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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 8921033" data-attributes="member: 7035894">So, not to go too "grad school" on the discussion, but the issue I see is that alignment relies on what are essentially deontological ethics, meaning that there are supposed to be universal rules about what is right and what is wrong, full stop, no grey areas. Immanuel Kant argued that you could determine what was right or wrong (good or evil) by seeing if the principal had universality. For example, to determine if it was okay to lie, you had to imagine a universe in which everyone lied all the time, whenever they felt like it, and nothing anyone said could ever be trusted. If such a universe seems like a bad idea, then that logically means lying is wrong. Always. Full stop. No exceptions. In fact, intending or wanting to lie is wrong, even if you don't go through with it. No grey areas. Kant called this the categorial imperative.Kant felt that ethics were as cut and dry as mathematics. Literally, as both were derived from the same logical principals. As a result, Kant utterly rejected consequentialist ethics. The notion that right or wrong depended on the outcome of an action was anathema to everything he believed, where right and wrong is inherent in the action itself.The obvious objection is that a system of ethics that never takes context or consequences into account turns out to produce really terrible results in lots of fairly typical situations. Another objection is that it turns out the people are super complicated and so something that one person thinks must be universally obvious turns out not to be. Deontological ethics are simple, and people are super complicated.That's where the alignment system falls apart. It relies on the supposition that there is some kind of universal definition of good and evil, law and chaos, from which morality can be derived. But to see why that isn't the case, just look up some of Gary Gygax's own statements about what sorts of actions could count as lawful good (hint: most of us would probably not make a case for public torture and infanticide, but he did!). So inevitably you get all these arguments about what is "really" good when the DM and the player have different perspectives, because of course they do.I recognize that most of the time folks just use alignments in a kind of broad sense, so these arguments are avoided. But D&D players being D&D players, the arguments do come up, and they can get pretty intense.On principal, I don't like alignments because I don't think they add anything to creating an interesting character, I think they are logically unsound, and I think they are an attempt to impose one person's moral compass over other people. And from a pragmatic perspective, they are not needed. You can have factions without them (the real world has no shortage of factions), and you can create interesting characters without them. Fiends can behave fiendishly without an alignment label, and saints can be saintly. If alignments ever had a purpose, that purpose is long past.</blockquote>

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