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<blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 1925958" data-attributes="member: 27012">One of the questions raised by the way alignment is treated in the Monster books when it qualifies the alignment with a word like &quot;usually&quot; or &quot;often&quot;, is whether that means that the creature could be of any alignment or just some other alignments.&nbsp; For example, a Goblin is &quot;Usually Neutral Evil&quot;.&nbsp; Does that mean a Goblin can be Lawful Good or does that mean that a Goblin could be &quot;Lawful Evil&quot;, &quot;Neutral Evil&quot;, or &quot;Chaotic Evil&quot; but still always &quot;Evil&quot;?In fact, depending on which book you read, the Mind Flayers need sentient humanoids to reproduce, which is pretty much exactly like the Aliens.&nbsp; This raises yet another issue, which also comes up in discussions of other hominids and such.&nbsp; What does it mean to be sentient?&nbsp; Were the aliens &quot;sentient&quot; in the sense that they were free moral agents or were they simply &quot;sentient&quot; in the sense that they were self-aware, could communicate with one another, and were clever?&nbsp; The one does not necessarily imply the other.&nbsp; A lot of what we associate with sentience could simply human nature.&nbsp; As I pointed out elsewhere, humans make the moral choices that they make, in part, due to emotional resonse.&nbsp; Monkeys deal with certain experiments the same way that humans do, despite lacking the same level of sentience, because they have the same emotional rsponses that humans do.&nbsp; But what if you changed all that and replaced it with a system that provides different emotional responses, such as enjoying the suffering of others rather than feeling empathy?&nbsp; What would that mean?I highly recommend Lawrence Keeley's book War Before Civilization which deals with several of these issues, including the artificial distinction between small scale homicide and warfare in societies and why groups of people go to war.&nbsp; It's interesting and well written (as opposed to being dry and academic).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="John Morrow, post: 1925958, member: 27012"] One of the questions raised by the way alignment is treated in the Monster books when it qualifies the alignment with a word like "usually" or "often", is whether that means that the creature could be of any alignment or just some other alignments. For example, a Goblin is "Usually Neutral Evil". Does that mean a Goblin can be Lawful Good or does that mean that a Goblin could be "Lawful Evil", "Neutral Evil", or "Chaotic Evil" but still always "Evil"? In fact, depending on which book you read, the Mind Flayers need sentient humanoids to reproduce, which is pretty much exactly like the Aliens. This raises yet another issue, which also comes up in discussions of other hominids and such. What does it mean to be sentient? Were the aliens "sentient" in the sense that they were free moral agents or were they simply "sentient" in the sense that they were self-aware, could communicate with one another, and were clever? The one does not necessarily imply the other. A lot of what we associate with sentience could simply human nature. As I pointed out elsewhere, humans make the moral choices that they make, in part, due to emotional resonse. Monkeys deal with certain experiments the same way that humans do, despite lacking the same level of sentience, because they have the same emotional rsponses that humans do. But what if you changed all that and replaced it with a system that provides different emotional responses, such as enjoying the suffering of others rather than feeling empathy? What would that mean? I highly recommend Lawrence Keeley's book [u]War Before Civilization[/u] which deals with several of these issues, including the artificial distinction between small scale homicide and warfare in societies and why groups of people go to war. It's interesting and well written (as opposed to being dry and academic). [/QUOTE]

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