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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7671019" data-attributes="member: 42582">This claim is highly contentious.It's contentious among moral philosophers. It's contentious among theorists of the methodology of social science.Those are academic debates, and so it's not reasonable to expect lay people to follow them in any detail. But they aren't merely academic debates, and it's not hard to see them reflected in contexts that lay people engage with all the time.Giving examples where the debates in methodology play into ordinary life and discussion is tricky because of board rules, which forbid discussing politics. So I'll confine myself to some examples that I think are relatively uncontentious: America, like Australia, experiences public debates about its history and the meaning/significance of its history. Who can write a history of 1492 and thereafter, or of the Civil War and emancipation, without using language that (wilfully or not) takes a stand on whether the things described are inherently admirable or undesirable? Or consider Ferguson's "The Hammer and the Cross" (a recently-published history of the vikings). And then <a href="http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/a-history-of-violence/" target="_blank">this review</a>. It's not easy to talk about patterns of history, and social processes, and cultures, without engaging in evaluation. Suppose, for instance, that vikings really were lovers of martial violence. It's very hard to identify and explain that, and the way that it shapes their culture, without taking an orientation towards it. For instance, to think oneself into the viking mindset one therefore has to think oneself into a love of violence - if one can, or if one can't, it seems that either way it's going to be hard to divorce what follows from that orientation. To put it at its plainest (and therefore perhaps a bit simplistically): how can someone claim to have properly comprehended or translated the viking concept of battle, if the translation doesn't capture and manifest the viking joy in fighting? (This connects to the "social consensus" issue - for those who don't find fighting joyful, what concept do they have in common with the vikings in respect of which some aggregate social consensus is then determined by the multiverse?)On moral philosophy rather than methodology of social science: look at literature that tries to present human life and experience in a way that involves stripping off questions of evaluative commitment (say, The Outsider or, in a less stylised way, The Quiet American - it's not coincidence that they're both "existentialist" novels). It's not a trivial thing, and there's an argument that evaluative disengagement is itself a form of commitment (or perhaps , rather, callous or indifferent or self-satisfied non-commitment).What I find frustrating in some contexts of the use of alignment (Planescape tends to highlight it but doesn't have a monopoly on the issue) is that it doesn't engage seriously with these pretty significant strands in our culture that concern the relationship between human activity, human sociality, evaluative commitment and the like.As I've said upthread, if you want to be broad-brush or 4-colour, that's completely fine. And there are a range of literary/narrative techniques that can be used to facilitate this. Tolkien and superhero comics provide good models in respect of this: for instance, one of the techniques that Tolkien uses for avoiding the raising of moral questions around the divine right of kings is to avoid giving us any systematic study of the peasantry of his imagined world; similarly, Chris Claremont frames the world of the X-Men so that the read is mostly distracted from asking the question why Storm does not use her weather powers to end drought and famine rather than fight the Brood and Doctor Doom.But if you are going to get more subtle - consider, eg, what happens to the tone of the X-Men/Magneto conflict once Magneto is reconceived as a Holocaust survivor - then I think it becomes harder to ignore the fact that these questions are real one, and figure in our cultural lives, and to pretend that it is trivial to strip all evaluation from the description of human choice and experience and yet still adequately capture and describe human life.I think that if this idea is taken seriously - which perhaps it should be - it casts significant doubt on the existence of "multiversal consensus" in respect of these notions.It strikes me that this is no different from the real world. But in the real world, when I (for instance) persuade a former Communist to become a parliamentary democrat, the persuaded person regards this as a change of mind - from error to truth (I choose this example because it is a very common pathway for many well-known and engaged intellectuals in the US, Australia and Europe).I don't see what it adds to say that, furthermore, Communism used to be good (due to social consensus) but is now evil (due to a changed social consensus). If the good/evil labels are meant to signify the existence of agent-independent reasons, then the whole set up becomes bizarre - because changing someone's mind required getting them to be irrational (ie go against reason) until I got enough people to change their minds, in which case they retrospectively validated their irrationality. But upthread you and other posters have suggested that good/evil does not signify the existence of agent-independent reasons, in which case what is the point of the changes of label? Why can't we just speak as we do in the real world, and say "I used to think the Seven Heavens was good but now I realise it's not, for reasons . . ."?But the relevance of the Dawn War is like the relevance of the French Revolution, or any major historical event. For clarity, I'm not puzzled about why people in a fantasy campaign care about what others think of political or moral things. I have a life outside of ENworld!, and important chunks of it connect to such elements of the real world.But my goal (and the goal of others whom I know) is to get people to change their minds. It's not to change the meaning of words. The target is human belief and motivation, getting people to realise they were mistaken in their former attitudes.The real world - at least as I experience it, which admittedly isn't the way everyone experiences it - is a battleground for ideas. My comment on PS is that its metaphysics (i) are epiphenomenal to this, and (ii) threaten to make the notion of a "battleground for ideas" incoherent by stripping away the very grounds of the reasons that real people actually deploy in real battles over ideas.If Bahamut, Heironeus, etc are all killed off, then this will be true, sure. But that has no bearing on any question of evaluation. That possibility on its own has nothing to do with PS - it could happen in any D&D game where the gods can be killed. (Dark Sun can be seen as a variant on this.)I can see that you might add to a campaign setting that if most people cease to believe that Bahamut, Heironeous etc are good then they die. The whole "old gods making way for the new" thing. But that also has no bearing on any moral question. If people cease to believe that Bahamut is good, that doesn't show that he's not (anymore than people believing that he is good shows that he is). People might be wrong. (Just as they might think he lives somewhere beyond the East Wind, but be wrong because he really lives in the Seven Heavens. Or whatever else people could be mistaken about in respect of Bahamut.)The bit of PS that I find verging on incoherent, and mostly unmotivated, is the bit where it says that people's believing Bahamut to be good makes it so.I find this all very hard to make sense of.As best I can: the force of "good" is a free-floating but capturable/directable force, and the way you capture/direct it is by making people believe that goodness consists in X rather than Y. And the effect of the force is channelled/manifested through certain magic items/effects that themselves deploy these capturing/directing labels.So saying that something is good or evil doesn't have the meaning it has in the real world (where these are the most ggeneric but also the clearest terms for expression moral praise or condemnation) but simply aims at characterising someone's place in this metaphysical scheme.I don't get the motivation behind this - it's still basically epiphenomenal, except for a handful of magical effects (the Talisman's, some cleric spells) that themselves were introduced into the game in the context of an alignment system that was intended to give voice to ordinary understandings of the meanings of moral language.I also find the irrationality worrying: if I am currently labelled "good", and hence vulnerable to the Talisman of Pure Evil, I have to (i) concede that I am good (the evidence of the Talisman affecting me is sufficient for that), but you are saying that I can also (ii) try and persuade everyone (including myself?) that I am really not good, thereby changing the social consensus and hence the effects of the Talisman. It seems that (ii) requires me lying to others, ore else deluding myself (eg by denying that I am vunerable to the Talisman).TL;DR: battles over ideas don't puzzle me; moral disagreement doesn't puzzle me; the claim that you can increase a campaign's focus on these things by asserting that social consensus makes moral claims true is the bit that I don't get. And when the answer is "Well, no one has to agree with the social conensus, but if you don't you'll still get burned by the Talisman of Pure Evil" that looks to me like epiphenomenalism plus a hesitance to get rid of legacy features of the game (like the Talisman, Holy Word etc) which are huge obstacles to making the game one in which the focus is on battles over ideas and moral disagreement.</blockquote>

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