The D&D Great Wheel of the Planes and Moral Ethical Relativism

[Cheiromancer]

Kudos, Mardoc, for introducing the Euthyphro into the discussion! I am not sure that I agree with the following:

If cosmological good determines what is said to be objective moral good, it is difficult to see why everyone must care about "objective" moral good, even if there is a higher power who makes a moral judgment between balors and solars... and thus we might be able to say that such "objective moral good" is not objective at all. But this subjectivist/relativist conclusion is no more inevitable in the D&D universe than it is in the real world, nor--crucially--any less.

My take on objective morality is that it makes values like objects- something that exists independently of your perceptions or preferences. A table has an objective existence. Now you could take a subjectivist approach and say that your nature and cultural values make you spontaneously recognize it as a table- that is probably true. Without the innate features of your visual system, you would not be able to interpret visual stimuli. Without a psychological category of an enduring object, you would also have trouble. Without a cultural knowledge of furniture you wouldn't know what a table is for. Etc., etc. But I think that it makes sense just to say that a table has objective existence. Sure it's a cultural artifact, and so would not have been made if intelligent life had never existed, but there is a way in which its existence is independent of intelligence.

There isn't any higher power that enforces the objectivity of a table. It just is. I think a parallel might hold with morality and ethics in D&D. An unholy blight is going to hurt you if you are good aligned; but even if there were no good (or neutral) creatures there would still be such a thing as an unholy blight. There is no higher power than enforces the way morality interacts with the spell- it just does what it does.

What I don't get is what you mean by why people would care about objective moral good. Presumably the moral properties of actions do more than affect the function of spells like unholy blight. They also play a cognitive and conative role in the actions of moral agents. I don't see why these roles can't be normative; that people ought to do good things, say. In fact, I don't see how actions could be good unless it were true that people ought to perform them. Characters are evil insofar as they are disinclined to do good things, and inclined to do evil things.

 

[Mardoc Redcloak]

Mardoc, great post. You need to lurk less often!

I intend to.

But this is what I distrust about moral relativism; while the theory may say that your environment defines your morality and morality is not subject to an individual's conscious will, an appeal to relativism could cite conditions in one's environment that could explain how an action that an absolutist would call "Evil", is not "Evil" because of the environment. Would it not relieve the individual of the burden of responsibility if the morality of an act is determined not by the actor and the action, but by the perspective and environment?

That's an excellent point.

The best response I can think of at the moment is something akin to that which Compatibilists might resort to in response to similar objections regarding determinism: judgments of "responsibility" are only relevant insofar as we wish to draw a connection between the action or consequence and the person. For instance, to show that a person is evil, we must demonstrate that she is genuinely responsible for evil actions. But since "responsibility" is important only with respect to the individual, when it comes to the individual himself, she need not be responsible for what she is to be judged by what she is: what she is is her, she need not be "responsible" for it.

Thus, to judge a person's moral standing, we need only resort to "responsibility" if our evidence is indirect, if we are judging her by her actions and their results. If she is under a dominate spell, her actions under it are excused because they are not representative of her moral virtue. But if somehow we have direct access to her moral virtue, we need not be concerned with responsibility: we can judge her directly based on that, because fundamentally it is a part of her, and is determinant of how we judge her morally (rather than a mere indicator of that determinant.)

To bring this back to subjective morality, it follows that I can (with a subjective standard) judge someone to be morally evil based on her moral beliefs (say, "It is right to murder innocent people") simply because that is her moral belief, regardless of her responsibility for it.

That was somewhat convoluted... I'm not sure how much sense it made. Even if you are right, though, that subjective morality makes judgments of moral responsibility impossible "across" moralities, this in and of itself does not establish the falsity of the theory. It makes it inconvenient, not wrong. The basic problem, in my opinion, with most of the arguments for subjective morality is that they reduce all rationality to instrumental rationality ("how to accomplish x") and thus lose sight of the possibility for moral rationality ("ought I to seek x in the first place?")

