dreaded_beast said:
Good points Elder Basilisk!
Thanks.
So based on the above stealing is always wrong and killing may or may not be wrong? I do not entirely agree with this belief. While I believe stealing is wrong, when compared to taking life, it is the lesser of two evils.
Maybe so. I think the problem is that stealing is actually a bit more ambiguous than I let on. There are a lot of circumstance under which even most moral absolutists would say that theft is
excusable even though it's wrong. The contrast is made more difficult because, while we have murder for "the kind of killing that is wrong" to contrast with simple killing (which may or may not be wrong), we don't have any simlar neutral/bad word for stealing.
Granted, within the context of DND, violence and combat is one of the driving factors of the game and the above scenario is why many people probably play. However, I believe whether or not an act is considered "good" or "praiseworthy" depends entirely on the type of campaign you play. I believe the above may be so for your campaign, but not entirely so for others.
What is good certainly depends upon the campaign. Even assuming that the same basic moral principles hold from campaign to campaign, non-moral facts will make a big difference. For instance, in one campaign, certain animals might have reincarnated human souls and it would be wrong to kill them for food. In another campaign, they might have animal souls or no souls at all making that acceptable. In yet another campaign, said animals might be sacred to the god of goodness and killing them would be impious and therefore wrong.
What is praiseworthy will vary even in the same campaign. For instance, in a campaign I ran a while back, making offerings to the gods was considered generally praiseworthy in the Empire, generally blameworthy in a breakaway republic (who followed a prophet who had taught that all so-called gods were demons who devoured the souls of the dead), and in another land, it was considered praiseworthy to make offerings to the god known as the Emperor of Heaven in the empire (for that was the name by which men knew their creator) but blameworthy to make offerings to any of the other gods (for they were not divine but merely the rebellious servants of the creator).
I think that there is, however, a basic level of praise or blameworthiness that will be common to most cultures in most campaigns. For instance, the violence of a soldier who is defending the just government of his country from a foreign aggressor is almost always considered praiseworthy when kept within certain bounds. In most games, the violence of a traveller who sees the stereotypical woman being assaulted by a gang of toughs and comes to her defense is generally considered praiseworthy too. By the time the violence gets down to the level of a Punisher, it's no longer clearly praiseworthy but it's not generally seen as clearly blameworthy either. IME, most D&D campaign violence tends to fall within that spectrum and that's why it's possible for the PCs to generally be considered good despite their violence.
In my opinion, it sounds as if, since these [the evil human-sacrificing death cultists] are "bad guys" killing them is not a problem since they deserve it and had it coming.
That's my opinion also.
This I have no problem considering an evil act. As I think more about it, I am starting to believe there is a difference in what is considered "evil" within the DND context and alignment system, as oppossed to what is considered "evil" using real world morality and ethics.
I don't think that's necessarily true. My opinion is that the D&D alignment system is useful to exactly the extent that it illuminates real world morality in the context of the game and ceases to become useful when it ceases to illuminate real world morality.
The primary difficulty with it, I think (other than its inclusion of law and chaos which are IMO incoherent as ethical or even philosophical categories) is that it doesn't clearly integrate its functions as an act and a virtue ethic. As a virtue ethic, it asks "What kind of qualities does a good person have?" and "is this person good?" That determines a character's alignment. As an act ethic, it asserts that "casting animate dead is evil" and "killing innocent people for fun is evil," etc. However, how many evil acts it takes to make a person evil or how many good acts it takes to make a good person evil is not clear. Indeed, how individual actions interact with alignments isn't clear.
Then again, integrating act and virtue ethics is somewhat difficult in philosophy too so that is not to be wondered at.
But does greedy necessarily conotate evil? In the PHB under alignment there is a fine example of the Lawful Good merchant who cheats a stupid adventure out of his money by overcharging him. However, he feels guilty afterwards and lets his next customer have a big discount. My point is that, I do not believe that greed is necessarily evil. In DND terms, I see greed affecting more of the Lawful-Neutral axis instead of the Good-Evil axis.
I don't think displacing greed onto the law/chaos axis helps you in that situation. The merchant in the example is Lawful as well as Good. And if you wanted to make greed a quality of law, then your character still has the wrong alignment (as do most greedy CN barbarians and CE assassins).
The example is further complicated by the question of what it means for an independent merchant who sets his own prices to "overcharge" someone. If it means setting his asking price high because he can see that the adventurer has money, there's clearly an element of greed there but it's not clear that he's done anything wrong. The situation is different if he sells the adventurer a vial of water and tells him it's a potion of healing or sells the adventurer rotten apples or hemp rope and claims that it's silk. It's also different from leaving his finger on the scale as he weighs the adventurer's gold.
But I think it can still be explained if you start from the assumption that greed is a vice and that it's evil:
The merchant's lawful good alignment represents the fact that he generally has the virtues that make people both lawful and good. That doesn't mean he has no vices (he's still somewhat greedy) but generally his virtues win out and predominate over his vices. (And his greed is a lesser vice than some others he might have).
The merchant's overcharging the adventurer (I'll assume it's not fraud) represents his greed winning in a particular situation and causing him to commit an act which is evil (for sake of argument, I think it's probably more on the shady end of neutral assuming there is no fraud involved).
His subsequent reaction (feeling guilty and resolving to be more generous as evidenced by the discount he gives the next person (hopefully someone who needs a discount)) demonstrates that greed is not yet a dominant attribute of his character and enables us to still say that, on the whole, he is still possessed of the lawful good virtues.
Here you ware wrong, because I did present such a proposal to my adventuring party, but it was meet with reluctance and dislike. They said "it's stealing", "it's wrong", etc.
Now that I know there's a paladin in your group I'm no longer surprised. Paladins tend to have a less flexible view of such things and even though they might recognize the outcome as better often prefer to achieve their outcomes on the recognized and acceptable path rather than a shady one. The arguments I supplied are, I suppose the arguments that would defend such a paladin's position as the proper one rather than the ones a non-reflective paladin (int is often a dump stat for paladins) would have to hand. "I'm a paladin, it's my job to obey the precepts of my god and my king; it's not my job to think about them. If you want to know why it's right, ask one of the doctors of the church--explaining and thinking is their job."
I guess it wouldn't bother me so much if the campaign didn't seem so inconsistent. After this discussion, the party dwarf and paladin, believing their to be evil afoot in a scuzzy tavern frequented by "evils" went on a killing spree. What happened was that the bouncer wouldn't let in the dwarf and paladin, so the dwarf attacked him. The bouncer retaliated resulting in his death and then chaos insued.
Anyways, the result of this was nothing. Basically a slap on the wrists, the people you killed were "bad guys" anyways so noone is going to miss them.
Well that does sound a bit inconsistent. I suspect that, if properly explained, a lot of players would recognize that killing the scuzzy bouncer for not letting them in was wrong (though they might well conclude that they should have done subdual damage or stabilized him instead rather than that they ought to have avoided the confrontation). But maybe not....
[edit] I should point out that situation sounds like one that the paladin would at the very least get a serious warning for and the dwarf might discover that Holy Smite hurts next time he's in the area of effect[/edit]
