If you're evil and you know it clap your hands

[Malapterus]

In the D&D world where 'good' and 'evil' are tangible things, is it possible to not know you are evil?

Like, if you were out and about doing things for what you believed was the greater good without taking any moment to weigh your actions and never questioning cutting off that orphan's head because you needed something to throw at the necromancer, and honestly believed all your actions are warranted and righteous, could you actually be evil?

Or, does ~EVIL~ require some direct intent? Is someone killing off peasants to stop a hunger crisis evil or just Neutral Stupid?

[Ruethgar]

There are a number of actions that are explicitly Evil for the purposes of D&D but it is completely possible that your character may not view them as wrong depnoon how he was taught and the society he was raised in. So no, evil in default D&D does not require intent to be evil.

[Deophaun]

There are a number of actions that are explicitly Evil for the purposes of D&D but it is completely possible that your character may not view them as wrong depnoon how he was taught and the society he was raised in.
The issue is, regardless of what you were taught, there are objective measures of Good and Evil readily available. It's difficult to think you're on the side of angels when there are actual, physical angels pointing their flaming swords at you.

Despite that, it is possible for someone to know they do evil and still think of themselves as righteous. While the universe may have clear, objective standards, putting them into practice is often a real @#%$@. There is nothing that says doing what it has decided is the right thing will ensure your people won't starve over the winter.

[Darth Ultron]

In the D&D world where 'good' and 'evil' are tangible things, is it possible to not know you are evil?

Yes.



Like, if you were out and about doing things for what you believed was the greater good without taking any moment to weigh your actions and never questioning cutting off that orphan's head because you needed something to throw at the necromancer, and honestly believed all your actions are warranted and righteous, could you actually be evil?


No, in the D&D Universe no being has to ''pretend" they are as Good and pure and the wind driven snow at all times......unlike some other universes.

In the Good universe, people have to ''say'' and ''pretend" they are Good at all times. In this Good universe Good is the Only Accepted Way of Doing Anything and Anything Not Good IS Evil, and anything Evil is Always Wrong. So in the Good universe, a person will ''say they are doing good" no matter what they do. As Good is the Only Acceptable Way to do Anything Ever, they will Always Say they are Doing Good.

The D&D Universe is not like that. In the D&D Universe, Good and Evil are Equal and Accepted by All. Compared to the Good Universe, Evil in not Always Wrong in the D&D Universe: it's just another way.

So in the D&D Universe, there is no reason to think or pretend a person is good: Evil is a Pure and Accepted Choice and Philosophy of Existence. Exactly like and Exactly equal to Good (and Neutrality). In the D&D Universe, a person simply does Evil (or Good).

In the D&D Universe, if your killing innocent orphans to get stuff.....you are Evil. And if your not insane..you know your Evil. And you agree with being Evil and like it and Choose to be Evil. Your actions are actions are warranted and righteous...and Pure Evil.

But, again, the D&D Universe has Good and Evil as Accepted Ways of Existence, Philosophy and Thought. So the guy killing innocent orphans does not walk into the city like a Fruit Loop and say ''yuk yuk, i'm a good guy doing things to be good and save everyone and it's all good!". THAT guy is EVIL and he walks into the city saying "I did what I wanted to do and don't care what you think...and if you disagree with me..I'll KILL YOU!".

Now sure an EVIL person might walk into a room of Good Two Shoes and ''pretend" to be good like them...but he would know he is faking it.

[zlefin]

In Pathfinder, unlike 3.5; detect evil doesn't notice normal creatures of HD <= 4
which means that most common people won't ping one way or the other. Thus it wouldn't be so obvious and they might not know or ever find out. I'm not sure of there's some other way that would serve as routine screening.

[P.F.]

... no being has to ''pretend" they are as Good and pure and the wind driven snow at all times......unlike some other universes.

In the Good universe, people have to ''say'' and ''pretend" they are Good at all times
...
The D&D Universe is not like that. In the D&D Universe, Good and Evil are Equal and Accepted by All. Compared to the Good Universe, Evil in not Always Wrong in the D&D Universe: it's just another way.

So in the D&D Universe, there is no reason to think or pretend a person is good: Evil is a Pure and Accepted Choice and Philosophy of Existence. Exactly like and Exactly equal to Good (and Neutrality). In the D&D Universe, a person simply does Evil (or Good).

In the D&D Universe, if your killing innocent orphans to get stuff.....you are Evil. And if your not insane..you know your Evil. And you agree with being Evil and like it and Choose to be Evil. Your actions are actions are warranted and righteous...and Pure Evil.

My experience at the table has been ... not this. Not this at all.

[Florian]

In a D&D universe with absolute morality, each of the nine alignments is a valid choice and works by itself following the internal logic. The alignments are not a religion and not really open to interpretation, what for, anyways? So, if you're Evil, you know that you're Evil and that's it, nothing to it.

[tadkins]

Taking Cook Person on a Pathfinder Witch isn't evil, it's just being efficient and unwasteful!

[Zanos]

My quick and dirty answer to this question is that what mortals think is right and wrong is not directly synonymous with cosmic Good and Evil. Since not everyone has access to Detect Whatever, it is possible to either not know you're Evil, or to be Evil and not believe it to be morally wrong.

