D&D 5E The Multiverse is back....

[Mr Fixit]

But there are no real world people or countries I can think of who conceive of themselves as committed to evil

Conceive of themselves? No. Many generally "evil" people don't consider themselves such. Though I understand your point upthread on absolutism of D&D alignment. When a certain in-game mechanic absolutely identifies a being as good or chaotic for instance, it's hard, or even impossible, to allow for shades of gray. If someone's evil, he's evil in a provable way.

I do, appreciate, however, 5E's efforts to circumvent this problem without abandoning the alignment system. Various detect and protection spells encompass all of the extreme philosophical alignment variations without necessarily tying the detect/protect effect to a specific one. You aren't detecting LG/LE/CG/CE beings, you're detecting celestials, fiends, fey and such. In a way, the names of the spells are really somewhat of a misnomer since they are essentially extraplanar detection and protection spells. It's their planar origin that is the salient point. "Mundane" Material Plane good and evil, as far as I know, can't be proven in this way. Alignment here remains in the eye of the beholder.

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).

I think this is an oversimplification. Communism may well be an enlightened ideology if viewed in the context of its post-industrial revolution origins. I find it very hard to accept Stalinism of WWII Soviet Union to be a fundamentally enlightened ideology (twisted in practice) as opposed to fascism and nazism as variants of state corporativism.

Point is, state actors are willing to get in the bed with what they perceive as lesser evil to confront a great evil, just as they are willing to do the same with regards to order vs chaos. For example, and I won't go any further because of the board rules, was Allende's government evil? In the great scheme of things, I would say it was a progressive regime with "good" tendencies, especially considered in its historical, geographical, and socio-economic context. Yet certain powers deemed his government as too disruptive to the established geo-political order (chaotically-inclined, if you will) and supported the "evil" Pinochet regime that promised stability and order. The entire cold war could be simplistically understood that way, not as a conflict of good and evil--though there were elements of that--but as a conflict between revolution and counter-revolution (if your vantage point is in the East) or established world order and those who would usurp it. It's not that far-fetched to understand it as law vs chaos, though such real-world analogies are by their very nature flawed and shouldn't be taken literally.

 

[Imaro]

When a certain in-game mechanic absolutely identifies a being as good or chaotic for instance, it's hard, or even impossible, to allow for shades of gray. If someone's evil, he's evil in a provable way.

Where are people getting this from? Is it an earlier (pre-3.0) edition thing? Nothing about alignment is absolute and that's made clear in it's description...

 

[Imaro]

Well, first off, no alignment system, so that's a major leg up right there.

But, the Aspect system would fit with law vs chaos so much better than D&D. You simply choose Aspects that fit within that theme - something like, Letter of the Law or Stick It To the Man, or even something as simple as Free Spirit and you'd create a game that is inherently focused on ethics rather than morality. Also, since D&D tends to resolve a lot of issues by killing them, Fate would perhaps mechanically fit trying to act within a specific moral framework a little bit better.

Put it this way. Evil is real in a D&D world. It is a force, same as gravity or heat. It can be measured and detected. Makes moral questions pretty bloody easy to answer - if I do this, will it make me evil? Yes? Well, better not do that then since being evil is a bad thing. In Fate, you would never get such easy answers.

Yes but in most of the fantasy fiction that deals primarily with the law vs. chaos conflict (I'm thinking mainly Moorcock and WHFRP)... it is an actual cosmological force... it's not subjective ina nay way and it's clear when you are siding with one force or the other. The moral questions are about why you choose to serve one force over the other as opposed to the whether you're actions serve one force or the other... At least IMO.

EDIT: I guess that's why I don't see major flaws with D&D in this area. Elric knows when he's serving chaos, when he's serving law and when he's chosen to serve the balance... that's not where the dramatic conflict comes from, it comes from the things that have pushed him to purposefully choose to serve one or the other cosmological forces.

