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<blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9539875" data-attributes="member: 7035894"><p>The problem that folks keep running into is that good and evil are subjective concepts, yet the alignment system treats them as if they are objective...while defining them in such vague terms that they are, in fact, still subjective.</p><p></p><p>You <em>could</em> make good and evil fully objective in D&D Land by using virtues ethics and prescribing a very specific list of do's and don'ts for each of the nine segments and then stating that, as a matter of the rules of this game, these specific acts, and only these specific acts, are consistent with Lawful Good, or whatever. Gary Gygax sort of hinted in that direction, but it turns out that, because good and evil are in actuality subjective concepts, nobody can ever entirely agree on such lists.</p><p></p><p>Which is exactly what is playing out in this thread: people are stuck arguing about what really constitutes good and evil. It's not a solvable problem, so if you want to use the alignment wheel you have to accept a fair degree of hand-waving and let every table come to their own consensus. Or you could just do away with the alignment wheel because the game plays just as well (better, IMO) without it, and you get to avoid endless debates about whether a particular action is Good or Evil.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Clint_L, post: 9539875, member: 7035894"] The problem that folks keep running into is that good and evil are subjective concepts, yet the alignment system treats them as if they are objective...while defining them in such vague terms that they are, in fact, still subjective. You [I]could[/I] make good and evil fully objective in D&D Land by using virtues ethics and prescribing a very specific list of do's and don'ts for each of the nine segments and then stating that, as a matter of the rules of this game, these specific acts, and only these specific acts, are consistent with Lawful Good, or whatever. Gary Gygax sort of hinted in that direction, but it turns out that, because good and evil are in actuality subjective concepts, nobody can ever entirely agree on such lists. Which is exactly what is playing out in this thread: people are stuck arguing about what really constitutes good and evil. It's not a solvable problem, so if you want to use the alignment wheel you have to accept a fair degree of hand-waving and let every table come to their own consensus. Or you could just do away with the alignment wheel because the game plays just as well (better, IMO) without it, and you get to avoid endless debates about whether a particular action is Good or Evil. [/QUOTE]
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