Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9314581" data-attributes="member: 4937">My guess is that you believe that too, and you are missing the critical point.  If someone says, "Greater love has no man than this, that he gives his life for his friends.", you don't quibble.  What you are really saying is someone should not be sacrificed for someone else's personal gain, and well LG believes that just fine.  But a soldier gives his life for the safety of another, and a parent will lay down their life for the safety of another.  And a commander sends soldiers into battle, knowing that some will die, in order that others might be safe.  So yes, my guess is that you to believe "it's OK that one person is hurt, in exchange for another person's safety."You are clearly making a Chaotic critique of Lawful Good, and not a Good critique of it.  I think a critique from the vantage of Good is possible, but only if we know more about society than we are given in the problem.Why not?  Does the peasant not think so?  Read the introductory passage of Beowulf, where it talks about the consequences of not having a good strong king to keep the peace and establish justice in the land.  Do you think the peasant thinks the king only oppresses him?  You are critiquing the situation from a very modern very Chaotic perspective.  This is nonsense.  Poverty is the natural state of man.  It's only through great effort that either an individual or a community digs its way out of it.  For the great majority of human history, the great majority of humanity struggled to meet basic needs of subsistence.  That the community didn't have the charity to help the poor is only one of many possibilities why there might be poverty in society.  We err perhaps in seeing as they almost universally would have seen it as a flaw in the individual and in his ethic and in wisdom, but an individual can fail in his ethics and in his wisdom and become destitute quite without society and a poor society may not have the surplus to dig him out of it.  Compared to almost every generation that came before us, we are indolent and wealthy with a great deal of time for idleness.  But let's not judge so harshly a past society that was poor for lack of technology and infrastructure.  Don't make the mistake of looking back at history and assuming you are so much terribly smarter and wiser than the past.  Again, this is very much a Chaotic critique of Law and not a Good critique of it.  Chaotics may be right that Law is just a moral relative thing, not worthy of respect in and of itself, but that's not a critique of Law from the vantage of Good but from the vantage of Chaotic.  Every Chaotic agrees with the passage I just quoted, whether good or not.  You may be right that the highest good and the most moral ethic is Chaotic Good, but I'm not really here to quibble over who is right, just put all the labels on correctly.Spoken by someone who has never seen a civil war.  Don't judge order to harshly until you've really seen its absence.</blockquote>

Verification