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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7670890" data-attributes="member: 42582">Of course you can give him that label, but then why not just say that he's evil (in the full-fledged moral sense) and be done with it?I'll focus on your use of "petty personal reasons". This is why he detects as evil. Whereas let's say a jailer or even executioner in the court of Furyondy or Cormyr presumably need not, per se, detect as evil - these people also inflict suffering, but not for petty personal reasons.But now, when the villain casts Detect Evil on himself, and comes up positive, is he obliged to conclude that he is inflicting suffering for petty personal reasons? If not, why not? What other explanation is there for the fact that he registered to Detect Evil? If so, then hasn't he just been told, by the detection magic, that he is committing moral error (in this case, mistaking petty personal reasons for genuine ones)?What does it mean for the villain in your example to realise that, as an objective matter, he is inflicting suffering for petty personal reasons, but yet for this not to amount to internalised self-assessment? The only way that you could avoid the self-assessment is to reject the characterisation of your reasons as petty. Yet the Detect Evil spell is unambiguously telling you that your reasons are petty ones.Nor am I, although someone in a recent thread did (maybe not this one, maybe the one about the "problem" player of a CN PC).I'm making the point that if Detect Evil pings on "scornful of beauty" (as another indicator alongside "inflicts suffering for petty personal reasons"), and the succubus pings as Evil, then she herself has to conclude that she is scornful of beauty. Whereas in the real world it would be open for her to argue that the received conception of beauty is deeply flawed (look at the disputes between mainstream and avant-garde artists between the late nineteenth century and (say) the 1960s - and notice how work that was once scandalous is now completely mainstream and used on chocolate boxes and family TV commercials).In other words, in the real world she would not have to accept the "internal self-assessment" that she is scornful of beauty, but the world of Know Alignment spells obliges her to.</blockquote>

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