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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5216672" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is one of several competing ways of describing good and evil.  It is by no means universally accepted.  It is merely something some people suppose to be true about the real world.  Thus, the claim that all systems of value are necessarily subjective, is itself merely an opinion and not objective fact.We of course agree that it need not be the case than an imaginary world be described in any particular way, and the world of the imagination can obviously be described in any of the ways that people have attempted to describe the real one (plus presumably several ways that they haven't, though this in my opinion would be a great effort of imagination indeed).To try get this pulled back to terms we can freely debate without breaking the rules, from the perspective of a Chaotic Neutral believer or a Lawful Neutral believer the position that good and evil are purely subjective and the distinctions between them are abitrary is a natural one.  Such a character would argue that extreme good is the same as extreme evil, and so forth.  We can easily imagine a character in our imaginary world coming to another one and asserting this philosophy and getting in an argument with some other character who asserts something else (perhaps that Chaos and Law are meaningless arbitrary distinctions).  But of course, we don't have to choose for the characters.  We don't have to assert that we know the answer and choose which character is correct, because the debate itself is interesting.  In our imaginary world, it may be the case that it is actually true that the Chaotic Neutral character is correct and the world really is the sort imagined by existentialist philosphers (for example).  Or we can imagine that the world is one in which Lawful Evil's description of the world as being a contest between tribes in which power and success are the only real measurments and in which good is merely how a coward or a deciever hides his weakness is actually correct.  Under such a description, mercy is merely the plea of a coward unwilling to accept the true nature of the universe.  Or perhaps the Neutral Good believers are actually correct and there is only goodness and its absence.   What is most interesting to me as a story teller is I don't have to pick sides.  The characters within my imaginary world can be ultimately ignorant about the exact nature of the universe.In this way, it seems to me that my imaginary universe has quite a lot in common with the real one.</blockquote>

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