Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 807043" data-attributes="member: 4937">shilsen: I slightly disagree with you on a couple of counts.First, I don't think there was a big overhaul in the alignment system between 1st, 2nd, or 3rd edition.   Things may have been clarified further or explained differently, but the core remains the same.   There is nothing in what I said that is in expressed contridiction to 3rd edition.   I don't expressly forbid the possibility that you are the highest authority, and I don't expressly forbid that the system of morality that you follow can be one of your own devising.   These are however rare cases, and I stand by my explanation.Saying that a person who is lawful can follow a 'personal code' , that is to say one not shared by the larger society or indeed any organization that the person is attached to, leads us into a bit of a circular definition.   A 'personal code' is a lawful code, if and only if it serves to further the overall cause of lawfulness.  That is to say, the only personal codes which are 'lawful' ones are ones that serve to place yourself in your proper, ordered, place in the world.   It has to be a code which other lawful people recognize to be lawful, even if it is not there own and in the details they don't agree with it.You can't simply say, "I'm an individualist, and I'm looking out for myself but because I follow a set of rules in my goal of individuality and self-engrandizement at the expense of all others I'm lawful."But you could possibly say, "My honor is my own.  Because my society has no honor I must show them through my actions the proper way to live ones life."Note that if you believe that no person's path in life bears any similarity to any other person's path in life, then your philosophy isn't lawful either.  Lawful is about emphasizing the connectedness of things, not thier uniqueness.Also the code has to be non-good as well as non-evil. I agree that the deed was lawful and not evil because Sa'Keb had in his own view the authority to act as he did, and did not do it out a personal desire to see the man dead, and presumably because Sa'Keb believes he has limits to his authority opposed upon him by his superiors and the code that they collectively follow.  He wasn't thinking "I can kill because I want to... because I'm powerful... because I enjoy it... because I'm Sa'Keb...because this man p1$$ed me off... because I'm in a bad mode...etc."</blockquote>

Verification