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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kinematics" data-source="post: 8693769" data-attributes="member: 6932123">I had avoided going into the cosmological side of things, but the recent thread trend seems to need to step into that arena.When considering alignment as an objective "thing", that pretty much has to be the cosmological side of alignment. Personality and behavior can't be considered objectively defined in that way, so deeper thought needs to be given when considering absolute good/evil/law/chaos (GELC).Each of the alignment edges is so intrinsic to the universe that there are entire planes of existence dedicated to them. They define part of the structure of the universe. One might even ask whether the gods determine the alignments, or whether they merely settle into place within an alignment that the universe already defined? Is a cleric doing good by following his god's precepts, or were those precepts something the god had no control over, and it just transcribed what the universe said belonged in that box?To consider GELC to be absolute and objective, they kind of have to be outside the control of even the gods.  After all, the gods have their own motivations and goals, and many would surely twist what is good or evil for their own purposes. However doing so would put them out of step with what other gods say, and it shouldn't take long for followers to start noticing those discrepancies.  While there are disagreements in dogma, I don't recall disagreements in principals.So, how are these absolute concepts even defined? Obviously, from a Doylist perspective, by the GM.  However from the Watsonian perspective, there must either be some fundamental principals that everything can be derived from, or some uber-arch-god-being whose will supersedes everything else in the universe.That level of abstraction makes it very difficult to reason about, though, so I'm going to set it aside for the moment.The next question is, what do the GELC alignments even mean?  Some posters have provided basic concepts.  For example, Group vs Individual for Lawful/Chaos, and selfless vs selfish for Good vs Evil.  Personally, I don't find those sufficient to describe the alignments. They work as traits of the alignments, but are otherwise inadequate.If I were to describe Good and Evil in a more abstract way, the terms I would use would be "moral" and "rational" (as in the rational actor of game theory, or rational self interest from capitalism). The example about the gnolls earlier in the thread had them choose a "survival of the fittest" approach to life because it was rational. The rational actor in game theory will always make the choice that provides the greatest personal benefit, because it's not rational to not do so.  Yet, as anyone who has studied game theory knows, multiple rational actors making the best possible choice can end up with the worst possible outcome.  Making a less optimal choice (ie: not being greedy) can end up with a better overall outcome.  The rules that govern making less personally optimal, but more globally optimal choices are "morals".Because rationality and morals can be defined in terms of game theory ethics, it's entirely possible for these to be objective truths, at least insofar as the context within which they are evaluated is static, such as in an artificial game world.  Not that such evaluations are easy; it took humanity thousands of years of trial and error just to work out moral rules that are pretty broadly applicable in most circumstances, and they still struggle to adapt to world and societal changes, which are not artificially static.So what about Law vs Chaos? Well, based on articles about the planes, the pinnacle of Law is "order" — predetermination, predestination, scheduled, structured, measured, controlled. Everything is real and concrete; there are no illusions.  I am reminded of the governing principals* (each of which has an aspirational state and a grounded state), with Law being tied to all the "grounded" principals (typically described as conservative principals).Chaos, on the other hand, is change, unpredictable, primordial (unstructured, immeasurable, uncontrolled), and the domain of choice and self-determination.  Many of the principals associated with it match the aspirational governing principals.I bring up the governing principals because each pair of principals is on a tension with the other, and pushing to 100% of one side or the other tends to be destructive. Yet it is also something we'd expect when we have a concept that can be "pure" in a cosmological sense. 100% Law is pure order, rigid and unchanging.  100% Chaos is pure disorder and madness.  And they can be considered objective measures of a tension that struggles to find the best balance between the two, because the concepts are not bound to personal perspectives. It's not a "human" measure, it's a tension within any social fabric that simply can't not exist.~~* Governing principals:Liberty/Freedom (aspirational) vs Order (grounded)Equality (aspirational) vs Hierarchy (grounded)Fraternity [broadly: nationalist identity] (aspirational) vs Family (grounded)Cooperation (aspirational) vs Self-Reliance (grounded) {some debate over the framing of this principal}Trust (aspirational) vs Force (grounded)~~~So, overall we have the Law-Chaos axis, which describes how society deals with the individual, and we have the Good-Evil axis, which deals with how individuals deal with society or each other.  Law-Chaos is a tension between grounded and aspirational social designs, and Good-Evil is the tension between moral and rational behavior.Each of them can be considered "objective" (though I'm not sure any of them can be considered "truths"), in a way that can be considered "universal", and thus fit with the idea of a cosmological alignment system.Note that this still leaves completely open the question of what "good" and "evil" really are (in the moral sense, not the alignment sense), which means there's still the flexibility and conflict of having characters try to answer those difficult questions.</blockquote>

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