D&D General Some thoughts on Moral Philosophies in D&D

[Jaeger]

It's about the Moral Philosophies of characters that players create to be heroes.

No need to create Moral philosophies for characters in D&D realms/settings with core book D&D cosmology.

With the in game cosmology/religions taking the stance of the gods being "Scientific Fact", expected and preferred behavior from any given deity is clear-cut: "My god says x."

Objectively speaking the PC's need only conform their actions so that they meet the minimum requirements that their god requires to enter the promised afterlife. No sophisticated "Moral philosophy" need apply.

The closest thing any PC might need to have to a moral philosophy would be the pragmatic need to weigh their actions against the mores and values of others in relation to their potential to enforce threats of corporal punishment.

So any Moral philosophies are either just projection of the players own mores and values on their characters. Or created whole cloth by the player for their PC above and beyond the requirements of their characters deity.

Circling back around to player disruption: No one cares what you PC's 'moral philosophy' is if your jerky behavior is disrupting the group.

 

[Steampunkette]

It's predicated on DnD's implicit definition of 'Evil' which has (in recent years, since 3E certainly) always been 'Harming others'. This was made in clear in the BovD and BoED with both express and implicit text.

Rape, Slavery, Murder, Torture have always been in the realms of 'evil' because they all involve harming others.

Good OTOH is generally defined as 'Self sacrificing altruism'. Helping others, usually at cost to ones' self. Charity (Paladins have long been required to tithe wealth, and there is an oath of poverty in the BoED that does the same thing), mercy, compassion, altruism, empathy and kindness.

A lie doesnt (in and of itself) 'harm' anyone, and may in fact be a thing of mercy, with the liar taking on a burden in the lie to protect others. It can even be an act of Good.

Deception, on it's face, like killing, is morally wrong in basically every ethical structure.

However, outside of absolutist deontology and virtue ethics, there are loopholes. Extenuating Circumstances. Explicit situations where killing, or lying, are expressly allowed. Like Self Defense or Harmless Lies.

Hence the actual statement being about absolute deontology being a flawed system to attempt to model player morality outside of extreme Kantian Paladins.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Of course, that statement is predicated on an implicit philosophy choice.

Indeed.

It's predicated on DnD's implicit definition of 'Evil' which has (in recent years, since 3E certainly) always been 'Harming others'. This was made in clear in the BovD and BoED with both express and implicit text.

Rape, Slavery, Murder, Torture have always been in the realms of 'evil' because they all involve harming others.

Good OTOH is generally defined as 'Self sacrificing altruism'. Helping others, usually at cost to ones' self. Charity (Paladins have long been required to tithe wealth, and there is an oath of poverty in the BoED that does the same thing), mercy, compassion, altruism, empathy and kindness.

A lie doesnt (in and of itself) 'harm' anyone, and may in fact be a thing of mercy, with the liar taking on a burden in the lie to protect others. It can even be an act of Good.

Under a really rigidly deontological approach, a lie does harm, both to the speaker and to the listener. The speaker is self-harming by being irrational: a lie is told in order to control others via communication, but by the first formulation of the Categorical Imperative, this means the speaker wants all people to always lie forever. That would either make communication impossible, or would prevent actually controlling what someone else thinks (because they would know you were lying); it is thus trying to achieve something logically impossible. Intentionally seeking the logically impossible reflects either a damaged mind, or self-sabotage, which is a form of self-harm.

The speaker is harming the listener by way of the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative: they are treating the listener as a means to some end, rather than an end in themselves. It does not matter how noble, kind, generous, etc. the end you seek is: by the Categorical Imperative, it is ALWAYS wrong to treat another person as a means, period, end of discussion.

