The idea for this post came out of a discussion on another thread. The post makes a suggestion as to what the focus of play should be in a game using 9-point alignment to explore moral/political themes.
First, I need to present a take on 9-point alignment, based on a fairly close reading of the 1st ed AD&D rulebooks (supplemented a little bit by the 3E SRD).
In the 9-point scheme, good is about fostering human wellbeing, and also beauty. When it comes to wellbeing, Gygax doesn't distinguish between economistic conceptions of welfare, happiness, rights and dignity. This means that there is scope for disagreement over what is truly good, but the alignment framework doesn't shed any light on this disagreement, nor help set it up as any sort of focus for play.
Evil, on the other hand, is the disregard of (others') wellbeing, and of beauty, even the scorning of these things. As Gygax puts it, for the evil person "purpose is the determinant": the evil person do whatever is required in the pursuit of self-interest, and does not recognise the rights and wellbeing of others as any sort of limit to his/her will.
I think it's fairly clear that, within alignment as set out in Gygax's rulebooks "evil" is not a distinct moral outlook, but rather a failure to take the demands of morality seriously. Which means that good vs evil is not a particularly suitable focus for exploration within this scheme, as it already provides the answer: evil is evil, and the proper thing to do is to pursue those human values, plus beauty, that constitute the good.
Law and chaos are considerably harder to pin down in Gygax's scheme, because he doesn't deal with what has been the most contentious issue in modern debates around institutional design, namely, what is the role of freedom and "invisible hand" mechanisms in generating effective systems of social order? But as I'll explain that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Turning now to the focus of moral exploration within this framework: it's law vs chaos.
Roughly, the LG are those who believe that social order will foster welfare and beauty (and accept at least some interpersonal trade-offs); the CG are those believe that individual self-realisation is the best way to foster welfare and beauty (and are more doubtful about interpersonal trade-offs, although clearly think that individuals owe duties of forbearance to one another). The 9-point alignment system frames this as an interesting and viable focus of exploration, to be worked out through play. The fact that "law" and "chaos" are quite loose in their characterisations is a help rather than a hindrance for these purposes.
The other alignments then label positions that are relevant to this question of law vs chaos as the foundation of wellbeing and beauty.
LN, as I read Gygax's alignment descriptions, is rules fetishism. Hence, it's a type of moral failing of the LG: the conviction that wellbeing can be maximised by social order gets corrupted into an obsession with order for its own sake. It's the vice of bureacrats. Because LN people pursue and practice order in a way that severs its connection to wellbeing, they are ultimately a cause of human misery. But they are not evil, because they are not just pursuing self-interest. Even the chief bureaucrat is pursuing something external to him/her, which s/he accepts as a limit to his/her will, and hence is not evil. It's just that the thing s/he's pursuing is not wellbeing - it's social organisation per se. So s/he's making people miserable, but not because s/he's evil.
The LE,on the other hand, are those for whom purpose is the determinant, and think the best way for them and their friends to get what they want is via social hierarchies with them at the top.
In this law vs chaos campaign, the CG point to the LN as showing that law is an impediment to good, and to the LE as displaying the true face of order and hierarchy: a source of domination which prevents those who are dominated from realising wellbeing.
But the existence of the LN and LE doesn't settle the conflict in favour of CG, because there are vices on the chaotic side too. The CE are those who favour individual self-aggrandisement above all - they are willing and lusty participants in a Hobbesian war of all against all. The LG point to the CE as showing the true consequences of individualism - an unwillingness or even ability to recognise that others are a source of duty and constraint.
CN is freedom-fetishism. It's distinct from CE, because the CN recognises others as a limit to his/her will - their freedom, too, has value. But the CN people doesn't properly honour the duties owed to others (eg in virtue of those others' rights). CN is a failing of the CG.
