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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wayside" data-source="post: 765005" data-attributes="member: 8394">That's a good point.  By the same token, do morals have any authority if their religious sanction is in doubt?  In a fantasy world, where gods are merely superterrestrial men, more or less, and not gods in any metaphysical sense, can there be an absolute morality that isn't, as you say later, Kantian--that is, a morality that isn't derived purely from logic (though in Kant's case by a man desperately wanting to vindicate his Christian leaning)?Well, essentially I would think that it does.  If Diogenes acts wickedly proceeding by logic, then according to Tertullian's religion logic would be wrong; but logic cannot be wrong, there can only be wrong logic.  Abstracted away from action, there was a time when science and ligic were, in a way, viewed as evil.  The image of Galileo muttering "Eppur si muove" as he walks away from the Inquisition, having just been forced to renounce his theory, comes to mind.Attemps at answering all of these questions can be made with logic.  The Epicureans did it, the Stoics did it, the Cynics (like Diogenes) did it; today Bernard Williams and Richard Wollheim do it.  It's a part of philosophizing.  The flaw comes in that none of these people can take every fact into account, and also there is the problem of epistemology.  Yes, you have to start from some assumption, even using logic, but this is true of every intellectual undertaking, from believing that you exist to, well, to anything.Come now, surely you have heard the story of Alexander's visit to Corinth?  We know that Diogenes would not have worshipped the emperor; but, for the sake of argument, how wouldn't that make Diogenes evil?  If Tertullian thinks it is wrong to worship the emperor, then he thinks Diogenes is wrong to do it.  Now, whether you want to take the step and say he thinks Diogenes is evil to do it is up to you.  Certainly, this would be in all likelihood such a minor infraction of Tertullian's morality that he would not think of Diogenes as evil.  But, if it were something else, like killing a man, say Tertullian, by order of the emperor, simply to avoid being put to death himself, certainly Tertullian would think Diogenes an evil man to do it?Funny you should bring up the Essenes.  I've just been working on a Gnostic cult for Demon: The Fallen.  It makes sense to me since the gnostics regard(ed) Pistis Sophia's emanation of Yaldabaoth as the evil that imprisoned them in flesh.  A few thousand years later Lucifer and the fallen are their comrades, and their enemy is God himself.Anyhow, I don't quite get your point about nothing objectively evil being valuable for itself.  What about murder?  Wouldn't a serial killer be valuing what he does for what it is, when what he does happens to be (according to pretty much everybody) evil?  I don't know that you live in the states, but recently there was a lengthy interview on HBO with The Ice Man, a hitman who killed hundreds of people for fun and professionally while being married and raising children.  It's a pretty creepy thing to see because this guy is completely unaffected by anything at this point.No, I don't think he would be the opposite of a Paladin, that's true.  But say you lose a loved one to some deranged psychopath, someone so far gone that they'll probably just be committed to an institution for the rest of their lives; or they'll get however many decades of appeals before they get fried.  Now, if you go out and get a gun and mow this guy down in court, isn't that almost the opposite of being a Paladin?  The Paladin upholds the law, the law that you just took into your own hands, or circumvented--however you want to think about it.In the same way, say the Goodguy King is responsible for your loved one's death, so you go strike up a bargain with the Lich King, and now everything good is your foe.  Now, this is definitely blackgaurd territory, not antipaladin, but the original question was 'can someone think of themselves as evil and be Paladin-like?'--and I, at least, think the answer is 'yes.'  Someone can be perfectly aware that what they are doing is wrong and do it anyway.  You can be honorable and just and all that, and still want to kill the Goodguy King, which, however wrong you know it is, you have a burning need to do.That makes total sense to me, and in D&D, with its grades of alignment, I think that is how most people would rule it.  I don't use alignments though, which couples well with not using the Paladin as a core class, since smite evil would be fairly useless without that guage.That's true, it is a caricature.  I've never actually seen a game like this, but I assume, from many people's stories on this board, that it is all too common.  Still, if some mindless--or even mindful--creature is harassing the local folk, would hunting it down and killing it always be the good thing to do?  Well, don't answer that, since we aren't discussing specific moral views. Let's put it this way: since the dominant moral (and social) compass in D&D is basically Western, and part of that is a stance against animal cruelty and, in many places, the death penalty, wouldn't it make more sense for adventuring parties to carefully move the savage animal to some part of its natural habitat far away from people, or to try to reform the misguided Kobolds?  Certainly there are cases where fullscale warfare is the day's special, but a lot of adventures seem to me unnecessarily brutalUnfortunately I don't really have time to read story hours, but they definitely sound interesting.  I think, though, that people who go the trouble of writing their campaigns up are automatically 1000% more likely to be running a more interesting and thoughtful game than the average group of friends, who just play for a little fun now and then, not to tackle serious issues or be overly realistic.Right.  Both are logical approaches to morality (though Kant works hard to derive a logical basis for Christian morality, to the point of being absurd in some cases, not lying to the axe murderer being the most famous).  I'm afraid I don't remember Aristotle's ethics being remotely similar to Aquinas', though it would seem to me that in Aquinas' case the telos would be God.  For Aristotle I think it would be The Good, but again that would be relying on assumptions of what The Good is, i.e. The Good is what is best, what is best is what is most right, etc.  It's an epistemological ouroboros you can't really get clear of.Absolutely true.  This is why I am against the Paladin as a core class too, which begs the question, what did I even have in mind posting to this thread in the first place?  And the answer is.. I have no idea.. in my best Eddie Izzard voice.No, I'd say you're spot on.  I've seen a lot of MMORPG's, none of which involved any roles being played.But, like you said before, that moral imperative would be low in the ranks of moral imperatives in your world.  And anyway, if the two nations were sufficiently Good (and were Good an absolute) that both fielded Paladins, I don't think any disputes between them would ever come to blows, with the exception maybe of border skirmishes between villagers.  There wouldn't be any conflict involving armies though.Well, the nature of Aristotle's definition of tragedy (i.e. Greek tragedy) is like that anyway <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> .  There is no conflict here if there is a hierarchy of moral imperatives.  Antigone should simply do whichever ranks higher, and the same goes for Creon.  Of course that hierarchy doesn't exist in Greek Tragedy: Does Orestes avenge his father, though it means killing his mother?  Just to be relevant, say the Paladin's mother kills his father.  If anyone else had killed his father, he would cut him down and that would be it.  But.. his mother?  Or say it was an uncle: is Hamlet something of an anti-paladin?</blockquote>

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