[D&D] On Morality

[thurgon]

Chimps might be a partial model of evil societies. Lots of might makes right, poor impulse control, albeit also mixed in with some familial tenderness. But they band together because they want to, maybe because they need to -- certainly for mating and such.

But I don't think chimpanzees are much like orcs (as typically depicted) - they are not warlike, they don't enjoy torture, they care for their young, and I think they exhibit some food sharing more generally.

If chimpanzees are the model for D&D evil, then the idea that killing evil people is justified per se becomes even more absurd!

[Belac]

I'd point out that D&D has spells to determine alignment, that most educated characters (at least) in Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, and even some interpretations of Ravenloft know that the alignments exist as objective cosmic forces, and that most people know what their deity's exact alignment is. In Greyhawk, many people are explicitly dedicated to being Evil, and build things with names like "The Temple of Elemental Evil." They may see "Evil" as being "good" and "Good" as being "evil" (with the lower-case terms being words we'd used but they wouldn't), but they generally do know that they are "Chaotic Evil" or "Neutral Good."

That's the official rules and settings, I mean. I don't know exactly how Eberron handles it because I haven't read as much of Eberron, but in Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms characters know that alignments are real and generally know their own. Ravenloft doesn't allow good/evil detection, but in an early Ravenloft module, an NPC explictly introduces herself by saying that she is aligned with all that is good and lawful and asks if the PCs are the same. (She might not explicitly say Lawful Good, but characters in the other settings might, though it's maybe a particular formal way of speaking.) In AD&D 2e, it says that it's extremely rude to ask someone their alignment, but also says that they most like know the formal name of their alignment and that any Chaotic Evil person with common sense would say "Lawful Good."

So alignments aren't like Strength scores or hitpoints (which characters don't know about.)

[John Morrow]

But there is at least a plausible argument that psychopaths can function only because they are parasitic on the non-pscyopathic majority.

And that's why orcs raid human settlements instead of tilling the soil, planting seeds, and so on. They are parasites on human, elven, and dwarven societies.

This doesn't on its own show that a fully-pschopathic society is possible - and I still find it hard to imagine.

I think the problem is that you find it hard to imagine. I don't. All I can suggest is spending some more time looking at the full variation of human societies.

What "dysfunctional" implies, after all, is that if you had only these elements then the system would not be functioning.

No, that's not what it means. Dictionary.com (http://www.dictionary.com/) defines "dysfunctional" as "Sociology. a consequence of a social practice or behavior pattern that undermines the stability of a social system." It means that orcish society would be unpleasant and unstable. That's not the same thing as not functioning.

Btw, the paper from the Monist that you referred to (http://www.hum.utah.edu/philosophy/f...pathsFinal.htm) is interesting. It seems to support my position on some points; in particular, it suggests that psychopaths do use moral language (especially in the context of "ought" judgements) only in an "inverted commas" sense (p 295 in the journal imprint).

I don't think that the fact that the psychopath can't distinguish a moral violation from a conventional violation means that they are using terms in an "inverted comma" sense. Do you really believe that one can't really understand what is moral unless one is compelled to be moral? Wouldn't that mean that the core of morality is not rational but emotional?

It also suggests that psychopaths are a counterexample to standard rationalist accounts of moral objectivity. To my mind, if we are accepting that "Evil" in D&D corresponds broadly to the psychopathic, then that suggests we have to abandon a rationalist account of morality (and thus, I would have to abandon my view that "I ought to do Evil" is paradoxical). Philosophically, that would seem to leave a type of hypothetical-imperative virtue ethics intact, and also a type of Neitzchean aestheticism.

It's not simply the psychopathic lack of a conscience or remorse that is Evil. To be Evil also requires something like cruelty or casual killing. What the psychopath explains is how one can be cruel or a casual killer without a conscience or remorse, understand that they are Evil by the conventions of the D&D setting, and simply not care.

Applying this conclusion to the game, I see the two most obvious alternatives as either:

*Alignment purely as description, a mechanical short-hand for in-game behaviour and outlook (so the in-game psychopaths don't have to think of themselves as Evil at all, but rather just refrain from moral judgement);

They don't have to think of themselves as Evil at all but they can and not care about it. In other words, the Evil Cleric knows that his alignment is Evil, they can detect it, and they are not troubled by that. Yes, they are cruel and kill casually because that's what they enjoy doing. They don't have to justify it to their conscience or anyone else.

As I said above, refraining from moral judgment is not sufficient to be Evil. To be Evil, one must be actively cruel or a casual killer (or worse). Thus, unless they are delusional, they should understand that they are cruel or a casual killer, understand that they are Evil by the conventional judgment of society and via alignment detection, and simply not care that they are Evil.

*Alignments purely as teams, with the rules not being moral rules at all, but rather conventions setting out the constraints of team-membership (so the in-game psychopaths can choose the team that fits with their aesthetic and prudential sensibilities, without having to concede that they are violating any binding moral principle in so choosing).

What you don't seem to be allowing for is the idea that Good people can view their moral rules as normal moral rules, Neutral people can view morality through a pragmatic lens, and Evil people can be indifferent to morality yet all three can understand that Hitler was Evil, Mother Theresa was Good, and Dirty Harry is Neutral and all agree on that assessment. I honestly don't understand what's so difficult or confusing about that.

I still don't see how the current approach of D&D, which is to take a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B, can be rendered consistent.

All three groups agree with that there are three buckets defined by certain ruies of behavior that all three agree definet hose buckets and the labels. Wjhy is that problematic.

I guess so. It certainly doesn't suggest to me that we have moral permission to kill them. I still think just war theory is the most relevant real-world moral thought to bring to bear on this paladin's dilemma.

What are the consequences of the Paladin killing the orc babies vs. the consequences of letting them live, not only for humanity but for the orc babies? What kind of life could they possibly have?

[John Morrow]

But I don't think chimpanzees are much like orcs (as typically depicted) - they are not warlike, they don't enjoy torture, they care for their young, and I think they exhibit some food sharing more generally.

Are you really sure about that? See this article (http://people.bu.edu/mnmuller/Pdfs/Watts%20et%20al%202006.pdf) about lethal intergroup aggression, including a description of some attacks.

If chimpanzees are the model for D&D evil, then the idea that killing evil people is justified per se becomes even more absurd!

They are not a model for D&D Evil. They are an example of how a fairly dysfunctional social system can still thrive.

[thurgon]

Re: alignment in D&D


All three groups agree with that there are three buckets defined by certain ruies of behavior that all three agree definet hose buckets and the labels. Wjhy is that problematic.

Because the problem is not one of objectivity, but the status of moral reasons - do these make absolute or only relative claims?

In other words, the Evil Cleric knows that his alignment is Evil, they can detect it, and they are not troubled by that. Yes, they are cruel and kill casually because that's what they enjoy doing. They don't have to justify it to their conscience or anyone else.

As I said above, refraining from moral judgment is not sufficient to be Evil. To be Evil, one must be actively cruel or a casual killer (or worse). Thus, unless they are delusional, they should understand that they are cruel or a casual killer, understand that they are Evil by the conventional judgment of society and via alignment detection, and simply not care that they are Evil.

The question is, if the Evil cleric judges that he or she is doing nothing wrong, and the paladin judges to the contrary, who is correct?

If the answer is "Both - each is correct by his or her own lights", then we have confirmed that D&D alignment, while objective, is relative. The natural tendency of this approach is to head towards "alignments as teams". I think this is what OD&D and Basic/Expert D&D had in mind. I think it can work well, but as I've said above it won't deliver a medieval fantasy experience, but a more modern thematic experience.

If the answer is "The paladin", then what error has the cleric made? And when s/he detects his or her own alilgnment as evil, and thus has the fact of error drawn to his or her attention, wouldn/t s/he be irrational not to try and remedy it? This is Plato's problem re-curring, which suggests we should not go down this route.

If the answer is "The cleric", then we seem to be in the realm of a virtue-ethics hypothetical-imperative approach to alignment: given that the evil cleric doesn't care for virtue, s/he has no reason to try and cultivate it, and has made no error. The difficulty with this approach is that it makes the typical D&D hostility to all things evil hard to maintain - the evil are not irrational, who could become good if only they'd see the error of their ways, but are just rational people with a different set of dispositions. Killing some evil people might be justified in self-defence (as might killing some good people) but I don't see how there could be a justified blanket policy of killing all evil people.


What you don't seem to be allowing for is the idea that Good people can view their moral rules as normal moral rules, Neutral people can view morality through a pragmatic lens, and Evil people can be indifferent to morality yet all three can understand that Hitler was Evil, Mother Theresa was Good, and Dirty Harry is Neutral and all agree on that assessment. I honestly don't understand what's so difficult or confusing about that.

This is, in effect, option 3 above. It is not, in itself, confusing, but it does give rise to some puzzles - for example, it tends to rule out that the evil have any reason to be good, whereas many people think that it is more rational to be good than to be evil.

It also appears to mean that Evil is not itself an ideal or value - it is simply indifference to the ideals or values of those motivated by such things. This is fine, but does seem to be at odds with the suggestion in much of D&D that alignments are ideals which various gods and mortals aim at. Consider Satan, who is reputed to have said something like "Henceforth Evil shall be my Good!" This implies not only that he will cast morality aside, but that he will embrace wickedness as his guide to action. D&D seems to embrace this idea of alignments as commitments, but then the Evil person is actively pursuing an alternative morality. And in that case, we have to wonder whether they have made an error (which they can learn of by casting Detect Evil) or whether their judgements are correct by their lights (in which case we are back to the objective-but-relative alignment as teams).


What are the consequences of the Paladin killing the orc babies vs. the consequences of letting them live, not only for humanity but for the orc babies? What kind of life could they possibly have?

However vague the paladin's code, I think it is very clearly indicated as either a set of denotic principles, or a set of virtues to be cultivated. Utilitarianism is excluded. Thus I don't think the above question can be the right one. After all, it is not the paladin who has brought the babies, or their social world, into existence, and s/he is not responsible for what they make of their lives. (For a good expression of this view, I recommend GEM Anscombe's paper "Modern Moral Philosophy").

Re: functional societies

All I can suggest is spending some more time looking at the full variation of human societies.

-snip-

Dictionary.com (http://www.dictionary.com/) defines "dysfunctional" as "Sociology. a consequence of a social practice or behavior pattern that undermines the stability of a social system." It means that orcish society would be unpleasant and unstable. That's not the same thing as not functioning.

They are not a model for D&D Evil. They are an example of how a fairly dysfunctional social system can still thrive.

Surely, within the theoeritical framework of standard functionalist anthropology and sociology, "unstable but thriving" or "dysfunctional but thriving" is oxymoronic, and an enduring but entirely dysfunctional society is (within the confines of this theory) impossible because the very notion is contradictory. After all, the whole point of functionalist social theory is to analyse the features of a society by explaining how those features perpetuate the society (ie how the functions of various elements help render the society as a whole stable). If a society endures, then there is no question of dysfunction (except at the margins), but only of identifying what functional elements (which perhaps we have not noticed yet) contribute to stability. (That is not to deny that there cannot be periods of social transition from one sort of stability to another - but no one is suggesting that orcish dysfunction is a product of social upheaval, analogous to the dysfunction of nineteenth-century industrial cities.)

