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The 'Wonderland'-Inspired Faces of the RAGE OF DEMONS
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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7670792" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>I think the testimony problem is overrated - most "ultimate evils" in D&D are spellcasters, who can scrutinise themselves. And it's always possible to lend the non-spellcasting monarch the ring of spell storing, or whatever it might be, so that s/he can perform a self-scan.</p><p></p><p>The real issue is that the game posits a type of unmediated epistemic access to evaluative truth, as characterised using the two-word alignment labels. Whereas in the real world, evaluative facts supervene upon other facts, which mediate epistemic access.</p><p></p><p>To give a non-moral example: the beauty of a painting supervenes on its visual appearance. And epistemic access to a painting's beauty is mediated through visual perception of it. There is no direct cognition of a painting's beauty except via cognition of its appearance. (There can be indirect knowledge, of course, eg someone tells you that it is beautiful.)</p><p></p><p>Imagine if, in D&D, we had a convention of using "Beautiful", "Plain" and "Ugly" as a set of descriptors for the visual appearance of all objects and creatures, and there was a Detect Beauty spell. Exactly the same issues would come up, because the game would provide answers to questions about beauty or ugly while bypassing the question of what the actual visual appearance on which those answers supervene.</p><p></p><p>And then, instead of alignment debates, we'd have debates about whether Quasimodo (who statblock says "ugly") is <em>irredeemably</em> ugly, and there would be contrarians who assert that he's really beautiful (because all human beings are beautiful in their own way), etc.</p><p></p><p>(Also: while questions of objectivity vs relativism/subjectivism about value are interesting, they are orthogonal to the above issues. The tensions that D&D's alignment rules create aren't a result of any assumption of objectivity over relativism, but rather out of the attempt to separate evaluative judgements - via alignment labels and detection magic - from the base on which value facts supervene.)</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 7670792, member: 42582"] I think the testimony problem is overrated - most "ultimate evils" in D&D are spellcasters, who can scrutinise themselves. And it's always possible to lend the non-spellcasting monarch the ring of spell storing, or whatever it might be, so that s/he can perform a self-scan. The real issue is that the game posits a type of unmediated epistemic access to evaluative truth, as characterised using the two-word alignment labels. Whereas in the real world, evaluative facts supervene upon other facts, which mediate epistemic access. To give a non-moral example: the beauty of a painting supervenes on its visual appearance. And epistemic access to a painting's beauty is mediated through visual perception of it. There is no direct cognition of a painting's beauty except via cognition of its appearance. (There can be indirect knowledge, of course, eg someone tells you that it is beautiful.) Imagine if, in D&D, we had a convention of using "Beautiful", "Plain" and "Ugly" as a set of descriptors for the visual appearance of all objects and creatures, and there was a Detect Beauty spell. Exactly the same issues would come up, because the game would provide answers to questions about beauty or ugly while bypassing the question of what the actual visual appearance on which those answers supervene. And then, instead of alignment debates, we'd have debates about whether Quasimodo (who statblock says "ugly") is [I]irredeemably[/I] ugly, and there would be contrarians who assert that he's really beautiful (because all human beings are beautiful in their own way), etc. (Also: while questions of objectivity vs relativism/subjectivism about value are interesting, they are orthogonal to the above issues. The tensions that D&D's alignment rules create aren't a result of any assumption of objectivity over relativism, but rather out of the attempt to separate evaluative judgements - via alignment labels and detection magic - from the base on which value facts supervene.) [/QUOTE]
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