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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4237563" data-attributes="member: 42582">Celebrim, just a quick one about the discussion. I'll make another post to answer some gameplay points.No need to back down in any strong sense - my reference to the board rules was just because it is hard to discuss some of the historical and contemporary examples (imperialism, Rawls, etc) without breaking the no politics/no religion rule. I'm not suggesting that you've done anything improper.Also I have to write a couple of papers for work (one on the relationship between law and responsibility for wrongdoing) which means I don't have time to write the same stuff for the ENworld forums.And on the disingenousness, you didn't use that word but I took you to be implying it - but no apology is required. I thought it was a legitimate attack upon what one (and I thought you, but wrongly) may have taken to be my argumentative strategy. I just wanted to make it clear that I genuinely don't see how you are distinguishing law and chaos - that is, although I do see the force of the reasons you adduce for drawing the distinction in a particular way I don't see how you have rebutted what strike me as equally salient reasons for drawing it in a different way. Unfortunately, as I've said, for both time and board rules reasons I don't think I can pursue it.I don't really agree with this. I think that we disagree. I also think that Celebrim's concept of Law/Chaos is not really coherent or defensible, but he (obviously and naturally) thinks that it is, at least to a degree. Conversely, I imagine that he thinks that my attacks upon the coherence of his notions fail - naturally and obviously, I think that they succeed.Disagreement isn't a shocking thing. At least for me, it's a stock-in-trade of my job.But I do think that it is not helpful for a game to almost go out of its way to turn these disagreements into an obstacle to successful and fun play. Thus, at a somewhat meta-level, I think that it counts as a good reason to drop the "total" model of alignment that it can engender this degree of disagreement over its classificatory capacity (and that is even before we actually turn to classificatory questions about particular actions or particular individuals).</blockquote>

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