Thus, if orcish society is able to endure, then it must have functional elements that contribute to this stability. If orcish society is really a society of psychopaths, then I have trouble seeing what these elements would be. How would children be socialised? How would food be distributed? How would the elderly be cared for? If the answer to all of these is "None of the above for those brutal orcs!", then we get a whole lot of new questions, like "How does orcish language and culture get passed on through the generations?"

I'm willing to have the picture painted for me, but I'm having trouble seeing it myself. And I don't think my problem is a lack of attention to actual human social systems - none of these (that I'm aware of) is a system of psychopathic killers. To generalise a little, the typical (pre-modern) society is governed by a complex set of laws which is highly integrated into a moral and religious world view. This is not CE in the D&D sense.

Re: moral philosophy


I don't think that the fact that the psychopath can't distinguish a moral violation from a conventional violation means that they are using terms in an "inverted comma" sense.

I was merely drawing attention to a suggestion made in a paper on the moral psychology of psychopath to which you drew attention.


Do you really believe that one can't really understand what is moral unless one is compelled to be moral? Wouldn't that mean that the core of morality is not rational but emotional?

An RPG message board is not the easiest forum to debate deep questions of meta-ethics. But to summarise my views:

*I think it is plausible that the psychopath who says "I am willingly doing evil" is using the word "evil" in an inverted commas sense.

*I believe the above primarily because I think that the best account of the meaning of moral predicates like "good" and "evil" is an expressivist one, to wit the expressivist theory set forth in Barker, Analysis (2000), p 268.

*According to such expressivism, what is expressed when "evil" is predicated of some action is that the action is condemned by the speaker.

*The psychopath who says "I am willingly doing evil" obviously does not condemn what s/he is doing; thus, his or her use of "evil" is not the standard use, but some sort of "inverted commas" use.

*The analysis of indirect speech is obviously a whole other thing, but we might say that, in an inverted commas use of a word, the psycopath goes proxy for a conventional speaker; thus the attitudes brough into play by "evil" are those of the conventional speaker, and not the psychopath himself or herself.

The above analysis is consistent with the suggestion that the core of morality is emotional (because condemnation is an emotional outlook), but I suspect not in the sense you had in mind.

[thurgon]

I'd point out that D&D has spells to determine alignment, that most educated characters (at least) in Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, and even some interpretations of Ravenloft know that the alignments exist as objective cosmic forces, and that most people know what their deity's exact alignment is. In Greyhawk, many people are explicitly dedicated to being Evil, and build things with names like "The Temple of Elemental Evil." They may see "Evil" as being "good" and "Good" as being "evil" (with the lower-case terms being words we'd used but they wouldn't), but they generally do know that they are "Chaotic Evil" or "Neutral Good."

-snip-

In AD&D 2e, it says that it's extremely rude to ask someone their alignment, but also says that they most like know the formal name of their alignment and that any Chaotic Evil person with common sense would say "Lawful Good."

So alignments aren't like Strength scores or hitpoints (which characters don't know about.)

That is consistent with the 1st Ed approach also, with its alignment languages.

If an Evil person sees "Evil" as "good" (in the sense of worthy of being pursued) then we have "alignments as teams" - "Evil" simply names the team whose members are dedicated to suffering and the like as goals of action.

But in that case, "Evil" doesn't mean "evil" (in the sense of meriting condemnation) - or at best it means it only in a relative sense, for "Evil" merits condemnation from the opposed team of the "Good", but the "Evil" themselves have no reason to condemn what they do.

[Lev Lafayette]

Yes, actually the evidence suggests that a sapient creature could be be incurably evil. We have examples of human beings that pretty much exactly that problem (e.g., violent psychopaths and violent sex offenders).


My Paladin does not concur! They are merely ignorant of the needs of others!


If you are really interested in understanding how someone can be both sapient and irredeemably evil, these articles are a good place to start:


You know, I have been a graduate student in moral philosophy and developmental psychology for the better part of two decades ;)

(This said, I really liked the Nichols article, even if its implied behaviouralism is antithetical to my own considerations on the matter)


Please bear in mind that being a psychopath, alone, does not mean that a person will automatically do criminal or evil things and Dr. Robert Hare does believe that it may be possible to help psychopaths avoid doing criminal or Evil things, but I do think these articles demonstrate how and why a sapient being might be Evil and how they might be incurably so. How do you change a person who has no conscience, feels no remorse, doesn't want to change because they like the way they are, and enjoys hurting or killing others?

Remind them that everything they know comes from shared and mutual understanding of symbolic values.

[Katsue]

In other words, Evil cultures don't burn people because they think they are witches and believe it is a greater Good for society. They burn people because they enjoy the sound watching them squirm and scream in pain or, at the very least, have no compunctions about doing so.

I'm not sure it's easy to separate the two. I mean, back in the Middle Ages, who didn't enjoy a good hanging? The SRD specifically states that Lawful Evil characters are prone to imagining that they aren't evil.

[loseth]

Remind them that everything they know comes from shared and mutual understanding of symbolic values.

Just out of curiosity, what do you mean by 'symbolic values?' Do you mean propositional truths/falsities and conceptual frameworks (with the 'truths/falsities' in inverted commas if you're a hardcore lingustic reletavist)? Or do you mean moral values?

[malleus Arianorum]

Right. This is the commitment approach to alignment, taken seriously and to its extreme of the "team" model of alignment.

It is workable, I think, but it does not fit with any sort of conventional theology of the medieval Christian or Tolkeinesque fantasy (which is in any event infused with pre-Vatican II Catholicism) variety. The word "team" is anacronistic, but within medieval Christianity there's plenty of imagry of being a loyal soldier or of owing aliegence to the "Lord." Likewise evil people are often portrayed as worshiping "money" or "the flesh" or some other unworthy master.

Same thing in middle earth. Evil creatures weren't on "team Sauron" but they were in many cases fighting on Sauron's side and in all cases rebelling against Eru's side. Simply by changing the terminology from "team" to "side" the concept is rehabilitated.
For example, on this approach, when asked why he won't murder an innocent peasant to achieve some tactical advantage, the paladin can only answer "Because that is against my team rules". But when asked why his team rules are better than the orcish team's rules, he can't give much of an answer, because the language of ordinary moral argument has been neutered, and turned into a series of team badges. The paladin need not be helpless to explain the value of Good actions so long as he can convince his audience that goods like life, happiness and community are valuable. Likewise he can explain that Evil is bad if he can convince his audience of the badness of always sleeping with one eye open and having to store one's valuables under lock, key and poisoned trap.
Instead of moral evaluation, the paladin might appeal to aesthetic evaluation - he finds his team's method more appealing or pleasing in a certain respect. I think this sort of aesthetic approach works better for "law" vs "chaos" (think Neitzche, or Lovecraft and Moorcock) rather than "good" vs "evil" - can we really imagine anyone but the most depraved psychopath finding suffering more attractive than wellbeing? I agree with Plato -- "evil is crazy!" A creature totally devoted to evil would have to kill himself, rape himself, mislead himself, steal himself blind and so forth. Pathetic? Yes. High challenge rating? Not so much.

A more plausible explanation is the Christian/Tolkien idea that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Evil creatures desire the same goods as all people; power, safety, pleasure, praise, etc... but an evil creature chooses to pursue those goods through wrong means. Roughly speaking, Good characters choose the lesser evil and Evil characters choose the greater evil but both Good and Evil characters pursue the same goods. E.g. Satan wants to be king, Melkor wants to own the Silmarills. Good goals, poor execution.

[Albert]

I find it curious that the offers, as you've described them, revolved around what it would mean for the Paladin and not others. Since Good involves making personal sacrifices for others, if she was more concerned with her own fate than the braoder implications of her choice, I'd argue that she'd already slipped into Neutral.

The devil had already told her that it was perfectly fine to organize the thrall types into a non-dysfunctional society and usher in a golden age. Provided that everyone understood that it was the Smart powers, not the Sucker powers, that were making it all possible, of course. (The trap being that forcing people into a golden age doesn't seem to work, in practice. But the devil wasn't lying - her sponsers in Hell had no problem with her making the attempt, and would be delighted if she succeeded.) The angel had already disclosed that sticking to good would involve, among other things, watching people do really stupid, self-destructive things and not be able to forcibly restrain them out of respect for their personal freedom. Devils rage, but angels weep.

-Albert

[John Morrow]

Because the problem is not one of objectivity, but the status of moral reasons - do these make absolute or only relative claims?

I think it makes absolute claims at least in part because D&D alignment is interpreted by the players as well as their characters who presumably agree to at least some degree with the labels.

The question is, if the Evil cleric judges that he or she is doing nothing wrong, and the paladin judges to the contrary, who is correct?

Why do you seem to assume that the Evil cleric will judge that they are doing nothing wrong and not agree with the paladin or that if they agree with the paladin, they will feel compelled to change?

If the answer is "The paladin", then what error has the cleric made? And when s/he detects his or her own alilgnment as evil, and thus has the fact of error drawn to his or her attention, wouldn/t s/he be irrational not to try and remedy it? This is Plato's problem re-curring, which suggests we should not go down this route.

The problem here is that you seem to assume that morality is rational and that people will always behave rationally. I'm not sure that either of those two things are true.

This is, in effect, option 3 above. It is not, in itself, confusing, but it does give rise to some puzzles - for example, it tends to rule out that the evil have any reason to be good, whereas many people think that it is more rational to be good than to be evil.

See the essay, "How Psychopaths Threaten Moral Rationalism, or Is it Irrational to Be Amoral?" that I posted a link to earlier. It makes a good case that people are not good for rational reasons, as does the Discover Magazine article about moral decision making. The reason why moral discussions are so emotional is that, at their heart, they are about emotions.

It also appears to mean that Evil is not itself an ideal or value - it is simply indifference to the ideals or values of those motivated by such things.

Evil requires active maliciousness. So it is indifference to the ideals or values of those motivated by concern for others combines with an active maliciousness toward others. The ideal or value is simply self gratification. They are not motivated by ideals or values that concern the welfare of others, though they can understand them and their benefits rationally. In other words, an Evil character can enjoy the fruits of a Good society and even see value in cultivating Good people, yet still prey on them mercilessly and cruelly when they get the chance, much in the way that a shepherd might cultivate a flock of sheep and then take a few every now and then to satisfy their hunger.

That psychopaths can pretend to be morally normal people suggests that they can understand moral rules and even obey them when they want to. They simply aren't compelled to follow moral rules by a conscience or remorse.

