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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5582652" data-attributes="member: 42582">There are at least two problems here.First, this seems to capture personal self-defence - which is, after all, acting with disregard for the life of another in pursuit of personal gain. The standard move to distinguish pesonal self-defence from the impugned conduct would be to define "personal gain" relative to some sort of moralised baseline - so that protecting myself from wrongly-threatened harm doesn't count as personal gain - but this just pushes the question of evaluation back one step. And there are other difficutlies with this sort of moralised baseline which have been explored a lot in the literature on coercion (which gives rise to a similar issue in distinguishing threats from offers).Second, even if a definition is settled upon, there is the problem of determining whether any given act falls under the definition. This is almost always non-trivial and controversial. And generalising: I'm a professional philosopher. The morality of political violence is one area where I've done a fair bit of work. At both high and low levels of abstraction, the area is rife with disagreement. I have published defending the moral equality of soldiers (ie that the typical soldier fighting in an unjust cause is no more a murderer than the typical soldier fighting in a just cause). But there are many other leading scholars who argue the opposite (eg Jeff McMahan, probably the leading contemporary author in the field). I used to hold the view that terrorist violence can be analysed in a very similar framework to warfare, and this is still a common view (eg I think Tony Coady still holds it). But my work on moral equality of soldiers has led me to the view that terrorism probably is different (as per the arguments of eg Michael Walzer, Raimond Gaita). And then when we drill down to particular cases, most authors in the field regard attacks on civilian targets as unjustified, but there is always dispute over who counts as a civilian (eg Coady argues that police and political officials are not, but not everyone agrees) and some authors (eg Ted Honderich, writing in response to the second Intifada) argue that attacks against civilians sometimes may be justified, at least where there is good reason to believe that they may produce a just political consequence.I think of it slightly differently. If the game rules prevent the game progressing unless an authoritative evaluative classifiction of PC action takes place, then there are two main options - endless morality debates, or deference to a GM's judgement ("passing judgement on the state of  PC's soul"). The former can grind the game to a halt - if you want that, go to philosophy seminars! The latter shuts down the point of play, and undoes the meaningful part of the players' choices for their PCs (which in my view is a problem, whether or not you want to call it railroading). The way you make this sort of game work is by removing the need for endless debate. Instead, the players' choices for their PCs are allowed to speak for themselves. Players and GM, as participants, can have views, and express them - but that is metagame stuff. It is not part of resolving or adjudicating actions in the game.The same question could be asked of Hussar's terrorism-oriented game. Or of a typical D&D game - what happens if a player has his/her PC rob the merchants and slaughter all the villagers? In my view this is not a problem about the adjudication of PC action - it is a metagame/social contract problem. It's solved by finding out whether or not the player is actually interested in playing the game.</blockquote>

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