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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7979404" data-attributes="member: 42582">Alignment is defined by the claims it makes - in AD&D, those are claims about the role played by order, or individualism, in facilitating certain ends.The truth of those claims is what is contested.So LG people assert that society generates happiness. That community is the natural and best condition for humanity. That tradition, if followed conscientiously and thoughtfully, provides the best guide to resolving conflicts and ensuring wellbeing. This is an easily-understood view - Hobbits, valiant and heroic knights, Aragorn-esque kings, etc all provide us with examples from the fantasy genre.Conversely, CG people assert that individual self-realisation is the path to wellbeing. They are suspicious of order and tradition because (as they see things) it stifles that self-realisation.Someone who thinks that peope are by nature unruly and hence need to be disciplined by external law is not, in D&D terms, LG. The LG have an optimistic, not pessimistic, view of human nature and society. Nor is such a person CG - to the extent that people are unruly and diverse, CG celebrates that.In D&D terms, someone who want to use external law to discipline the community seems to be either LN - they're an order fetishist - or perhaps LE - they want to impose their yoke even if that prevents people realising their own wellbeing.In the real world, no doubt there are people who think that people are by nature unruly, and will only come to grief if not disciplined by external law. But I don't see that there is very much room for that viewpoint in the D&D alignment system. That viewpoint requires adopting a conception of wellbeing that strongly divorces it from concerns for freedom and individual right. D&D alignment, on the other hand, tend to posit a broad unity of values.This is another reminder that D&D alignment is a device adopted for a particular game purpose. It is not a general system for classifying social, political and moral outlooks (which is probably one reason why no serious system of philosophical thought uses the D&D alignment categories).</blockquote>

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