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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6267347" data-attributes="member: 42582">Actually, the question that you raise is a fairly standard problem in the construction of criminal law statutes. For instance, it comes up in relation to the offence defined in s 102.7 of the Australian Commonwealth Criminal Code.It's clear that the action must be wilful (ie committed intentionally and knowingly). But the wording of the requirement leaves it open whether the action's evil must be known to the paladin. In contemporary Anglo-Australian criminal law, the default threshold for guilt in relation to this sort of property of an action is recklessness, not knowledge. I suspect it is probably the same in the US and Canada, though I'm not certain.Recklessness can be a rubbery concept, but the basic idea is knowledge of a real chance that the action has the property in question - in this case, that would suggest that at a minimum the paladin must be aware that there is a real chance that the action is an evil one.   [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] has argued for strict liability as to the act's evil. That is certainly a construction that the words leave open, although it would depart from contemporary common law standards of criminal liability. But as tomBitonti has said, modern standards may not be the applicable one.(On a side note: in the criminal law "mens rea", "culpability" and "fault element" are just different ways of talking about the same thing, at least until you get into technicalities (eg the notion "mens rea" is not used in the technical language of Australian federal criminal law, which prefers the phrase "fault element"). But until we are talking in technicalities, they are all just ways of referring to the mental element of an offence. Of course some offences have no mens rea or fault requirement: namely, offences of strict or absolute liability.)On the substantive question of how this should be handled in 3E play I express no view. It's not my game and I don't use mechanical alignment in any event.EDIT: There are also questions raised about the individuation of actions. For instance, manslaughter (homicide by way of gross negligence) is committed, roughly speaking, when a person knowingly and deliberately takes an action with a culpable disregard towards its possible consequences for the physical wellbeing of another. For this statement of the offence to even make sense, we have to be prepared to distinguish between the action (say, throwing a brick out of a 10th storey window) and the consequence of the action (having the brick lend on a pedestrian below). If your preferred ontology of actions includes the consequence as an inherent element of the action, then you are going to conclude that the action (ie the throwing-of-a-brick-such-that-it-lands-on-a-pedestrian-below) was not committed intentionally.The criminal law, and the law more generally, has its own techniques for carving up actions into their constituent elements, and their consequences. But there is no reason why the paladin's obligations should be interpreted in accordance with the ontological framework adopted by the criminal law. This is a further aspect of the question which can lead to debate around the proper construction of the code's requirements.</blockquote>

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