This is fine, but does seem to be at odds with the suggestion in much of D&D that alignments are ideals which various gods and mortals aim at. Consider Satan, who is reputed to have said something like "Henceforth Evil shall be my Good!" This implies not only that he will cast morality aside, but that he will embrace wickedness as his guide to action. D&D seems to embrace this idea of alignments as commitments, but then the Evil person is actively pursuing an alternative morality. And in that case, we have to wonder whether they have made an error (which they can learn of by casting Detect Evil) or whether their judgements are correct by their lights (in which case we are back to the objective-but-relative alignment as teams).

Consider that Satan, as depicted in Paradise Lost and elsewhere, is using "Good" in an "inverted-commas" sense, hence the phrase "my Good". That he has embraced wickedness as his guide to action does not mean that he no longer understands that it's wickedness. He does, and does it on purpose. He isn't pursuing an "alternate morality". He is purposely violating the existing morality.

They don't have to wonder whether they've made an error or whether their judgment can be rationalized or justified. They just don't care.

Have you really never met a person who has done something wrong on purpose because they get a kick out of the moral violation?

However vague the paladin's code, I think it is very clearly indicated as either a set of denotic principles, or a set of virtues to be cultivated. Utilitarianism is excluded. Thus I don't think the above question can be the right one. After all, it is not the paladin who has brought the babies, or their social world, into existence, and s/he is not responsible for what they make of their lives. (For a good expression of this view, I recommend GEM Anscombe's paper "Modern Moral Philosophy").

Are we talking about irredeemably Evil orcs here or simply orcs with an Evil culture?

Surely, within the theoeritical framework of standard functionalist anthropology and sociology, "unstable but thriving" or "dysfunctional but thriving" is oxymoronic, and an enduring but entirely dysfunctional society is (within the confines of this theory) impossible because the very notion is contradictory. After all, the whole point of functionalist social theory is to analyse the features of a society by explaining how those features perpetuate the society (ie how the functions of various elements help render the society as a whole stable). If a society endures, then there is no question of dysfunction (except at the margins), but only of identifying what functional elements (which perhaps we have not noticed yet) contribute to stability. (That is not to deny that there cannot be periods of social transition from one sort of stability to another - but no one is suggesting that orcish dysfunction is a product of social upheaval, analogous to the dysfunction of nineteenth-century industrial cities.)

I'm not even sure we are using the word the same way, at this point. What do you mean by a "dysfunctional"? I'm using it in the conventional sense, "[a]bnormal or impaired functioning", neither of which implies an utter inability to prosper.

Thus, if orcish society is able to endure, then it must have functional elements that contribute to this stability. If orcish society is really a society of psychopaths, then I have trouble seeing what these elements would be. How would children be socialised? How would food be distributed? How would the elderly be cared for? If the answer to all of these is "None of the above for those brutal orcs!", then we get a whole lot of new questions, like "How does orcish language and culture get passed on through the generations?"

The children are socialized through instinct and watching other orcs. Food is distributed by whatever a creature can grab and eat without getting their head bashed in. Maybe mothers feed their own children as a means of creating a codependent relationship until they are old enough to pose a threat to the mother or don't need her. Maybe orcs taste bad to each other so they don't have to worry about being used as food. The elderly aren't cared for, and since they are post-reproductive, that has zero impact on how well the culture prospers. Orcish language gets picked up the same way abused and neglected children pick up language. Their culture gets passed on the same way abusive family relationships get passed on. I'm not seeing any show-stoppers here.

I'm willing to have the picture painted for me, but I'm having trouble seeing it myself.

Stop assuming that the answer has to be pleasant or desirable, only that it allows each orc woman to bear more than two children who survive to adulthood to have more than two children themselves. That's all you need to figure out. How do two or more orc babies survive to have two or more orc babies of their own.

And I don't think my problem is a lack of attention to actual human social systems - none of these (that I'm aware of) is a system of psychopathic killers.

There are some "boy gang" cultures in Africa that come very close. Of course it's going to be difficult to find larger cultures run by psychopathic killer rules because most human beings aren't psychopaths. But I do suspect that certain cultures were founded by or, at points, run by psychopaths.

To generalise a little, the typical (pre-modern) society is governed by a complex set of laws which is highly integrated into a moral and religious world view. This is not CE in the D&D sense.

Don't look at the typical societies. Of course they aren't going to be a good model. Look at the atypical societies.

I was merely drawing attention to a suggestion made in a paper on the moral psychology of psychopath to which you drew attention.

Fair enough. It's not a point that I agree with, nor, as the paper suggests, do the people asked about it in a survey.

*I think it is plausible that the psychopath who says "I am willingly doing evil" is using the word "evil" in an inverted commas sense.

*I believe the above primarily because I think that the best account of the meaning of moral predicates like "good" and "evil" is an expressivist one, to wit the expressivist theory set forth in Barker, Analysis (2000), p 268.

*According to such expressivism, what is expressed when "evil" is predicated of some action is that the action is condemned by the speaker.

*The psychopath who says "I am willingly doing evil" obviously does not condemn what s/he is doing; thus, his or her use of "evil" is not the standard use, but some sort of "inverted commas" use.

All of which seems to assume that a person cannot differentiate between the universal application of a moral principle and their own personal conduct and seems to assume that a person will harmonize their own personal conduct with a universal application of moral principles. I don't think that either of those two assumptions are true.

It's quite possible to know and understand that something is wrong and do it, anyway. If an individual's morality guided their thoughts and behavior as directly and strongly as you seem to suggest, then people would never do anything that they regret or are ashamed of, because they'd always be doing the right thing. But real world examples suggest that people often do do things that they consider wrong because they lack the courage to do the right thing or let other passions guide them. You seem to assume that people are perfectly rational at all times. I don't. People are often full of contradictions.

*The analysis of indirect speech is obviously a whole other thing, but we might say that, in an inverted commas use of a word, the psycopath goes proxy for a conventional speaker; thus the attitudes brough into play by "evil" are those of the conventional speaker, and not the psychopath himself or herself.

Only if you assume that to understand that something is Evil is to want to not do that thing. I don't think that's a given at all. I think you are mixing universal morality with personal morality and I think that many people can and do separate the two.

For example, I've talked to Christians who understand that forgiving people is Good yet they'll admit that they are bad Christians because they can't forgive. There are people who know that helping a stranger in danger is the right thing to do yet they are two cowardly to help, and they feel ashamed about it afterward. There are drug and alcohol addicts who understand that their addictions are destroying their lives yet don't change their behavior to do what they know is right.

There is no "inverted commas" issue there. They understand what they are doing. People often don't live up to their own moral ideals, if they have them, and they can be controlled by their lusts, no matter how their rational mind and moral emotions assess the situation. They can do wrong even when they understand that they are doing wrong. Irrational? Absolutely. And I'm not sure why you'd assume that people can't or won't be irrational.

[John Morrow]

My Paladin does not concur! They are merely ignorant of the needs of others!

What if they understand the needs of others but are indifferent to them? That psychopaths are often quite adept at manipulating others suggests that they often have a very good understanding of the wants and needs of others.

You know, I have been a graduate student in moral philosophy and developmental psychology for the better part of two decades ;)

OK. Then perhaps you might find Joshua Greene's home page (http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/) interesting. Please note that I don't agree with the ideas in his philosophy dissertation.

Remind them that everything they know comes from shared and mutual understanding of symbolic values.

Why should they care about that?

[John Morrow]

I agree with Plato -- "evil is crazy!" A creature totally devoted to evil would have to kill himself, rape himself, mislead himself, steal himself blind and so forth. Pathetic? Yes. High challenge rating? Not so much.

Not at all. You are assuming the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."). Evil does not have to follow the Golden Rule. It's about doing things to others, not doing them to yourself. As a comparison, a racist can hate, mislead, steal from, rape, and murder people of a race that they had but if they are totally devoted to racism, it doesn't follow that they have to hate and harm themselves.

[John Morrow]

I'm not sure it's easy to separate the two. I mean, back in the Middle Ages, who didn't enjoy a good hanging?

I don't know. I wasn't there to ask.

The SRD specifically states that Lawful Evil characters are prone to imagining that they aren't evil.

It says, "Some lawful evil villains have particular taboos, such as not killing in cold blood (but having underlings do it) or not letting children come to harm (if it can be helped). They imagine that these compunctions put them above unprincipled villains." So it states that some Lawful Evil characters imagine that they aren't evil. That's fine, especially when they are Evil by choice rather than nature. My objection is to the idea that Evil cannot think of itself as Evil but must consider itself Good.

[RobertFisher]

Right. This is the commitment approach to alignment, taken seriously and to its extreme of the "team" model of alignment.

What you say on this matter comes close to what I mean when I say that, in play, I don't take alignment so seriously. Either you've sided with the forces of good/law/whatever in the world, you've sided with evil/chaos/whatever, or you couldn't care less.

Well...that and that I don't take it very seriously. (^_^)

Another respect in which OD&D and Basic/Expert may have been a more sensible set of rules than AD&D.

I agree.

[Albert]

It says, "Some lawful evil villains have particular taboos, such as not killing in cold blood (but having underlings do it) or not letting children come to harm (if it can be helped). They imagine that these compunctions put them above unprincipled villains." So it states that some Lawful Evil characters imagine that they aren't evil. That's fine, especially when they are Evil by choice rather than nature. My objection is to the idea that Evil cannot think of itself as Evil but must consider itself Good.

Good? Hah. Smarter, cleverer, stronger, wiser, better? Sure. But Evil doesn't ordinarily think in terms of Good and Evil - those are the self-deceptive terms of the stupid, weak, foolish idiots on the other side.

-Albert

[mindstalk]

But I don't think chimpanzees are much like orcs (as typically depicted) - they are not warlike, they don't enjoy torture, they care for their young, and I think they exhibit some food sharing more generally.

If chimpanzees are the model for D&D evil, then the idea that killing evil people is justified per se becomes even more absurd!

Actually they have been observed showing warlike behavior, where a large group fissioned, and then the larger subgroup systematically wiped out the smaller one. And you wouldn't want to be a male chimp visiting another chimp group. They've also been observed practicing infanticide: not by mothers who can't support another kid but by males and, more oddly (males killing kids not their own is common in the animal kingdom), by other females too. You're probably right about torture, though.

As for how psychopaths could live together: enlightened self-interest! One can practice sharing out of emotions of generosity and gratitude and obligation, or one can reason out that practicing tit-for-tat cooperation is good for survival, at least some of the time. This works as long as interactions are iterated, but breaks down when someone sees a chance to steal everything and escape. Which seems to describe a bunch of orcish portrayals pretty well...

[thurgon]

Just out of curiosity, what do you mean by 'symbolic values?' Do you mean propositional truths/falsities and conceptual frameworks (with the 'truths/falsities' in inverted commas if you're a hardcore lingustic reletavist)? Or do you mean moral values?

I think he's referring to Habermas's attempt to derive inter-subjectively binding moral principles out of the necessary pre-conditions of successful communication.

