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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4235265" data-attributes="member: 42582">This doesn't answer the question - is constitutionalism a chaotic or a lawful value? My own view is that this question has no answer - that constitutionalism (one of the most important of modern political ideals) cannot be adequately described within the D&D framework.And, given that it is an express feature of the US system of government to avoid rule by the mob (hence, for example, the presidential electoral college) does it therefore follow that the US system of government is lawful?In which case every post-enlightenment system of government is chaotic, as they all have methods whereby the law can be lawfully ammended.Again, I point out that this claim depends upon assuming (without argument, as far as I can see) that Lon Fuller was wrong and Hart right.Furthermore, the National Socialist "legal system" had a wide range of methods of ammending its "laws" (indeed, this is part of what Fuller has in mind when he denies that it was not a system of law at all). Does this make it Chaotic rather than Lawful?Fuller's point is not that Lawfulness is the best Good, as D&D sometimes seems to have it, but rather that Law of necessity tends towards Good, which D&D denies.And committed to the Rule of Law. Is that a lawful or a chaotic commitment?But if the correct conclusion, then, is that the Rule of Law is a Chaotic value, I rest my case that the D&D alignment system has been refuted as an adequate framework for moral description - in this case, the refutation is by reductio ad absurdum. Again, this is a controversial claim about economic and social history. I'm not persuaded it is true. There is at least a strand in Calvinist thought that holds that "charity" is wrong as it encourages the indolence of the poor. This thought also takes on Social Darwinist aspects in the second half of the nineteenth century.Whatever the better view, I contend that it is a weakness of traditional D&D alignment that, if those at the table have different view on such matters then the game cannot proceed smoothly.But agreement on controversial matters of history, politics, sociology and morality should not be a necessary condition of smooth gameplay. It is disruptive and adds nothing.There is at least a mild implication that Good is good and Evil evil. More seriously, however, it presupposes that certain matters are true which are in fact controversial (eg that law does not tend towards good) and is unable adequately to encompass certain fundamental political ideals (like the Rule of Law and constitutionalism).And I happen to think that the 4e system, from what I understand of it, is more useful for the purposes of heroic fantasy, as (as far as I can tell) it does not purport to offer a total framework for all moral thought. It hives off a few categories of outlook that the genre itself defines, and leaves everyone else in the "unaligned" basket.This notion of Good as purely inverted-commas good runs into its own problems in the semantics of moral argument and moral disagreement, but I'm not sure that this thread is the place for it.I wouldn't know. I'm an academic lawyer and philosopher who teaches (among other things) social theory. D&D's alignment system is of no use, as far as I can see, for understanding any actual system of moral or political thought that humans have created and acted upon, nor for understanding any actual moral or political conflict or transition that humans have experienced. It can't even tell me whether one of the greatest theorists of US political ideals, John Rawls, is Lawful (because he believes in order and an important role for government) or Chaotic (because he believes in individual rights).I don't think I asserted that it does. I do think your arguments rest on controversial premises. And I do think that a game should not depend, for its playability, upon these beliefs being shared by the participants.I think that the endless disputes over the 1st DDG classification of pre-modern religious sytems, or the endless debates about Aztecs, are a sufficient refutation of this. Also, I don't know if you've read Inga Clendinnen's well-regarded book on the Aztecs, or Mary Midgley's writings on cultural relativism and morality, or Bernard Williams on the "relativism of distance", but the lesson I draw from these sorts of writings is that understanding and classifying cuturally and historically diverse forms of life is actually quite difficult.</blockquote>

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