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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jonny Nexus" data-source="post: 1919174" data-attributes="member: 14664">Well my take on this is that there are certain areas where "D&D logic" diverges from real-world logic and that this is one of them. Which means that until you first identify where the D&D logic has diverged, a discussion in this area makes about as much sense as arguing the merits of magic vs science.Why do I think there is a difference between D&D logic and real-world logic in the area of morality? Well in our system of ethics we have no concept of people being good or evil. We only a concept of good actions and evil actions, and of people who do good actions and people who do evil actions.So when we say someone is good, what we really mean is that they have performed good actions. And when we say someone is evil, what we really mean is that they have performed evil actions.Why do I say this?Because our entire system of justice is pedicated that you must be judged on your actions alone - and not on any vague sense of whether or not you are intrinsically good or evil. If you've committed no crimes then you will not be put in prison. If you have, then you will. But D&D is fundamentally different.It's has a concept of intrinsic good and evil.You can "scan" someone and find out that they are evil. They might have never yet got round to performing any evil acts, but they are still evil. So even though they've haven't yet done anything wrong, it's okay to punish them. (Or even kill them). You even get some races that are intrinsically evil.So whilst in our world people are judged on what they do, in D&D worlds, people are judged on what they are. This is a fundamental difference which makes it impossible to apply real-world morality to a D&D world.Back to slavery...In our world we have people who are nice and kind. Because they are nice and kind they will not perform actions that they understand / believe / realise to be evil. But if they don't realise that something is evil then they can do it, even though they are still nice and kind. So we have a duality or discontinuity between someone's essential nature and the actions they perform.i.e. People who had nice, kind inner natures could own slaves because they genuinely didn't realise that it was wrong.Note:- I'm not in any way saying that what they doing wasn't wrong, and I personally believe that they should have known it was wrong. But I can accept that there were people in the early 19th century southern United States who a) owned slaves, and b) weren't violent, cruel, or psychotic.In our world, we can only determine whether an action is good or evil by debate, logic, and philosophy. In a D&D world, people can investigate whether actions are good or evil by "scanning" those who perform them. The spectrum of Good and Evil is hardwired into a D&D universe in much the same way as the electromagnatic spectrum is hardwired into ours.So since in our world "kind" people can perform "evil" actions, the whole question of whether George Washington would scan as "evil" makes no sense. Because if we lived in a world where Good and Evil were actual real entities independent of actions performed, then George Washington wouldn't have owned slaves.So if you want a "shades of grey" world, where morality is a matter of opinion and not fact, then you have to ditch the concept of alignment as a "rule of the universe" and keep it only as a roleplaying guide on the character sheet. (So no detect evil spells, no magic items that only work on evil characters and so on).</blockquote>

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