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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 1924183" data-attributes="member: 27012">As I've pointed out elsewhere, the PHB/SRD uses the word "innocent" in several places, though not consistently.  It says:"Good characters and creatures protect innocent life. Evil characters and creatures debase or destroy innocent life, whether for fun or profit."After two paragraphs that describe Good and Evil without that qualifier (after it has been established), it continues:"People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others. Neutral people are committed to others by personal relationships."In other words, the type of hurting, oppressing, and killing that the PHB/SRD are talking about involve killing the innocent.  That is, walking up to somebody that is minding their own business and not doing any harm to anybody else and beating them up, stealing their goods, enslaving them, or killing them.  It's not talking about killing in self defense, it's not talking about capital punishment for mass murder, it's not talking about slaying an Evil dragon that's burned a village to a crisp.  It's talking about hurting, oppressing, and killing nice people who haven't done anything to warrant such a response.  And since Neutral people simply have "compunctions against killing the innocent" rather than any absolute prohibition against it, I'd argue that what really differentiates a person who is Evil from a person who is Neutral is the absence of any compunction to hurt, oppress, or kill the innocent and, likely, a compulsion to do so in many cases.In fact, the alignment description goes on to say, "Animals and other creatures incapable of moral action are neutral, rather than good or evil. Even deadly vipers and tigers that eat people are neutral because they lack the capacity for morally right or wrong behavior."  If killing were Evil regardless of the moral context of the killing, as some people have been claiming, then every murderous animal would be Evil, not Neutral.As for the BoED and BoVD definitions, I've looked them over and I think they miss the boat in several key ways.  In fact, I think D&D has a mixed mind about alignment in such a way that it simply confuses the matter.  On the one hand, it wants to deal with absolutes and make alignment a part of a person's nature while on the other hand, it wants to make alignment a matter of moral choice and qualifies the alignment of many monsters suggesting that they might actually be of any alignment.  I think that's more the product of the current disdain over the idea that a sentient creature might be born Good or Evil and have no choice about it than any attempt to create a coherent moral system.  On the one hand, D&D embraces the archaic concept of the Evil species of monsters while on the other hand, it embraces the more current idea of free moral choice.You are making a straw man argument.  Creating an absurdly simple definition of Good and Evil and then pointing out how it doesn't work doesn't prove that black and white morality will always play out badly.  It simply proves that absurdly simple definitions of Good and Evil don't work out very well.  Solution?  Don't use absurdly simple definitions of Good and Evil as the basis of your black and white morality.</blockquote>

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