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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6417150" data-attributes="member: 42582">Perhaps our paths will cross!I think this is right. I think Gygax has a particular idea about what that universal vision is ("creature rights" to life, relative freedom and the prospect of happiness) and that d20 restates it in a way that is a bit different, but probably not in a way that matters for most RPGing purposes (rather than rights, 3E/d20 talks about "respecting the life and dignity" of sentient beings).Rawls thinks that the good is plural, but that the structures that make individual pursuit of the good feasible in a social context are common. The technical slogan for this is "the priority of the right to the good": ie "the right" - social structures that give everyone an equal prospect of pursuing their conception of the good - come first, and then people are free to pursue whatever vision of the good they want to provided it will fit within those fair structures.For alignment, I think this means that (i) it is hard to classify as lawful or chaotic (I think this is a general problem for any idea that puts forward something like the rule of law as a constitutional foundation for individual liberty and self-directed wellbeing), and (ii) that while the good is divided, there should be no deep conflict between the different adherents of the good. So, for instance, people who like orderly fruit trees in Arcadia are free to try and get recruits from the crazy battlefield brawlers of Asgard, and vice versa, but if they come to blows over it then they've ceased to be genuinely good, because they're no longer respecting the universally acceptable structures that make social life feasible (because they're resorting to mere power).I don't know the Republic as well as I should. It would be either Glaucon or, more likely, Thrasymachus.What he thinks he's doing is giving reasonable people licence to beat up, or imprison, or otherwise deal with the unreasonable, without being worried about the fact that from the internal point of view of the unreasonable they have no reason to acquiesce in what's being done to them. Rawls actually uses quite strong language (he says that the unreasonable need to be contained, in order to protect "the justice and unity of society" from their disruptive influence - Political Liberalism p xix).This certainly makes sense from a conventional D&D alignment perspective - demons, gnolls, orcs etc are a threat that needs to be contained, rather than accommodated - but it can have sinister connotations! Opening up the conception of who is entitled to accommodation, though, becomes tricky - if you say (i) that literally everyone counts, yet (ii) it's the case that some people want conflicting things (eg demons want to smash everyone else, but not everyone wants to be smashed), then how are the claims to be prioritised?In this thread I've heard a lot of different and interesting opinions about what Planescape is doing, but I haven't really heard an answer to this question that I could embrace for my own purposes.    [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION], in particular, seemed to say that from the point of view of the universe it's arbitrary, and from the point of view of the individual any claim to prioritisation is simply an assertion of power. If that is true within the setting, I think that's a big deal that I personally don't feel the setting comes to grips with (in depth or seriousness).</blockquote>

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