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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5365365" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, first I'd like to say that if you are using BoVD and BoED as your sources of moral authority and ethical philosophy then you are already digging yourself a hole that will be difficult to climb out of.Secondly, I would generally agree with the assessment that the truly sadistic are evil.  But, you've created what I think is a card board cut out of a sadist who possesses a redeeming virtue that I think real sadists generally (and maybe even universally) lack.  That virtue being, he never inflicts pain on the innocent.  And moreover, he apparantly is so careful that he avoids doing this even unknowingly.   Now, maybe I'm interpretting this very broadly, and in fact he enjoys tortoring to death people who spit on the side walk accidently while aiming for a tuft of grass and children who suck their thumbs after being told not to, but generally to me 'innocent' means they are not deserving of death or other severe punishment.   To my mind, this 'redeeming feature' is very redeeming indeed.  If he only delights in torturing those that have committed heinous deeds, then we are dealing with not merely someone gratifying themselves with others pain and not merely an agent of blind vengeance but an agent of a very harsh form of justice.    Well, that I agree with.  But we are dealing with someone who does in fact have a great reluctance to do evil.   You have as you said imagined this character combining a phenomenal level of compassion with a phenomenal level of hatred for those that do harm to the innocent.  Those are both attributes that are almost exclusive to good!  Evil is never marked with either great compassion or with great concern for justice.  That this character is markedly lacking in mercy and engages in a level of retribution which most good characters would find overwhelmingly repulsive only suggests he is not perfect in his goodness.  It doesn't to me suggest someone of evil character or motives.    That there is no punishment to vile to inflict on the vile is not a notion normally associated with evil.  That the child molester or the abuser of women should recieve as a just reward some horrible end is not normally seen as an evil impulse and when such a villain in a story recieves just such a reward we tend to find it a just ending.  When we say of that person, "They deserve to burn in hell." or call out for similar damnation, even if we are not a believer in such a place, we are not normally condemned as vile sadists but rather, the venom of this comment is generally seen as mitigated if the crime committed by the target of our outrage is sufficiently vile.  The character in question appears to exist to serve that impulse, and if he truly harms no innocent, then the targets of his impulse in fact deserve their vile punishment.Which makes us wonder then whether or not, as I alluded to earlier, the labels have gotten mixed up.Having a code in no way gaurantees one is lawful.   Not all codes are lawful codes.   A sense of personal honor unbeholden to any master other than your own conscious is almost always Chaotic in nature.   If you have your own code, and you are the creator and judge of it, then it is you the person who is at the center of the moral universe and not the larger society or external source of authority.  That's what Chaos is. Again, then I think you are deprecating the outcome far too much in this assessment.  If you enjoy evil but never actually do it, then you have a personality quirk - a weakness.  I think it matters little how much you revel in your depravity.  A great many sociopaths recieve no joy and pleasure in the murder that they commit.  It is simply an impulse which grips them and from which many of them wish they could escape. I agree.  But even in war, some blame falls on you for the deaths of the innocents and some burden is on you - indeed a quite great burden - to demonstate that you did everything possible to avoid such outcomes.  And even when such outcomes occur despite your every precaution, you still bear some responcibility for the outcome.  The impression I get from your description is that the Crusader feels very little burden to avoid the death of innocents should it interfere with his desired outcome.   I get the impression indeed that he could hardly hold them in less regard however his 'feelings' may be, which to be frank, I count as worth very little. But that isn't the two principles you've outlined.   You have the two principles: "Do not torture - ever."And "Do not harm the innocent - ever" The crusader has tossed out one and the vigilante the other.  Now I'm left to judge the relative value of harming the innocent to torture, and frankly, its the torture principle (however important) that still seems the lesser of the two.  The vigilante has tossed the means, while the crusader has tossed the ends.   Normally, we expect to find means and ends together in the same person, as we wouldn't expect bad means to lead to good ends or bad ends to come from good means.  But if we must judge between the two, I think I'll take the ends over the means.</blockquote>

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