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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6736578" data-attributes="member: 4937">I also don't like when people give very narrow definitions, but at the same time I don't like such broad definitions that the concept becomes meaningless.  Most people in my opinion err regarding alignments in one of two ways.  The most common one is to define the two axis in such a way that they aren't really independent variables.  This results in the idea that 'Lawful Good' is the most good, that 'Chaotic Evil' is the most evil, and that ideas like Lawful Evil (or even LN and CN) are actually oxymorons.  And provided that you do define the two axis in a way that they aren't independent, all of that is probably true, and we could do better with just a single axis running from 'lawful good' to 'chaotic evil'.I reject that on two grounds, one of which is that it misses out on some legitimate complexities, and the other is that it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of good and evil IMO leading to some really sloppy thinking and as often as not rebellion against the idea that good is good.  (Gygax himself was stuck in this viewpoint about the time he wrote 1e AD&D, so their are hints of it right from the beginning.  It shows up again in the finale of Chronicles of the Dragonlance when Palladine equates perfect goodness with evil, such that it had to be destroyed.)I agree.  But at the same time, it should not be so broad that any character could be described by multiple alignments - which is the situation you are going to end up in and part of what causes people to reject alignments as nonsensical and pointless.Ok, that's a good start, but you are going to go absolutely wrong on your very first shot at it.  Observe:That's wrong.  It's wrong on two counts.  First, not every evil character actually believes that.   And second, because you've inadvertently made the core concept of evil overlap with core elements of the concept of chaos.  When you start describing evil inherently in terms of self and non-self, you are inherently overlapping with the implicit self/non-self idea that is contained within law/chaos.   You are going to end up with good being defined as most selfless and evil being defined as most selfish.  And you are at the same time going to have law defined as selfless and chaos defined as selfish, or else you are going to end up defining law/chaos according to the very trivial and narrow and incidental features that you started out saying you wanted to avoid.No.  Everyone isn't.  That's a bias.  Not everyone sees themselves that way at all.  I can't get as deeply into this as I want, but in "Band of Brothers", one of the characters is asked by their grandson whether they were a hero during the war.  And the character responds, "No.  But I was in a company of heroes."  Some people, arguably many people, take pride not in being the hero in the story, but in being the hero's sidekick, friend, companion, servant or herald.  Some people think the better aspiration and the more honest aspiration is to not try to be the hero because you aren't.  In fact, this statement is a very incidental trait.  Not only is it not universal, but it's not even universally associated with any viewpoint.Well, I don't think anyone has a perfect definition, but to the extent that this was the primary goal of your definition I think you failed in it.A few weeks ago, I made a stab at defining Evil.  The thread is over here <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?467449-On-Evil" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?467449-On-Evil</a></blockquote>

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