What if the question was: if the forces called "good" and "evil" (and "neutrality") ceased to exist, what would actually change?
Couldn't the outer planes and angels and demons continue to exist, founded on individual virtues and sins and beliefs that continue to persevere in the hearts and minds of the immortals and mortals? If people still cherish their values, must the outer planes come crashing down in this new secular world?
I guess I meant the Good/Neutral/Evil alignment system was gone. People still did good and bad things, just like in real life, but good and evil does not exist as an objective cosmological force.
I think this would be perfectly coherent. It's how I run all my fantasy RPGs.
I'll elaborate, but with reference to these posts too:
every belief system and philosophy ever subscribed to by actual human beings (not figuratively; literally every single one) is more coherent than the nine-point alignment setup. It is crazy incoherent when actually scrutinized
The idea that philosophical concepts are actual forces pervading the multiverse always just sorta weirded me out. But I can totally get behind the idea that different planes are home to creatures with similar moral philosophies
Having fairly recently done a systematic rereading of Gygax on alignment, I think it is possible to character his scheme in a relatively coherent way:
good is about fostering human wellbeing (Gygax doesn't distinguish between economistic conceptions of welfare, happiness, rights and dignity here, which means that there is scope for disagreement over what is truly good) and also beauty; and
evil is the disregard of this ("purpose is the determinant"). (On this view, "evil" is not a distinct moral outlook, but rather a failure to take the demands of morality seriously.)
Law and chaos are considerably harder to pin down, because he doesn't deal with what has been the most contentious issue in modern debates around institutional design, namely, what is the role of freedom and "invisible hand" mechanisms in generating effective systems of social order?
Still, roughly, the LG are those who believe that social order will foster welfare and beauty (and accept at least some interpersonal trade-offs); the CG are those believe that individual self-realisation is the best way to foster welfare and beauty (and are more doubtful about interpersonal trade-offs, although clearly think that individuals owe duties of forbearance to one another).
The LE are those for whom purpose is the determinant, and think the best way for them and their friends to get what they want (and deserve - Gygax characterises the LE as meritocrats) is via social hierarchies with them at the top. The CE are those who favour individual self-aggrandisement above all - they are willing and lusty participants in a Hobbesian war of all against all.
The True Neutrals are believers in the importance of balance and harmony. They favour nature over artifice. In terms of real-world intellectual tradition, Stoics and some strands of Taoism and Zen are the models.
This is not a comprehensive scheme for describing people. It doesn't capture the difference between (say) a modern utilitarian and Rawls (both probably end up as LG), nor between right and left anarchists (both probably end up as CG). There is also a tendency for the self-realisation goals of the CG to collapse into the anti-artifice outlook of the TN. But it's not hopeless.
Where the incoherence kicks in is in trying to turn this framework for labelling people's beliefs and outlook
into a scheme of social and metaphysical truth. For instance, once we say that the Seven Heavens is, per se, a LG place, we are stipulating that
it is true that social order can maximise human wellbeing. Yet, at the very same time, we define Olympus as, per se, a CG place, thereby stipulating that
it is true that the best route to human wellbeing can be self-realisation largely free of social constraint.
The same thing happens when we label nations as LG, CG etc - we imply that they
successfully give effect to their alignment beliefs, although each of LG and CG involves a denial of the other.
I don't know what exactly Gygax intended with his outer planar sceme - did he mean that Olympus is populated by people who have the CG outlook (seems feasible) or that Olympus is a place where the claims of CG people are true (seems uttery infeasible when generalised, as I've just argued)? But it's the second approach that is picked up in Planescape and has continued since, and that is what produces the incoherence. A similar question - are devils happy or miserable? Gygax's Appendix IV leaves it open that devils are miserable, because in fact wellbeing is a real thing and living in a place where the most powerful people don't care about others' wellbeing would be horrible. But Planescape and onwards present a realm where the devils are happy with their situation ie where wellbeing is being created. This is incoherent - if the Nine Hells succeed in generating wellbeing via harsh discipline then they show the truth of (a particular view within) LG, not LE!
It is just as bad to turn the alignment "grid" from a device for labelling outlooks into a conception of two sets of two forces - G/E and L/C - which mix together to produce the alignments. Under this bizarre metaphysical view, a LG person has to accept that a CG person is just as infused with the "good" force - whereas the whole essence of the LG outlook is to
deny that self-realisation will lead to human wellbeing, and hence to deny that those of CG outlook actually do good.
Enough on incoherence. An interesting challenge for using the Gygaxian scheme as a set of labels for outlooks - which I've argued it
can be used for, though it's not perfect by any means - is what to do once the game actually starts, the world is put into motion, and various truths become evident. For instance, suppose that in my game, due to whatever factors (the ideological biases of the participants, the roll of the dice, whatever) it turns out that social structures are nothing but a source of misery. Then, in that game, the Lawful Good have been refuted! Their belief - that social order will be maximising of well-being - has been shown to be false. They can stick to their guns if they like, but (within that game) most morally decent people are going to judge them as deluded or worse.
