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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 2157229" data-attributes="member: 4720">Of course it is.  Most of the long ones are. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  I'm VERY late to this thread, but it has been an immensely interesting read.  If infuriating at times.  People seem to have very different definitions than I of what constitutes "Good" and often completely unrecognizable definitions of "Lawful."  I'm particularly interested in your conclusion that Cedric is "good (with strong neutral tendencies)" from the post I'm about to dissect.What makes "stardust and gumdrops" prostitution un-good is that it is some form of attack on the prostitute's dignity?  I would buy that, but only if her personal dignitiy is somehow predicated on so superficial a thing as who she gives orgasms to.  Placing this immense burden of morality on the reproductive act is very strange to me.  (And I spent more than half my life as a devout Catholic)  To bring it back to game terms, animals are supposedly neutral, but a female cat will have sex with any male cat that comes along when she is in heat.  Doesn't that make her wanton and evil?RELIGIOUS CONTENT REMOVEDFrom what I've read, it sounds like this brothel is very comparable to some of those in small town America.  The girls are there as sort of a halfway house to get the heck out of the life eventually.  The patrons of the tavern know about the place, the religious hierarchy clearly knows about the place and at least some of them don't approve.  We can assume that the religious demagogues would, at best, shut the place down and run the girls out of town, thereby eliminating a place that was acting as a haven for women who fled a much harsher version of that life in the city.  What do you think the women would do then?  You tell me: what is the Good thing to do?  Oddly, just like real life, and action you take has BOTH good and bad consequences.  It is easy to claim a particular "moral high ground" out of adherence to tradition.  It is harder to live in the real world and still do the most good for the most people.  You spend a lot more nights sitting up and agonizing over the decisions you've made.  For my money, that thought and self-exploration makes you a better person than the guy who was "just following orders" and managing to do "good." YMMVEvery great spiritual and cultural revolution in history (including the one that created Christianity) was sparked by someone trying to make people think in new ways about morality, tradition, and religion.  Heck, that's what most SAINTS did.  But, apparently, paladins aren't allowed to do that.  Who knew?On a different note: a related set of comments on prostitution's "alignment"...Yep.  As a neurobiologist, I can tell you that we are wired to think "sex=fun."Unfortunately, our culture decided "fun=bad."As always, the interaction between "nature" and "nurture" is what tells the story, so you do the math.Of course, there is an entire wing of the feminist movement dedicated to being objectified on their own terms.  It's part of the sexual (not gender) equality notion.  It tends to conflict with the, arguably, inherent psycho-social deviancy of our entire culture: liking sex makes you a deviant, according to our religious and cultural dogma.  Of course, we're wired to REALLY like sex.  Mmmmmm.... dopamine....From my, limited, experience with this movement (sub-movement?), I think it comes from a class of woman who is fed up with the whole Madonna-Whore thing.  After all, I can imagine that it must suck for women in our culture to finally let him have sex with you, and then be deflated, morally, in his eyes for doing so.Personally, I find it much more convenient to be a guy.  We're morally repellent BEFORE the sex act as well.  The consistency is handy.All that nonsense aside, my personal belief is that gender inequality and objectification of women are both symptoms, and have no causal relationship to one another.  Telling you what I think the actual cause is would probably close the thread.  And I would hate to be the cause of death for so long-lived a discussion.  However, the point does bring me to this:Aside from all the other things wrong with this statement... You can't prove a negative.  I can prove that other things cause the objectification of women.  I can prove that some men who go to prostitutes do NOT objectify women.  I can even prove that an extremely small scale and temporally limited "objectification" has been known to produce a result that both I and the woman involved would consider "Good."  Of course, that objectification goes both ways.  Is objectification of men also a "BAD thing"?  Most men don't seem to think so.  Heck, I encourage women to objectify me.  Does wonders for the self-esteem. In any case, I can not prove a negative.  If you cannot budge from your position without asking for the logically impossible, no further discussion is possible.Yep, the prostitute has access to something (Sex) that the buyer does not.  If this is unequal by definition, then sales should be inconsistent with the notion of equality.That flippant comment aside, a fair number of people here seem to be fully embracing the notion that the only way to be good is to speak out against evil and refuse to associate with anything evil.  Unfortunately, you have gone to such an extreme with this that I have a hard time seeing how you could conceptualize a good man living in the world at all without massive angst and beating of his head against the wall.  Sort of rejects the notion of "good as its own reward."</blockquote>

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