(This, incidentally, is the "real" reason why it is supposed to be morally wrong for a German citizen in WWII to lie to a Nazi about the Jews hiding in their basement: it's because you would be using that Nazi as a means, even though the goal of that using-a-person-as-a-means is "to save the life of another person." We just instinctively balk at the notion that it is wrong to "use a person as a means to save the life of another person" in this way, a consequentialist suspicion of hardcore deontology. Like how Foot's trolley problem isn't meant to derive any specific answer--it's simply meant to show that we have an intuitive virtue-ethics-derived suspicion of hardcore consequentialism: that it is somehow inherently bad, somehow inherently an error, to actively cause the death of one person in order to prevent the death of a larger number of people.)

 

[Umbran]

It's predicated on DnD's implicit definition of 'Evil' which has (in recent years, since 3E certainly) always been 'Harming others'. This was made in clear in the BovD and BoED with both express and implicit text.

BoVD and BoED are not core, and older than many in the player base at this point, so I wouldn't look too hard to them for support.

Given how much we argue about alignment, it is clear that what is stated in the rules is not really definitional to the game as played, especially when what is in the books is not generally consistent, either in exact wording, or in philosophy.

A lie doesnt (in and of itself) 'harm' anyone...

So, for this discussion, this is assuming the conclusion. You are resting your position on a particular definition of "harm" (you put it in quotes yourself, calling attention to the fact that its definition is in question) that does not hold in all philosophical systems.

There are philosophical systems in which it is thought that a lie, in and of itself, does harm - it is a debasement and degradation of the speaker and the recipient. In such a system, at best the lie is only acceptable if the harm of the lie is lesser than the available alternatives.

We are apt to find that discussion of philosophical systems bears a lot in common with formal logic - in which you have to be absolutely certain of what your founding axioms are. The moral and ethical qualities of certain basic acts are philosophic axioms - and you cannot disprove or dismiss a philosophical framework with axioms from another framework.

 

[Flamestrike]

So, for this discussion, this is assuming the conclusion. You are resting your position on a particular definition of "harm" (you put it in quotes yourself, calling attention to the fact that its definition is in question) that does not hold in all philosophical systems.

But I am not looking at the assumption that 'harm is evil' in other philosophical systems (ours, yours, mine or anyone elses) - I'm looking at its implicit assumption in DnD's philosophical system.

Any observation of DnD through the ages, shows that DnD more or less consistently has held 'murder, slavery, rape, torture and harming others' as being 'Evil', and also has more or less consistently held that 'charity, self sacrifice, mercy and altruism' as being 'Good'.

Whether you or I agree with that assumption is neither here nor there; it does seem to be the assumption of the core game.

 

[Flamestrike]

Under a really rigidly deontological approach, a lie does harm, both to the speaker and to the listener.

Assume a person was present when his or her best friend died in a horrific manner. Slowly fed into a woodchipper after weeks of torture. You get where Im going here.

Is lying about their mode of death, and instead telling their loved ones they died peacefully and heroically (and holding that secret to your grave) to give comfort to their loved ones (and holding that burden yourself) an act of evil?

Who (other than yourself) are you harming?

 

[Flamestrike]

Deception, on it's face, like killing, is morally wrong in basically every ethical structure.

I personally disagree, and so does DnDs implicit morality.

 

[Umbran]

As long as we are digging up Ancient Greeks ... metaphorically, I hope... Cynicism needs to be in this discussion somewhere.

You need the gen-x point of view?

You two probably realize this, but for others who have not made a detailed study of philosophy - when we talk about someone being cynical today - the distrust of the motives of others, and a rejection of need to be engaged and involved - doesn't have a lot to do with the original Greek philosophical cynicism.

Our current use of the word arises from a focus on only the negative aspects of the philosophical system, and caricatures of some of the founders of the philosophy.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

No need to create Moral philosophies for characters in D&D realms/settings with core book D&D cosmology.

With the in game cosmology/religions taking the stance of the gods being "Scientific Fact", expected and preferred behavior from any given deity is clear-cut: "My god says x."

