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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8272161" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think Rawls is correct that the classic utilitarians (Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick) saw utilitarianism as a method of evaluating institutions and practices, not as a method for determining what an individual should do in any given moment of action.As Sidgwick noted and Rawls's whole body of work really elaborates on, there is an instability in utilitarianism applied in this way, because anyone who is participating in a utility-maximising practice is subject to two sorts of incentives that can destabilise that participation: (i) self-regarding incentives if participating in the practice will lower his/her personal utility; (ii) other-regarding incentives if, on a particular occasion of action, utility might be maximised by doing other than what the practice requires (eg breaking a promise; telling a lie). A major part of Rawls' work in A Theory of Justice and subsequently is to put forward an account of the justification of practices which is not so vulnerable to these incentives to destabilisation.The whole approach to institutions and practices set out in the previous two paragraphs only makes sense if one assumes that human practices are subject (however imperfectly) to deliberate change by way of human action. In a D&D context this assumption is typically going to be doubtful, because (i) D&D societies tend to be pre-modern, pre-bureaucratic ones which lack the requisite technical and administrative apparatus to deliberately change themselves, and (ii) there tend to be active divine/extra-planar forces who are strongly committed to reinforcing the status quo of institutions and practices.The sort of moral outlook that makes sense in typical D&D is the same sort of one that is found in heroic fantasy stories: one in which honour and truthfulness are valuable on their own account (and hence justify risking the lives of oneself and others to uphold); in which wanton killing is bad; in which the call of duty is keenly felt. In terms of the categories set out in the OP, this could be seen as a type of deontology or a type of virtue ethic/role morality - for the purposes of D&D play there is very rarely if ever going to be anything at stake in drawing those distinctions.There are different possible approaches to this sort of thing: in REH's Conan it is more of an ethic than a morality, with a strong modernist flavour of "self-creation"; in LotR it is a morality with a strong anti-modernist flavour connected to ideas of tradition and providence. I think playing with these differences is interesting in the RPG context, and differences of fiction (eg how are faith and divinity handled) and differences of mechanics (eg how are dice rolls understood in their relationship to the fiction) can help bring them out. For instance, classic D&D with its impersonal mechanics that correspond to purely abstract "divine favour" or "luck" pushes towards REH-ish rather than LotR-ish feel (also reinforcing the oddity of the paladin in the gameworld); 4e D&D on the other hand (with its powers and its rerolls and its action points and other metagame elements) can be quite well-suited to a providential-feeling game.</blockquote>

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