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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6412586" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>I don't understand what "good" and "evil" mean here. Upthread you described them as labels that express arbitrary codes.</p><p></p><p>If they're arbitrary, why would someone care about them? </p><p></p><p>Where does this belief prevail? Who regards evil as a valid life choice? Given that, as was discussed upthread, the majority of the multiverse - including perhaps the majority of fiends - labels evil fiends as evil rather than good, it seems that the prevailing view is that evil is <em>not</em> a valid life choice, and rather than it is evil.</p><p></p><p>But any RPG anywhere, anytime can have a character who thinks that vengeance is a universal principle. The real world contains such people, just as it contains people who think that the need for vengeance is personal to them, and it also contains people who think that vengeance is wrong. And all sorts of other attitudes about vengeance besides.</p><p></p><p>I'm not getting a sense of what <em>permission</em> it is that Planescape grants that otherwise is lacking.</p><p></p><p>This is another bit that puzzles me. The PC's story starts out as a principled quest for vengeance, but then becomes a quest to change other people's minds. I don't get that transition.</p><p></p><p>But in any event, if I wanted to change NPCs' minds I could do that too, without using Planescape.</p><p></p><p>It also reactivates the question - if "justice" is arbitrary, why is it better to have many people regard what one did as just, than few? What does this show, other than that one was able to change minds?</p><p></p><p>I also don't follow the word "objectively", given that in your previous posts you have said that "good", "evil" etc in Planescape are subjective and arbitrary.</p><p></p><p>I don't really understand this other than as a manifestation of a type of megalomania, perhaps also tinged with a denial of reality. It seems to be taking something that makes sense - "I want the world to have less evil in it, and more goodness" - and transmute it into something that makes less sense - "And I want to do this not by changing the world, but by changing other people's beliefs about the world."</p><p></p><p>I don't see the rational motivation.</p><p></p><p>That depends.</p><p></p><p>I think a scene in which someone tries to persuade someone that torture, which that person has hitherto regarded as morally impermissible, is in fact permissible, might be interesting. (Or tasteless. Or distressing. It would depend a bit on context. You seem oddly cavalier about this, given your very strongly moralised response upthread to my post about the theme of slavery in 4e.) But this sort of argument takes it for granted that what is good is something independent of human whim, and is an object of cognition - the argument consists in pointing the interlocutor to features of torture, and aspects of goodness, which relate in ways that the interlocutor has hitherto failed to notice.</p><p></p><p>But I don't see how this connects to "belief determines what's good".</p><p></p><p>Following on from what I wrote immediately above, what I am missing is the nature of the challenge.</p><p></p><p>If the challenge takes the form of other people running moral arguments, then the whole idea of "good is dictated by belief" seems to have been abandoned. We're back into the common-sense world of evaluative arguments made by pointing to features of conduct, and features of value, which connect in ways that someone has failed to notice or has mistakenly denied.</p><p></p><p>But if the nature of the challenge is that the PC's opponent go out into the world trying to change minds, then the challenge isn't a moral chalenge at all. It's a <em>procedural </em>challenge - can I stop them rendering my conduct evil, before I get to do it. (I'm still not really sure what that would <em>matter</em>, but that's a reiteration of a point that I've already set out above.)</p><p></p><p>This second interpretation of the challenge at hand fits with my broader conception of Planescape, as having the function of transforming moral challenges into procedural challenges, so as to blunt the metagame, "real life" dimensions of ingame situations and turn them into more classical D&D "can the PCs overcome the obstacles" situations.</p><p></p><p>Your counterexamples seem to take as a premise that all these choices will raise issues of weakness of will - ie a clash between acknowledged duty and the dictates of self-interest. Weakness of will is an interesting phenomenon, but I think is not the only moral challenge, perhaps not even the most important one. I also think weakness of will is a very frail chassis on which to build chalenges in an RPG, because in an RPG the <em>player's</em> self-interest is not at stake.