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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 598862" data-attributes="member: 3146">You could argue this but it wouldn't get you anywhere with most people. The point is that the assassins represented by the prestige class kill people for money. Period. Whether they enjoy it or not is immaterial. According to the D&D understanding of good and evil and my understanding of good and evil, anyone who would kill an innocent for money is evil.Similarly, one could argue that a criminal defense attorney who lies in order to ensure that guilty criminals aren't punished for their crimes is just doing a job and getting paid for it. He might not even particularly like his job although he's good at it. The problem, however, is that his "job" is evil.Even if an individual only killed the guilty--for instance, a bounty hunter who kills bandits for the bounty on their head or the perennial favorite of dark fiction: the assassin who only accepts contracts on really bad guys (which seems pretty unrealistic to me--almost as unrealistic as the clean living assassin in films like Leon--but that's beside the point)--and they could therefore arguably be neutral rather than evil, that's clearly not what the D&D assassin class represents. It represents members of an organization of hired killers who kill for money and only for money (or maybe pleasure) without any restricting factors.This is ridiculous. That particular defense of guns works because guns are not moral agents. They don't make decisions about who to shoot and who not to shoot. If someone pulls the trigger, they shoot. And that's what they're supposed to do. Humans, by contrast, are moral agents. They're not supposed to be (and can't be, even if they try) simple automotons. Thus the key portion of the argument--that guns are not moral agents--is different in the case of the assassin. Assassins are moral agents. And that's why they're evil.The other difference is that guns have uses other than murder. Guns can be used for sport (the biathalon or skeet shooting, for instance), or for hunting. Those guns are just as much guns as military guns that are used to shoot people. An assassin who didn't kill people, however, wouldn't be an assassin.Similarly, guns can also be used to defend the innocent (without killing or even being fired; most confrontations involving a gun end without anyone being killed). An assassin could theoretically defend the innocent, but would not be acting as an assassin when doing so--the "assassin" would be acting as a bodyguard in that case. (An assassin could theoretically also be used to defend the innocent as an assassin by killing someone who threatened the innocent however that is much more indirectly defending an innocent than the gun in question).So, really there is no significant similarity whatsoever between the moral status of guns and assassins.</blockquote>

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