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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6405097" data-attributes="member: 42582">In the real world, of course, it makes perfect sense for person A to think that achieving good requires order, and hence to regard person B, who is (let's say) an anarchist, as morally flawed. Because A judges B to be evil - or, at least, to be producing evil results even if subjectively committed to goodness.But part of why this is possible is because, in the real world, whatever supposed utopia B points to (whether a real or a hypothesised one), it is open to A to deny its utopic character. For instance, someone who wants to argue that tight-knit social order is more conducive to human welfare might point to measures of happiness in pre-modern hunter gatherer or pastoral socities, and contrast them with the high rates of alienation and mental illness in mass industrial societies. But the defender of modern conceptions of liberty can always deny that pre-modern societies were really conducing to wellbeing (in part, perhaps, by disputing the relevant criteria of well-being) or contend that modern societies, while currenty flawed, enjoy an as-yet unrealised utopic capacity (both Marx and Hayek, in different ways, believe this).What causes the breakdown in 9-point D&D is that the game tells us, as a matter of canon, that there is a place, Olympus, which is both fully chaotic and fully good, and another place, the Seven Heavens, which is both fully lawful and fully good. And the alignment graph tells us that the same possibilities are open to individual characters. That is to say, the game stipulates an answer to a question which, in the real world, has been and remains one of the most heated of political and moral disputes; and furthermore, it stipulates that a certain dispute (between Law and Chaos) continues on in spite of that answer, whereas in the real world, whenever the answer is accepted (ie by value pluralists), the immediate consequence is that the dispute between different ways of realising the good becomes simply a dispute of taste and inclination, not one about moral error.I think this is what [MENTION=6780330]Parmandur[/MENTION] had in mind in stating that, while alignment can work as a personality descriptor, it is hopeless as a metaphysics.(And for those who enjoy analogies, here is another one. It would be possible for a source book to tell me that the geometry of Greyhawk is Euclidean, that the walls are a perfect circle, that the diameter is exactly 700 yards, and that the circumfrence of the walls is exactly 2200 yards. But the mere fact that you can write that sentence down in a rulebook doesn't make it coherent.)</blockquote>

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