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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7870999" data-attributes="member: 4937">So I have two objections to this argument.First, if it is not necessary for a lawful to believe that the rules represent higher wisdom than themselves, then you will not find a hard distinction between being lawful and being chaotic. The implication of your argument that rules utilitarianism itself is the essence of lawfulness is that chaotic cannot believe that there is value in rules qua rules, for the purpose of coordinating individual activity. Yet you can have a football team or an army composed of chaotic individuals, and you can as a chaotic see relative value in having a rule for a specific circumstance or purpose. What you cannot believe and be chaotic is that the following the rules ought to override one's own judgment. Because that is the sine qua non of being lawful.Secondly, lawful societies have rules for more reasons than just rules utilitarianism, and in particular they have rules that tend to place people in a hierarchy whereby certain persons hold the right to make and pass judgments over others. For example, I was talking with a Graduate Student from Korea, and she told me that she wanted to go home to Korea so that her parents could "find her a boy [to Marry]". This is a lawful rather than chaotic perspective not because the society has a rule that parents arrange the marriage, but because in her own mind parents would do a better job of arranging for her happiness than she would herself and this made perfect sense to her and seemed perfectly logical. But in a chaotic society, the idea that someone else might better judge your own happiness over such a personal decision as marriage seems ridiculous and even abusive. (A lawful on the other hand might wonder why you thought marriage was a primarily personal decision at all.)I'm good at wearing people down.I very much agree, and do rather regret that both modern players are rarely attracted to playing a lawful character and even if they put it on their character sheet are rarely actually good at it.However, I invite you to look at that statement again, "what happens when there is a conflict between their rules/laws/code and what they perceive as the correct course of action", and contemplate just how much you are actually in disagreement with me.</blockquote>

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