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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6752293" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Also, @<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/member.php?u=4937" target="_blank">Celebrim</a>: I'm not really sure the Dunning-Kruger effect applies here. D-K is about people with minimal experience(/previous skill) overestimating their skills, and people with lots of experience(/previous skill) underestimating their skills. You're instead highlighting a "framing effect" bias; it's not that the candy-thief disputes that it is bad or wrong to steal candy, but rather that it oh-so-surely can't be "Evil" because it's not X, where X is something widely agreed to be Evil. They have similar natures, I'll grant you that, but they're still different. Particularly because D-K tends to yield very quickly to even a small amount of education on the subject in question, whereas the effect you're describing here tends to exclusively become more entrenched when questioned.Of course, we're also dealing with issues like a fuzzy boundary, and more importantly vague terms ("wrong" vs. "Evil"), which only serve to hamper any analysis we could do. This is why I prefer to start from some kind of clear, consistent definition of the things in question, even if they aren't uncontroversial, e.g.:"a dedication to Law means recognizing the legitimacy of a particular external authority/duty to regulate your life, even if it runs counter to your desires""a dedication to Chaos means denying the legitimacy of any external authority/duty to regulate your life, even impersonal ones such as promises""a dedication to Good means that you prioritize the well-being of other individuals over your own well-being, when the two cannot both be sought""a dedication to Evil means that you prioritize your own well-being categorically over the well-being of others, even when both can easily be achieved."Under these definitions, the character in question appears to be inconsistently (or, rather, hypocritically) Lawful, and we really can't say whether he is Good or Evil though things are leaning in an Evil direction. Since he is inconsistent about the Law, that's a decent argument for being Neutral at present. Though I still stand by my belief that his alignment is currently in flux and thus cannot be assigned to one particular square until this moral quandary is "resolved," in some vague sense of the word.Edit:And just to be clear, I chose the above definitions very specifically. They are not meant to be jointly exhaustive, though they are meant to be mutually exclusive. In order to be jointly exhaustive, you have to include people who don't necessarily accept any specific external authority as legitimate, but at the same time are not overtly opposed to the concept of legitimate external authority; such people would be Neutral on that scale. Part of my reason for framing them this way is that I tend to see Evil and Chaos painted as extremely broad, essentially consuming most of the space that would be assigned to the two types of Neutral, while Good and Law tend to be characterized as the province of only a tiny minority, a rare few who can somehow adhere to a particular philosophical idea despite distractions away from it. I see this as a rather impoverished idea of the two Neutral regions, which (as I had understood it, anyway) were supposed to be much more common than all of the "corner" alignments combined. (That is, it's "supposed" to be that, in rough population count, CE ≈ CG ≈ LE ≈ LG < CN ≈ LN ≈ NG ≈ NE < TN, and (CN+LN+NG+NE+TN)>(CE+LE+CG+LG).) Instead, both Law and Chaos, both actual Good and actual Evil, should be sufficiently narrow, so as to make most people fall midway between the "extremes." Individual acts can then be consistent with one side or the other, and we can look at behavior in the aggregate to get a sense of where a person "should" fall.</blockquote>

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