Is any one alignment intellectually superior?

[Seeten]

I am also firmly in the True Neutral is superior crowd.

Law, Chaos, Good, Evil, a little of each makes the world go round. A place for all things and all things in their place, as it were.

 

[John Morrow]

John, don't you think that there is a strong chance that herd survival insticts and moral quandries elicit similar responses in the brain? One could even be the product of the other. Don't you see the potential for serious misconceptions?

I don't think there is a clear distinction between a moral quandry and a survival problem and think that both instinct and intellect come into play for either one. In the big nature vs. nurture debate, my position is that we are a product of nature and nurture.

By the way, I don't think our instincts are herd oriented. They are designed to help us deal with social situations involving extended cooperative groups. If you want to see other similar and different examples outside of primates, take a look at dogs (which share similar instincts because they also live in extended cooperative groups) and cats (which don't because they don't have the same social structure).

Isn't there a strong chance that there can be separate cognitive functions displaying very similar patterns? One could even argue that emotion is our poor attempt to quantify our instictual motives. Ahhhh...I see.

I think the cognitive functions are built on top of the instinctual functions. Emotion is not a poor attempt to quantify our instinctual motives. It's a mechanism that allows rapid (and often correct, in many contexts) decisions to be made with incomplete information.

It's much like why many chess masters memorize past chess games. If they notice that the game they are playing looks like a past game that they've seen, they don't have to waste time assessing the possible results of their various options. Instead, they can instantly use or reject a large pool of options that they already know will either work or not work. It's a real time saver and works, too.

The human brain has the ability to recognize patterns in human interactions and can produce an emotional response that provides a quick assessment of whether the interaction is "fair" or not. Stereotypes are common for similar reasons. The objective is to use what little you do know to improve your chances above a wild guess and then play the odds.

Yes, it's easy to think of plenty of cases where emotions, patterns, and stereotypes produce the wrong answer but the alternative, due to the inevitability that we'll have incomplete information, is often not the right answer but something closer to a wild guess. A wild guess would be wrong more often, as would many guesses that treat incomplete information as though it were complete. And given how complex life is, we simply do not have the option of waiting until we have complete and accurate information before we make most decisions.

As the LA Times article mentions, Antonio Damasio "showed how people who suffered damage to the feeling centers of the brain--areas such as the amygdala and prefrontal cortices, which are near the brain stem--found it difficult, if not impossible, to make even the simplest choices. Without access to somatic markers, setting the time for a doctor's appointment or choosing a restaurant for dinner became a torturous process." Basically, emotions help us make good guesses and may be why we can make guesses at all. But the flip side of that is that the wrong emotions or absence of emotions can lead us to make wrong guesses and choices. Thus a lack of empathy and the emotional responses it produces are characteristic of sociopaths, independent of how rationally intelligent they are.

You see alignment as a set or internal response rather than a world view. I get it. We keep on crossing our planes but never in sync so that we can step across.

Actually, I don't think you can seperate the internal responses from the world view. I think that they influence each other. The internal responses influence our world view through emotional assessments while our world view influences our internal responses by filtering the data. And depending on various things, one can trump the other (in either direction), which is why our rational brain is not entirely at the mercy of our instincts and why culture can influence the way we intuitively respond to things.

 

[John Morrow]

I agree that this could be true for some, but not across the board.

Absolutely. And I think that some of the insights offered by Celebrim earlier in the thread were quite interesting and can be true in some cases. My objection was to the idea that a person's answer can always be interpreted in one or two particular ways. I simply don't think that's true, so I'm trying to explain other reasons why people might have given the answer they've given that have nothing to do (or nothing directly to do) with their own moral compass.

IMO the "rational=utilitarian=evil" ignores the presence of rational constructs (ie. philosophy) that supports non-utilitarian goals (or even defines what "utilitarian" means). If I believe that my tribe's welfare is more important than my own, then what is "utilitarian" to me is affected by that.

Absolutely. But I'm not sure that's what a lot of those people are thinking. Instead, I think they are considering that little part of their brain that coldly says things like, "Take off and nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." It's the part of the brain that, to take an example of the research, allows us to consider smothering a baby to death so that a basement full of refugees won't get caught and killed if the soldiers searching for them hear the baby crying (a subject of the final episode of M*A*S*H, by the way). And there are also plenty of philosophers and ethicists who advocate positions that are often ruthlessly utilitarian and many people do think they are Evil (e.g., Princeton's Peter Singer falls into this category).

