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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 2164620" data-attributes="member: 27012">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.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.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.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.</blockquote>

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