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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Badjak" data-source="post: 4658235" data-attributes="member: 58103">I don't understand why roleplaying games aren't the perfect format to talk about ontological evil. First, the fact that it is a game means there's never the risk of stepping on people's toes, unlike if you talked about say the united states and its treatment of indigenous natives, or the bath party and its treatment of kurds. Conversations in which you bring in historical anecdotes have a tendency of heating a convesation. But is there anyone whose going to be morally offended on a orcs behalf if we stereotype a little. Certainly not in the middle of a session, obviously, where politics and religion should be curtailed to keep the trail on its well greased rails, but afterwards, really whats the harm. I tend to think that people are too quick to be offended by these conversations. Either they accuse you of being pedantic or relativistic, which is obviously redundant, because of course you are, that's the whole point of using a fantasy game to bring up philosophical conversations, and why do they got to be a spoiled sport. Or they draw a line in the sand and say right is right, wrong is wrong, which is kind of silly to me. Kind of like playing a roleplaying  game called "offices & taxes" I mean if you can afford some imagination in your hacky/ slashy why not in your quasi-roleplayed discussions on moral philosophy.  anyway, if i was going to have a discuss the concept of evil in dungeons and dragons, and I am...then i would point out that slavoj zizek in his book violence, i thought did a spectacularilly good job of categorizing violence down in two three themessymbolic violenceobjective violencesubjective violencesymbolic violence relates to the nature of a system of symbols that makes language inherently violent.subjective violence is subjectivized obviously. Like Saddam Hussein or the eye of Veccna,and objective violence is a cultural system in which the very mechanisms of culture create creates an architecture of violence, like american ghettos, or third world countries, or orc villages.In response to an earlier poster who was talking about evil cosmologies vs. relativity and relating it to pillaging, raping, farting, dirty orcs, i 'd like to point out  that objective evil/subjective evil aren't necessarilly dualistic, but linked. Certainly, orcs are cosmologically evil, much as in the the same way terrorists are cosmologically evil, because we create the nature of our cosmos. This is a difficult idea for us to grasp because we like to think of ourselves as subjectivized, as agents which I think we are I'm not disputing that, i'm just pointing out that an ontologically evil orc, and an orc nurtured into evil are not necessarilly to different things. To use a knee jerk liberalism analogy, i might say, "look of course orcs are evil, you'd be evil too if you were forced to live on the steppes and eat your own kind, and was a dissadvantaged orc youth, never getting a proper education, giving up on your dreams etc." orcs are evil because they have to be. Because we made them that way. but they are still cosmologically evil, and as someone who is basically a slave to the system, i'm not going to stay up nights over how many I've murdered.</blockquote>

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