This also brings out that the CG are slightly more lawful than the CN: they at least acknowledge duties owed by one individual to another, which is a type of minimal sociality/order. And the LG can point to this in arguing against the CG. (I think there is a lack of grid symmetry here - whereas CG is more lawful than CN, which implies that CN is more chaotic than CG, and CE yet more chaotic than CN, there is nothing like this on the other side of the grid. LG, LN and LE are all equally lawful, in that all are about social organisation. They just favour different approaches to organisation.)
When alignment is approach in this way, I don't think that NG and NE are very interesting. NG is basically CG-lite - they are the individualists who are a little more tolerant of the odd bit of social order. And NE are pretty hard to tell from CE, as they also seek their own self-interest without regard for others, and don't see social hierarchies as particularly important for doing that.
Finally we get the True Neutrals. These are believers in the importance of balance and harmony. They favour nature over artifice. In terms of real-world intellectual tradition, Stoics and some strands of Taoism and Zen are the models. There is a risk of overlap between TN and CG, because the rejection of artifice and the pursuit of self-realisation can look pretty similar.
Still, in the law vs chaos campaign the True Neutral are observers who sit outside the conviction that human choices can make a difference to human welfare or the creation of beauty. They probably work better as NPCs than PCs, because they don't have a stake in answering the question that would drive this campaign, namely, is it social order or self-realisation that will produce human happiness.
I have no idea if this has any connection to what Gygax had in mind in writing up 9-point alignment, but I think it could be an interesting campaign.
I've never quite tried this in a game, though I've come close in two games. In one, the PCs ended up rejecting the divine order of the cosmos, on the grounds that it was causing human misery rather than human wellbeing; but they didn't move to self-realisation as the alternative, but rather established their own, superior, social and ultimately cosmological order. In the other - my current 4e game - the issue of divine order has come up again, but its primordial chaos/change vs divine order/stasis that is the conflict, rather than social order vs self-realisation.
The bottom line, in my view, is that an alignment system with good and evil alignments has already answered the question of what the ultimate goal of human striving should be. So all the action is over the suitability of means. Law vs chaos is a conflict over those means: social order vs self-realisation.
First, I need to present a take on 9-point alignment, based on a fairly close reading of the 1st ed AD&D rulebooks (supplemented a little bit by the 3E SRD).
In the 9-point scheme, good is about fostering human wellbeing, and also beauty. When it comes to wellbeing, Gygax doesn't distinguish between economistic conceptions of welfare, happiness, rights and dignity. This means that there is scope for disagreement over what is truly good, but the alignment framework doesn't shed any light on this disagreement, nor help set it up as any sort of focus for play.
Evil, on the other hand, is the disregard of (others') wellbeing, and of beauty, even the scorning of these things. As Gygax puts it, for the evil person "purpose is the determinant": the evil person do whatever is required in the pursuit of self-interest, and does not recognise the rights and wellbeing of others as any sort of limit to his/her will.
I think it's fairly clear that, within alignment as set out in Gygax's rulebooks "evil" is not a distinct moral outlook, but rather a failure to take the demands of morality seriously. Which means that good vs evil is not a particularly suitable focus for exploration within this scheme, as it already provides the answer: evil is evil, and the proper thing to do is to pursue those human values, plus beauty, that constitute the good.
Law and chaos are considerably harder to pin down in Gygax's scheme, because he doesn't deal with what has been the most contentious issue in modern debates around institutional design, namely, what is the role of freedom and "invisible hand" mechanisms in generating effective systems of social order? But as I'll explain that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Turning now to the focus of moral exploration within this framework: it's law vs chaos.
Roughly, the LG are those who believe that social order will foster welfare and beauty (and accept at least some interpersonal trade-offs); the CG are those believe that individual self-realisation is the best way to foster welfare and beauty (and are more doubtful about interpersonal trade-offs, although clearly think that individuals owe duties of forbearance to one another). The 9-point alignment system frames this as an interesting and viable focus of exploration, to be worked out through play. The fact that "law" and "chaos" are quite loose in their characterisations is a help rather than a hindrance for these purposes.
The other alignments then label positions that are relevant to this question of law vs chaos as the foundation of wellbeing and beauty.