Gygax gives no advice on this, and I don't recall ever seeing any in any D&D book. But it seems to me that, if we want to use the alignment system as a way of loosely characterising a variety of recognisable moral/behavioural outlooks, this is the number one question that is going to come up in play! For instance, thinking of a campaign I ran several years ago now, there were PCs who started with the belief that conformity to the will of heaven was the best way to foster wellbeing - we could call that, roughly, LG. But then those PCs (as played by their players in response to the unfolding ingame situation) found they had to abandon that belief. The heavens were still there, and the gods and angels still asserted that conformity to the will of heaven was the best way to foster wellbeing - that is to say, they continued to proselytise for LG - but the PCs (and players) had given up on them, and regarded them as self-deluded, self-serving or both.
That was a fun game. But it couldn't have happened if we began from the premise that the
claims of LG, about the relationship between divine order and wellbeing, aren't open to doubt. Which means that it couldn't have happened if you built in to the cosmology of the game that the heavens are a cosmologically LG place.
I always find Lawful Neutral a little hard to visualize.
In my sketch of Gygaxian alignment above I left out LN and CN. (I also left out NG and NE, but that's because I think they're completely uninteresting. They're purely products of grid-fetishism, but don't describe any distinctive evaluative outlooks. NG is basically CG-lite, and NE is basically LE-lite.)
LN, as I read Gygax's alignment descriptions, is rules fetishism. Hence, it's a type of moral failing of the LG: the conviction that wellbeing can be maximised by social order gets corrupted into an obsession with order for its own sake. It's the vice of bureacrats. As for a plane full of LN people - as per my comment upthread about devils, it should be a miserable place. If, in fact, all that order was making them happy, then it would be an instance of order fostering welfare and hence a proof of the truth of LG!
CN is freedom-fetishism. It's distinct from CE, because the CN recognises others as a limit to his/her will - their freedom, too, has value. But the CN people doesn't properly honour the duties owed to others (eg in virtue of those others' rights). CN is a failing of the CG. (Thinking about this also brings out that the CG are slightly more lawful than the CN: they at least acknowledge duty as between individuals, which is a type of minimal sociality/order. Whereas I don't see any reason to think that the LN is more lawful than the LG. An insistence on grid symmetry isn't helpful for making sense of the Gygaxian scheme.)
Basically. PS starts with the conceit that good exists because people believe it exists and if a villain (or PC perhaps!) started changing that belief, you might have a scene in, say, Arcadia, where this iconoclast convinces the people of Mount Clangeddin that there is no such thing as "good", there is only this phenomena of "peace" and that comes out of "order" and then the dwarves, convinced due to the creature's actions, spread out over the planes to help convert others, and maybe Silverbeard goes to talk to the other dwarven deities about this remarkable individual with these interesting ideas and through some other effort the entire dwarven pantheon is convinced and now things start rolling because every dwarf on every world slowly starts to agree that LG is an illusion of ego and there is only truly Law, and influence spreads...and on and on. As this influence grows, layers and planes start becoming part of other places - Mount Clangeddin becomes a gear on Mechanus and soon the dwarven heavens join it and dwarf-bots suffuse the planes and the Slaad become nervous and the story goes on and the assuming it's the antagonist doing this the climax sees the party in the plane of Elysium as Law and Chaos try to claim dibs on it and the guardinals are fighting a civil war and they must convince the Last Good Soul (perhaps the spirit of a child) to somehow remind everyone that there is more than Law and Chaos and Evil, and either they succeed and Good gets (gradually) restored or they fail and there are no upper planes.
I don't see how you need any sort of alignment system, or "social consensus makes alignment labels true", to make this work.
The 20th and 21st centuries provide plenty of examples of people forming strong views about the truth of certain moral/political frameworks and successfully spreading them, thereby incorporating other realms into theirs, starting new social conflicts in places that didn't use to polarise along those lines, and making their ideological opponents nervous.
All without the PS theory that "belief is the grounds of truth".
what do people believe in when they don't believe in the alignments?
This is the sort of thing that I don't get. A bit like the issue with the Talismans or Holy Word, its the game disappearing down a rabbit-hole that only exists because Gygax et al invented the alignment system for a completely different purpose.
It makes sense, to me, that someone should think that helping the suffering is important. It makes sense, too, that s/he might label this "good". It makes sense, too, that s/he might be perturbed, and perhaps moved to a re-evaluation of her own values, when s/he encounters Milton Friedman (or perhaps a parody of him) saying that the best way to relieve suffering is to mostly ignore it in your daily life and instead build up your own weath so that it will trickle down - maybe in giving alms to the poor for all these years s/he's been fostering rather than relieving suffering!
But none of this intellectual and emotional activity is concerned with
labels. It's not that s/he cares about suffering because it bears the label
good. Rather, it's because suffering ought to be alleviated that s/he labels behaviour that does so good. (This is the Euthyphro issue again.)
