Good, and I will sometimes take actions which fail to promote Good or even (despite my best efforts) weaken Good or promote Evil. This is both due to me being a finite being with finite resources, and me being a finite reasoner with incomplete data. Therefore, I must be selective; I have determined that my chosen method (L, N, or C) is the one that will succeed most at promoting Good and weakening Evil, and most avoid weakening Good and promoting Evil."You can only get "Lawful Good forces you to be less Good" by presupposing that the Neutral Good person is correct, which is circular logic. By the standard of the Lawful Good person, both Neutral and Chaotic Good are "less Good" because they accept methods that either excessively fail to promote Good, excessively weaken Good, or excessively promote Evil. (Usually "excessively fail to weaken Evil" is less of a concern, but in theory that's also an option.)</blockquote>

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