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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 1918316" data-attributes="member: 27012">Can you refuse to pay your taxes?  Can you refuse to obey the speed limit?  Can you refuse to work and still demand a paycheck from your employer?  Life is full of obligations and things you can't refuse (in any realistic or meaningful way).  The question, I think, is not whether slaves have obligations or a right of refusal but what obligations are demanded of them, what rights they have, and what obligations their owners have.  Again, I'm not claiming that this arrangement will ever rise to the status of Good but it can certainly fall well within the definition of Neutral, in my opinion.Employers use employees to perform tasks for their own enrichment or comfort and that's hardly Evil (if you feel that captialism is inherently Evil, then we'll probably just have to agree to disagree).  And I think that grouping a slave owner who treats his or her slaves well with a warlord who steals, rapes, and murders his or her way through the weaker villages surrounding him or her simply debases the whole concept of Evil, especially when it's a tangible trait that can be detected.When a Paladin's "Detect Evil" can't differentiate Thomas Jefferson and Pol Pot, something is wrong.Again, I am not aruging that slavery is Good.  I am arguing that it is not ncessarily Evil.  That is, that it can be Neutral.  The SRD definition of Neutral is:"People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others. Neutral people are committed to others by personal relationships."How does slavery not fit into that definition, especially if the form of slavery practiced prohibits the murder and mistreatment of slaves?  Remember, saying that slavery can be Neutral does not mean that slavery is Good.  There are plenty of reasons why people became slaves (all were not carted off from their homelands) and the alternative facing at least some of those taken from their homelands was death.  Consider that when the Mycenaean Greeks destroyed Troy, they carried the women and children back to Greece to work as slaves who, for example, processed flax into linen.  They had destroyed the city, killed all the men, carried off all of the wealth, and had probably killed or eaten all of the animals.  Would it have really been more humane for the Greeks to leave them on the shores of Asia Minor to fend for themselves?In the real world, most peple are required to work against their will.  I don't have the option to quit my job and survive on the good will of others.  In fact, in less than a century in the United States, we've gone from children being required to work to help feed their families to children being supported by their parents well into their twenties and thirties such that they think it's grossly unjust to be forced to do something that they don't want to do.  So again, we are left with a Paladin being unable to differentiate between Thomas Jefferson and Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, or Jeffrey Dahlmer with their Detect Evil.  Is that really useful?Remeber that D&D does have a third option between Good and Evil.  As the SRD says:"People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others. Neutral people are committed to others by personal relationships."Why can't slavery fit into that definition?  Put another way, why does an act have to cross the threshold of being Good in order to be Neutral?And I would argue that a Good agrarian society in D&D should be structured that way.  The question is not whether slavery can be Good but whether it can be Neutral.  What part of the SRD definition, in particular, makes you think that slavery is Evil?  And what part of teh SRD definition of Neutral makes you think that it can't apply to slavery?</blockquote>

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