Objectively speaking the PC's need only conform their actions so that they meet the minimum requirements that their god requires to enter the promised afterlife. No sophisticated "Moral philosophy" need apply.

The closest thing any PC might need to have to a moral philosophy would be the pragmatic need to weigh their actions against the mores and values of others in relation to their potential to enforce threats of corporal punishment.

So any Moral philosophies are either just projection of the players own mores and values on their characters. Or created whole cloth by the player for their PC above and beyond the requirements of their characters deity.

Circling back around to player disruption: No one cares what you PC's 'moral philosophy' is if your jerky behavior is disrupting the group.

I don't think the discussion was meant to be primarily about players intentionally choosing a moral philosophy for their characters, nor even about the characters intentionally choosing a moral philosophy for themselves, but more about examining what moral philosophies those characters are actually demonstrating in play, which can be rather interesting.

For me, characters tend to come into my mind fairly quickly, and when I'm playing them I instinctively know what they would or wouldn't be prone to do. But I wouldn't necessarily think of trying to classify their moral philosophy without a discussion like this encouraging it. And while there is some projection of my own values (I don't want to be a bad person and I get very little out of identifying long term with a fictional bad person character), there is a lot of other variety in the moral philosophies that my characters' behaviors display, as well as in their alignments.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Assume a person was present when his or her best friend died in a horrific manner. Slowly fed into a woodchipper after weeks of torture. You get where Im going here.

Is lying about their mode of death, and instead telling their loved ones they died peacefully and heroically (and holding that secret to your grave) to give comfort to their loved ones (and holding that burden yourself) an act of evil?

Who (other than yourself) are you harming?

I appreciate that that's what you're going for, but that's explicitly not how very very hard deontology interprets things. Naturally you--and I, and many other people besides!--do not really share this view. (I'm mostly a virtue ethics guy personally; Philippa Foot is one of my philosophy heroes.)

That is, this is a bit like being a physicist going to an electrical engineers' conference and getting upset that they use "j" to denote the imaginary unit rather than "i." You are, essentially, saying "the deontologist MUST only work with my definitions and no others," which the deontologist is just as free to balk at as you are to balk at their rather strident insistence about the alleged "harm" caused by lying to others. Again, I have no skin in that particular game, because I am not a deontologist to begin with, but you should know whenever you get into a debate about ethics that "when I say 'harm,' I specifically mean grievous physical harm and nothing abstract or philosophical" is not going to be met with a particularly friendly response.

(Again, for my own position, the various virtues--and their corresponding vices of excess and deficiency--encapsulate why telling the truth is morally superior as a general rule, but make allowance for deceiving a person whose aims are bad. However...)

I personally disagree, and so does DnDs implicit morality.

I'm not sure you do. I mean, I can't read your mind, so perhaps you disagree, but "the truth is preferable to falsehood in general" is a pretty common ground rule of moral behavior. E.g. the ethic of reciprocity rejects telling lies in both its positive and negative forms. "Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you" (the negative version of the ethic of reciprocity, sometimes called "the silver rule") would imply that, since we do not want others to gain advantage over us or manipulate us via lies, we should not tell lies to others. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" (the positive ethic of reciprocity/"golden rule"), which unlike the previous version requires actions instead of merely forbidding actions, expects of you that you tell the truth to others if you wish for others to tell you the truth.

These aren't complex philosophical theories; these are simple moral maxims everyday people use and live by. I would be extremely surprised if you said that lying about any random thing whenever a person felt like it was an acceptable behavior, for example, even if the harm caused by those lies failed to meet your "thrown into a woodchipper" standard. E.g., if I lie to someone to tell them I am vaccinated for COVID when I am not, and they catch COVID as a result but experience only mild symptoms, I certainly haven't done any harm to them that is comparable to throwing them in a woodchipper, but I suspect you would consider me morally at fault for having told that lie. (Please do tell me if you WOULDN'T think that though! That implies a very interesting discussion/explanation!)