If I've got that right, then I think a sufficient refutation of Habermas's idea is provided by Davidson's papers "Communication and Convention" and "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs". In particular, I think Habermas is wrong in claiming that successful communication has as its pre-condition a readiness to defend one's assertion in intersubjectively accessible terms: one can go through the motions of assertion without actually having the relevant commitments. If this is obvious to one's interlocutors, we call it metaphor or irony or . . . ; if this is kept secret from one's interlocutors, we call it lying.

[thurgon]

The word "team" is anacronistic, but within medieval Christianity there's plenty of imagry of being a loyal soldier or of owing aliegence to the "Lord."

-snip-

Same thing in middle earth. Evil creatures weren't on "team Sauron" but they were in many cases fighting on Sauron's side and in all cases rebelling against Eru's side. Simply by changing the terminology from "team" to "side" the concept is rehabilitated.

Perhaps. I still worry about what account those on God's side are able to give of their allegiance to that side. If they say, for example, that it's the best side, what does "best" mean here? They want it to be more than tautological (ie mere equivalence to "the side we call 'good' rather than 'evil').

The paladin need not be helpless to explain the value of Good actions so long as he can convince his audience that goods like life, happiness and community are valuable. Likewise he can explain that Evil is bad if he can convince his audience of the badness of always sleeping with one eye open and having to store one's valuables under lock, key and poisoned trap.

This makes sense - one justifies allegiance to Good over Evil by pointing to the values that Good upholds and that Evil ignores or undermines.

So does this mean that Good and Evil should be understood as disagreeing over the relationship between moral conduct and flourishing? Then the Evil person who rejects morality need not be understood as (subjectively) irrational - they simply deny what the paladin asserts, that justice, fairness, respect for innocence, etc all conduce to a good life. (There is a slight oddity here, in that on this approach one can coherently deny that Good conduct and outlook is the best way to a good life - but as a purely linguistic oddity, it is tolerable.)

I like it. But I would see this a move away from a "team" analysis and towards a "descriptive" analysis: "Good" and "Evil" are descriptive shorthand for conduct and outlook that respectively acknowledges, or ignores, the relevant list of values and virtues. On this analysis, in particular, Evil would not itself be an independent value (or suite of values) to which one might be committed. It would simply be the disregard of, or hostility towards, values.


A more plausible explanation is the Christian/Tolkien idea that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Evil creatures desire the same goods as all people; power, safety, pleasure, praise, etc... but an evil creature chooses to pursue those goods through wrong means. Roughly speaking, Good characters choose the lesser evil and Evil characters choose the greater evil but both Good and Evil characters pursue the same goods. E.g. Satan wants to be king, Melkor wants to own the Silmarills. Good goals, poor execution.

This also makes sense. Evil people still aim at flourishing and a happy life, but disagree with the Good over the right way to get it.

The implications of this approach are that the Evil aren't necessarily psychopathic at all. Indeed, on this approach some utilitarians would count as Evil. And all a positive reading to "Detect Evil" tells you is that the target rejects certain values and virtues as essential to their flourishing. It leaves it a completely open question whether or not killing the Evil person is justified.

Thanks - you've just made me see how D&D alignment really can be made to work using an in-game descriptive approach, without having to posit the Evil as irrational! (Although I think it would require some reworking of the standard way in which predominantly Evil cultures, like orcs, are portrayed. But that's probably all to the good.)

[thurgon]

It says, "Some lawful evil villains have particular taboos, such as not killing in cold blood (but having underlings do it) or not letting children come to harm (if it can be helped). They imagine that these compunctions put them above unprincipled villains." So it states that some Lawful Evil characters imagine that they aren't evil. That's fine, especially when they are Evil by choice rather than nature. My objection is to the idea that Evil cannot think of itself as Evil but must consider itself Good.

The problem here is that you seem to assume that morality is rational and that people will always behave rationally. I'm not sure that either of those two things are true.

-snip-

people are not good for rational reasons, as does the Discover Magazine article about moral decision making. The reason why moral discussions are so emotional is that, at their heart, they are about emotions.

-snip-

All of which seems to assume that a person cannot differentiate between the universal application of a moral principle and their own personal conduct and seems to assume that a person will harmonize their own personal conduct with a universal application of moral principles. I don't think that either of those two assumptions are true.

It's quite possible to know and understand that something is wrong and do it, anyway. If an individual's morality guided their thoughts and behavior as directly and strongly as you seem to suggest, then people would never do anything that they regret or are ashamed of, because they'd always be doing the right thing.

-snip-

Only if you assume that to understand that something is Evil is to want to not do that thing. I don't think that's a given at all.

-snip-

There are people who know that helping a stranger in danger is the right thing to do yet they are two cowardly to help, and they feel ashamed about it afterward. There are drug and alcohol addicts who understand that their addictions are destroying their lives yet don't change their behavior to do what they know is right.

There is no "inverted commas" issue there. They understand what they are doing. People often don't live up to their own moral ideals, if they have them, and they can be controlled by their lusts, no matter how their rational mind and moral emotions assess the situation. They can do wrong even when they understand that they are doing wrong. Irrational? Absolutely. And I'm not sure why you'd assume that people can't or won't be irrational.

I'm not assuming that people can't or won't be irrational. But I had assumed weakness of will was not really relevant to the conversation at hand, given that we are talking about the genuinely Evil, as opposed to the lazy good.

Nor am I assuming rationalism about morality. As I said in my earlier post, I'm an expressivist, not a rationalist - I think that the function of moral discourse is to express (without describing) the deep commitments of interlocutors. These commitments are best understood as affective attitudes.

What I am assuming is that action can be critiqued on rational grounds. And my concern is, that if "Good" names what are objectively better reasons for action than "Evil", then self-consciously Evil people are being self-consciously irrational - which (putting weakness of will to one side) is odd.

Alternatively, if "Good" names a set of behaviours and outlooks, but doesn't include any commitment as to their value, then we seem to get team morality. But malleus Arianorum has cleared this up for me, by showing how the disagreement between Good and Evil can be understood as a disagreement over the conditions that conduce to human flourishing - and the only odd consequence is purely linguistic, in that an Evil person is committed to the following assertion: "Evil, not Good, conduces to a good life."


an Evil character can enjoy the fruits of a Good society and even see value in cultivating Good people, yet still prey on them mercilessly and cruelly when they get the chance, much in the way that a shepherd might cultivate a flock of sheep and then take a few every now and then to satisfy their hunger.

-snip-

Consider that Satan, as depicted in Paradise Lost and elsewhere, is using "Good" in an "inverted-commas" sense, hence the phrase "my Good". That he has embraced wickedness as his guide to action does not mean that he no longer understands that it's wickedness. He does, and does it on purpose. He isn't pursuing an "alternate morality". He is purposely violating the existing morality.

I don't quite follow these points. You seem to be saying that the Evil are indifferent to the values the Good uphold, but know that in being so indifferent they are doing a wicked thing. What does "wicked" mean here? If it merely means "contrary to the values the Good uphold" then we have tautology - which doesn't seem right. Because on this reading, "wicked" would have no evaluative content, contrary to its natural interpretation.

If it means "not the sort of action a sensible person would do" then the Evil come out as paradoxically irrational - which also doesn't seem right. I think it must be an inverted commas use of "wicked", to pick out something condemned by the Good (without simply being equivalent to the phrase "condemned by the Good").


The children are socialized through instinct and watching other orcs. Food is distributed by whatever a creature can grab and eat without getting their head bashed in. Maybe mothers feed their own children as a means of creating a codependent relationship until they are old enough to pose a threat to the mother or don't need her. Maybe orcs taste bad to each other so they don't have to worry about being used as food. The elderly aren't cared for, and since they are post-reproductive, that has zero impact on how well the culture prospers. Orcish language gets picked up the same way abused and neglected children pick up language. Their culture gets passed on the same way abusive family relationships get passed on.

-snip-

That's all you need to figure out. How do two or more orc babies survive to have two or more orc babies of their own.

I don't see the problem of socialisation as reducible to the problem of reproduction and survival. There is all the language and culture to be passed on. The comparison to neglected children helps, but few human children live in the sorts of conditions normally attributed to D&D orcs, and I think it is open to doubt that such conditions, spread universally, would be sufficient for enculturation to take place.

If orcs are "socialised by instinct" ie not socialised at all, that is a different matter, and fits more neatly with orcs as irredeemably evil, like demons. But then much of the problem about orc babies and whatnot goes away. They are like dangerous animals, and while moral problems might be raised by the question of how to deal with them, they are not on a par (at least on the conventional view) with those raised when dealing with people.

[John Morrow]

So does this mean that Good and Evil should be understood as disagreeing over the relationship between moral conduct and flourishing?

[...]

This also makes sense. Evil people still aim at flourishing and a happy life, but disagree with the Good over the right way to get it.

Why do you assume that in order to be rational, a person must be concerned with flourishing? Doesn't that presuppose "flourishing" as an absolute moral good and that one cannot be rational unless one desires to "flourish"?

[John Morrow]

I'm not assuming that people can't or won't be irrational. But I had assumed weakness of will was not really relevant to the conversation at hand, given that we are talking about the genuinely Evil, as opposed to the lazy good.

It's not lazy Good. Lazy Good would be Neutral. There are people who, because of various passions, decide to do Evil things even though they understand that they'd be more likely to "flourish" if they were Good.

Nor am I assuming rationalism about morality. As I said in my earlier post, I'm an expressivist, not a rationalist - I think that the function of moral discourse is to express (without describing) the deep commitments of interlocutors. These commitments are best understood as affective attitudes.

Once you raise the issue of irrationality, you are expecting morality to be rational, are you not?

What I am assuming is that action can be critiqued on rational grounds. And my concern is, that if "Good" names what are objectively better reasons for action than "Evil", then self-consciously Evil people are being self-consciously irrational - which (putting weakness of will to one side) is odd.

What does it mean to critique an action on rational grounds unless you make assumptions about what a rational moral decision looks like?

Alternatively, if "Good" names a set of behaviours and outlooks, but doesn't include any commitment as to their value, then we seem to get team morality. But malleus Arianorum has cleared this up for me, by showing how the disagreement between Good and Evil can be understood as a disagreement over the conditions that conduce to human flourishing - and the only odd consequence is purely linguistic, in that an Evil person is committed to the following assertion: "Evil, not Good, conduces to a good life."

That assumes that Good and Evil are even concerned about the same things, and I don't think that's true at all. The psychopath is certainly disinterested in "human flourishing" because they simply don't care about other people, or necessarily even themselves. The Neutral character has decided that flourishing personally is more important than human flourishing, while the Good character has decided that human flourishing is more important than flourishing personally.

I don't quite follow these points. You seem to be saying that the Evil are indifferent to the values the Good uphold, but know that in being so indifferent they are doing a wicked thing. What does "wicked" mean here? If it merely means "contrary to the values the Good uphold" then we have tautology - which doesn't seem right. Because on this reading, "wicked" would have no evaluative content, contrary to its natural interpretation.

Wicked means being cruel or murderous toward others. There are psychopaths who express bafflement that the courts do not execute them because they understand the menace that they pose to others and they would execute a person like themselves if they were faced with the same choice.