</p><p></p><p>Maybe you meant your counter-examples to instead raise issues of conflicts of vaue: between sacrifice to Moloch and duty to child; between obedience to one's superior and a duty not to kill oneself. But upthread, and in the post to which I'm replying, you've argued (or, at least, have seemed to me to argue) that conflicts of value are trivial to resolve and raise no interesting issues. That's a view that I happen to think is radically mistaken, but given that you seem to be advocating it, I assume that that is not what you intend by your counterexamples.</p><p></p><p>This is incredibly simplistic. I don't see how it relates to either real world moral debate and uncertainty, nor to the way that serious fiction engages with such matters.</p><p></p><p>In <em>The Quiet American</em> - * SPOILERS FOLLOW* - Fowler learns that Pyle is negotiating with a "third force" - neither French nor Vietnamese nationalist - to try to resolve the colonial war without the Communists taking control. The third force is a renegade general. Pyle provides the general with explosives, which he then uses to blow up a public square. Fowler and Pyle are present when the explosion happens, and Fowler is horrified both by the killings, and also by Pyle's woefully inadequate response (he complains about the blood on his shoes). Fowler therefore sends a message to the Communists, telling them when and where they can catch Pyle unawares, and Pyle is duly assassinated. And as a consequence of Pyle's death, Phuong, who had left Fowler for Pyle, returns to Fowler.</p><p></p><p>To say that choosing between friendship (staying loyal to Fowler) and justice + public welfare (betraying Fowler and thereby trying to mitigate the future harm he might cause) is an easy choice, because both values are good, strikes me as ludicrous. In the abstract, both are values. In this concrete situation, what is the right choice? Is Fowler an evil man - someone who betrayed his friend to the Communists just so he could get his girlfriend back? - or is Fowler a hero, who did a hard thing (betraying his friend) in order to secure a greater good (preventing more carnage)?</p><p></p><p>I don't know if you actually read the post that I linked to - <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?312367-Actual-play-another-combat-free-session-with-intra-party-dyanmics" target="_blank">here</a> is the link again. In this episode of play, three PCs were interrogating a prisoner, and in order to extract information tricked her into thinking that a fourth PC - the fighter/cleric of Moradin - would intercede on her behalf with the local ruler to stop her being executed. Unfortunately for this plan, the fighter/cleric then arrived on the scene before the other PCs had been able to finish their interrogation and summarily execute the prisoner. Which gave the prisoner the opportunity to say that a promise had been made, in his name, to intercede on her behalf. The other PCs couldn't really deny this, because they could hardly say that they had manipulated the prisoner in a fashion that the fighter/cleric wouldn't approve of!</p><p></p><p>The player of the fighter/cleric, therefore, in playing his PC, had to choose between honouring the promise made on his behalf by his manipulative, less-than-fully-honouable comrades - thereby granting the prisoner clemency he believed she did not deserve - or alternatively betraying the promise and letting her be executed. He chose the first option. But does this make him a good peson - someone who kept his word, despite the temptation to betray it and exact the justice that he desired? Or does it make him an evil person, who allowed someone who deserved death to escape her just deserts simply out of a moral vanity, an unwillingness to allow a stain on his personal honour?</p><p></p><p>(For clarity - I'm not suggesting that my game, either in this case let alone in general, has the depth of Graham Greene. The comparison to Greene is simply for the purpose of elucidating one typical structure of moral dilemma in fiction.)</p><p></p><p>I don't see how this is any different to what I described.All you have done, in your example, is to move from a conflict of abstract values to a conflict of actual, concrete, elements of the situation. Two values are in conflict, but the choice of which one to pursue is uncertain because of the consequences that would ensue. That is inherent in many moral dilemmas, though it is not exhaustive of moral dilemmas. For instance, both in The Quiet American and in the situation I described, there are also questins around purity of motive (is Fowler motivated by altruism, or a desire to have Phuong return to him? is the fighter/cleric motivated by a genuine sense of honour, or mere moral vanity?)