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<blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8924586" data-attributes="member: 87792">This is a strawman and I'm going to avoid politics so far as I can. But it's a complete misunderstanding of moral relativism as used by most people who think that moral relativism is a good thing. The point of moral relativism isn't that &quot;everything you think is good is good&quot;, it's that &quot;doing better is an act of good&quot;.To use an example that is more relevant to D&amp;D than it is to the real world politics I think that we can agree that slavery is bad and genocide is worse. Now imagine a raiding band of gnolls that are in the habit of raiding villages, eating some of the people they kill and slaughtering the ones they don't eat. Pretty clearly evil, right?Now imagine there's a really smart gnoll who gets the idea &quot;if we stop killing them all and instead just kidnap and enslave the ones we don't eat we can get them to dig our latrines and build our houses for us and we can also use them as a snack when we don't want to go raiding&quot; then that gnoll is an advocate for slavery. Pretty clearly the gnoll is a bad guy by our standards both because they eat people and because they advocate for slavery. The disagreement between moral relativism and moral absolutism is is that gnoll doing good by advocating for slavery? The moral relativist would say &quot;Yes, they are actively trying to improve gnoll society by making it less genocidal and this is going to have a positive impact on the people not slaughtered and the people not eaten.&quot; They are doing better than the exceptionally low baseline that gnolls start at and to a moral relativist this is a good thing.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Neonchameleon, post: 8924586, member: 87792"] This is a strawman and I'm going to avoid politics so far as I can. But it's a complete misunderstanding of moral relativism as used by most people who think that moral relativism is a good thing. The point of moral relativism isn't that "everything you think is good is good", it's that "doing better is an act of good". To use an example that is more relevant to D&D than it is to the real world politics I think that we can agree that slavery is bad and genocide is worse. Now imagine a raiding band of gnolls that are in the habit of raiding villages, eating some of the people they kill and slaughtering the ones they don't eat. Pretty clearly evil, right? Now imagine there's a really smart gnoll who gets the idea "if we stop killing them all and instead just kidnap and enslave the ones we don't eat we can get them to dig our latrines and build our houses for us and we can also use them as a snack when we don't want to go raiding" then that gnoll is an advocate for slavery. Pretty clearly the gnoll is a bad guy by our standards both because they eat people and because they advocate for slavery. The disagreement between moral relativism and moral absolutism is [I]is that gnoll doing good by advocating for slavery?[/I] The moral relativist would say "Yes, they are actively trying to improve gnoll society by making it less genocidal and this is going to have a positive impact on the people not slaughtered and the people not eaten." They are doing better than the exceptionally low baseline that gnolls start at and to a moral relativist this is a good thing. [/QUOTE]

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