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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2156632" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm less fascinated by the intellectual questions raised by this poll, than I am by the capacity to use a poll like this to get a rough idea of the distribution of alignments in actual society.Granted of course that alignments are a vast oversimplification of people's actual moral and ethical positions, but I think that phrasing the question in this way potentially gets a very good picture of what people actually believe.  A question that allows people to self-identify thier alignment will be skewed because many people's alignment probably is not what they believe it to be (an oppressive religious zealot for example).  On the other hand, if a person believes that a particular ethical and moral system is intellectually superior to every other ethical and moral system, it is probably because he finds the particular arguments made by a particular ethical and moral system more attractive and persuasive than any other.  This is true even of neutrality, since one of the intellectual arguments of neutrality - indeed perhaps the core argument - is that no particular moral system is intellectually superior to any other.I'd actually be fascinated to see a test that cross referenced the above question with age, gender, place of birth, income, religion, the person's heroes and so forth to see whether there was any trend in the above.   Are capitalists more likely to be chaotic or lawful?  Are older people more lawful than younger people?  Are men more ruthless than women, or perhaps it is the other way around?   Are Protestants really (as the name might imply) more chaotic than Catholics, and so forth.   The only unfortunate thing is that now that I've said that this question is equivalent to self-identifying your alignment, the results will be skewed slightly by people who believe that and answer accord to what they believe that they should believe.  On the other hand, since most people won't buy that what I've said is true, it's all good.</blockquote>

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