 

[Mr Fixit]

Where are people getting this from? Is it an earlier (pre-3.0) edition thing? Nothing about alignment is absolute and that's made clear in it's description...

Yes, in 2E at least, and I presume earlier as well, there were spells that allowed you to detect alignment of every creature. Also, as far as I know, it's a 3.0 thing as well. I don't know if it was left that way in 3.5, but 3.0 PHB details such mechanics.

 

[pemerton]

I think the flaw in your argument is you claim that having "good" as part of your alignment makes you good in an absolute sense... yet the definition of alignment in 3.5 doesn't support that conclusion

I think you're missing my point.

If we take Law vs Chaos seriously, then a LG person regards a CG person as fundamentally, radically in error. Pursing goals that are impermissible, by way of means that are impermissible. Yet the LG person also has to concede that, as far as respect for human welfare is concerned, the CG person is making no errors in his/her aspirations. The LG person has to concede that a CG person can be fully good - 10 out of 10 for goodness - yet also fully chaotic. That is incoherent.

 

[Imaro]

Yes, in 2E at least, and I presume earlier as well, there were spells that allowed you to detect alignment of every creature. Also, as far as I know, it's a 3.0 thing as well. I don't know if it was left that way in 3.5, but 3.0 PHB details such mechanics.

Just to clarify...I'm not speaking to the detecting of alignment... I'm speaking to alignment being defined as absolute...

 

[pemerton]

I do, appreciate, however, 5E's efforts to circumvent this problem without abandoning the alignment system. Various detect and protection spells encompass all of the extreme philosophical alignment variations without necessarily tying the detect/protect effect to a specific one.

<snip>

"Mundane" Material Plane good and evil, as far as I know, can't be proven in this way. Alignment here remains in the eye of the beholder.

4e is somewhat similar. Alignment is a team marker, and also something of a behavioural marker, but there is almost nothing in the system (eg detect spells, reversible spells, etc) that prevents good and evil being matters open to individual judgment ("in the eye of the beholder", as you put it).

state actors are willing to get in the bed with what they perceive as lesser evil to confront a great evil, just as they are willing to do the same with regards to order vs chaos. For example, and I won't go any further because of the board rules, was Allende's government evil? In the great scheme of things, I would say it was a progressive regime with "good" tendencies, especially considered in its historical, geographical, and socio-economic context. Yet certain powers deemed his government as too disruptive to the established geo-political order (chaotically-inclined, if you will) and supported and "evil" Pinochet regime that promised stability and order.

As we both realise, board rules create limits on discussion of these examples.

So I'll just say that it would be obviously contentious to characterise the cooperation of the US government with Pinochet as LG teaming up with LE to stop chaos. (Particularly as Allende was seen as a communist or communist sympathiser, and the Soviet Union is typically classified, when I see it come up, as lawful rather than chaotic because of its collectivist tendencies.) I think that, to the extent that those who supported Pinochet were sincere (which is obviously itself a contentious matter), they probably regarded him as good, or at least as better than Allende.

 

[Imaro]

I think you're missing my point.

If we take Law vs Chaos seriously, then a LG person regards a CG person as fundamentally, radically in error. Pursing goals that are impermissible, by way of means that are impermissible. Yet the LG person also has to concede that, as far as respect for human welfare is concerned, the CG person is making no errors in his/her aspirations. The LG person has to concede that a CG person can be fully good - 10 out of 10 for goodness - yet also fully chaotic. That is incoherent.

Why is that incoherent if they are on two totally different axis?

One does not correlate with the other which is how Moorcockian Chaos and Law work neither are inherently good or evil... How chaotic you are doesn't affect how good you are and vice versa... they are two different things so why should it?"

You're also again looking at it in terms of absolutes... even a LG character may not be Lawful at all times, can have a philosophy that chaos is a necessary compromise but only in the most dire of cases and so on. Being Lawful does not mean his behavior or his personality is absolute law or that he believes the CG person's philosophy is not flawed (though he may also see redeeming qualities in it if he could just get him to serve order as opposed to chaos)... because again the CG label does not translate to an absolute. That's the point of the alignment definition I posted.