If it means "not the sort of action a sensible person would do" then the Evil come out as paradoxically irrational - which also doesn't seem right. I think it must be an inverted commas use of "wicked", to pick out something condemned by the Good (without simply being equivalent to the phrase "condemned by the Good").

What is a "sensible person"?

Let's see if I can explain this.

Psychopaths understand the threat that they pose to others. Psychopaths understand that they wouldn't want another psychopath to prey on them. Yet the psychopath doesn't have a conscience to feel guilty about posing a threat to others and doesn't assume that their behavior can do anything to increase or decrease the risk of another psychopath preying on them.

When you ask normal people about why they don't murder others or even why they value free speech, they'll often toss out some quasi-utilitarian reasoning that by respecting the rights of others, others will be more likely to respect their rights. They expect reciprocal treatment.

The psychopath has no reason to assume that. The behavior of others has no impact on their behavior, thus they don't assume that modifying their behavior to be nice to others will do anything to guarantee that others will be nice to them and, besides, they can get most of the benefit simply by acting nice and deceiving normal people without actually being nice and treating them well.

The psychopath can understand that what they are doing to others is nasty but not have the conscience that makes them feel bad about it. Thus they know their behavior is wicked, in the sense that they are doing things to others that they wouldn't want done to them, but so long as it's not happening to them, it's not their concern.

I don't see the problem of socialisation as reducible to the problem of reproduction and survival. There is all the language and culture to be passed on.

Just how complex do you expect orcish language and culture to be?

The comparison to neglected children helps, but few human children live in the sorts of conditions normally attributed to D&D orcs, and I think it is open to doubt that such conditions, spread universally, would be sufficient for enculturation to take place.

Look outside of the Western world and back into history.

ALso consider that the Golden Rule is not necessarily in operation in all periods or places. That is also how you get people who treat members of their own group quite well while being casually cruel or murderous toward members of other groups.

If orcs are "socialised by instinct" ie not socialised at all, that is a different matter, and fits more neatly with orcs as irredeemably evil, like demons. But then much of the problem about orc babies and whatnot goes away. They are like dangerous animals, and while moral problems might be raised by the question of how to deal with them, they are not on a par (at least on the conventional view) with those raised when dealing with people.

Correct, though I don't think that socialization is an all or nothing proposition.

[thurgon]

Once you raise the issue of irrationality, you are expecting morality to be rational, are you not?

_snip_

What does it mean to critique an action on rational grounds unless you make assumptions about what a rational moral decision looks like?

Well, if someone desires that X, and performs an action which they believe will bring about not-X, they are acting irrationally. There action can be criticised for irrationality, without making any assumptions about whether or not everyone is rationally motivated, or whether or not rational motivations would be the same for everyone.

Hume, for example, thought that reason is the slave of the passions. But he still thinks people can be criticised for acting irrationally, as when they act to thwart rather than satisfy their passions.

The causes of irrational action can be weakness of will, various forms of shortsightedness, wishful thinking, etc.


That assumes that Good and Evil are even concerned about the same things, and I don't think that's true at all. The psychopath is certainly disinterested in "human flourishing" because they simply don't care about other people, or necessarily even themselves. The Neutral character has decided that flourishing personally is more important than human flourishing, while the Good character has decided that human flourishing is more important than flourishing personally.

I was taking it as given that Evil people don't care about the flourishing of others. But to not care about their own flourshing is a different matter. Certainly, as portrayed in the Monist article, psychopaths aren't indifferent to their own well-being - indeed, it suggests that they manipulate and use others in pursuit of it.


Wicked means being cruel or murderous toward others. There are psychopaths who express bafflement that the courts do not execute them because they understand the menace that they pose to others and they would execute a person like themselves if they were faced with the same choice.

-snip-

Psychopaths understand the threat that they pose to others. Psychopaths understand that they wouldn't want another psychopath to prey on them. Yet the psychopath doesn't have a conscience to feel guilty about posing a threat to others and doesn't assume that their behavior can do anything to increase or decrease the risk of another psychopath preying on them.


But it doesn't follow from this that the psychopath is unconerned with his or her own well-being, or thinks that s/he should commit suicide. The psychopath may think that others - the court, for example - have a reason to kill him or her. It doesn't follow that s/he thinks s/hehas a reason to kill himself or herself (or that s/he is indifferent to his or her own continued life).


When you ask normal people about why they don't murder others or even why they value free speech, they'll often toss out some quasi-utilitarian reasoning that by respecting the rights of others, others will be more likely to respect their rights. They expect reciprocal treatment.

The psychopath has no reason to assume that. The behavior of others has no impact on their behavior, thus they don't assume that modifying their behavior to be nice to others will do anything to guarantee that others will be nice to them and, besides, they can get most of the benefit simply by acting nice and deceiving normal people without actually being nice and treating them well.

The psychopath can understand that what they are doing to others is nasty but not have the conscience that makes them feel bad about it. Thus they know their behavior is wicked, in the sense that they are doing things to others that they wouldn't want done to them, but so long as it's not happening to them, it's not their concern.

I am not having trouble grasping the psychology. I am having trouble with the proper deployment here of evaulative language like "wicked".

The analogy would be soldiers opposed to one another on a battlefield. Soldier A has a reason to shoot soldier B, and knows that B has a reason to shoot him; likewise, B has a reason to shoot A, and knows that A has a reason to shoot her. But A does not have a reason to shoot himself, and B does not have a reason to shoot herself.

This is structurally identical to the situation of two psychopaths: psychopath P thinks that he has no reason to treat pscyopath Q well, and thinks that Q has no reason to treat him well; Q thinks that she has no reason to treat P well, and also that P has no reason to treat her well. But P has no reason to treat himself poorly, and Q has no reason to treat herself poorly.

The classical philosophical exposition of this situation is Hobbes' state of nature in Leviathan. The most common everyday occurrence is between competing teams on a sportsfield. The psychopath's problem is simply that s/he doesn't understand the boundaries to what we might call these "circumstances of liberty".

My philosophical difficulty is that you say that P knows he is being wicked, because he is doing to Q what he doesn't want done to himself. But this is not a sufficient condition for judging something wicked, because soldier A (I think correctly) does not judge himself to be wicked. So either the psychopath has made a mistake in this judgement of wickedness, or there is something more involved in it then simply the fact that s/he is doing what he wouldn't want done to himself or herself. My worry is that the most natural candidate for the "something more" is that a judgement of wickedness is a judgement that something oughtn't to be done. And the psychopath can't be judging that of his or her own action, on pain of irrationality.

That's why I liked the virtue-ethics style solution: the psychopath doesn't judge his or her action wicked at all (except in an inverted commas sense) but rather differs in beliefs about the good life for him or her. (These different beliefs may well have their basis in a different emotional response to suffering.)


Just how complex do you expect orcish language and culture to be?

Given that they are of nearly the same intelligence as humans, pretty sophisticated.

ALso consider that the Golden Rule is not necessarily in operation in all periods or places. That is also how you get people who treat members of their own group quite well while being casually cruel or murderous toward members of other groups.

How does this help me to understand orcs, who are typically portrayed as equally hostile to one another as to those outside the groups?

I think this issue is actually one of the single biggest sources of pressure on the D&D alignment system - because it makes nationalist xenophobic paladins, or family-loving orcs, very difficult to capture in alignment terms. I think the most natural solution is to run the game in a social setting analogous to medieval Christendom, where the sense of political inclusion is sufficiently widespread that there is no major outgroup to give rise to the problem except for the CE orcs, who have a different moral code as well as a different political affiliation.


Look outside of the Western world and back into history.

You keep saying that. What examples of cultures analogous to orcs, as portrayed in typical D&D, do you have in mind? I'm not an ignoramus here - I teach social theory at a university. Should I be thinking of the PNG highlands? The Aztecs? The Ik in Uganda (based on your earlier reference to "boy-gangs")?

I don't see any of them as a suitable model for a society of psychopaths.

[malleus Arianorum]

Not at all. You are assuming the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have others do unto you."). Evil does not have to follow the Golden Rule. It's about doing things to others, not doing them to yourself. As a comparison, a racist can hate, mislead, steal from, rape, and murder people of a race that they had but if they are totally devoted to racism, it doesn't follow that they have to hate and harm themselves. I was not considering racism or typical evil. I was briefly exploring the contradictory (or as Plato says: Crazeh!) nature of a totally evil creature. A totally evil creature would not follow the Golden rule or any other good rule by definition. As a result, he would quickly destroy himself by his evil choices, just as a totally evil civilization would tear itself apart by choosing evil for itself instead of good. The point is: for an evil person or civilization to thrive, they must imitate some of the behavior of good people, and as we all know imitation is the highest form of flattery. ;)

The racist you described is evil, but totally evil? No. He is only evil towards certain races. Therefore Plato would say that he's choosing the good of his own race over that of others. The racist is NOT choosing evil for all races. He is NOT choosing evil for evil's sake. He is NOT choosing to be totally evil so he's not an exception to Plato's rule. Likewise the Psychopath may be evil towards all races, but unless he is evil towards all people (including himself) he is not totally evil in the Platonic sense.

Anyway, I considered the question of a totally evil person as a straw man -- obviously it's crazy. Now let's move back to plausible causes of evilness such as your psychopath examples bearing in mind that plausible evil is always motivated by a desire for a good of some kind or another. I.e. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

[malleus Arianorum]

Perhaps. I still worry about what account those on God's side are able to give of their allegiance to that side. If they say, for example, that it's the best side, what does "best" mean here? They want it to be more than tautological (ie mere equivalence to "the side we call 'good' rather than 'evil'). Well, for Christians and the people of Middle Earth "best" is a person so if you're on "The God Side" (or The Eru Side) then you're on The Best Side. In a certain sense it is a tautology "God is perfect" but for good people it's also self evident, written on their hearts so to speak because good people seek beauty, truth and morality all of which reach their perfection in God or Eru depending on which earth you hail from.

More importantly for this discussion, it's supposedly written on everyone's heart. Even Melkor, the wickedest creature in middle earth, can't say "no" to the beauty of the Silmarills. It's not that he's unaware of the greatest good (let everyone take a peek) it's that he values his own good more highly. He's selfish.

But D&D paladins do not have the option to serve God or Eru. There is no "Creator." There is no "one God". There is no "The Plan." There are different gods with varying amounts of beauty, truth and morality but no god makes a claim to being perfect (i.e. the best.) From a medieval Catholic perspective, a paladin in such a world only has access to the cardinal values (prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance). She has no way to acquire the heavenly virtues (faith, hope and charity) or rather, if she did acquire them they would be insane to hold in a world without God. (Basically, the difference here is that the cardinal virtues lead to a life of shrewd dealing and taking care of your allies. Heavenly virtues lead to love for all people.)

This makes sense - one justifies allegiance to Good over Evil by pointing to the values that Good upholds and that Evil ignores or undermines.

