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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6407601" data-attributes="member: 42582">As I said, that's not in dispute. But that's a statement about various people's beliefs. It's not a statement about cosmological forces or about moral truth. If you had to file that statement under the Dewey decmial system, it would go under "biography", not under "ultimate metaphysical reality".I don't think this addresses my point. If all the evil people were converted to LG, then the lower planes would cease to be. Likewise if they were all converted to NG. Likewise if they were all converted to CG. There is nothing to choose between the different good alignments, in so far as eradication of evil is concerned.This is the bit which, to me, makes no sense.The Seven Heavens is the plane of ultimate lawful goodness. It is already free of evil. As long as its denizens keep doing whatever they have done so far to render it the ultimate plane of lawful goodness, it will be free of evil.And the same is true of Olympus (but substituting chaos for law).There is also a puzzle in the notion of "the better good". Given that "better" is equivalent to "more good", the notion is equivalent to "the good that is more good". Well, neither is "more good", at least if I believe the Know Alignment spells, Detect Good spells, the effects of a Holy Word spell, etc.This is why I asked [MENTION=509]Viking Bastard[/MENTION] about the status of cosmological good in his campaign - because the standard D&D cosmological setup doesn't make room for the concept of "the so-called good which is really good", because the "so-called" good is the same thing, sitting on its own axis, whether it is associated with LG, NG or CG.If you want to say that "good" in LG means something different from "good" in CG, then you have to abaondon the notion of a single good-evil axis. (The same, mutatis mutandis, would apply to "lawful" as it figures in LG and LE.)As I hope I've made clear, I have no inherent objection to that. But I don't see how it fits with the D&D notion of two axes, each independent of the other. Because it asserts that the nature of good (or evil) is not independent of its association with law (or chaos).This is another instance of what I have trouble making sense of. What would be the difference between wiping out all the paladins because you thing they're wrong about goodness, and the triumph of evil. How does a Planescape protagonist who thinks "all this purity and virtue isn't so good after all" differ from a NE or CE daemon/demon?I understand how various types of moral relativism can in-principle be framed. But I don't see how moral relativism is to be integrated with the treatment of "good" and, even moreso, "evil", as descriptors in the way that the D&D alignment system (in its 9-point/Great Wheel form) does. (And Planescape, too, at least as I have encountered it.)</blockquote>

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