Also, if I believe in a universe ruled by a Lawful Good god, then it makes no sense to be Chaotic Evil, and vice versa.

Not necessarily true. Celebrim offered one motivation earlier in this thread when he discussed people who play their opposites -- being a rebel. It's all a matter of objectives and priorities.

If a person "reasons" their way to Neutral Evil being the most "intellectually superior" I still maintain that it says *something* about their world view/cognitive beliefs, even if that doesn't mean that person is Neutral Evil himself.

Oh, that's fair enough. Just about anything a person says or does can tell your *something* about that person. My objection was to the idea that these answers were somehow a reliable channel into a person's psyche, seemingly without even considering their explanations of why they answered the way they did.

 

[John Morrow]

Thanks for the Neuron article, it did make more sense than the other one (and IMO was far less ambitious in it's conclusions than the news article). IMO this is getting beyond what's useful to RPGs though, and so I apologize if I'm not able address everything you've said. I'll try to keep it to this -

I've considered this useful for RPGs because it deals with how I handle Evil in monsters. Monsters who lack empathy and enjoy inflicting pain on others are essentially irredeemably Evil, much in the way human sociopaths are almost impossible to redeem or reform in the real world. As one of the articles on Dr. Greene's website points out, two patients who suffered prefrontal damage during early childhood engaged in flagrantly immoral behavior. "These patients lie, steal, have neglected their children, and at types have been physically aggressive -- all without apparent remorse. Both patients perform reasonably well on IQ tests and other standard cognitive measures and perform poorly on the Iowa Gambling Task, but unlike adult-onset patients, their knowledge of social/moral norms is deficient. Their moral reasoning appear to be, in the terminology of Kohlberg, 'preconventional', conducted from an egocentric perspective in which the purpose is to avoid punishment."

That's a pretty good model of how I've been running the irredeemably Evil goblinoids in my game. Yeah, you can take those little goblin babies home and give them a proper moral human upbrining and you might make them more Lawful or Chaotic, but in the end they are still going to turn out to be Evil an immoral. Basically, they are a race of sociopaths (you should have seen the look on the player's faces when the trapped goblin women forced their own children down a corridor to fight the PCs in hopes of escaping alive themselves).

Note that I don't handle all of the monster races like this.

DnD alignment covers a greater scope of decisions than IIRC what the Neuron article describes.

Sure. But I think the moral elements that it discusses can play a role in which alignments a person favors. This again my be some of my own biased interpretation of the alignment system intruding here. I tend to read Neutral as "Pragmatic", at least with respect to he axis or axes that it's associated with.

Also, the article uses "cognitive" in a certain way that excludes what I was talking about earlier. My assertion was that people's cognitive processes and culture contribute to their emotional responses. So telling me that such and such a decision occurred in the emotional center of the brain does not rule out the (IMO strong) possibility that cognitive processes played a role in creating that emotional response. I think psychotherapy is based on this idea.

Yes. And that is exactly how culture and the conscious mind can control the emotional part of the brain and why we are not simply slaves to our instincts. But there are several bits of evidence (from the moral examples in the articles to how people behave when parts of their brains are damaged) that the rational part of the brain, in the absence of an emotional counter-balance, is ruthlessly utilitarian. And the question that this thread ultimately asks, I think, is what sort of alignment would reason, alone, produce. I'm not sure that I personally agree thta the answer is a ruthlessly utilitarian one, but I can see why people would answer that way.

IIRC to summarize your position: "emotional and rational parts of the brain both play a part in moral decisions". Then I misunderstood what you were saying earlier, and I think the Neuron article supports this, and with some generalization you can apply it (qualified) to the DnD alignment system.

You can find plenty of other articles. I actually originally read about this topic in Discover and I agree that mainstream news outlets can play fast and loose with the science. The main reasons why I use the LA Times article are (A) it's available on the web (Discover closed its archives), (B) it's layman accessbile, and (C) it's fairly comprehensive. If you do searches on some of the key words in these articles, you'll find plenty of other articles, both mainstream and academic, on the subject.

 

[ARandomGod]

So is Neutral truely above good and evil, or simply a code which enspouses survival over morality (vs Neutral Evil which, IMHO, engenders greed over survival).

