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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4916252" data-attributes="member: 4937">A lawful Good Tyranny would have two features:1) It would be doing very little if anything which you could morally object to.2) It would leave its citizens very little if any personal freedom.I think to begin with you have to very carefully separate out your feelings about what is 'good', from the chaotic good stance that 'good' begins with personal freedoms.  And in particular, I think you have to toss out the impulse to want to demonize moralizers as hypocrits.  There is plenty to skewer LG's types with, without resorting to saying that they are just as bad as LE ones only they are less honest about it.  I think we have to recognize that impulse as springing from a world view that is itself characterizable as an alignment.  That's the hard part of an alignment discussion.  If we let ourselves define 'good' from our own subjective position, then we'll define NG as what we believe and characterize everything else accordingly.  If you happen to be (just to pick on them) a libertarian that holds personal freedom as the highest good, you are going to tend to characterize all lawful/social/orderly impulses not designed to promote personal freedom as being the worst of evils.A lawful good tyranny makes many many many very reasonable laws for the good of its citizens.  To put it in modern terms, a lawful good tyranny makes an infinite number of 'motorcycle helmet' laws.  A LG tyranny doesn't believe that there is anything like a victimless crime, nor that there is any limit to what the state ought to be able to tell people to do for their own good.  If the law promotes goodness and order, that it is onerous and petty doesn't even come into consideration.  On one hand, such a state is benevolent and prosperous and just and fair.  On the other hand, most of us (not having strong lawful impulses) would find life under such a regime extremely challenging.Things we'd likely find illegal that would strike us as utterly unreasonable:1) Sedition: Speaking out against the state would be a crime.  And no, the state wouldn't be using this to conceal its hidden nefarious schemes.  The LG bureaucrats would be zealous in rooting out corrupt officials.  It's more basic than that - you couldn't complain about the fine you recieve for parking a wagon with wheels higher than the king's waist within 12' of the city wall (or whatever other obscure law you'd find yourself breaking) without being suspected of being subversive.  You'd be expected at all times to be courteous and cooperative with the authorities, who afterall, really were serving the greater good.2) Every aspect of your life would be regulated: There would be a tendancy for the government to find reasons why everything should be done a certain way.  There would be a tendancy for the law to cover everything.  There would be a vanishingly small number of situations which personal choice was considered a valid reason for doing something.  So, for example, everyone probably would eat the same thing at every meal, and it would require some sort of waiver to eat a non-government approved meal.  Consumption of wine would be illegal except at government approved times.  Indeed, consumption of anything not at a government approved time would be illegal.  You cooked your meal in bacon fat instead of olive oil, on a thursday - time for a fine and a sit down with a magistrate on how all the food laws were for your own and societies greater good.3) Taxes would be extremely high: The government would provide just about everything for you, and you would have no reason to buy something (because you have no choices about what to buy anyway) so most of your labor would be turned over to the state for everyone's good.  Indeed, technically, you probably wouldn't own anything, but instead were simply borrowing property from the government.4) Free expression would be frowned upon.  Art serves the interests of the state, of glorifying the state, and of glorifying the things the state approves of.  Art for art's sake would be suspect.  Art which even incidently glorifies the artist, the individual, or something that the state doesn't approve of is probably subversive, and the artist if informed of this would be expected to cheerfully destroy his incidently dangerous works.  If you have the slighest individualistic impulse, you'd probably find all artistic expression in such a society to be ultimately very banal and unsatisfying.5) A fantasy LG society would have absolutely no qualms about squashing free will magically, if doing so prevented evil.  Criminals wouldn't merely be killed - which might strike us as harsh but just.  Criminals would, depending on the severity of their crime, be magically or surgically lobotomized, dominated, cursed, mind wiped, memores altered, charmed, and otherwise forced to behave morally - all for their own good of course.  All of this would of course be undertaken with real and not feigned regret and tenderness toward the criminal.6) Freedoms in general wouldn't be prized.  The general argument would run that freedom isn't valuable or desirable, that what people really need is security, stability, and prosperity.  The argument would run that freedom is really illusionary, and that people in free societies aren't really free but that they are predated upon by the powerful and so are less free than they are in the noble LG society.  And so, the society would tell you who your friends are, what job you should have, where you should live, and so forth.  And the really grating thing is that they really would care for your happiness.  You wouldn't be sacrificed as a cog for the greater good.  They'd pick the things you liked, that you'd be good at, where you should be happy, but they just wouldn't give you any choice about it or any freedom to find that out for yourself.Real world examples of anything like this would be very hard to come by at the level of a complete society, because real world people are seldom as moral and honorable as fantasy people.  In my opinion, no real society so organized would stay good for long, on the simple grounds that power would rapidly corrupt the powerful however good their initial intentions.  In fantasy terms, such a society would be like if Gandalf took the One Ring from Frodo, and set about creating a just society with Gandalf as its all-powerful moral busybody.  It might be good for a while, but it would be a very transient good, because Gandalf wouldn't stay good with that power at his command for long.I also should note that this wouldn't even be considered an idealized society even by LG standards.  Most LG's would probably consider this a society turned far too down the road to Lawful Nuetrality with too much law and not enough good.PS: It should be pretty easy from this to see how to create a CG society and skewer it:1) It would be doing very little that was morally objectionable.2) It would do very little or nothing to gaurantee stability, order, security, or prosperity.</blockquote>

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