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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7973567" data-attributes="member: 42582">There are contemporary legal systems that inflict retributive violence. They are not universally regarded as evil either by participants or observers.In the fiction of D&D, I think that it makes sense to be more permissive about retributive violence than one might be in the real world. And one of the AD&D level titles for paladins is justiciar.I have put the word "vigilante" in square quotes, or have referred to  "quasi-vigilante" violence, because the concept of vigilantism is not entirely apt in the D&D context, with systems of government and social order generally presented as pseudo-mediaeval rather than modern. In the Giants modules, the PCs are even agents of a king.I think this is another point where, if contemporary standards and outlooks are just projected straight onto fantasy RPGing, most of the tropes of the game evaporate.In romantic fantasy, the protagonists engage very often in consensual violence, and rarely as a last resort.But in D&D, and romantic fantasy more generally, they also affirm truth, and beauty, and - at least some of them - honour.In the Giants scenario, a paladin might wish that the giants would surrender and return the stolen goods and pay compensation for those they killed and help rebuild the villages they destroyed. But if the giants will not, the paladin is ready to mete out justice. And suppose the giant king suggested a duel to settle the point, I think a paladin woudl readily take up that duel.D&D-type fantasy won't work in ways that emulate the source material if attitudes to permissible violence are not relaxed compared to many real-world conceptions. (Superheroes are the same, except that fantasy also needs to be more permissive in respect of lethal violence.)Correct. The UN Charter permits warfare in self-defence (Individual or collective), not for recovery of stolen goods. Most contemporary philosophical writing about just warfare broadly corresponds to the Charter conception that only defensive violence is permissible in the international context.This is why, in the real world, cross-border disputes over stolen assets are generally resolved through diplomatic means.Some elements of these real-world conceptions and practices rest on understandings about institutions. For instance, invading a country to rob from it is iteslf an international crime, and the invaded country would be entitled to international assistance to resist the aggressor. If the aggressor nevertheless succeeded, the invaded nation could look for international assistance to achieve recompense, which might take place in ways other than a literal return of the stolen good (eg seizure of the invading country's assets in third countries and transferring them to the invaded country).The world of D&D does not have these sorts of institutional structures. That's part of what makes it easy, in imagination, to apply a non-real morality that is more permissive in the use of violence than the real world while nevertheless maintaining a pretty recognisable contrast between what is good and what is not.</blockquote>

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