Sorry, English isn't my first language and although I usually have no problems with it I don't have a clue what you want to say - and I think it's bad form to write "read section a to you see why you're wrong instead of writing "because x and y you are wrong". Maybe I am wrong but I don't know why - please explain.
The short of it is, there's almost nothing in that entry that points to gold dragons being lawful good. They eat treasure, especially if it's treasure given as a gift, but not if it's treasure given as a bribe. I wonder how they tell the difference? If you offer it nummy gemstones on its birthday? They're willing to befriend humanoids when shapechanged into humanoid form--but they "amuse themselves" by "by observing how the smaller races live." Which sounds a rather patronizing to me, because those smaller races are intelligent people, not animals you've decided to watch and anthropomorphize.
In the "Persistence of Memory" section, it says that metallic dragons can effectively smell bloodlines and will judge you based on how it interacted with your ancestors (if it knew them). The text even talks about how this isn't useful, since the metallic dragon will welcome a bad person who had good ancestor but will dislike a good person because they had a bad ancestor. Which is both bizarrely naïve and not very good of these good-aligned beings (sins of the father and whatnot). I
assume that the dragons will change their mind if they learn that you're not like your great granma, although the text doesn't say.
If you're right and I did ignore the lore of Gold Dragons: The dragon was an example, please pick some other "monster" where the alignment suits the lore.
Do you mean where the alignment
doesn't suit the lore? I've got some doors to trap so I don't want to spend too much time on this, but: Elves are considered good even though they are also described as at least a bit racist and they tried to genocide the quaggoths for land. Slaadi are supposed to be chaotic
neutral but are continually written as being evil. Beholders are paranoid, hateful, destructive, and alien-minded, but are written as
lawful. Djinni are chaotic good slavers. In 3e, dryads were chaotic good despite their whole shtick being about magically controlling and possibly raping men.
Where alignment suits the lore, the lore is often there to support the alignment even if it makes no sense on its own. Why are ettercaps evil? Dunno; ask Tolkien. Maybe he didn't like spiders? How do you know that ettercaps are evil? Because their forest homes are filled with spiders and cobwebs (so are lots of basements and garages, but never mind). So why are their forest homes filled with spiders and cobwebs? Because they're evil. Sure, ettercaps might eat people, but so do lots of unaligned animals in D&D, and while ettercaps might be more intelligent than a wolf, they still can't speak or understand any language so you can't communicate with them enough to help them learn.
Why are goblins evil? Out-of-game, it's because D&D needed low-level monsters that good PCs could kill without having their alignment change (especially back in the days when changing your alignment caused massive XP loss) and/or so the PCs don't have to feel bad about it; in game, it's currently because Maglubiyet makes them evil (by... yelling at them until they do evil?). Why does Maglubiyet want them to be evil? So that D&D has a low-level monster that PCs can kill without feeling bad about it.
The point is: Alignment for a individual person is individual (of course), declaring a default alignment for a group allows persons/monsters to be way beyond the expectation of the players. It's a valuable tool for storytelling.
In real life (with the "neutral good" humans) we are shocked by murders and other crimes because it isn't the norm. Our society rewards "good behavior" and "following the rules", most of the people do it (more or less - to a certain point) and we expect it - so (IMHO to a lesser degree) extremely alturistic or antisocial egoistic behavior are the "Hey, look at this!" exception. (So in crime novels the point is not always the "How" and the "Who", it's the "Why").
So the real question is, why isn't the neutral or neutral good the default alignment for every intelligent being, or at least every intelligent and social mortal creature? I can see creatures with supernatural origins having a different default alignment (meaning aberrations, celestials, constructs, elementals, fey, fiends, and undead), since they don't have anything like real-world biology or a mortal mindset. And I can see extremely solitary beings like dragons having different default alignments. But intelligent and social beings? Why aren't all orcs, goblins, ogres, giants, etc. neutral good by default?
There would still be
plenty of exceptions to that default. As you say, "neutral good" humans are shocked by murders and crimes, which means that there are still people committing those evil acts. And there would be other evil acts as well simply owing to the magical nature of the universe, like creating undead, stealing souls, opening gateways to fell dimensions and allowing demons in, etc.
dnd.wizards.com
www.enworld.org