LN, as I read Gygax's alignment descriptions, is rules fetishism. Hence, it's a type of moral failing of the LG: the conviction that wellbeing can be maximised by social order gets corrupted into an obsession with order for its own sake. It's the vice of bureacrats. Because LN people pursue and practice order in a way that severs its connection to wellbeing, they are ultimately a cause of human misery. But they are not evil, because they are not just pursuing self-interest. Even the chief bureaucrat is pursuing something external to him/her, which s/he accepts as a limit to his/her will, and hence is not evil. It's just that the thing s/he's pursuing is not wellbeing - it's social organisation per se. So s/he's making people miserable, but not because s/he's evil.
The LE,on the other hand, are those for whom purpose is the determinant, and think the best way for them and their friends to get what they want is via social hierarchies with them at the top.
In this law vs chaos campaign, the CG point to the LN as showing that law is an impediment to good, and to the LE as displaying the true face of order and hierarchy: a source of domination which prevents those who are dominated from realising wellbeing.
But the existence of the LN and LE doesn't settle the conflict in favour of CG, because there are vices on the chaotic side too. The CE are those who favour individual self-aggrandisement above all - they are willing and lusty participants in a Hobbesian war of all against all. The LG point to the CE as showing the true consequences of individualism - an unwillingness or even ability to recognise that others are a source of duty and constraint.
CN is freedom-fetishism. It's distinct from CE, because the CN recognises others as a limit to his/her will - their freedom, too, has value. But the CN people doesn't properly honour the duties owed to others (eg in virtue of those others' rights). CN is a failing of the CG.
This also brings out that the CG are slightly more lawful than the CN: they at least acknowledge duties owed by one individual to another, which is a type of minimal sociality/order. And the LG can point to this in arguing against the CG. (I think there is a lack of grid symmetry here - whereas CG is more lawful than CN, which implies that CN is more chaotic than CG, and CE yet more chaotic than CN, there is nothing like this on the other side of the grid. LG, LN and LE are all equally lawful, in that all are about social organisation. They just favour different approaches to organisation.)
When alignment is approach in this way, I don't think that NG and NE are very interesting. NG is basically CG-lite - they are the individualists who are a little more tolerant of the odd bit of social order. And NE are pretty hard to tell from CE, as they also seek their own self-interest without regard for others, and don't see social hierarchies as particularly important for doing that.
Finally we get the True Neutrals. These are believers in the importance of balance and harmony. They favour nature over artifice. In terms of real-world intellectual tradition, Stoics and some strands of Taoism and Zen are the models. There is a risk of overlap between TN and CG, because the rejection of artifice and the pursuit of self-realisation can look pretty similar.
Still, in the law vs chaos campaign the True Neutral are observers who sit outside the conviction that human choices can make a difference to human welfare or the creation of beauty. They probably work better as NPCs than PCs, because they don't have a stake in answering the question that would drive this campaign, namely, is it social order or self-realisation that will produce human happiness.
I have no idea if this has any connection to what Gygax had in mind in writing up 9-point alignment, but I think it could be an interesting campaign.
I've never quite tried this in a game, though I've come close in two games. In one, the PCs ended up rejecting the divine order of the cosmos, on the grounds that it was causing human misery rather than human wellbeing; but they didn't move to self-realisation as the alternative, but rather established their own, superior, social and ultimately cosmological order. In the other - my current 4e game - the issue of divine order has come up again, but its primordial chaos/change vs divine order/stasis that is the conflict, rather than social order vs self-realisation.
The bottom line, in my view, is that an alignment system with good and evil alignments has already answered the question of what the ultimate goal of human striving should be. So all the action is over the suitability of means. Law vs chaos is a conflict over those means: social order vs self-realisation.
"What is good?" is a legitimate question for a character to ask, because we could be talking about greatest good for the greatest number, gross national happiness, rights and dignity, etc. I'd always thought D&D embraced a more absolute morality, but the way you describe it, Gygax's didn't pin down what sense D&D refers to well-being, which is more indicative of a grayscale morality than a black and white morality.
