How would you classify "Good by any means neccessary"

[delericho]

It depends on whether you are taking a deontological or consequential perspective.

You'll never persuade me that not knowingly ending the life of an innocent person is an evil action. The only life you have a right to sacrifice is your own.

As such, I reject consequentialist ethics as fatally flawed.

From a consequential perspective, allowing the worse outcome to happen would be the evil act.

Not if you ask the one person who you didn't just murder.

The fundamental problems with consequential ethics are that the viewpoint from which the consequences is to be judged can never be properly defined, and furthermore the consequences can never be fully understood - every action has an infinite number of reactions. If the one was otherwise destined to go on and cure cancer, while the five were destined to become rapists and murderers, the consequentialist view suddenly shifts - killing the one becomes the wrong thing to do.

 

[Umbran]

Folks,

Just a reminder - discussions of ethics can quickly become nigh religious in nature. Don't take things, or make things, personal, please.

And, now just for myself - if someone here has experience with torture, I don't wanna hear about it. And if you don't, you're not in a position to tell us how it "should" be done. Either way, as a personal favor, just drop that line of commentary folks, please...

 

[Asmor]

Folks,

Just a reminder - discussions of ethics can quickly become nigh religious in nature. Don't take things, or make things, personal, please.

And, now just for myself - if someone here has experience with torture, I don't wanna hear about it. And if you don't, you're not in a position to tell us how it "should" be done. Either way, as a personal favor, just drop that line of commentary folks, please...

Darn it, and I just finished up a nice post on the dreaded Yentil-Kazaam torture. Blast.

 

[Mardoc Redcloak]

You'll never persuade me that not knowingly ending the life of an innocent person is an evil action. The only life you have a right to sacrifice is your own.

But either way you are sacrificing lives. If you kill one to save five, then you sacrifice one life for five; if you just let the five die, you sacrifice five for one.

So either way according to the moral framework you have advocated, you are acting outside of your rights - but in the first case, you are doing so with regard to one life, and in the second, you are doing so with regard to five. Consequentialism says: maximize the good and minimize the evil. Save the five.

You have no "end no one's life" option. If you did, no consequentialist would propose killing anyone.

Not if you ask the one person who you didn't just murder.

This doesn't help your case, because the exact same logic could be used to justify the opposite action - what do you think the five people whose lives you saved would think? Once again, maximize the good, minimize the evil. If human beings (or, in the D&D case, sapient beings) are of equal moral worth, then five trumps one.

The fundamental problems with consequential ethics are that the viewpoint from which the consequences is to be judged can never be properly defined,

The proper viewpoint is the objective one, measuring people's lifes, preferences, and happiness equally instead of being partial to one or the other.

In fact, if you take the deontological theories founded upon universality and impartiality (say, Kant's Categorical Imperative, or Rawls' application of it with the veil of ignorance thought experiment), it isn't that difficult to use them to support utilitarian conclusions. The reason for this is that once we have assumed an impartial perspective, it is difficult to see why we would NOT save five lives over one, rather than one over five - because we have no partial perspective from which to value one life over another.

and furthermore the consequences can never be fully understood - every action has an infinite number of reactions.

Perhaps, but every inaction does as well. What we have to do is try our best - consider what we know, and utilize our reason to the best of our abilities to decide which action has the best consequences.

Yes, we will make mistakes, but making mistakes is an unavoidable aspect of being human.

If the one was otherwise destined to go on and cure cancer, while the five were destined to become rapists and murderers, the consequentialist view suddenly shifts - killing the one becomes the wrong thing to do.

Certainly, but if the person making the decision did not know and had no reasonable way of knowing that this was going to happen, there is no basis upon which to hold him or her accountable for the failure.

 

[Klaus]

But either way you are sacrificing lives. If you kill one to save five, then you sacrifice one life for five; if you just let the five die, you sacrifice five for one.

No, you don't. Because you didn't bring about the event that will victimize the five people. If you let nature/history/fate/karma/DM run its course, those people will die, and you have no responsiblity of that. If you take action to spare those people, you're taking responsibility over the one death you'll cause.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

All it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.

 

[Mardoc Redcloak]

No, you don't. Because you didn't bring about the event that will victimize the five people.

Yes, you did. You are unavoidably part of the event, because if you had acted, they would not have died. Your inaction was a cause of their deaths - and you consciously, deliberately chose it knowing what the results would be.

As well say that when a person shoots someone and she dies, he didn't bring about the event - after all, it isn't his fault that human beings die when shot in the head.

If you let nature/history/fate/karma/DM run its course, those people will die, and you have no responsiblity of that. If you take action to spare those people, you're taking responsibility over the one death you'll cause.

