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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 3333498" data-attributes="member: 3146">I think reasonable humanoids are few and far between, in the context of moral reasoning, generally tend to be defined as "people who agree with us."Would a reasonable person approve of early 21st century western sexual morality? Maybe if the reasonable person is a 21st century westerner or a late first century Roman. If said reasonable person is your early fifteenth century mexica, an early Roman, eighteenth century American, or even early 20th century American, odds are their reactions would be very different. For a topic more germane to most D&D games, how about revenge killings? There once more, your reasonable 11th century Icelander (say, Burnt Njal or Skarphedin), 13th century Scotsman, or 20th century Arab is likely to have a different answer to your reasonable 21st century Dutchman. Hence the problem of the reasonable person test. Real people react to different things in different ways and controlling for sanity (in any non question-begging way) doesn't change that fact. Nor does controlling for general mental capacity. The concept of a "reasonable person" divorced from time and culture is an enigma since there are no people reasonable or otherwise who are divorced from time or culture. (Or, if there are, their existence is not universally acknowledged and discussion of it is forbidden on these boards). Hence, reasonable in this sense generally turns out to mean "agrees with me and shares my worldview." Otherwise, I can't see what standard one would apply to judge between the modern American and the Viking or the Aztec and the Dutchman (or for that matter, the Dutchman of 1575 and the Dutchman of today).Things are, of course, quite different if there actually is an individual who could judge right and wrong independently of human cultures, but discussing divine command theories of ethics probably treads on thin ice on these boards. (And a typical polytheistic D&D world where different gods present radically different ideas of vice and virtue would not be sufficient for divine command theory anyway).</blockquote>

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