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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6404249" data-attributes="member: 42582">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.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.</blockquote>

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