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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1927798" data-attributes="member: 3146">The difficulties with this idea fall in the interactions between species with various "natures."For instance, humans, orcs, and elves, can all interbreed and produce viable offspring. The argument then that they have an essentially different nature will run into some difficulties: what is the nature of a half-orc? Is a human with a little bit of orc blood (a quarter orc) different in nature than a normal human? How about a human with a little bit of elf blood (1/8 or 1/16 elf)?Second, it provides difficulties WRT the interactions of various races. There is an intellectual difficulty of meaning similar to the difficulties posed to nominalist divine command theories of morality by the Euthyphro dilemma. One of those problems in common philosophy is this: if the only reason that actions are good is because God or the gods command them, then how can it be meaningful to say that God or the gods are good? If that means that God or the gods act in accordance with his/their commands for himself/themselves (as distinct from his/their commands to humans), doesn't it render the prase meaningless? There are answers to this argument that have been explored in the thousands of years that Plato wrote Euthyphro and the dilemma isn't a logical dilemma WRT other intelligent races (since their will does not define good for them), but it is still difficult to maintain a useful notion of good while, at the same time, saying that it is "good" (ie: in accordance with their nature) for orcs to rape, murder, betray, lie, steal, and pillage, for elves to be irresponsible, for dwarves to be responsible, and for humans to be--well, fill in the blank. (Though it should be pointed out that, in an essentialist scheme, there is no particular reason that nature should be the same for an entire species; many past philosophers and even a number of current ones have maintained that men and women have essentially different natures. I imagine this demonstrates that the difficulty in defining what is "natural" for a human is not any bit easier than the difficulty of defining an abstract, Kantian, Christian, or Stoic Good).Furthermore, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense that the natural and unnatural descriptors would be the relevant ones for defining opposition in a D&D world. A paladin  that is even close to the one typically imagined--and indeed, any champion of humanity would want to smite the natural orcs rather than the unnatural ones. An orc that goes against its essential nature and acts according to what would be good for a human might be slain by a paladin or champion of humanity, but it's the orc who acts according to his nature and who rapes, and pillages who is the bigger threat. In order to get a convincing "who smites whom" list, I think you would need to base smiting on principles opposed by the nature of the smiter rather than the nature of the smitee. So a human paladin would smite those, whatever their race, who depart from the essential good of humanity rather than those who depart from their own essential goods.On the whole, this idea strikes me, more as a way of explaining some of the alignment tendencies of different creatures--for instance, if orcs do have an essential nature that means that they are, in a sense, supposed to rape, murder, betray, and pillage, etc, it makes sense for them to be usually chaotic evil. (In fact, some of Frodo's statements in LotR (book, not movie) could be interpreted as indicating that this was the explanation for the evil of orcs in the books: they were created according to the nature of their creator and thus were, in a sense, naturally evil).</blockquote>

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