NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7670883" data-attributes="member: 42582">I've already explained, in my post above this one, how the issue about alignment goes "all the way down" - as in, the X, Y and Z themselves are open to interpretation and contestation.But this passage gives rise to another point: the claim that no one has an inherent reason to do good (let's say, to promote the interests of others even when this doesn't directly further his/her own interests; to encourage beauty rather than squalor; etc) is iteslf hugely, hugely contentious. For most of the history of philosophy, pages of ink were spilled trying to rebut it (Hobbes and perhaps Hume stand out as pre-19th/20th century philosophers who accept the claim).That's not a reason to reject the claim - perhaps Hobbes was right and everyone else from Socrates through to Kant wrong - but if we're going to affirm it, we probably should at least take it seriously. How can such everyday practices as praise, blame, punishment and the like - all of which are part of D&D (eg it's OK to kill the orcs, because they're to blame for doing the wrong thing) - be reconciled with the fact that the ones we are blaming never had a reason to do otherwise? In which case, what are we blaming them for? Failing to toss the coin again and again until it came up heads rather than tails?Hobbes, and in a slightly different way Nietzsche, are prepared to bite the bullet and say that value is really just about desire and power. But they didn't believe in angels, paladin or the Seven Heavens, either!</blockquote>

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