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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7817970" data-attributes="member: 42582">As Gygax defines Lawful Good in his DMG, it is Benthamite utiltarianism - the greatest good to the greatest number, or as Gygax puts it "whatever brings the most benefit to the greatest number of decent, thinking creatures and the least woe to the rest."However, paladins are an obviously non-utilitarian archetype: they evoke a morality of duty and an ethic of honour, not the "shopkeeper's morality" of Benthamism.This is one instance of the more general point that Gygax lumps all standard approaches to morality - human rights, wellbeing, duty, honour, consequentialism - under the label "good" and leaves the details as something to be sorted out on a table-by-table basis.That's one reason why looking to the alignment descriptors to try and resolve these sorts of paladin questions is largely fruitless. A Benthamite paladin is anachronistic and (in my view) aesthetically jarring; others might disagree; but either way it's not something the rules answer for us.To me this is fine if the player gets to decide what Pelor would do. But at many tables the assumption will be that Pelor is the GM's NPC and hence this is really the player asking the GM how to play his/her PC - which I think is a pretty degenerate state of affairs in a RPG.The problem only gets worse if the GM then tries to answer the question of what Pelor would do by (i) looking up Pelor's alignment (NG?) and then (ii) trying to interpret the alignment principles - because as per the earlier part of my post, those principles provide no answers to these sorts of questions.This I don't agree with. It's an idea that is incipient in Appendix IV of Gygax's PHB, is  hinted at in the Manual of the Planes but that comes fuly into its own with Planescape. I think its incoherent.It's clear in Gygax's alignment descriptions (in his PHB and DMG) that LG isn't some "diluted" form of good. LG persons aspire to be maximally good, and believe that law (whatever exactly that means) is an essential means thereto. Conversely, the CG also aspire to be maximally good, but they believe that individual self-realisation rather than social order is the best means thereto. That is, the disagreement between LG and CG is not about whether law is intrisincally valuable but rather about whether it is a means or an osbtacle to realising truth, beauty, wellbeing etc.The incoherence that reaches its pinnacle in Planescape is the following: that the Seven Heavens, Elys8um and Olympus are all in some sense good. If the convictions of the LG, as presnted by Gygax in his alignment descriptions, are correct then it is impossible that Olympus should realise the good; and mutatis mutandis for the CG and the Seven Heavens. The way that Planescape deals with this is by decreeing that both Oympus and the Seven Heavens realise good to some degree, but that in each case its diluted by another value - Law or Chaos. And then Elysium gets presnted as purely or maximally good.Not only does this contradict the alignment descriptions - which is one source of incoherence - but it makes no sense on its own terms. Because if pursing law and order dilutes goodness then what rational person woudl possibly do that?!</blockquote>

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