Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="spinozajack" data-source="post: 6633467" data-attributes="member: 6794198">Lawful evil is indeed the worst kind of evil, because all that's done in its name is inherently accepted due to its lawfulness, so many people simply look the other way. Heck, people look the other way even when their government blatantly breaks its own internal laws (NSA spying anyone? General warrants mean 4th Amendment = gone). One could easily say many aspects of many governments have inherently "evil" laws. For example, voter disenfranchisement, targetting people of color and throwing them in jail by the buttloads for petty crimes, making people to to war and die horribly against their wishes to profit munitions companies who sell to both sides (definitely evil, and definitely illegal, yet done constantly). I can't think of anything more perfectly representing a LE society than one in which poor people have no choice but to go and die to make rich people richer for no other reason. Ok, maybe the Mayans ripping people's hearts out by the thousands then kicking their still alive bodies down hundreds of stairs along future victims, to make it rain again by appeasing some very evil-looking demon gods, and where the priests wear human skin during those sacrifices. Cortes was evil, for sure too, but was he more evil than those he was killing? I don't think so. If anything, that was just LE vs LE societies. If you boil it down, most societies are built on genocide and war, and then maintaining a social order which benefits the elites at the expense of everyone else, and those are pretty evil. So my thinking is, society is in itself pretty evil. It's 2015 and laws are are still being made to make it possible discriminate against those who don't conform to gender or sexuality norms. Those are pretty evil. Why sugar coat it? Laws, at best, are amoral. At worst, definitely evil. And sometimes good, yes. So they run the spectrum of good vs evil. Gygax was on to something, albeit you can't reduce morality or personal behavior to a 9 point or 10-point list, let alone a society on the whole. Except for Nazis, as you wrote <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> But Germany during Nazi era (and maybe even because of it) did create many wondrous and good things, that are still used today. Many of their scientists were hired by the US to win the space race. That I would say is evil, but maybe in realpolitik, evil is only what's necessary to achieve a goal. Lawfulness can definitely be used to maintain a strict and inhuman social order, and often is. Laws don't really care about morality or justice per se. But they can cause great harm (the Draft, internment camps, disenfranchisement, discrimination), and great good (Voting Rights Act).</blockquote>

Verification