</p><p></p><p>If you'd read the post to which I linked, you would have seen these concrete elements in the situation that I was talking about. The idea that whichever choice the player made "I am the Good Guy" is, frankly, ridiculous. It doesn't remotely capture the stakes or actua experience of play.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 6412586, member: 42582"] I don't understand what "good" and "evil" mean here. Upthread you described them as labels that express arbitrary codes. If they're arbitrary, why would someone care about them? Where does this belief prevail? Who regards evil as a valid life choice? Given that, as was discussed upthread, the majority of the multiverse - including perhaps the majority of fiends - labels evil fiends as evil rather than good, it seems that the prevailing view is that evil is [I]not[/I] a valid life choice, and rather than it is evil. But any RPG anywhere, anytime can have a character who thinks that vengeance is a universal principle. The real world contains such people, just as it contains people who think that the need for vengeance is personal to them, and it also contains people who think that vengeance is wrong. And all sorts of other attitudes about vengeance besides. I'm not getting a sense of what [I]permission[/I] it is that Planescape grants that otherwise is lacking. This is another bit that puzzles me. The PC's story starts out as a principled quest for vengeance, but then becomes a quest to change other people's minds. I don't get that transition. But in any event, if I wanted to change NPCs' minds I could do that too, without using Planescape. It also reactivates the question - if "justice" is arbitrary, why is it better to have many people regard what one did as just, than few? What does this show, other than that one was able to change minds? I also don't follow the word "objectively", given that in your previous posts you have said that "good", "evil" etc in Planescape are subjective and arbitrary. I don't really understand this other than as a manifestation of a type of megalomania, perhaps also tinged with a denial of reality. It seems to be taking something that makes sense - "I want the world to have less evil in it, and more goodness" - and transmute it into something that makes less sense - "And I want to do this not by changing the world, but by changing other people's beliefs about the world." I don't see the rational motivation. That depends. I think a scene in which someone tries to persuade someone that torture, which that person has hitherto regarded as morally impermissible, is in fact permissible, might be interesting. (Or tasteless. Or distressing. It would depend a bit on context. You seem oddly cavalier about this, given your very strongly moralised response upthread to my post about the theme of slavery in 4e.) But this sort of argument takes it for granted that what is good is something independent of human whim, and is an object of cognition - the argument consists in pointing the interlocutor to features of torture, and aspects of goodness, which relate in ways that the interlocutor has hitherto failed to notice. But I don't see how this connects to "belief determines what's good". Following on from what I wrote immediately above, what I am missing is the nature of the challenge. If the challenge takes the form of other people running moral arguments, then the whole idea of "good is dictated by belief" seems to have been abandoned. We're back into the common-sense world of evaluative arguments made by pointing to features of conduct, and features of value, which connect in ways that someone has failed to notice or has mistakenly denied. But if the nature of the challenge is that the PC's opponent go out into the world trying to change minds, then the challenge isn't a moral chalenge at all. It's a [I]procedural [/I]challenge - can I stop them rendering my conduct evil, before I get to do it. (I'm still not really sure what that would [I]matter[/I], but that's a reiteration of a point that I've already set out above.) This second interpretation of the challenge at hand fits with my broader conception of Planescape, as having the function of transforming moral challenges into procedural challenges, so as to blunt the metagame, "real life" dimensions of ingame situations and turn them into more classical D&D "can the PCs overcome the obstacles" situations. Your counterexamples seem to take as a premise that all these choices will raise issues of weakness of will - ie a clash between acknowledged duty and the dictates of self-interest. Weakness of will is an interesting phenomenon, but I think is not the only moral challenge, perhaps not even the most important one. I also think weakness of will is a very frail chassis on which to build chalenges in an RPG, because in an RPG the [I]player's[/I] self-interest is not at stake. Maybe you meant your counter-examples to instead raise issues of conflicts of vaue: between sacrifice to Moloch