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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Reprisal" data-source="post: 187701" data-attributes="member: 1161">Ah, let's see here... on what pages can I find these parts of the argument:Nature v. Nurture Absolute Morality v. Relative MoralityWell, as a DM who likes to fiddle with things, I pretty much take the fashionable Environmental Determinism angle on pretty much everything that's not Undead or an Outsider...  In my mind, all sentient/sapient (I'm not sure which is correct anymore), mortal beings from the Prime Material plane are born True Neutral.  It is not racial programming, or divine mutation, or whatever, that makes them "evil," it is the environment that they grow up in that makes them "evil."While I personally believe that morality, at this stage in our development, either exists out of our comprehension, or does not exist at all.  The D&D system pretty much states that there are two axises: Good-Evil, and Order-Chaos.  So, at that point, I have to state that some things are "good" while others are "evil."At this point, I must misquote Immanuel Kant and say that "one must be able to will this action as universal law, outside of circumstance, for all rational beings."  Therefore, to be able to say that killing the children of an enemy can be done as a universal law of all rational beings if you want to say that doing so is a good action.At this point, it gets muddy.  So if I have to will an action as a universal law of all rational beings in order to make it a virtuous action, do I have to do the same for an evil action?  Of course, the process instead being that one should never do (that action) regardless of situation.Even muddier now... So there are Virtuous, or Good, actions; Nefarious, or Evil, actions; and Amoral, or Neutral, actions.The trouble is that most, if not all, actions can be called amoral actions... neither good nor evil.So, it seems to me that this sort of thing is best handled in such a way that it rests in the hands of the DM.  Regardless of your own personal beliefs, you should rely on the DM to make the decision and as long as future rulings are consistent, I wouldn't worry about it too much.I dunno, I thought it might be more helpful to attempt to discuss this sort of thing rather than debate the semantics of what makes a sentient creature, or how the books don't say that animals don't have a soul... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f644.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":rolleyes:" title="Roll eyes    :rolleyes:"  data-smilie="11"data-shortname=":rolleyes:" /></blockquote>

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