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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6120434" data-attributes="member: 42582">He fell because of his betrayal of Arthur and his lust for Guinevere (at least on one standard reading). Not for killing those 6 or so knights. You can retcon that back in, I guess, but I think it's crystal clear that de Troyes doesn't regard that as questionable behaviour.Much the same point could be made about Viking law codes: what they called "murder" we would tend to call "assassination" - poisonings, killing someone under cover of darkness or while they're asleep, etc. Whereas picking a fight with someone and killing him in the street was not a criminal act (there may be duties of reparation to the family, but that's a different matter).Premodern moral practices don't approach life and death in the same way as Bentham or human rights scholars. Nor do they approach political authority, democracy, freedom or equality in the same way. Concepts like honour, valour, courtesy and even truth play little role in modern moral thought. The idea of loyalty, for instance, becomes replaced by interest-based notions like reliance or legitimate expectations (see, for instance, Dworkin's discussion of the value of integrity in Law's Empire).Whereas honour, valour, courtesy and truth are (in my view) at the very heart of paladinhood.This is also why I think it's essentially unfair, if a player is playing a paladin, to introduce into the game examples of political conflict or strife that speak to modern concerns. In the same way that the X-Men comics never raise the question why Storm isn't using her powers to alleviate drought the world over - her heroism is framed in a fictional space where those sorts of real-world issues are just bracketed away - so I think the default D&D game should bracket the issues of serfdom, political oppression and the like.Of course if the table is up for it then remove the brackets - but at that point a paladin is not going to look like Lancelot or Galahad or a Knight Templar. And D&D alignment concepts still won't help anyone solve moral quandries. (Who was lawful - the French revolutionaries, who were committed to doing away with arbitrary political power and replacing it with government under law in accordance with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen? or Burke, who attacked the revolutionaries for disregarding and destroying all the real social relations that made communal life possible and worthwhile? Or, to give another example: individualists tend, in alignment debates, to get labelled as chaotic; yet who is a bigger advocate of the rule of law than Hayek? Those are the sorts of questions that a game focused on modern moral and political concerns will throw up, and D&D alignment rules don't even begin to help us understand them, let alone resolve them.)</blockquote>

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