On Evil

[EzekielRaiden]

@EzekielRaiden "Allowing" someone to starve to death, so long as he's your prisoner, is called murder. If someone else holds that person prisoner, and you don't help the prisoner, then the captor is doing the killing, not you. Maybe what you're asking is, "from whose perspective is Good?" The answer is, of course, "Good is in the eye of the beholder." But more broadly, since humans generally don't approve of killing, that answer is "Good is he who does not harm others."

Actually, I'm fairly sure it would be called negligent homicide rather than murder--and as it is a lesser offense (lower even than second-degree murder), it would carry a lesser but still fairly serious punishment. "Killing" is an active thing; "allowing to die" is still absolutely a morally reprehensible thing, but it is completely within the purview of "one who does not kill." Hence why Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics begin with, "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm"--and the second clause is meaningfully different from the first clause (while still being essential, in the US Robots setting, to avoiding pathological behavior from the robots, e.g. the plot of Little Lost Robot).

I'm not sure your points agree with each other, but I like point 2: gods determine reality. If something is Good, it's because a god said so. Let Plato, the PC, define Goodness all he wants. He can then die in two days from something undiscovered (germ theory, or an act of a god), and theory comes face-to-face with reality.

They're meant to be three distinct, separate "solutions." Your preference for point 2 is rather unusual, in my experience. Most people find it extremely distasteful to accept the idea that a fallible mind (for surely, if the gods are not completely eternal, they are also not absolutely perfect of mental faculties?) can outright define the foundational philosophical and logical principles of a world. That is, a finite mind can very easily claim two things which are in truth mutually contradictory, but fail to realize it for whatever reason--and, thus, you could have a fiat-declared "Good" which is outright impossible to meet, yet still the standard that is applied.

You also run into issues like what happens if the "god of mathematics" starts doing things like declaring that a shape with exactly three angles must always have exactly two sides, that pi is exactly 4, or that A = B does not imply that B = A. In other words, in order for the gods to work as you are describing, they must be above absolutely everything, including logic and empirical observation, which makes dealing with them rather an exercise in futility. They can literally just declare that you're wrong, because they don't have to obey logic. Even when you're 100% right, they can just declare you're wrong, and it's true, because they can create truth.

Most people, when deciding how the deities of their world work, choose option 1 because it allows for fallible but still interesting deities. I have not yet seen a...clearly-articulated polytheistic or henotheistic example of option 3, though as I noted, 13th Age appears to use something along those lines (the Priestess, one of the default Icons, reveres all the Gods of Light, so there's some implicit idea that all of them are 'good' in one way or another).

 

[Celebrim]

[MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] Yes, I'm guilty of using a broad definition of "god." That being: any of those creatures that contribute in the creation of reality.

I find that a much broader definition than you think it is. With that definition, every person is also a god, assuming at least that this appearance of free will is not merely a delusion.

So, if you're the god of fertility, you have the power to make anything or everything fertile. Further, if another god seeks to supplant you, your portfolio becomes that god's domain if he succeeds. So, everything that exists does so because a god controls it. This is slightly larger than the Superman simile, because Superman doesn't allow things to exist - they do so without his permission.

In general D&D deities are rarely of that order of being. Most D&D deities are capable of having very broad influence over their portfolio but aren't in fact necessary and at all times sustaining their portfolio so that without them it would cease to have being. Most D&D deities are not creators of the universe they find themselves in, any more than the pagan deities of Greek, Egyptian, and Sumerian myth that they are largely drawn from conceptually are the creators of their universe. Uranus can get himself chopped into little pieces and killed, and the sky doesn't cease to have being just because the sky has been killed. In most polytheism, gods exist because things do, not the other way around, and those things can continue existing without the gods.

A better model of orders of being is presented by Terry Pratchett's discworld. Most gods in the setting are brought into being by the power of mortal belief. This isn't to say that they aren't in fact potent and sometimes necessary, as for example belief in the Hogfather is apparently literally sustaining the Sun. But these gods are really actually pretty small on the cosmological scheme of things, as Death is in fact of a higher order of being and not apparently dependent on human belief or appointed by the gods but by some higher order of being still. Death is following some sort of cosmological rules that have been set by someone else. The Death of Discworld turns out to be a vassal of a being who incarnates the Death of all things given the name, Azrael (the angel of death), and belonging to an order of beings called 'The Old High Ones'. Since Death is given the name of an angel, it's implied this lord of all deaths is also a vassal of some yet higher power - presumably something capable of creating the race of Great Atu and the discworld itself and not merely something bound to it. And we might even suppose that this being was in fact subject to yet some higher power - the creator of creators.

 

[pemerton]

Well, first of all 'capitalism' is a communist term of art... so yeah, anytime you read a primer on 'capitalism', you would be basically reading Marxism.

Or any serious economist, historian or sociologist. Neither Durkheim or Weber is a Marxist; both write about capitalism, using that word. Giddens's well-known book is called "Capitalism and Modern Social Theory". Friedman's is called "Capitalsim and Freedom". Neither is a Marxist.

 

[Lanefan]

At a fundamental level, the big problem I see backing all your reasoning is that this word 'god' is being really vaguely and poorly defined, so that in between sentences (as it were), you are replacing one definition of the word with another and then rolling on forward without noticing you've done so. So you either need to decide if this 'god' is the Judeo-Christian god with his infinite properties, or if this 'god' you keep referencing is the incarnated emanations of some Platonic idea, or if this 'god' is merely a pagan superhuman figure lacking any particular differences from the ordinary mortals of common experience save for scale (indeed might even be simply elevated mortal figures), or somewhere else on the scale. Naturally, if from one sentence to the next, you replace the 'god' the word is referencing, you are going to end up with complete incoherence. You can say, "There is no Good apart from an Infinitely Good Creator Deity that is the Source of all Good Things", but then that statement is incoherent if you are saying, "There is no Good apart from Zeus." You can say, "I wouldn't put it past Zeus to do things knowing that they are evil, because Zeus incorporates into himself all the notions of how mortal kings behave good and bad, and because there are no consequences for Zeus being evil.", but then that would be incoherent if we were talking about an Infinitely Good Omniscient Creator Deity.

In my own D&D cosmology I found what seems to be a rather efficient way to solve this thorny little problem.

When the universe came into existence a sentience came with it (I've never bothered worrying about which came first). As the universe expanded so did the sentience, and as the universe divided into planes and galaxies etc. so did the sentience, into first a few gods, then many. The omniscient powers of the original sentience passed into the gods, more or less, and the original sentience - while still existing - essentially faded into (or became) the background. This sentience was and remains either neutrally aligned or non-aligned depending how one defines such things as in effect it at all times spans all alignments at once.

At the character level they deal with the known gods (e.g. Zeus etc.) who are themselves each pretty bloody powerful and who each have their own agendas, alignments, etc.; but they never deal with the overarching background sentience nor do they really know of its existence. At the divine level there's probably some knowledge of the higher sentience but little if any direct interaction with it.

So, in short, it's possible to have both at once.

Lanefan