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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6738146" data-attributes="member: 4937">I quite understand your anger at being misrepresented, as it is generally one of the few things that gets my blood boiling as well, but while I apologize, I certainly am not intentionally misrepresenting your position.  Nor is it yet clear to me what exactly your position is if I have not restated it.   Certainly I don't agree that it has been perfectly clear you haven't defined lawful "as follows the laws".We seem to be pretty close on this, in as much this seems to mean that the person would see the social construct as having primacy.  But nothing about your barrister example seems to suggest he is not defining the social construct by himself.  He sees the purpose of the law as being to enrich himself at the expense of others - particularly the weak and powerless.  Is that what the social construct he defines himself by declares as its purpose?  Is that placing the society higher than himself so that he's really defined by the society, or is he thinking the whole thing - society, the law, even the orphans - exists to make him personally happy, powerful, and comfortable?Then we can dismiss the idea that it is the sacrifice itself that is good.  After all, while it is true that he does sacrifice himself to kill others, it is equally true that he is sacrificing himself on the behalf of others.  I didn't draw that from your statement.  The only motive or intent that I understood from your prior post was that it was selfless.  What additionally must be true about your intent or the outcome of your action?I think it is obvious that that it is.Force and deceit wasn't mentioned.  But with this addition, isn't the taking or the giving irrelevant?  Isn't it the force and deceit that is the problem regardless of the action it is associated with?  I'm not angry.  I was a bit frustrated with Maxperson earlier, but I certainly have had no feelings of frustration with you.  It was a quick example that seemed to contradict your earlier positions.  And indeed, seems to contradict your reiterated positions.  I'm confused.  What am I supposed to ask you?  I am directly asking my questions.  I'm even trying to clarify why I ask the questions.  I understand you think the example is unimportant.  I understood that right from the start.  I still see the following statement (and related ones) as a self-contradiction: "I was presenting an example of a LE barrister using the system for his own, personal benefit."   If he's lawful, he defines himself by the system.  I think we both agree with that.  I'm saying, if that is true, then he ought to see that the system is supposed to use him for its benefit.  If he thinks the system exists for his benefit and uses it that way, then he thinks he's more important than the system is.  He defines the system by his personal needs.  I don't see that as lawful; I gather that you do, but feel that eventually if we accept your LE barrister as lawful, it will lead to a contradiction where LE is an oxymoron.   So I immediately made a counter-example of a Barrister acting in the exact same way, but with a radically different impersonal motivation such that the needs of the system were more important than his own, and he was sacrificing himself to it to obtain those ends, but those ends and means were both clearly evil and clearly not-chaotic.  And my point in doing so is that I think if you insist on selfishness being the trait that defines evil, you miss the possibility of evil where no component of the system is selfish.  (Though I suppose you could say the system as a whole was selfish with regards to other systems, this I think would run into a contradiction as each system has something it can't tolerate, if only intolerance itself).   Naturally, mortal systems that were on the aggregate LE would be made up of people of mixed motives, but I don't want to classify systems that are on the aggregate lawful or lawful evil until I'm sure of the definition of those terms.</blockquote>

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