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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5810468" data-attributes="member: 42582">Well, you yourself quote Aquinas to that effect - that a purported law which is unjust is in fact not what it purports to be.Dworkin also seems to deny the possibility of unjust laws in his recent Justice for Hedgehogs.But Fuller makes a weaker claim - namely, that the general tendency of formally adequate law is to serve good rather than bad ends.Sure. But that's not my point. My point is that it is arguably incoherent.To elaborate: honour, as a value, is largely dead in the contemporary world. It is something, though, that is central to much of the fiction that D&amp;D is meant to resemble (chivalric knights, duelling swashbucklers, honest yeoman etc). It therefore makes sense that the game might present a value system that is at odds with that of most moderns.My objection to 9-point alignment is not that it departs from contemporay morality. It is that it rests upon a conceptual assumption - that order and goodness are independent - which is highly controversial. And not just in hifalutin circles - the contemporary obsession by the World Bank and other agencies with bringing the rule of law and &quot;good governance&quot; to every land is driven by a belief that order and goodness are not independent.An analogy. D&amp;D does not apply real world physics; for example, matter can be created and destroyed. But it does not require us to imagine plane triangles on Euclidian surfaces whose angles sum to other than 180 degrees. It is conceptually coherent, or at least coherent enough, in this respect.This is why I prefer single-spectrum alignment - this requires me to adopt an imaginary rather than a real-world value scale, but does not require me to imagine that two concepts are independent when there are powerful arguments that they are not.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 5810468, member: 42582"] Well, you yourself quote Aquinas to that effect - that a purported law which is unjust is in fact not what it purports to be. Dworkin also seems to deny the possibility of unjust laws in his recent [I]Justice for Hedgehogs[/I]. But Fuller makes a weaker claim - namely, that the general tendency of formally adequate law is to serve good rather than bad ends. Sure. But that's not my point. My point is that it is arguably incoherent. To elaborate: honour, as a value, is largely dead in the contemporary world. It is something, though, that is central to much of the fiction that D&D is meant to resemble (chivalric knights, duelling swashbucklers, honest yeoman etc). It therefore makes sense that the game might present a value system that is at odds with that of most moderns. My objection to 9-point alignment is not that it departs from contemporay morality. It is that it rests upon a conceptual assumption - that order and goodness are independent - which is highly controversial. And not just in hifalutin circles - the contemporary obsession by the World Bank and other agencies with bringing the rule of law and "good governance" to every land is driven by a belief that order and goodness are not independent. An analogy. D&D does not apply real world physics; for example, matter can be created and destroyed. But it does not require us to imagine plane triangles on Euclidian surfaces whose angles sum to other than 180 degrees. It is conceptually coherent, or at least coherent enough, in this respect. This is why I prefer single-spectrum alignment - this requires me to adopt an imaginary rather than a real-world value scale, but does not require me to imagine that two concepts are independent when there are powerful arguments that they are not. [/QUOTE]

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