So does this mean that Good and Evil should be understood as disagreeing over the relationship between moral conduct and flourishing? Then the Evil person who rejects morality need not be understood as (subjectively) irrational - they simply deny what the paladin asserts, that justice, fairness, respect for innocence, etc all conduce to a good life. (There is a slight oddity here, in that on this approach one can coherently deny that Good conduct and outlook is the best way to a good life - but as a purely linguistic oddity, it is tolerable.) There is no disagreement over what is good and evil, it's just that evil people are too selfish for their own good and Good people are too generous for their own good

Assuming that there's no 'One True God' to throw things out of wack, the world is amoral and only neutrality is rational: be good to your allies and evil to your foes. Occasionally you should be evil to your allies (if their loot is worth more than they are) and good to your foes (if you can get something more valuable in return.)

Note that even though neutrality is the most rational, a perfectly rational person might be smarter to choose some non-Neutral alignment depending on the world. LG might be better if the LG gods are more helpful or if LG has all the good paladin gear. The important thing is that no matter her alignment a rational character should first and foremost be a hypocrite. Believing in absolute good in an relativistic universe is a weakness, just as an automatic tendency towards evil is a weakness. ONLY do Good and Evil enough to get a bonus!

This also makes sense. Evil people still aim at flourishing and a happy life, but disagree with the Good over the right way to get it.

The implications of this approach are that the Evil aren't necessarily psychopathic at all. Indeed, on this approach some utilitarians would count as Evil. And all a positive reading to "Detect Evil" tells you is that the target rejects certain values and virtues as essential to their flourishing. It leaves it a completely open question whether or not killing the Evil person is justified. Actualy the implication is that Neutral is psychopathic: completely free and unfettered from morality. They can do whatever is most profitable at that time. Detect Evil, tells you that a person is less free -- they must act selfishly even when it's not the most profitable choice. Thus, orks waste their efforts fighting with potential allies (like other orks) because they are evil (i.e. stupid.) Similarly evil overlords have to spend tremendous amounts of effort "watching their backs" and often end their lives on the dagger point of some underling turned traitor, or bite the bullet and have minions that are too idiotic, too mind-controlled, or too Balkanized to rebel. A neutral overlord can play nice. (I recognize that being LE mitigates the problem of a chaotic rebellion but even a LE overlord has to be careful.)

Thanks - you've just made me see how D&D alignment really can be made to work using an in-game descriptive approach, without having to posit the Evil as irrational! (Although I think it would require some reworking of the standard way in which predominantly Evil cultures, like orcs, are portrayed. But that's probably all to the good.) No prob. If you follow 3.5 to it's conclusion, Orks are evil because they're stupid enough to brag about it openly. Paladins are good because they're stupid enough to do good when no one is watching. True Neutral are the enlightened ones -- exactly as you'd expect from a world revised by a question-asking, authority-challenging Unitarian Universalist. ;)

[WayneLigon]

So, I am curious if this is how most gamers today see Paladins? I would be particularly interested to see how some of the old timers (I'm looking at you Geezer) deal with this issue.

Old-Timer here.

In the actual Old Days paladins were something I never had to worry about. What with rolling 3d6, the chances of someone actually having the stats to be a paladin (and not be a cheating bastard) were nothing short of astronomical. So, nobody ever played one. (We had advanced to the heady new territory of assigning stats after we rolled them, so it was at least possible. I don't want to consider the math of figuring out the actual odds of getting a paladin with 'roll 3d6 in order')

[For those just joining us, in previous editions you could not enter a class unless you met the minimum statistics for it. Paladins required a 17 Charisma (and if I remember correctly, Charisma did nothing for you at all until you got up to something like 10th level and could attract followers. Or something like that)]

But I'll be damned if some of the people who I played with and around at that time had exactly the same view of a paladin as Gary: the absolute worst charicature of a Crusader-era zealot anyone could come up with. It just blew my mind that any sane person would actually consider that this could - in any way or form - be what a Lawful Good person would do. I just ignored them, same as I did people who did the 'convert and die' tactic.

['Convert and die' is a similar idea I've seen people use. Paladin beats down the villain, puts a sword to his neck 'Convert to the ways of Light or perish!' he thunders. 'I do!' says the villain, who at this point has nothing to lose by humoring the guy. THWACK says the holy sword.

"Um, what just went on, there?"

"He converted. So I killed him. His soul is now in a better place and he has no ability to backslide back into Evil."

"You're an insane murdering #%!%, newly-made Fighter."

The mere idea, the concept that such a thing would actually work just boggles me.]

Now, in most campaigns I also don't mind the whole 'born evil' thing. So the whole 'orc babies' problem isn't a problem for me in most 'normal' D&D campaigns. It wouldn't matter how you raised the thing, it would still be evil. Better just to kill it as a kid and send it back to the abyss that spawned it. With that in mind, most Paladin 'problems' disappear. With the use of some common sense, the rest vanish.

[John Morrow]

Well, if someone desires that X, and performs an action which they believe will bring about not-X, they are acting irrationally. There action can be criticised for irrationality, without making any assumptions about whether or not everyone is rationally motivated, or whether or not rational motivations would be the same for everyone.

Hume, for example, thought that reason is the slave of the passions. But he still thinks people can be criticised for acting irrationally, as when they act to thwart rather than satisfy their passions.

The causes of irrational action can be weakness of will, various forms of shortsightedness, wishful thinking, etc.

If a person desires X and also desires Y, and acts in a way which they believe will bring about not-X but also bring about Y, are they making a rational trade-off (acknowledging that they want Y more than X) or are they being irrational? If you think they are making a rational trade off, then you have your explanation of how a person can desire X yet act in a way which they believe will being about not-X and still be rational. If you think they are being irrational, than anyone with conflicting desires will be irrational if they try to satisfy any of their desires.

I was taking it as given that Evil people don't care about the flourishing of others. But to not care about their own flourshing is a different matter. Certainly, as portrayed in the Monist article, psychopaths aren't indifferent to their own well-being - indeed, it suggests that they manipulate and use others in pursuit of it.

I think I need you to define "flourishing".

But it doesn't follow from this that the psychopath is unconerned with his or her own well-being, or thinks that s/he should commit suicide. The psychopath may think that others - the court, for example - have a reason to kill him or her. It doesn't follow that s/he thinks s/hehas a reason to kill himself or herself (or that s/he is indifferent to his or her own continued life).

Being unconcerned with their own well-being is not the same as wanting to end one's own life. A woman who charges into a fire to save her child is unconcerned with her own well-being to the extent that she is willing to risk death to safe her child. It does not follow that if she is willing to do that, that she is also willing to simply throw herself into a fire and die.

A person who is willing to risk their own well-being to satisfy their desires is unconcerned with their own well-being to the extend that they are willing to risk it. Using the formula that I presented earlier, they desire their well-being but desire satisfying their urges even more, thus they are willing to behave in ways that may sacrifice their well-being in order to get something that they value more.


I am not having trouble grasping the psychology. I am having trouble with the proper deployment here of evaulative language like "wicked".

That's because I think you insist on interpreting words like "good" and "wicked" in a morally relative way rather than a morally objective way. If you interpret all evaluative language in a relative way, then you'll never grasp how they can be used in an objective way.

My philosophical difficulty is that you say that P knows he is being wicked, because he is doing to Q what he doesn't want done to himself. But this is not a sufficient condition for judging something wicked, because soldier A (I think correctly) does not judge himself to be wicked. So either the psychopath has made a mistake in this judgement of wickedness, or there is something more involved in it then simply the fact that s/he is doing what he wouldn't want done to himself or herself. My worry is that the most natural candidate for the "something more" is that a judgement of wickedness is a judgement that something oughtn't to be done. And the psychopath can't be judging that of his or her own action, on pain of irrationality.

The situation of the soldier is identical to the situation of two psychopaths up to a point. Where they diverge is that soldiers generally assume that they are serving some greater purpose, and assume the same of enemy soldiers. In fact, soldiers go through a great deal of trouble to wrap warfare in pomp, circumstance, nobility, and even rules of "civilized" warfare in order to support that idea and create an atmosphere of mutual respect.

Thus soldiers do not assume that their behavior or the behavior of enemy soldiers is wicked, unless they violate the rules of "civilized" warfare or act dishonorably, in which case warfare often becomes quite uncivilized and, well, wicked. And I think both sides can recognize that as such, even when they are wicked themselves. In fact, such wickedness is often meant to answer a real or perceived wickedness from the other side -- a way to show that "I can be just as terrible as you can be."

A psychopath understands that another psychopath means to do them harm for no higher or more noble goal than their own gratification. There is no respect there. No nobility. No mutual understanding or trappings of civilized behavior. It's more like a cobra and a mongoose, locked in a cage together.

That's why I liked the virtue-ethics style solution: the psychopath doesn't judge his or her action wicked at all (except in an inverted commas sense) but rather differs in beliefs about the good life for him or her. (These different beliefs may well have their basis in a different emotional response to suffering.)

The only thing that requires that these words be used in an "inverted-comma" sense is the demand that words like "wicked" have a subjective rather than objective meaning. By demanding that such words can only have a subjective meaning, of course it becomes impossible to use such words in an objective sense. But you haven't actually explained why, if a psychopath intellectually understands what "good", "evil", or "wicked" mean in a way that corresponds with the way that non-psychopaths commonly use those words, and assess themselves to be "evil" and "wicked" and, say, Gandhi or Mother Theresa to be "good" that they are magically using the words differently than a non-psychopath is. Why do they need the "inverted-commas"?

Given that they are of nearly the same intelligence as humans, pretty sophisticated.

If language and culture simply require intelligence, then they don't have to worry about passing those things on to their children, do they? Isn't what you are really saying here is that you find it impossible to believe that a create nearly as intelligent as humans won't have a culture as sophisticated as human culture? Is that a valid assumption to make?

How does this help me to understand orcs, who are typically portrayed as equally hostile to one another as to those outside the groups?

Do you mean an orc is as likely to kill the orc standing next to him as the human standing in front of him? I don't think I've ever seen orcs portrayed that way, but that is what would happen if they were equally hostile to one another as outsiders. You'd never have an orc band or an orc tribe if that were the case, and both seem very common in the portrayals that I've seen.

I think this issue is actually one of the single biggest sources of pressure on the D&D alignment system - because it makes nationalist xenophobic paladins, or family-loving orcs, very difficult to capture in alignment terms. I think the most natural solution is to run the game in a social setting analogous to medieval Christendom, where the sense of political inclusion is sufficiently widespread that there is no major outgroup to give rise to the problem except for the CE orcs, who have a different moral code as well as a different political affiliation.

A nationalist xenophobe isn't Good in D&D terms. Again, I think the problem is your morally relative assumptions (that a nationalist xenophobe could be Good because they think of themselves that way) rather than the alignment system. The D&D alignment system has a place for nationalist xenophobes in the Lawful Neutral and Lawful Evil alignments. If you want Nazi Paladins, not a problem. Simply allow Lawful Evil paladins in your game. Similarly, family-loving orcs aren't Chaotic Evil. They are probably Chaotic Neutral or maybe even True Neutral, and possibly even Good if they love all other innocent sentient creatures, too.

