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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 766278" data-attributes="member: 3146">I can only manage a partial response at the moment--Sigil has some good things to say too though.An absolute morality is perhaps further than I'd be willing to go. I think you could make a case for an objective morality on an impartial observer theory like Hume appears to espouse. That would require Hume to be right about human nature (and the sympathetic impulse) though and it would be undermined by the existence of other forms of rational life (orcs, goblins, troglodytes, etc). For that matter, it's not exactly clear how the presence of inherently (even if it were only an inherent predisposition) good races (elves and dwarves) or inherently evil races would effect Kantian a priori derivations of morality. Would it be obvious that it's wrong to use other persons as a means rather than an end in a world with races of Djinni, Efreet, orcs, Archons, and devils? (Real world religious metaphysical systems do sometimes include some of these things but usually in a distinctly different way than the default D&D cosmology seems to assume).In general, I think it becomes harder to justify non-divine morality, the more you change the world--just as it becomes harder to justify divinely anchored theories of morality the more you change God. But that shouldn't really surprise anyone. If morality is subjective then changing the situation obviously changes it. And if morality is objective, why should it be disconnected from the web of other objective facts? It should hardly be considered surprising that any real-world system of objective morality doesn't plausibly fit into a world that is dramatically dissimilar in morally significant ways.The title rings a bell but the story escapes me. . . .Tertullian's moral evaluation of Diogenes isn't what's in question though. The question is whether Diogenes values something that is evil for its own sake or whether Diogenes' misvaluation of something that is good has led him into evil.Altering your example somewhat, if we suppose Diogenes murders a dozen innocents because the emperor threatened to kill him otherwise, he is an evil man. And his following of logic led him into that evil. But that doesn't mean Diogenes is engaged in a disinterested pursuit of evil. As it happens, he is actually engaged in the pursuit of something that is, prima facia, good: his own life. Tertullian doesn't need to say that valuing one's own life is evil in order to say that Diogenes has done evil and is, in fact, evil. He just needs to say that Diogenes prizes his own life too highly and that led Diogenes into evil.But as far as I know, the serial killer doesn't actually value murder for itself. See below for the continuationThat does sound like it'd be creepy to see. However, even your description of it doesn't make it sound like he valued evil as an abstract principle. According to your description, he murdered for two reasons: Fun and Money.Now I don't think that either fun or money are inherently evil. I like fun and I like having fun and would say the same for money (although money is really a proxy for other things that I can get with it). As I see it, the Ice Man has a perverted idea of fun.  Thus the particular kind of fun he values (presumably, the pleasure of killing people) is evil. However, he only values it because of its connection to something that is good (in this case, pleasure or fun).That's true. However, I think Contact's story hour is a reasonable case study for the average group of friends' game because the particular version of interest and thoughtfulness that his story hours explore are the conventions of the fantasy role playing genre (particularly his Champions of the Risen Goddess story hour). The characters, especially Taran act like the archetypical beer and pretzels "heroes" and embody their ethos. In one of the recent installments, for instance, Taran captures a bugbear and interrogates him on the recent happenings in the city of the Spider Queen. The conversation turns to professional matters and Taran makes a comment to the effect that "it's not right. You kill someone and you expect to be able to take their treasure. It's the natural order of things. . ." The bugbear commiserates. The conversation finishes with Taran asking "Do you have any treasure?"</blockquote>

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