I say yes, it's above good and evil... But no, not a code which espouses survival over morality... (Although I do see that as fitting either in NN or NE, depending on it's strength and particulars) At least, the capital letter True Neutral is. The ones espousing balance in all things. Some amount of evil is needed in the world. You can't have a back without a front, and you cannot have good without evil. People who would take away evil would either become that evil themselves (fanatics), or if they somehow manage to avoid that trap and succeeded in their plans, would quickly find that they had simultaniously taken away all good.

I think it's interesting that, in general (in the poll so far) most people are agreeing that neutral is superior over law and chaos (those who took a side at all). However good and neutral are tied at the moment. But good is a relative term. And in it's own way is as restrictive and full of potential conflicts as Law is. I happen to know for a fact that some of the things some people would consider to be good I personally think of as the definition of evil. And some things that I view as good other people are just a little horrified that I'd think at all. And that's honest, I really DO think this thing is good, and I really am appalled (and slightly disgusted) that someone could think that other opinion would be considered anything but evil.

So. That leads to the further subquestion. If Neutral Good is the most intellectually superior, can it be MY NG, or must it be theirs? Because I consider them to be NE.

Care to take a stab at the 'none' reponse? I really haven't seen any sound argument against it yet.

I say that the none arguement means one of several things:
1) I don't care to think about it
2) I can't envision the difference
3) I don't know
4) I have an opinion which doesn't fit under the above, or that I'm unwilling to attempt to quantify.

Or, and I say this as a proponent of the Neutral Neutral position, they mean True Neutral. Because under one set of definitions they're identical positions.

To further this point I give a small excerpt from one 'none' opinion ( I think that the whole post supports True Neutral, just was unwilling to see itself that way )

No alignment can be "intellectually" superior because no alignment is reducible to a single set of canon beliefs, goals or objectives. No alignment is proscriptive in the values derived from it, much less the methods undertaken to fulfil those values. There is no simple A to B chain of reason. Alignment is descriptive, and therefore cannot be "intellectual" at all.

Really, that either IS true neutral, or it's a statement that the poster can't intellectually concieve of the concept.

 

[ARandomGod]

Just think, with all the time and energy invested in this thread someone could've submitted an entire neighborhood into the "World's Largest City".

To be fair, more time/energy has been expended on this type of discussion than building, publishing, marketing, distributing, selling, talking about, and playing the World's Largest Dungeon.

(To be more fair, this has also been around longer)

 

[Tric]

After playing KotOR II, I must say neutrality can really hold its own.

 

[Storyteller01]

I say that the none arguement means one of several things:
1) I don't care to think about it
2) I can't envision the difference
3) I don't know
4) I have an opinion which doesn't fit under the above, or that I'm unwilling to attempt to quantify.

Not true. I (and everyone else on this thread) can name an individual in history who is 'intellectually superior' for their time, and for every alignment. Morality doesn't limit or enhance intelligence, although it can define it's direction (Gangus Khan was concidered rather intelligent for his day).


Question: given that all things effect everything else (and everyONE else), can you truely be 'above' the concepts of good and evil? Given that animals are listed as Neutral (and given their environment, animals are less likely to think about what is good/evil/law/chaotic and more likely to think about the moment at hand), can one hold themselves above all others? What is balance, given how often culture and environments change (how long ago was it that Egypt was the bread basket of Rome?)?

 

[ARandomGod]

Question: given that all things effect everything else (and everyONE else), can you truely be 'above' the concepts of good and evil?

I'd say that it's possible but unlikely. Then, of course, we come across another redeeming quality of true neutral. It's the most forgiving of 'mistakes'.

Given that animals are listed as Neutral (and given their environment, animals are less likely to think about what is good/evil/law/chaotic and more likely to think about the moment at hand), can one hold themselves above all others? What is balance, given how often culture and environments change (how long ago was it that Egypt was the bread basket of Rome?)?

Ah. Questions suited for someone truely intellectually superior. Not that I'm attempting to ANSWER them, mind you. But these are the types of questions you have to ask of yourself and the world to be True Neutral instead of simply neutral/neutral.

Here I point out again (and acknowledge) that pure neutral is (under my definition) the alignment most common to idiots and geniuses.

 

[ARandomGod]

Ah HA!

The poll is closed and we win!

"None" being identical to True Neutral (as if there's a reason for every one of them to be better, then that's actually a true neutral opinion, by definition).

And TN has the same amount of votes as NG does. However, NE has some votes, which when added with the NG votes cancells out the G and E part of each vote respectively, making even MORE votes TN.

This cancelling effect can be applied to the other alignments too. NOONE CAN BEAT TRUE NEUTRAL!!