So the problem isn't finding a place for nationalist xenophobes or family-loving orcs in the alignment system. The problem is trying to wedge your nationalist xenophobes into the Lawful Good alignment or family-loving orcs into the Chaotic Evil alignment. That's because they don't belong there. But that doesn't mean that they can't be placed in the alignment system. I think the problem is that you keep trying to view an objective alignment system through a relativist lens. It doesn't work that way.

You keep saying that. What examples of cultures analogous to orcs, as portrayed in typical D&D, do you have in mind? I'm not an ignoramus here - I teach social theory at a university. Should I be thinking of the PNG highlands? The Aztecs? The Ik in Uganda (based on your earlier reference to "boy-gangs")?

I don't see any of them as a suitable model for a society of psychopaths.

Is any example I give you going to be a perfect analogy? Of course not. Human beings are not normally psychopaths. But I do think you can get glimpses of what such a society might look like in, for example, the gangs competing for control of Liberia, the activities of some groups during China's Cultural Revolution, the Somali militants depicted in the movie Black Hawk Down, various cults such as the Manson family, possibly the Moche, and so on.

But since you teach social theory at a university, let me ask you what criteria you are using to judge whether a human society is a suitable model for a society of psychopaths? In other words, what would the characteristics of a suitable model be?

[John Morrow]

I was not considering racism or typical evil. I was briefly exploring the contradictory (or as Plato says: Crazeh!) nature of a totally evil creature. A totally evil creature would not follow the Golden rule or any other good rule by definition.

That's because, as it has been describes so far in this thread, Plato defines "evil" in such a way that it can have no positive qualities. But Plato's definition of Evil is not the d20 3.5 SRD's definition of Evil, thus I see no reason why people should expect D&D Evil creatures to be Plato's sort of evil. Evil means something very specific in D&D. And I don't even think it's common usage matches Plato's. What was the original Greek word that Plato used that is being translated as "evil"?

As a result, he would quickly destroy himself by his evil choices, just as a totally evil civilization would tear itself apart by choosing evil for itself instead of good. The point is: for an evil person or civilization to thrive, they must imitate some of the behavior of good people, and as we all know imitation is the highest form of flattery. ;)

D&D Evil isn't about maximizing destruction. It's simply about cruelty and indifference to or enjoyment of the deaths of others. Maximizing Evil as defined in D&D does not automatically imply what the maximization of Plato's evil implies. If D&D Evil was Plato's evil, this might be a useful observation. Since it isn't, I'm not sure what it proves, other than you can break the D&D alignment system by changing the definitions of the alignments.

The racist you described is evil, but totally evil? No. He is only evil towards certain races.

D&D doesn't demand that anyone be totally anything. Good characters are allowed to kill, Evil characters are allowed not to kill, and even Neutral characters can kill innocent people and still be Neutral. You are placing external demands upon the alignment system.

Therefore Plato would say that he's choosing the good of his own race over that of others. The racist is NOT choosing evil for all races. He is NOT choosing evil for evil's sake. He is NOT choosing to be totally evil so he's not an exception to Plato's rule. Likewise the Psychopath may be evil towards all races, but unless he is evil towards all people (including himself) he is not totally evil in the Platonic sense.

And as I've already said, "Then I'll have to say that I think Plato is either wrong or using 'good' and 'evil' in a sense different than the sense used by D&D." Are we talking about what Good and Evil mean in D&D or what they mean in Plato's writing?

Anyway, I considered the question of a totally evil person as a straw man -- obviously it's crazy. Now let's move back to plausible causes of evilness such as your psychopath examples bearing in mind that plausible evil is always motivated by a desire for a good of some kind or another. I.e. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

I don't think that's true at all. What I think is true is that many people believe that plausible evil is always motivated by a desire for good of some kind or another because they find it impossible to imagine what it is like to not have a conscience and to not be motivated to do good of some sort. I think the problem lies in a failure of imagination, not the plausibility of someone who is evil and lacks any desire to do good.

Consider this descriptions of the psychopath/sociopath from Martha Stout's book The Sociopath Next Door (http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780767920209&view=excerpt):

Imagine--if you can--not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken.

And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.

Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless.

You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition.

In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.

You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences, will most likely remain undiscovered.

How will you live your life?

What will you do with your huge and secret advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other people (conscience)?

Now consider this quote from Political Ponerology: A Science on The Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes by Andrew M. Lobaczewski (taken from a blog entry here (http://ponerology.blogspot.com/2006_01_15_archive.html)):

It is a common phenomenon for a ponerogenic association or group to contain a particular ideology which always justifies its activities and furnishes certain propaganda motives. Even a small-time gang of hoodlums has its own melodramatic ideology and pathological romanticism. Human nature demands that vile matters be haloed by an over-compensatory mystique in order to silence one’s conscience and to deceive consciousness and critical faculties, whether one’s own or those of others.

The "human nature" that this second quote assumes, that humans have a conscience that must be silenced, is not true of the psychopath. Thus when a psychopath justifies their activities, the justification does not exist to silence their own conscience but "to deceive consciousness and critical faculties" of others. A psychopath does not have to justify their own actions or the actions of others as "a good of some kind or another" in order to feel comfortable with it. Where they do provide a justification, it's for others, not themselves, and it's not necessarily what actually motivates them. In fact, this is how psychopaths fool people into excusing their bad behavior.

[mindstalk]

Can you make sense of D&D Good and Evil without also considering True Neutral? Not the modern Neutral Neutral of someone personally in between L/C and G/E, but the old-school druid actively out to preserve "balance"? Which requires some idea of what you're balancing. Competing teams, easy enough. Balancing altruism and selfishness, or altruism and sadism, seems less sensible.

[Old Geezer]

You DO realize that the original 'Law-Chaos' rules of Chainmail, and the 9 alignments of D&D, AND the Paladin rules, were written in less time than was required to generate all the messages in this thread?

You DO realize there is such a thing as "over-thinking"?

You DO realize it's just a silly-ass game we made up?

Just checking. Carry on.

[thurgon]

Can you make sense of D&D Good and Evil without also considering True Neutral? Not the modern Neutral Neutral of someone personally in between L/C and G/E, but the old-school druid actively out to preserve "balance"? Which requires some idea of what you're balancing. Competing teams, easy enough. Balancing altruism and selfishness, or altruism and sadism, seems less sensible.

Interesting point.

[RedFox]

You DO realize that the original 'Law-Chaos' rules of Chainmail, and the 9 alignments of D&D, AND the Paladin rules, were written in less time than was required to generate all the messages in this thread?

You DO realize there is such a thing as "over-thinking"?

You DO realize it's just a silly-ass game we made up?

Just checking. Carry on.

Killing baby orcs is serious fucking business.

[thurgon]

The D&D alignment system has a place for nationalist xenophobes in the Lawful Neutral and Lawful Evil alignments. If you want Nazi Paladins, not a problem. Simply allow Lawful Evil paladins in your game. Similarly, family-loving orcs aren't Chaotic Evil. They are probably Chaotic Neutral or maybe even True Neutral, and possibly even Good if they love all other innocent sentient creatures, too.

So the problem isn't finding a place for nationalist xenophobes or family-loving orcs in the alignment system. The problem is trying to wedge your nationalist xenophobes into the Lawful Good alignment or family-loving orcs into the Chaotic Evil alignment.


Maybe. My worry is, that within the framework of D&D alignment, it is hard to explain how a LE paladin could genuinely love and care for his or her fellows, but be completely indifferent to, or even hostile to, outsiders.

Likewise, it's hard to see how a CN family-loving orc could also take pleasure in the torture of elves - under the rules, s/he would become CE, and at that point love of family seems to be thrown out the window.

To generalise - there are actually possible moral psychologies that D&D does not seem to allow for. This is because D&D recognises only 2 dimensions of moral judgement - altruism vs selfishness, and order vs freedom - when actual moral outlooks can be classified on a much wider range of dimensions.

If you interpret all evaluative language in a relative way, then you'll never grasp how they can be used in an objective way.

-snip-

The only thing that requires that these words be used in an "inverted-comma" sense is the demand that words like "wicked" have a subjective rather than objective meaning. By demanding that such words can only have a subjective meaning, of course it becomes impossible to use such words in an objective sense. But you haven't actually explained why, if a psychopath intellectually understands what "good", "evil", or "wicked" mean in a way that corresponds with the way that non-psychopaths commonly use those words, and assess themselves to be "evil" and "wicked" and, say, Gandhi or Mother Theresa to be "good" that they are magically using the words differently than a non-psychopath is. Why do they need the "inverted-commas"?

I get the impression that by "objective" you mean "descriptive", in the sense that Hare uses "descriptive" in The Language of Morals. Is this right -are you saying that "Good" and "Evil" in the D&D sense are purely descriptive with no evaluative content?

I would add - this is not what most meta-ethicists mean by "objective". Nor is the view that moral language has a crucial evaluative content - which is a pretty mainstream view - equivalent to the view that moral statements have only relative truth. Indeed, the paradox of irrationality that I am worried about arises only on the assumption that moral statements have non-relative (ie absolute) truth.


But since you teach social theory at a university, let me ask you what criteria you are using to judge whether a human society is a suitable model for a society of psychopaths? In other words, what would the characteristics of a suitable model be?

My worry is that socialisation would not take place among a society of pscyhopaths. Even Hobbes, who gives the classical account of a society of psychopaths in his description of the state of nature, allows that "natural lust" will hold the family together.

This worry is not assuaged by pointing to localised instances where particular deviant groups are able to emerge on a temporary basis - because it is very natural to see those groups as parasitic on the wider social system within which they have arisen.

[thurgon]

You DO realize that the original 'Law-Chaos' rules of Chainmail, and the 9 alignments of D&D, AND the Paladin rules, were written in less time than was required to generate all the messages in this thread?

You DO realize there is such a thing as "over-thinking"?

You DO realize it's just a silly-ass game we made up?

Just checking. Carry on.

Well, I've read posts in which weapons experts discuss combat rules, and in which physicists discuss fireballs, and falling rules, and whether or not a Hulking Hurler can hurl the earth.

I'm not a weapons expert or a physicist - I'm a moral philosopher. So I find it kind of fun to discuss the rules that deal with something I know something about.

[John Morrow]

Can you make sense of D&D Good and Evil without also considering True Neutral? Not the modern Neutral Neutral of someone personally in between L/C and G/E, but the old-school druid actively out to preserve "balance"? Which requires some idea of what you're balancing. Competing teams, easy enough. Balancing altruism and selfishness, or altruism and sadism, seems less sensible.