and duty to child; between obedience to one's superior and a duty not to kill oneself. But upthread, and in the post to which I'm replying, you've argued (or, at least, have seemed to me to argue) that conflicts of value are trivial to resolve and raise no interesting issues. That's a view that I happen to think is radically mistaken, but given that you seem to be advocating it, I assume that that is not what you intend by your counterexamples. This is incredibly simplistic. I don't see how it relates to either real world moral debate and uncertainty, nor to the way that serious fiction engages with such matters. In [I]The Quiet American[/I] - * SPOILERS FOLLOW* - Fowler learns that Pyle is negotiating with a "third force" - neither French nor Vietnamese nationalist - to try to resolve the colonial war without the Communists taking control. The third force is a renegade general. Pyle provides the general with explosives, which he then uses to blow up a public square. Fowler and Pyle are present when the explosion happens, and Fowler is horrified both by the killings, and also by Pyle's woefully inadequate response (he complains about the blood on his shoes). Fowler therefore sends a message to the Communists, telling them when and where they can catch Pyle unawares, and Pyle is duly assassinated. And as a consequence of Pyle's death, Phuong, who had left Fowler for Pyle, returns to Fowler. To say that choosing between friendship (staying loyal to Fowler) and justice + public welfare (betraying Fowler and thereby trying to mitigate the future harm he might cause) is an easy choice, because both values are good, strikes me as ludicrous. In the abstract, both are values. In this concrete situation, what is the right choice? Is Fowler an evil man - someone who betrayed his friend to the Communists just so he could get his girlfriend back? - or is Fowler a hero, who did a hard thing (betraying his friend) in order to secure a greater good (preventing more carnage)? I don't know if you actually read the post that I linked to - [url=http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?312367-Actual-play-another-combat-free-session-with-intra-party-dyanmics]here[/url] is the link again. In this episode of play, three PCs were interrogating a prisoner, and in order to extract information tricked her into thinking that a fourth PC - the fighter/cleric of Moradin - would intercede on her behalf with the local ruler to stop her being executed. Unfortunately for this plan, the fighter/cleric then arrived on the scene before the other PCs had been able to finish their interrogation and summarily execute the prisoner. Which gave the prisoner the opportunity to say that a promise had been made, in his name, to intercede on her behalf. The other PCs couldn't really deny this, because they could hardly say that they had manipulated the prisoner in a fashion that the fighter/cleric wouldn't approve of! The player of the fighter/cleric, therefore, in playing his PC, had to choose between honouring the promise made on his behalf by his manipulative, less-than-fully-honouable comrades - thereby granting the prisoner clemency he believed she did not deserve - or alternatively betraying the promise and letting her be executed. He chose the first option. But does this make him a good peson - someone who kept his word, despite the temptation to betray it and exact the justice that he desired? Or does it make him an evil person, who allowed someone who deserved death to escape her just deserts simply out of a moral vanity, an unwillingness to allow a stain on his personal honour? (For clarity - I'm not suggesting that my game, either in this case let alone in general, has the depth of Graham Greene. The comparison to Greene is simply for the purpose of elucidating one typical structure of moral dilemma in fiction.) I don't see how this is any different to what I described.All you have done, in your example, is to move from a conflict of abstract values to a conflict of actual, concrete, elements of the situation. Two values are in conflict, but the choice of which one to pursue is uncertain because of the consequences that would ensue. That is inherent in many moral dilemmas, though it is not exhaustive of moral dilemmas. For instance, both in The Quiet American and in the situation I described, there are also questins around purity of motive (is Fowler motivated by altruism, or a desire to have Phuong return to him? is the fighter/cleric motivated by a genuine sense of honour, or mere moral vanity?) If you'd read the post to which I linked, you would have seen these concrete elements in the situation that I was talking about. The idea that whichever choice the player made "I am the Good Guy" is, frankly, ridiculous. It doesn't remotely capture the stakes or actua experience of play. [/QUOTE]
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