Good (by which I mean the D&D definition of good) without law or chaos may be more "pure" but that doesn't necessarily mean the paladin or the bard thinks it's better.
If your goal is to bake the best tasting cake rather than the sweetest cake, then saying that unaduterated sweetness is not best tasting is not incoherent.
This just pushes back the question one step - what does
better mean here?
In ordinary English, "better" means "more good" (
good,
better,
best). Obviously that is being ruled out in this context, given that "better" is entailing "less good".
What value is the paladin, or bard, committed to that makes achieving human well-being less important? How is it rational for a human being to pursue that value? How does this relate to any actual, historically realised form of human aspiration or moral framework?
good in D&D parlance translates to charity, mercy, or selflessness (though these aren't totally appropriate either).
Leaving asie the fact that I find it hard to believe that a paladin thinks there can be too much charity or selflessness (mercy might be another matter), this is not the canonical meaning of "good" in D&D.
From the d20SRD:
"Good" implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings.
From Gygax's PHB and DMG (pp 33 and 23 resepectively):
[C]reatures of [chaotic good] alignment . . . place value on life and the welfare of each individual. . .
[C]haracters of lawful good alignment follow these precepts to improve the common weal. . . . [T]ruth is of highest value, and ife and beauty are of great importance. The benefits of this society are to be brought to all. . . .
[C]reatures of neutral good believe [snip details] if the best is to be brought to the world - the most beneficial conditions for living things in general and intelligent creatures in particular. . . .
[T]he tenets of good are human rights, or in the case of AD&D, creature rights. Each creatures is entitled to life, relative freedom, and the prospect of happiness. Cruelty and suffering are undesirable.
From the 2nd ed AD&D PHB (p 46):
Good characters are just that. They try to be honest, charitable and forthright. . . . [M]any things are commony accepted as gooed (helping those in need, protecting the weak).
Nowhere in these passages is "good" defind by reference to charity, mercy and selflessness. It's defined by reference to human wellbeing in general - life, happiness, dignity, etc. How can a paladin think there is too much of that. Or, to reference the 2nd ed AD&D definition, how can a paladin think that there is too much helping of those in need, and too much protecting of the weak? Those are the very raison d'etre of the paladin!
If we look at contemporary domestic politics in the West, I'd say that the main divide is on a law/chaos axis: things like conservativism vs liberalism, state vs individual, and similar contentious topics.
I think the law and chaos conflict is largely more interesting, because it's actually more common (in my experience) and because it allows for more nuance in storytelling. A lawful good character is clearly superior to a chaotic evil one, but are they really morally superior to a chaotic neutral one? What about a lawful neutral character and a chaotic good one? Which you believe to be superior depends to a large extent on your own personal beliefs, which is something the simple dualism of good vs. evil doesn't allow
I see it more as saying unadulterated sweetness is too sweet. As in, "Can't build a society on nothing but goodness, you need structure and law—otherwise it's vulnerable to corrupting influences."
This goes back to [MENTION=6780330]Parmandur[/MENTION]'s contrast between personality and metaphysics.
In the real world, policy making is plagued by doubt. Does a generous welfare system uphold human dignity and wellbeing (as eg European social democrats believe) or does it undermine productivity and generate dignity-eroding welfare dependency (as both US conservatives and the famous liberal philosopher John Rawls believed)?
But in a cosmological framework like the Great Wheel, all such doubt is eroded. What does it mean, for instance, to worry that the unadulterated goodness of Elysium is vulnerable to corrupting infuences? The game rules already tell us that it is uncorrupted. The game rules similarly tell us that both Celestia and Olympus are good, and hence that when it comes to achieving human wellbeing
the choice between law and chaos doesn't matter.
Another factor in the real world, which relates to political debates, is that political opponents have differing conceptions of the good. For instance, the French revolutionaries regarded
solidarity as a key civic virtue, and so does Rawls. Libertarians tend to doubt that solidarity has value - they favour strictly voluntary relationships between human beings.
Because of this difference in opinion on the value of solidarity, they can look at different societies, agree roughy on the facts, yet disagree on their moral value - because for the French revolutionary the existence of solidarity is a marker of human wellbeing, whereas for the libertarian it is irrelevant.
But the framework and cosmology of 9-point alignment rule this out too. Because each axis is treated as orthogonal to the other, we cannot say that Olympus and Celestia are realising different values (and are potentialy opposed in that respect). Rather, they are realising the very same value - that of "human weal", as set out in the game texts I quoted upthread and detectable via a Detect Good or Know Alignment spell- via different means.
Hence, there shoud be no conflict between law and chaos: the game's cosmology defines them as equally permissibe, equally effective modes of realising human well-being.
If you drop the cosmology, of course, and treat the law/chaos divide as reflecting differeing beliefs about the pathway to, and/or different belliefs about the content of, human welfare, then this particular incoherence goes away. Of course, you're still left with the question that I have never seen answered - are enlightenment republicans like the authors of the US Constitution, who believed in achieving democratic government aimed at conferring the benefits of a universal citizenship by way of the rule of law, chaotic or lawful?
Even Gygax was contradictory on this point, building the American constitutional notion of freedom not just into some of his ideas about chaos but also into his definition of goodness, as quoted above!
But as this incoherence in the alignment system isn't related to the cosmology, and rather to the inadequacy of law and chaos as terms for serious political moral inquiry (as shown by the fact that they see no use outside the context of fantasy adventure gaming), I won't press it in this thread.
