I don't believe in moral absolutism (to a certain extent; I do think certain things are clearly good and evil) and perceive law and chaos as alignments to be as much about how you view yourself in relation to society as they are about what you believe to be morally right or wrong.
The D&D 9-point alignment system is predicated on a type of absolutism. Within the system, there is no scope for the goodness of one person to be relative to the moral outlook of another person who is making the judgement as to the first person's goodness. Archons on Mt Celestia, devils in Hell, demons in the Abyss - all are committed to agreeing that the eladrin and titans on Olympus are fully good and fully chaotic.
I think it's entirely possible to see someone as mostly good but not necessarily wholly good.
This may be true, but is orthogonal to my point. In D&D, a CG character who is mostly good but not wholly good is CG(N). This is the position, for instance, of the einheriar on Ysgard.
My point is that when a LG character casts Know Alignment or Detect Good (depending on edition) on a CG character, the fact that the character is chaotic has no bearing on how good that character is (and hence no bearing on the result from the spell).
In other words, a LG character who denies that a CG character is fully good is, within the parameters of the D&D alignment system,
making a mistake. The LG character is, in fact, committed to the incoherent position that the CG character is both fully good yet morally inadequate.
Good, evil, law, and chaos all represent fairly different things in D&D's cosmology, which means there's no real conflict in having all four. Good and evil are the conflict between benevolence and charity over malice and selfishness. Law and chaos are (when taken beyond human-scale characters) representative of the conflict between stability and stasis vs. change and destruction.
Suppose this is true - which is contentious in respect of law/chaos (eg no one has ever explained to me whether the preference of the authors of the US Constitution for securing personal freedom via the rule of law makes them lawful or chaotic) - it doesn't answer the point.
A LG character, in D&D, is committed to regarding a CG character as wrong, as having made a morally impermissible choice, and yet as fully good.
Is breaking a promise selfish (and hence evil)? Or chaotic? In all the actual literature on promises, both philosophical and legal (where it is often mediated through analysis of the law of contract), it is taken for granted that the reasons in favour of, or against, promise-keeping are not orthogonal to the reasons that speak to human well-being, but are among those reasons. The idea that you can prise judgements about the merits of stability and change from judgements about human welfare is a conceit found nowhere but in D&D's alignment system.
treating "Law" and "Good" as different is like trying to say that "True" is different from "Good": if you are going to have a Realist metaphysics, doesn't make much sense.
Even within a value pluralist framework, it doesn't make much sense.
It might be that there are multiple valuable ways in which to pursue goodness and truth; but if that is true, then a person who pursues goodness to X degree and truth to Y degree has no rational basis for criticising someone who pursues goodness to Y degree and truth to X degree. Within a pluralist framework, both options are permissible.
But the LG person, in D&D, is committed to thinking that the CG person is wrong. Hence, has made a non-permissible choice. Yet is wholly good.
That is the incoherence.
I will say, however, that it's workable as metaphysics too, particularly if you have a non-dualistic outlook in things.
Not really, for the reason I just gave.
It's true that few (if any) real-world cosmologies present D&D's particular schema of good vs. evil and law vs. chaos. There are, however, quite a few that do not associate good with law (order) or evil with chaos. Hinduism, for example, puts the forces of destruction on more less equal moral ground with the forces of stability
Sure. Similarly, there are real-world moral and religious systems that have different views on the moral merits of same-sex relationships, of women's emancipation, of eating meat, etc. That doesn't show that these things full under some evaluative classification that is orthogonal to good and evil. They just show that there are differing opinions on what is good and what evil.
But the D&D alignment system doesn't deal with this. In the real world, a person who thinks that changes is good and stasis bad
doesn't agree with the person who thinks that order is the most important thing. For instance, the hippies think that the 1960s FBI is morally flawed; and vice versa. Whereas in the D&D alignment system, the CG hippies are forced to concede that the LG FBI is
fully good; and vice versa.
But it's a bit odd to say it's "untenable" when metaphysics as a field is entirely based on largely untestable principles (which is why it is philosophy and not science).
Some philosophical positions are untenable. I mean, I guess it's
possible that Gygax hit upon some insight of moral analysis that has eluded every serious moral and political philosopher before and since. But it seems to me to be pretty unlikely.
I think that D&D tends to focus primarily on the Good vs. Evil axis.
I think this is generally true. Like you, I think that the game is best without alignment.
But whereas I find the 9-point alignment system hopeless, for the reasons I've given, I think that spectrum alignment of the Law-Chaos variety, as found in classic D&D and 4e, is basically harmless. The spectrum presents a cosmological strugge. The players can choose where their PCs align themselves on the spectrum. The framework doesn't have the effect of the 9-point system, of forcing characters to acknowledge that others to whom they oppose nevertheless fully realise some value(s) to which those character are committed.
Our history and our present are full of examples of "law" siding with each other against "chaos" irrespective of their commitment to other values, such as good or evil.
I'm curious as to what examples you have in mind, although I appreciate that board rules probably constrain your capacity to elaborate.
But there are no real world people or countries I can think of who conceive of themselves as committed to evil. Exampes of classic alliances, such as between the USSR and the liberal democracies during the Second World War, were conceived of at the time as alliances in pursuit of good things against bad things. Compromises were seen in terms of lesser evils (eg both liberal democracy and Soviet communism are enlightenment ideologies, in opposition to the anti-enlightenment ideals of the fascists and national socialists).
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