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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6405527" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is not canonical. It is one usage.Especially because a standard synonym for "wrong all things considered" is "not morally permitted". And "permitted" is, in turn, a synonym for "allowed".In D&D, too, "lawfulness" doesn't equate to "upholds an externally-imposed code", because monks, honourable knights etc are all paladins even though their sense of discipline comes from within.Nor, in D&D, does "good" or "evil" refer to an internally held belief about what is right. (What woud "evil" mean, then? A lack of such belief? Or a belief that it is right to murder? Or . . . ?) They refer, in a rough-and-ready way, to actions which promote or undermine human wellbeing, somewhat amorphously defined.I can tell you, as a matter of brute fact, that in the bulk of conversation that occurs between Engish-speaking philosophers, "ethical" and "moral" are treated as synonyms. And debates about promise-keeping would most typically be described using the language of "the morality of promising", not "the ethics of promising" - because most contemporary philosophers would regard the obiglation to keep promises being an other-regarding duty (about upholding the interests of the promisee), not a self-regarding duty (about upholding the honour of the promiser).This may be a feature of 3E. It is not a feature of Gygax's AD&D, which is where my quote was taken from.This doesn't speak to my point. Sure, the paladin recognises that s/he, as a mortal, may be flawed. But s/he doesn't regard her commitment to law as a flaw, or as sullying his/her commitment to good. Hence, s/he cannot agree with the descriptions of Elysium that you posted.I'm not confused. I'm pointing out an incoherence. If what you say is correct, then every paladin who goes to cosmology school should immediately repudiate lawfulness, because acknowlding that it dilutes good. Which is absurd: the paladin thinks that his/her adherence to law promotes good, not that it sullies it.It's canonical from the point of view of authors and readers of fiction. It's not canonical within the fiction, though: paladins don't regard law and good as competing priorities. As others posted upthread, they regard law as a necessary condition of realising the good. (Others within the fiction may disagree - eg the bard who mocks the paladin - but they are not canonically correct within the fiction, either. Within the fiction we have a dispute between protagonists over what is the best way to live one's life, which is a staple of pretty much every story ever.)This is why alignment can, perhaps, work as a personality descriptor - the paladin thinks law is a necessary condition of good, and hence insists upon honour and discipline; the bard thinks this is all stick-in-the-mud nonsense and advocates anarchical liberty - but it can't work as a coherent cosmology: both the paladin and the bard can't be correct at the same time, yet the cosmology tells us that both Olympus and Celestia are equally good. Furthermore, it tells us that in a sense the bard and paladin are both wrong - neither law nor chaos promotes goodness, but rather both of them sully it.This is odd too. A person who is stuck in Hades might, as a result of a magical effect, form the beief that evil will triumph. But there is no basis for the belief - it is just a charm effect - so I'm not sure where the extreme evil consists in.I mean, the idea that it is more evil to make someone miserable than to kill someone isn't obviously true - and in the Nine Hells at least I imagine that they torture their enemies, which not only makes the miserable and hopeless but perhaps worse than would be the case on Hades.As a literary trope, a place that reduces all who enter it to despair is interesting. But I don't think it works very well as a contribution to a theory of evil. Particularly if we flip it around - a character who went around casting charm spells on everyone to make them romantically optimistic woudn't be our paradigm of a good character, would s/he?</blockquote>

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