EDIT: You seem to think the only way to take alignment "seriously"is to paint it in absolutes but this isn't supported by the game and is your own take on alignment.

 

[pemerton]

Just to clarify...I'm not speaking to the detecting of alignment... I'm speaking to alignment being defined as absolute...

This doesn't make any difference to my point.

Sure, it is possible for a CG person to be different in some respects from another CG person. Or from a LG person. But from the point of view of LG, CG is radically flawed. Yet a LG person cannot, coherently, deny that it is possible for a CG person to be perfectly, maximally good. Hence, a LG person is committed to it being possible that a maximally good being is nevertheless radically flawed.

That doesn't make sense. And it lacks parallels in the real world. In the real world, for instance, socialists don't think that libertarians are fully committed to human welfare yet flawed. They think that libertarianism is inimical to human welfare. Conversely, when Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom he didn't think that socialists and social democrats were fully committed to human welfare yet problematically collectivist. He argued that their collectivism was a threat to human wellbeing and hence that socialism and social democracy were evils to be opposed.

In the real world, there are no political or moral points of view which treat goodness/evilness, and lawfulness/chaoticness, as distinctive measures of value, such that the question of how good or evil someone or something is is independent of the way it relates to stability, change, liberty etc. Rather, they take positions on the contribution of stability, change, liberty etc to good and evil.

 

[pemerton]

Why is that incoherent if they are on two totally different axis?

It's incoherent that they should be on two different axes.

Being loud, and being tidy, are on two different axes. So if I'm trying to work out if you would make a good neighbour, I might have to trade off how loud you are (the louder, the worse) and how tidy your are (the tidier, the better). But these are factors that weight into an all-things-considered judgement about how good you are as a neighbour.

Putting good/evil and law/chaos on separate axes is like trying to say that I can have a loudness axis that is independent of a good neighbour axis: ie it makes no sense. It might be true that you are a good neighbour, yet loud, because other things about you eg your tidiness, your willingness to look after the kids if I'm late home from work, etc, outweigh your loudness. But you would be an even better neighbour if you did all those things, and also weren't so loud.

So a paladin (notionally LG) who looks at a knockabout bard (notionally CG) ought, in a coherent world, think "That bard's a pretty good person", but ought also to think "But the bard would be even better as a person if she was a bit less irresolute, and left a bit less of a trail of human wreckage behind her." But the 9-point alignment system rules out such thoughts, because the paladin has to concede that the irresoluteness of the bard makes no difference to her goodness (ie her relationship to human well-being) and only matters to some other, notionally independent, thing (law/chaos).

But asserting, by way of stipulation, that law/chaos is independent of good/evil doesn't make it so. I mean, I could define a "shape" system where you get to choose how many vertices you have, and how many sides, but that wouldn't make it coherent to say that I have fully 3 sides but fully 2 vertices. Vertices and sides aren't independent. Nor is law/chaos (be that social organisation, personal discipline, honourability, stability vs change, or however you characterise that particular contrast) independent of human wellbeing. It is a contributor to it.

One does not correlate with the other which is how Moorcockian Chaos and Law work neither are inherently good or evil

But nor does Moorcock assert that good and evil are independent of them. No character in Moorcock's world is obliged to concede that you can be fully chaotic and fully good. For instance, to the extent that Moorcock the author himself makes a case in favour of balance, he is not saying that the reason to be balanced beteen law and chaos is because goodness is independent of law and chaos. He is saying that the reason to be balanced is because goodness is to be achieved by an appropriate combination of law and chaos. Hence he thinks that both LG and CG - ie being fully lawful and fully good, or fully chaotic and fully good - are impossible states of affairs. Whereas 9-point alignment dictates that both are possible.