If the great wheel were a compass, able to turn to the cosmological analogs of True North, would that not lend itself to an absolutist view of morality that the OP wants in his game? Yes, you would need introduce two "Norths" (Good and Law), and two "Souths" (Chaos and Evil), but the analogy isn't an unseemly one. Wouldn't the Good of Celestia and its solars be Good because their morality is based on absolutist principles and the objective standard of Good? Does that satisfy the OP?

Actually, the "compass" analogy is a very good one. It gets at the point precisely. Compasses do not "define" what is north; they simply recognize it. Another standard (in the specific case of the compass, the location of the northern magnetic pole) determines what is north; compasses merely inform us of the right direction by that standard.

But by the same token, if there were no "objective" north, the mere fact that a compass pointed in a certain direction (even that all compasses happened to point in a certain direction) would not tell us where "north" was. The direction the compass pointed would be merely arbitrary.

Similarly, the mere existence of "cosmological good" (compasses that point in a direction) does not necessarily indicate objective morality. It only indicates objective morality if what is cosmogically good is so because it corresponds to the objective moral law--if the compasses point in a certain direction because that direction is north.

 

[Mardoc Redcloak]

My take on objective morality is that it makes values like objects- something that exists independently of your perceptions or preferences. A table has an objective existence.

Yes.

There isn't any higher power that enforces the objectivity of a table. It just is. I think a parallel might hold with morality and ethics in D&D. An unholy blight is going to hurt you if you are good aligned; but even if there were no good (or neutral) creatures there would still be such a thing as an unholy blight. There is no higher power than enforces the way morality interacts with the spell- it just does what it does.

What I don't get is what you mean by why people would care about objective moral good. Presumably the moral properties of actions do more than affect the function of spells like unholy blight. They also play a cognitive and conative role in the actions of moral agents. I don't see why these roles can't be normative; that people ought to do good things, say. In fact, I don't see how actions could be good unless it were true that people ought to perform them. Characters are evil insofar as they are disinclined to do good things, and inclined to do evil things.

The problem here is one of equivocation. "Normative" good and "cosmological" good are distinct conceptually, though they need not be distinct materially. It is true that we ought to do (normatively) good actions; it is not (necessarily) true that we ought to do the cosmologically good actions that will let us be harmed by an unholy blight spell.

The fact that certain actions let us be harmed by an unholy blight spell does not in and of itself mean that they are normatively good, that we ought to do them; it only means that they are cosmologically good, that celestials like them and they make us show up on detect good spells.

Imagine, for instance, that we switch cosmological good and cosmological evil. The solars in Elysium, at the height of cosmological goodness, advocate the murder and torture of innocents; the balors of the Nine Hells, at the height of cosmological evil, advocate altruism and universal love. Holy smite spares the callously selfish and unholy blight spares the noble and self-sacrificing. Would moral obligations really change? Would killing innocents be any less (normatively) wrong? Would helping innocents in desperate need be any less (normatively) right?

It doesn't seem so to me.

 

[Cheiromancer]

Mardoc,

This seems to be an example of a contingent a priori statement. I think the classic example is the metal rod in Paris that was used as the standard metre. (It no longer is the standard, but let's pretend it were.) Given that it is the standard metre, no empirical investigation is required to determine its length- it is exactly one metre long. But there are possible worlds where that piece of metal is a bit longer or a bit shorter than it is now- thus it is not necessary that it is one metre long. But imagining such a possible world doesn't involve imagining that one metre is, say, only 99 cm long.

In the case of cosmological and moral good, we stipulate that the cosmological good is the actual moral good. Then no investigation is required to see if the cosmological good = the moral good. It's a priori. But, since the terms are conceptually distinct, we can imagine the two diverging- in your cruel Elysium case, for example. Yet this doesn't involve any contradiction, any more than the 99 cm metre was a contradiction. In the actual D&D world, where the two goods are co-extensive, we shouldn't have any problems.

Now there is the epistemological problem of determining whether the cosmological good actually is the moral good. But given that the relationship is part of the structure of the game, I think it can be stipulated as part of its metaphysics.

Does this make sense?

I think I want to join your conversation with Felix, but I'm sleepy and I'll need to read it over more carefully.

