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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wayside" data-source="post: 945918" data-attributes="member: 8394">In a perfect system of law (consistent with the good) it would be fine.  The system would be sufficient to prove guilt or exonerate of it.  Look at our own system: how many alleged criminals are found not guilty, but still have their lives ruined by the fact of having been tried?  How many people have been imprisoned and even executed for crimes they didn't commit?If you want to say acts are only evil if governed by evil intents then you can.  That's an opinion.  I don't share it.  I take the fact that a supposedly good intent can lead to an evil act as evidence for that intent's being ill-conceived.If I lived in a world I believed to be morally absolute, my attempt to discover that absolute would be predicated on a belief that good intents cannot lead to evil acts; hence I would find prosecution to be wrong.In real life, of course, I'm far too vindictive a person to succeed in this endeavor <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 that's a central question to absolutists isn't it... is it good to punish evil?  Of course there's no clear answer to this question.Etymological fallacy <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> I make a distinction between establishing a law and establishing law, establishing an order and establishing order.  The proper law, the proper order, ought to be discoverable according to good, neutral, or evil (in an absolute world); the law according to good, well, nobody agrees on.  The law according to neutrality, surprisingly similar.  The law according to evil, might makes right, or something to that effect.The physically weak will of course exersize intellectual, manipulative, political might by trying to build power structures to support them.  They are not trying to establish order though.Selflessness is an insufficient concept to attribute the good to.  It certainly is held to be a virtue in most systems.The system as it is defined is inconsistent.  It isn't thought out well in the sense I would expect a book of Richard Wollheim's or Bernard Williams' to be, which is fine as this is D&D, not moral psychology.There are a few things wrong with this view.  Mostly, all moral codes are written in vento et rapida aqua anyway.  As we've already said, nobody agrees on the right moral code, or on the good.  Whether the DM invents some arbitrary absolute that he can know to be true in his world or leaves it blank, nothing changes for the PC's.  They're still falling through the wind or swimming in the running water.And chances are, the DM is not going to make his absolute absolutely consistent.  If it were even possible, it would require more intense thought than anyone's going to invest.  And after all that, it does nothing for the PC's, who do not need an absolute to justify their beliefs any more than the people who posted to this thread do.  An absolute does not need to exist in order for it to be believed in any more than a god does.Then in an absolute system, one or both of them is/are wrong.  Not very godly.It is a system, it does not have meaning.  What you discover is the system itself, not any indication drawn from it.  It is not a broad value system, it is a system of values.  Part of the problem of a moral absolute is that the good is defined in relation to iself.  The good is good.  Why is the good good?  Because it is the good.  Good luck getting anywhere with that.I prefer not to look for meaning; rather appreciate the elegance of it.  It's sort of like Grice's argument for speaker's meaning.  Just elegant.Yeah, I don't do the whole D&D god thing.  God in my campaign is more like something out of the Upanishads: The sum of everything that is connected, not something separate.  The system is no longer recognizably d20 either.This looks very absurd to me.  Law is defined in relation good.  If you follow a law and you are good, you do so because you believe the law to be good.  For a lawful good character to choose law over good is hillarious, which is part of what makes these designations inconsistent.Sure, it makes sense on a superficial level, and I'm aware that in the real world someone can choose order over the good because they believe in the long run that the consistency of order benefits the good, but a). if the good is absolute then it has something to say factually about the order, meaning for a law to be chosen over the good makes the person not good (otherwise the law would have been chosen according to the good); and b). show me the absolute in the real world.  Can't?  Then why do we need it in D&D?The 'because they're gods' line has no effect on me.  The standard D&D gods are just uber-men.  They aren't all-knowing or all-powerful or breathing extensions of ideas like good; they cannot reconcile concepts beyond them, like good and law when they conflict; if they were godly there would be no conflict to begin with.Yes.If you mean this to be pertinent somehow to your point, that's an equivocation fallacy.I never said that it did.  In fact I'm trying hard to stay away from realworld arguments.  Sadly, 'you have no proof that it doesn't exist' is not the proof you need to say it does.  You don't hear the people from SETI saying 'the fact that we've never seen aliens isn't proof that they don't exist, so obviously they do,' and for good reason.My point, however, was not that there is no absolute good in the real world.  We're talking about D&D, hence my point was that we do not need an absolute good in D&D to be defined, just as it is not defined in the real world, where there are still all the kinds of beliefs and formulations as there are in D&D, minus the inconsistent (and inconsistantly conceived) labels that vanilla D&D uses.</blockquote>

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