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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3451018" data-attributes="member: 4937">Funny, I would have reversed the two assessments, Mother T. as LG and Gandhi as LN.  Assigning alignments to any real person (except yourself just for the fun of it) is always fraught with difficulty.  Here we dealing with two clearly extremely sincere individuals, and by most standards extremists of some sort, but in assigning alignments we would run into questions of what it meant to be 'good' which would be answered in very particular ways.I think that we can safely say that neither is true neutral (we aren't dealing with people that believe in living life in a balance) and that neither is chaotic of any sort (we aren't dealing with people that put a primacy on self and self-interest), but after that it's a matter of debate with some reasonable things that can be said on many sides.The reason I see Gandhi as lawful neutral is that he seems to value the process over the results.  Ghandi doesn't believe that the ends justify the means, but he takes that view to the extent of believing that the ends are irrelevant.  That is to say that he believed that even if his code were to lead to demonstratable evil ends that it would still be a moral requirement to follow it.  I'm not sure that most readers will get why that is extraordinary, but in contrast most people who believe that the ends don't justify the means believe that because they believe that bad means invariably lead to bad ends regardless of ones good motivation, and that good means lead to good ends regardless of ones motivation.  Ghandi goes as far as to say, "I recognize that my means may lead to evil ends, but whether they do or not, they are still the only good means."  This strikes me as a lawful neutral position - that a moral code is absolute and cannot be judged or deviated from regardless of the benefit or lack thier of it produces.I understand that Mother T. is frequently judged LN on much the same grounds, and that's probably where you get your assessment, and while I understand where people are coming from I think if you'll do some research on Ghandi - say his position on WWII - you'll see that he was far more of an extremist in this than even Mother T., as her understanding of what was meant by 'good ends' (and therefore 'good means') is probably closer to what most of us would agree those terms meant.</blockquote>

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