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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3523058" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think you may be confusing alignment with personality.  You can be lawful good and be a stingy miser.  You can be chaotic evil and be a stingy miser.   Similarly, you can be cynical and abrasive and still be lawful good, and you can be cynical and abrasive and be chaotic evil.  How you manifest those personality traits and where you put your priorities when they clash determines your alignment.  Similarly, to knock down some other straw men, lawful doesn't necessarily mean 'subservient to the dominate socio-political order' and chaotic doesn't mean 'rebelling against the dominate socio-political order'.  As a general trend, those things might be more likely found with one alignment or the other, but its not that hard to think of contrary examples.  For example, if the dominate socio-political alignment is chaotic evil, a lawful good can be in rebellion to that in order to restore what he believes the right alignment is.  Or, two lawfuls from different cultures can be in conflict over what the lawful social norms should be.I've not seen enough of House to have an opinion on the alignment of any of the characters.  But I think that the way to judge House's alignment would be to look at how he behaves when he's under pressure.  If he's constantly sacrificing himself for the sake of others, there is a good chance that he's actually lawful and that his 'rule breaking' streak means that he thinks the rules are wrong.  If the set of rules he operates by are knowable and something which he can be externally critiqued by an observer, and if holds to these rules even at a personal cost, and if he's answerable to the society that holds them (for example the Hippocratic Oath and the society of doctors) then he is lawful and his problem is with sets of laws which he feels are in conflict with that.  If on the other hand, he has a personal standard which is not knowable, if he cannot be critiqued by an observer as to whether or not he's holding to a code, and if he changes his own standards according to the circumstance, then he probably is chaotic.</blockquote>

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