 

[Mardoc Redcloak]

In the case of cosmological and moral good, we stipulate that the cosmological good is the actual moral good. Then no investigation is required to see if the cosmological good = the moral good.

To truly echo the analytic a priori certainty of the meter's length, we would have to define the content of the cosmological good as "that which conforms to the moral good."

The problem here is that this definition assumes there actually is a moral good. You cannot use it to demonstrate that the D&D universe actually has objective morality, because you do not conclude that, you presuppose it. You could of course claim, probably correctly, that the designers designed the alignment system with objective morality in mind--but that does not mean that the cosmological system of D&D actually does imply objective morality.

From the perspective of a philosopher within the D&D universe, the subjectivist/relativist conclusion is no easier to escape than it is for a philosopher within ours.

Now there is the epistemological problem of determining whether the cosmological good actually is the moral good. But given that the relationship is part of the structure of the game, I think it can be stipulated as part of its metaphysics.

The problem is that most of the (good) arguments for subjective morality aren't founded on particular characteristics of our own universe that don't apply to the D&D universe. So if those arguments in fact hold (I think they do not), they apply as much to the D&D world as they do to ours.

 

[Kheti sa-Menik]

Has 'rad' come back into fashion or are you using a time machine to post from 1987?

Nice.

If I had beat anyone to it, my response would have been "Rad? hey, Bill and Ted called, they'd like their slang back."

 

[Cheiromancer]

To truly echo the analytic a priori certainty of the meter's length, we would have to define the content of the cosmological good as "that which conforms to the moral good."

Hmmm. I'm drawing on Kripke's Naming and Necessity here. I don't think it is an analytic a prioricity. It's kind of like when you christen a boat- you know the boat's name without having to investigate it. That kind of a priori. I don't know what it is called. The "stipulative a priori"? It wouldn't be philosophy unless we made up our own terminology.

The problem here is that this definition assumes there actually is a moral good. You cannot use it to demonstrate that the D&D universe actually has objective morality, because you do not conclude that, you presuppose it. You could of course claim, probably correctly, that the designers designed the alignment system with objective morality in mind--but that does not mean that the cosmological system of D&D actually does imply objective morality.

Well, at the very least we can say that the Great Wheel does not imply moral relativism. As a DM stipulating the cosmology of my campaign I can stipulate whatever I like. And it is certainly open to me to use the Great Wheel under the assumption that there are objective moral values. Which I think is a satisfactory response to the OP. And it doesn't imply there are objective moral values; if there aren't any at all then you can't stipulate that the cosmological values track them. And even if there were, you could separate them when you (as DM) set up the cosmology. To use the compass analogy, it would be like the difference from magnetic north and true north. In some worlds they may coincide, but in others they won't.

From the perspective of a philosopher within the D&D universe, the subjectivist/relativist conclusion is no easier to escape than it is for a philosopher within ours.

The problem is that most of the (good) arguments for subjective morality aren't founded on particular characteristics of our own universe that don't apply to the D&D universe. So if those arguments in fact hold (I think they do not), they apply as much to the D&D world as they do to ours.

I'm rusty on what those arguments are. If you give me some key words Wikipedia and Google will tell me the rest.

 

[Mardoc Redcloak]

Hmmm. I'm drawing on Kripke's Naming and Necessity here. I don't think it is an analytic a prioricity. It's kind of like when you christen a boat- you know the boat's name without having to investigate it.

Isn't this just "truth by definition"?

Well, at the very least we can say that the Great Wheel does not imply moral relativism.

Agreed.

I'm rusty on what those arguments are.

Well, the "best" arguments for subjective morality are more or less the best combined accumulated arguments against all the attempts at objective morality.

They tend to echo the first part of Kant, the idea that (objective) morality can't be based on particular ends because it is not a necessary truth that I will actually seek that end. You can tell me that "to achieve happiness" or "to satisfy my natural moral sentiments" or "to fulfill my fundamental desires" I must do x, y, and z, but if I don't care about any of those, none of them obligate me--and even if I do care about them, they aren't really "obligation" because fundamentally I fulfill them because I want to. I might feel obligated to do other things even if I do want to do those, and if the basis of the principle is simply the general inclination to do it, the case for superseding that sense of obligation won't be very convincing.