Being good is not about avoiding responsibility for things. It is about helping others - and that includes saving lives.

 

[Stone Dog]

Being good is not about avoiding responsibility for things. It is about helping others - and that includes saving lives.

And also for some it means not taking them regardless of the circumstances. "I must save these people" and "I shall not kill" are both perfectly valid lines of thought for a Good character and either one can take precedence depending on the person. Now the passive role of "I shall not kill" doesn't always make for good adventuring, but it is possible that it could.

If you could save a nation by the slaughter a town of innocent and unsuspecting people, that might be a good bargain and worth the price. However that does nothing to change the fact that you have commited murder. What the results are in a cosmological sense it up to debate of course, but I will hold that in D&D and act of evil always strengthens evil and never strengthens good no matter what the immediate results are.

What was said about good and evil in (I think) "Faces of Evil: The Fiends?" Something like "Each evil heart is as a grain of sand on the scales of the multiverse and each good soul is like a lead weight. The problem lies in that there are so many grains of sand and so few weights."

I think of an inquisitor reaching hell and being very surprised.

Inquisitor: But... but why? With all that I have done...
Devil: Oh yes, murder, torture and oppresion for decades. We are very pleased!
I: But the lives saved! The stability of the Church! The wicked defeated!
D: Yes, yes... all very unfortunate side effects. However, we are still satisfied with the results with you in particular and our long term operations have high hopes for some of those saved lives to grow into complacent old sinners in your safe little world instead of dying as noble heroes and martyrs. Well done!

Of course it is much more complicated than all that, but what it boils down to in terms of D&D at least is that there is often mortal goodness (saving lives) and comological Goodness (not taking them) as well as mortal evil (letting innocents suffer) and cosmological Evil (a noble soul sinking to darkness for "the greater good").

Read some Screwtape Letters sometime. Christian philosophy aside there are some very interesting notions regarding temptation, sin and salvation in there.



Of course, such thinking isn't really for most games to deal with. Most of the time alignment runs down to L-N-C as; mostly honorable, basically dependable, generally tricky and G-N-E as mostly virtuous, basically decent and generally wicked. Anything more complicated than that is either character dressing or useless stuff getting in the way of a good adventure.

 

[FireLance]

No, you don't. Because you didn't bring about the event that will victimize the five people. If you let nature/history/fate/karma/DM run its course, those people will die, and you have no responsiblity of that. If you take action to spare those people, you're taking responsibility over the one death you'll cause.

It really depends on where you consider your moral responisbilities to start. Some would argue that inaction is equally a moral choice. After all, even though it applies to robots, Asimov's First Law of Robotics implies that allowing harm to come to another through inaction is just as bad as causing harm yourself.

In the simplest case, if you are standing on a river bank, there is a drowning man in the water, and there is a life preserver next to you, most people would agree that you have the moral responsibility to throw that man a life preserver and save him (even though he might eventually go into politics and become the Evil Leader - it's a risk we all take ).

Now, if obtaining the life preserver puts you in some danger - say, it is at the top of an old, rotted, life guard tower that could collapse at any moment, some people would argue that you no longer have a moral responsibility to try to save the man since you would be putting yourself in danger. It is good if you do, but it is not evil if you do not.

It gets even messier if you must hurt or kill someone else to save that man, for example, if the life preserver is guarded by an enemy of the drowning man. Still, if you can get the life preserver without killing the enemy, even if you had to punch him out or severely injure him, some people would still argue that it is a good act, although hurting someone would normally be evil.

As such, I reject consequentialist ethics as fatally flawed.

I happen to agree with you , but some people do find consequentialism to be an appealing moral philosophy.

 

[Mardoc Redcloak]

And also for some it means not taking them regardless of the circumstances. "I must save these people" and "I shall not kill" are both perfectly valid lines of thought for a Good character and either one can take precedence depending on the person. Now the passive role of "I shall not kill" doesn't always make for good adventuring, but it is possible that it could.

Actually, I agree. They still should be classified as good; I just think they're wrong, and certainly wouldn't classify their moral opposites (the ultra-consequentialists) as non-good.

Of course it is much more complicated than all that, but what it boils down to in terms of D&D at least is that there is often mortal goodness (saving lives) and comological Goodness (not taking them) as well as mortal evil (letting innocents suffer) and cosmological Evil (a noble soul sinking to darkness for "the greater good").

That's the take of the Book of Exalted Deeds.

But it still doesn't make sense to me. Even if the greater good somehow involves "cosmological evil," it's still good; you're still saving lives. The fact that you might go to Hell for it just makes your sacrifice more profound.

I guess that for me "mortal good" comes before, and indeed determines, "cosmological good" - and that, if it doesn't, "cosmological good" is morally arbitrary and irrelevant.