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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7671164" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is a reply to a post I made replying to you. In your earlier post, you said "the possibility exists that social order can maximise human well being and that the posibility exists that the best route to well being can be self-realisation largely free of social constraint." If the thing you said is true, then LG - which claims that social order is a necessary condition of human wellbeing - is false. And if what you said is true, then CG - which claims that free self-realisation is a necessary condition of human wellbeing - is also false.So if what you said is true, then there is nothing to work out about whether LG or CG is true, because we already know that they're both false! And we also know that NG is true, because it is NG which says that, in some circumstances social order is the best path to human wellbeing, but in others free self-realisation is the best path.What you are describing here is different from what I described.As I presented the scenario (based on my reading of Gygax, which has elements of reconstruction but is grounded in his text), the question at issue was this: which claim is true, that of LG (that social order is a necessary condition of wellbeing true, or that of CG (that free self-realisation is a necessary condition of wellbeing)?Given that Olympus is CG, that means (on the approach I am putting forward) that its inhabitants - for simplicity's sake, I'll focus on the Greek Gods - believe that free self-realisation is a necessary condition of wellbeing. In the scenario I outlined, I imagined a paladin refuting this. The refutation I had in mind involved the paladin pointing to all the ways in which wellbeing is absent from the inhabitants of Olympus: Zeus and Hera constantly fighting, Athena and Aphrodite clashing with various mortal queens, etc. And then arguing that those failures of wellbeing are precisely due to a lack of social order - Zeus does not have any systematic way of reconciling his sexual desire with his marriage obligations, the mortal queens don't have any set of rules governing the way in which they may or may not compare themselves to the godesses, etc.If the paladin was correct about this - which is the sort of thing that play establishes, through the way the relevant fiction emerges - then s/he would have refuted the claims of CG. If s/he also persuaded Zeus et al of this (eg via social skill checks) then they themselves would come to realise that the claims of CG are mistaken.Making real world comparisons is challenging because of board rules, but we might say that events in the world that occurred in the interwar period and then from 1939-45 showed that the claims of Fascists/National Socialists were wrong, and that in the period from 1945 on the majority of those who supported such claims have themselves come to believe that those claims were wrong.But this has nothing to do with "consensus reality". The demonstration that certain claims about the relationship between social order/freedom and wellbeing were wrong rests on actual questions of social fact (eg is the reason for the fighting between Zeus and Hera a lack of rules governing sexual conduct? this isn't about anyone's beliefs, it's about the causal relations between social practices and human conflict/misery).Whereas, at least as PS is being presented in this thread, it is not at all interested in questions of actual social causation.If a necessary condition of behaviour disposition X being a virtue is that every time the disposition manifests human wellbeing is increased, then it seems almost certain that there are no virtues. That's not a ridiculous claim (eg some strong act utilitarians probably affirm it), but I don't think it's widespread.For instance, nearly every popular discussion of Rommel lauds his virtues as an honourable and clever solder. Which is to say, these are regarded as virtues, though the manifestation of those dispositions did not always conduce to wellbeing (given who he was fighting for).Similarly with generosity: being generous is a virtue. Of course, so is being wise, and part of wisdom is knowing what limits to put on one's generosity!If you were trying to teach someone what generosity was, and did not succeed in conveying that it was a virtue - a character trait that was admirable and worth cultivating - you would not have succeeded in your teaching. This is what makes it so challenging to write histories or anthropologies of people with values different from those of the author/investigator: because it is hard to understand what was meant by (say) honour in some other place or time if you don't understand how that figured as valuable, but that can be pretty hard to do if there is a deep clash with one's own values.Inga Clendinnen has written about this in the context of her work on the Aztecs, and also in some of her criticisms of the approaches taken by contemporary historical novelists.</blockquote>

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