As far as "reason" goes they tend to focus, like I said in reply to Felix, on its instrumental role at directing means to ends, and doubt that it can ever set before us anything as an end in and of itself.

Crucial to the subjectivist argument is the is-ought gap, the idea that "is" statements can never imply "ought" statements and therefore we cannot rationally reach objective morality from the knowledge available to us--matters of "is."

 

[Cheiromancer]

If something is true by definition it is true by virtue of its meaning, and this holds in all possible worlds. It is a priori and necessary. Something which is a priori and contingent can't be true by definition.

I was hoping for positive arguments for subjective morality. If you listen to arguments *against* positions you end up disbelieving in other minds, the existence of an external world, etc.. Pragmatic difficulties ensue.

You don't write like an amateur. What's your philosophical training? I have an MA and a few years teaching experience. And an M.Div.

edit

And before that, a B.Sc. in Mathematics. Which occasionally flavors my philosophical positions. For instance, I tend to regard statements as relative to their background assumptions... but then I turn around and consider them as absolute, given their background assumptions. Whether or not a particular position in Chess contains a winning move for White is a fact. Even though Chess is ultimately dependent on human minds.

In this case it means that if there are norms governing intelligent social behavior, then subjective morality grounded in those norms may be construed as objective, given those norms. I think this could be grounded in an evolutionary description of morality. The kernel would be that genes have an obligation to replicate. Then add enough game theory to support a theory of altruism (which is kinda necessary to have multicellular organisms, let alone social organisms) and you are off to the races. Evil behavior contradicts more sophisticated game theoretical rules, in the same way that selfish behavior is a losing strategy in an indefinitely repeated Prisoner's Dilemma.

Except it is not really evil in the absence of consciousness, is it? So there needs to be an explanation about why consciousness ought to classify things into categories of "is" and "ought" - what survival benefit would this bring?

I think it is very difficult to put these arguments together, but I don't see any reason why it couldn't be done.

 

[Mardoc Redcloak]

If something is true by definition it is true by virtue of its meaning, and this holds in all possible worlds. It is a priori and necessary.

And isn't it?

True, the word "meter" might mean different things, but the concept we refer to when we say "meter" in this world remains the same.

I was hoping for positive arguments for subjective morality.

Arguments for subjective morality are necessarily negative: they must deny the existence of an objective standard. (Everyone acknowledges that subjective moral standards exist. The question is whether they are the best we can do.) But unlike the skeptical epistemological arguments, they are talking about the possibility of something's existence, not just our capability to know it.

Fundamentally what an objective moral standard must be is a reason that can command every rational being's will, and if the subjectivists can prove that such a reason cannot exist, they have, by denying the possibility of an objective standard, successfully demonstrated that our actually existing moral standards are all subjective.

You don't write like an amateur.

No, I don't... but I am. My formal training, at least, is very limited.

The kernel would be that genes have an obligation to replicate.

But they don't. There is no "imperative" here, just natural processes.

What you are really saying is that certain physical laws select for genes that best aid replication, but this is not the stuff of "obligation"--no more than we are "obligated" to fall back down when we jump.

Evil behavior contradicts more sophisticated game theoretical rules, in the same way that selfish behavior is a losing strategy in an indefinitely repeated Prisoner's Dilemma.

Yes, but you can't tell me why I should care.

To reference your earlier chess example, the fact that a certain move will make me lose doesn't mean that I have a reason to not move there--perhaps I want to lose this game, perhaps, indeed, I am obligated to do so.

Similarly, contradicting the rules of the "evolutionary game" is something I will only recognize as "wrong" if I already am obligated to win the evolutionary game. What reason can you give that obligates me?

I am with Kant. I think that the best you can ever do is tell me that it will satisfy some emotion of mine, or even all my emotions together (bring me happiness)--not that I truly ought to do it.

Except it is not really evil in the absence of consciousness, is it? So there needs to be an explanation about why consciousness ought to classify things into categories of "is" and "ought" - what survival benefit would this bring?

It's just an accidental side-effect of rationality, I think.