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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2157342" data-attributes="member: 27012">Actually, no it isn't for most people.  For most people, freedom is a means to an end.  In fact, people happily surrender their freedom for a whole host of ends (much to the annoyance of people who do consider freedom an end) and would you really advocate freedom as an end if it produced nothing but misery and ruin?  To be fair, though, the Lawful or Chaotic character likely does consider either order or freedom to be an end, and is likely baffled by those who simply treat them as means toward an end.  This goes back to an earlier exchange about treating Law and Chaos differently than Good and Evil.  I'm more concerned with the latter than the former.  But you have a point with respect to the former.In the case of Evil, those means are also an end.  Evil doesn't hurt, kill, or oppress for some utilitarian purpose or ulterior motive.  It hurts, kills, and oppresses because it enjoys causing pain.  The enjoyment of the torture is the reason the torture is happening.  I would argue (and have argued) that if a character is torturing an NPC toward a utilitarian end (or helping them toward a utilitiaran end), those acts are not necessarily Good nor Evil.  What makes a character Good or Evil is that their behavior has no other motivation.I suppose you can make the same argument about Law and Chaos.  The extreme points at LN and CN are where the character is treating either order or freedom as an end, regardless of any other impact those ideals have.  Fair enough.And how does this relate back to the question of which alignment has an intellectual edge?With respect to the things that the D&D alignment concerns itself, I think it does OK.  Just don't expect it to model distinctions in the moral spectrum of the real world that it doesn't address and don't be suprised if it creates some strange bedfellows.  But regardless, I think you'll also find geniuses and morons across the D&D alignment spectrum, if you want to think of that as a distinct spectrum.I'm working with the assumption of the original question.</blockquote>

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