I think it can be fairly sensible once you realize that at the extreme, the altruism becomes mandatory (through taxes and social obligations) or the sadism becomes unavoidable. It also seems sensible when you realize that alignment defines attitudes toward sentient creatures and not all creatures. Thus the Druid in my D&D game was told not to do too good of a job of killing off the Evil sentient creatures of the world because they provided a natural check on the growth of humans, elves, and dwarves who, if they had their way would turn every patch of the planet into safe and productive farm, manicured grove, or sculptured mountain, leaving little room for nature.

[Maedhros]

Well, I've read posts in which weapons experts discuss combat rules, and in which physicists discuss fireballs, and falling rules, and whether or not a Hulking Hurler can hurl the earth.

I'm not a weapons expert or a physicist - I'm a moral philosopher. So I find it kind of fun to discuss the rules that deal with something I know something about.

...and I enjoy reading well-conceived thoughts on these matters as a healthy respite from the "help me find the optimum build" threads.

[John Morrow]

Maybe. My worry is, that within the framework of D&D alignment, it is hard to explain how a LE paladin could genuinely love and care for his or her fellows, but be completely indifferent to, or even hostile to, outsiders.

If it makes it any easier, think of it this way -- alignment is about how you treat strangers. Do you make self-sacrifices to help strangers as well as your friends? Then you are Good. Do you make self-sacrifices only to help your friends, but still have enough respect for innocent strangers to have compunctions about killing them? Then you are Neutral. Do you make-self sacrifices to help your friends but treat innocent strangers cruelly or murder them casually? Then you are Evil. And before you ask, there is no obligation for Good or Neutral or Evil characters to have friends. About the only thing you can't model well with this is the person who is indifferent or cruel to their friends but is willing to sacrifice themselves for strangers, which is a plausible, if tragic, type of behavior.

Likewise, it's hard to see how a CN family-loving orc could also take pleasure in the torture of elves - under the rules, s/he would become CE, and at that point love of family seems to be thrown out the window.

I'm not sure why you keep assuming that an Evil character or creature can't have attachments to others that they value or like. The BTK killer had a family and volunteered at his church, yet it would be fair to call him Evil, wouldn't it?

To generalise - there are actually possible moral psychologies that D&D does not seem to allow for. This is because D&D recognises only 2 dimensions of moral judgement - altruism vs selfishness, and order vs freedom - when actual moral outlooks can be classified on a much wider range of dimensions.

But the Good to Evil axis isn't altruism vs. selfishness (selfishness is achieved at Neutral). The Good to Evil axis is about going out of your way to help strangers, about not going out of your way to help or hurt strangers, or going out of your way to hurt strangers. Being Good does not imply that the character must mindlessly throw their own life away to help any stranger in need of help, nor does being Evil imply that the character must mindlessly attack or torture any stranger that they encounter. Good doesn't imply that a character must sacrifice their friends and family for strangers, nor does evil imply that a character can't make self-sacrifices to help friends or family if it suits their purposes.

Please note that I offered up psychopaths as a way to implement irredeemable Evil, if that's what a GM wants. The alignment system allows more nuanced, varied, and redeemable forms of Evil, if that's what the GM and players want.

As for recognizing only two dimensions of moral judgment, add as many as you want, but evaluate those two to determine where the person falls in that two axis system. The alignment system only worries about two, but doesn't demand that you have only two.

I get the impression that by "objective" you mean "descriptive", in the sense that Hare uses "descriptive" in The Language of Morals. Is this right -are you saying that "Good" and "Evil" in the D&D sense are purely descriptive with no evaluative content?

That's part of it, yes. But I think that anyone, Good, Neutral, or Evil, would prefer to have a neighbor that's Good or Neutral to a neighbor that's Evil so long as they don't have the critical mass to go on a witch hunt against Evil. Thus an Evil character wouldn't mind having a Good or Neutral servant or citizen so long as they lack the power to challenge the Evil character but a Good character might abject to having an Evil servant out of hand and find their company unpleasant. It's not simply teams and it isn't entirely missing evaluative content.

In other words, I think an Evil person does not evaluate Mother Theresa in the same way that a Good person evaluates Ted Bundy, even if neither posed an immediate threat to the person doing the evaluation. Similarly, although a Neutral character is not willing to make self-sacrifices to help strangers, I think they would prefer a neighbor how does to a neighbor that might enjoy torturing them or their loved ones. Thus I think most characters view Good as more benevolent and harmless than Evil, even if they personally follow a path of Evil. Again, toss the Golden Rule out the door. If everyone really followed it, we wouldn't need to define it and remind people of it.

I would add - this is not what most meta-ethicists mean by "objective". Nor is the view that moral language has a crucial evaluative content - which is a pretty mainstream view - equivalent to the view that moral statements have only relative truth. Indeed, the paradox of irrationality that I am worried about arises only on the assumption that moral statements have non-relative (ie absolute) truth.

I think it is both descriptive and evaluative, but perhaps not evaluative in the way you seem to expect it to be. People who are not saints admire saints. That means that they evaluate the behavior of others as superior to the values that they choose to follow themselves.

My worry is that socialisation would not take place among a society of pscyhopaths. Even Hobbes, who gives the classical account of a society of psychopaths in his description of the state of nature, allows that "natural lust" will hold the family together.

And there is no reason why "natural lust", fear, and a host of other pragmatic concerns couldn't hold a band of orcs together. I think the idea that the character dedicated to Evil would torture and slay every person they meet is as much of a straw man as the Good character willing to throw his life away trying to save any stranger, no matter how futile their sacrifice might be. An Evil character and a Good character don't have to be irrationally Evil or Good, though they could be.

This worry is not assuaged by pointing to localised instances where particular deviant groups are able to emerge on a temporary basis - because it is very natural to see those groups as parasitic on the wider social system within which they have arisen.

If course they are parasitic! That's why orcs, goblins, and other Evil creatures raid human settlements instead of tilling the soil, planting crops, and raising animals so they could be self-sufficient. A planet where there were no human farms or elven groves or dwarven halls to sack and loot would be an unpleasant place for orcs.

Over a decade ago, on rec.games.frp.advocacy, Neelakantan Krishnaswami wrote, "Bleah. I can't figure how to create a expansionist, totalitarian regime that can last more than a few years without going bankrupt." Mary Kuhner replied (here (http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.frp.advocacy/msg/abd0a4adf951da12?dmode=source)) with five suggestions but I think her last was the most insightful. She wrote, "So we go bankrupt--what do you think we are, a going concern? The Lords of Darkness *like* devastation, and they don't care what happens to their Empire. It is just a tool, to be discarded when it has done the maximum harm, or obtained whatever occult end it was designed for."

So how to orcs survive or even thrive? Like any other parasite. They take what they need from some other creature. They are very good at beating other people up and taking their stuff. And as long as a parasite has a host, it can survive and thrive. And in the case of orcs, when they can't prey on civilization, they can prey on other creatures and maybe even each other in the wild in a savage state until they can build up the numbers to threaten civilization again.

[mindstalk]

That's part of it, yes. But I think that anyone, Good, Neutral, or Evil, would prefer to have a neighbor that's Good or Neutral to a neighbor that's Evil so long as they don't have the critical mass to go on a witch hunt against Evil.

Some d20 book made exactly that point, that Evil and Good alike would prefer Good neighbors.

If it makes it any easier, think of it this way -- alignment is about how you treat strangers. Do you make self-sacrifices to help strangers as well as your friends? Then you are Good. Do you make self-sacrifices only to help your friends, but still have enough respect for innocent strangers to have compunctions about killing them? Then you are Neutral. Do you make-self sacrifices to help your friends but treat innocent strangers cruelly or murder them casually? Then you are Evil.

That seems pretty good. And close to what the SRD says, though with a stronger emphasis on how one treats strangers. Or to abstract a bit: how one treats non-self. Friends and family are, in a sense, people one regards as extensions of oneself; that an evil person helps her friends isn't that big a deal, whether because she anticipates a payback (tit for tat) or simply because she values that friend as a source of pleasure, so she's protecting her interests.

Of course, a key point is on which entities are entitled to consideration. Rocks? Animals? Other intelliegent species? Other people of your species but not of your tribe? Because looking at the SRD, I'm thinking that almost no human society could claim to be Good (20th century West has best large-scale, if not a very strong, claim; Jainists or Quakers might have stronger), and many could be easily classified as Evil, completely indifferent to the suffering of humans outside the tribe. With many tribe names being translatable as "the People", with the implication that outsiders aren't People. Someone one said that the Mongols were pretty orcish from the POV of everyone else, and while I don't think they were as internally backstabby as orcs, they did sometimes have tanistry, or inheritance by the last sibling standing.

But then some people would say meat-eaters are evil, for eating animals...

[SuperG]

That's part of it, yes. But I think that anyone, Good, Neutral, or Evil, would prefer to have a neighbor that's Good or Neutral to a neighbor that's Evil so long as they don't have the critical mass to go on a witch hunt against Evil.

Some d20 book made exactly that point, that Evil and Good alike would prefer Good neighbors.

If it makes it any easier, think of it this way -- alignment is about how you treat strangers. Do you make self-sacrifices to help strangers as well as your friends? Then you are Good. Do you make self-sacrifices only to help your friends, but still have enough respect for innocent strangers to have compunctions about killing them? Then you are Neutral. Do you make-self sacrifices to help your friends but treat innocent strangers cruelly or murder them casually? Then you are Evil.

That seems pretty good. And close to what the SRD says, though with a stronger emphasis on how one treats strangers. Or to abstract a bit: how one treats non-self. Friends and family are, in a sense, people one regards as extensions of oneself; that an evil person helps her friends isn't that big a deal, whether because she anticipates a payback (tit for tat) or simply because she values that friend as a source of pleasure, so she's protecting her interests.

Of course, a key point is on which entities are entitled to consideration. Rocks? Animals? Other intelliegent species? Other people of your species but not of your tribe? Because looking at the SRD, I'm thinking that almost no human society could claim to be Good (20th century West has best large-scale, if not a very strong, claim; Jainists or Quakers might have stronger), and many could be easily classified as Evil, completely indifferent to the suffering of humans outside the tribe. With many tribe names being translatable as "the People", with the implication that outsiders aren't People. Someone one said that the Mongols were pretty orcish from the POV of everyone else, and while I don't think they were as internally backstabby as orcs, they did sometimes have tanistry, or inheritance by the last sibling standing.

But then some people would say meat-eaters are evil, for eating animals...

I recall that normal earth people of today are supposed to tend to be either Neutral or Lawful Neutral.

A Lawful Good Society is what we /dream of/ in the real world.

[wgreen]

John is absolutely spot-on, except, I think, for this:

The Good to Evil axis is about going out of your way to help strangers, about not going out of your way to help or hurt strangers, or going out of your way to hurt strangers.

Evil characters need not go out of their way to hurt strangers.

Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient.

In other words, it's entirely possible to be casually Evil. That's the scary thing about Evil. It's so easy. All you have to do is not care about hurting other people.

Otherwise, excellent post.

-Will

[thurgon]

looking at the SRD, I'm thinking that almost no human society could claim to be Good (20th century West has best large-scale, if not a very strong, clai