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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9394322" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Lowercase l law is, by definition, teleological. It needs a purpose in order to do or be anything. A law always has to be set for doing something. Good may be what that something is, or not.Goodness is a goal. It is not a means; it is senseless to say "well just do Good, 4head!" Goodness is, by definition, an evaluation of something. It judges means, no question! But it judges those means by whether or not they pursue Good. Same goes for Evil. This applies regardless of which of the three theories of ethical value one might favor.Consequentialist ethics says that the good is that which causes the most benefit (and/or removes the most harm) to relevant beings: hence, we must evaluate various methods for how much harm they remove or benefit they provide, by some metric (pain and pleasure being the primary choice for most consequentialists.) Deontology says that the good arises from fulfilling our pre-existing duties, most famously as Kant's categorical imperative, which provides a standard (or, rather, three standards intended to be equivalent) for evaluating various methods to determine which ones are acceptable and which ones aren't. Virtue ethics (my personal preference) is nearly summarized by Aristotle himself: "Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feelings or in actions, while Virtue finds and chooses the mean." That is, Virtue is choosing the correct moderate position between extremes, conditioned by the specific situation; what might be cowardly (deficient) in one situation is brave (virtuous) in another and foolhardy (excessive) in a third.Those things are tools, methods, by which one achieves something. A Lawful Neutral person does not particularly care what end those things pursue, so long as they pursue them effectively. A Lawful Good person would ask, "What are the church's beliefs? What does the structure accomplish? Why was it built? What does the group value?" Etc. If the answers to those questions are worthy—if they seek good ends—then the LG person will support them with all their heart, while keeping an eye out for faults that must be corrected. LE wants to sate selfish desire and see those "beneath" them kept in their place; a structure that inhibits their (allegedly) deserved rise is bad and wrong, while a structure that takes away from their "leaders" and gives to the LE person is worthy and correct. As above, they will ask what the thing pursues, and why. Lawful Neutral does not care what the tools of law are used for, only that the tools do what they were intended to do effectively. An ineffective tool is a bad tool that should be replaced with a worthy tool.Edit: Missed replying to this part. See, I completely agree! But all of those things: individual people and their behavior/history/presentation, vs organizations? Those are approaches or methods. Things you can rely upon or engage with in order to achieve some particular end. They are not in and of themselves ends--unless you're taking a specifically Kantian deontological approach, at which point, you're already committing to Good to begin with. (Kant is pretty clearly on the Good side, and I'd say it's pretty hard to argue that his philosophy is anything other than Lawful Good in intent, given the whole "duty" focus of it.)Not at all. Good can absolutely approve of betrayal, if it is a defection away from Evil. "Murder" is the unlawful killing of another, which both LE and LG care about; CG does not care about whether a killing is lawful, it cares about whether the killing is warranted, laws be damned. Likewise theft; CG characters are quite happy to steal in the name of good (consider Robin Hood), while LE characters, at least my favorite ones, will go out of their way to restore a stolen item, not because they don't see the advantage, but because theft is an unacceptable tool in the pursuit of their goals, even though those goals are Evil. Again, Evil and Good are about evaluating whether something is worthy of pursuit or not. Law and Chaos are about which tools are most effectively used to pursue those ends.A Good person won't do an evil thing, whether or not it is effective. A Lawful person will favor a structured, regimented, formal approach if it is available and does not require them to disobey their morals. A Lawful Good person will oppose an evil law, despite the fact that it is a law, because evil laws are not acceptable. That is quite clearly choosing between methods of achieving Good.Not even close, so I'm not going to even engage further with this one.Nah. He's NG pretending to be CN. He repeatedly saves people he doesn't need to, and Shepherd Book barely needs to speak a word to get Mal to do the right thing for the right reasons. He's a bitter man who tried to do the right thing in the past and got burned for it, but beneath that bitterness, he still has the heart of a hero. He wants to do good. His goals are still good.I'm not seeing how this makes the Empire his goal. His goal is tyranny, with himself at the head. His method is force: obey or die. That sounds like an evil goal pursued with discipline and structure.So...the structure was a method of achieving his goals. Which were evil.Not really.Good is a direction on the plane of meaning. Necessarily, it expects that the paths you walk must point in that direction, so it evaluates paths. But it is not a path itself. Law is a type of road. Roads may point in any direction. Only those which point in a Good direction (or at least which do not ever point away from Good) are acceptable to the Lawful Good person. The Lawful Neutral person does not care which direction the road points. She only cares that the roads are well-made and well-maintained. Necessarily, an LG person cares about both the direction and the maintenance. An LE person likewise cares about the direction and the maintenance, but they favor the opposite direction. CG doesn't give an aerial coitus whether you use a road or a game trail or literally just hike cross-country, but you'd better always be heading towards the Good as best you can.</blockquote>

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