[Ruethgar]

Murdering orphans is hard to rationalize as a good deed, unless there is a famine or disease that they might suffer from if left be. But what if you are under a compulsion or have been convinced they are demons in disguise? What if your religion seeks to sent them to the heavens to save them from their own wickedness to which they will undoubtedly succumb in their Evil kingdom?

Does a succubus hit with Sanctify the Wicked know that it is Evil? Does someone forcefully ritually associated with Evil know they are Evil without the spellcraft or knowledge arcana to recognize what the ritual was?

[Darth Ultron]

Murdering orphans is hard to rationalize as a good deed, unless there is a famine or disease that they might suffer from if left be. But what if you are under a compulsion or have been convinced they are demons in disguise?

Well, the compulsion depends on how understating the Good is: Wise Good will understand and forgive the poor ''compulsed" person; but Strict Good will be very Unfair and blame the poor ''complused" person.

If you have just been ''convinced"...or more accurately fooled...the blame is all on you. A BIG part of any Good is that the person must make sure they are doing the right thing. Always. If you ''think" something, you should make very sure what you think is true. And this goes double if you are going right for the kill (and, in genral, good folks should not do that anyway). If someone just tells you ''president Bob is a demon" and you rush over and hack Bob to pieces....that is all on you.



What if your religion seeks to sent them to the heavens to save them from their own wickedness to which they will undoubtedly succumb in their Evil kingdom?

Skip.



Does someone forcefully ritually associated with Evil know they are Evil without the spellcraft or knowledge arcana to recognize what the ritual was?

There might be some dumb or clueless people, but most intelligent people know exactly what is Good and Evil. A great many things fall under ''neutral" or ''unaligned", but most Good and Evil things are very overly obvious. So an Evil Ritual is full of Evil Evil things. The sort of things that leave no doubt in the mind of anyone that is not dumb or clueless(has an intelligence or wisdom above six or so).

[Ruethgar]

Bluff is an insane skill. Being fooled by a trickster who invests enough in the bluff and disguise to give you several whitenesses, magical and spiritual experts to testify that they are using alignment and aura concealing magic and example of their shapeshifted imp familiar being “killed” and not reverting until dispelled etc. seems like your intention would be Good. But killing an innocent no matter the circumstance is a defined Evil act whether you know what you are doing is Evil or not.

There is nothing Evil about the Ritual of Association and presumably you could have been Wished to be associated with Evil instead. Would you still know that you are now Evil? And what of the LGCE succubus?

[Callista]

Magical alignment changes are interesting. This is somebody whose alignment (a facet of their personality that connects them to the appropriate planes) has been abruptly changed from what it used to be, without the character development that usually accompanies such a change. The result is a character whose personality doesn't match their own memories of how they acted in the past.

If it was done against their will, it's basically brainwashing. It changes who the character is at a basic level. Whether they notice this happening depends on how self-aware the character tends to be. As a rule of thumb, I'd say anyone with a Wisdom of 8 or higher would notice the personality change; the higher, the more they'd be aware of it. Below that, characters might have to be made aware of it by others around them, or if not, might continue to act on impulse and not think much about how they had changed.

A character who changes to Evil would, if they were paying attention, notice that their impulses had changed. They would find it suddenly easy to ignore the automatic tendency to care about others--or they might even find that that tendency was missing altogether (especially true in the case of being turned into an evil undead or other Always-Evil creature). They might realize that it's become so much easier to get angry, and that they enjoyed acting on their anger in ways that hurt others. Guilt might become easy to ignore, or simply vanish altogether.

Think about what might happen if you woke up in the morning and found you were suddenly an extreme sociopath--no compassion, no empathy, no prosocial impulses whatsoever--and you didn't, couldn't, miss what you'd lost.

If you signed up for that sort of thing to begin with, you might see it as a relief. You might think to yourself, "Finally. I've shed all that weakness," and decide that this is a new beginning, to serve your new deity or pursue your new goals. The doubts you had before are laughable; you know you were worried you'd become a monster, but your new outlook just makes so much sense.

If it happened against your will, though, you might be quite troubled by it. You've lost your compassion and your conscience, but you're aware of the change; you know something was done to you that you didn't ask for and didn't control. You still remember the moral code you followed before the change, and you remember how you used to depend on it to figure out what was important in your life. You've lost that guidance now, and you're most likely dealing with violent impulses that you don't remember ever having before. You might actively seek atonement--not because you want your conscience back, but because you remember being happier before the change, and you feel purposeless now.

It all depends on whether a character's self-image and priorities are compatible with their new outlook. If they aren't, they are likely to be unhappy with their abruptly changed personality because it just doesn't match their concept of who they are supposed to be. Characters who don't notice that they have changed usually don't have a highly complex self-image to begin with, so there's not much for their new outlook to clash with.

[Ruethgar]

Ritual Association with Evil only makes you count as Evil for all purposes, it doesn’t actually change your personality or outlook.

Also, Always Evil doesn’t actually mean Always. Forget where it says it, but it’s supposed to be like 95%, not 100%.

As far as Sanctified demons, they reflect on their past deeds and have memory of them and repent, or attempt to.

But what if you were to create a fresh demon and immediately sanctify it. Would it know that it is Chaotic Evil and Lawful Good?

[Darth Ultron]

But killing an innocent no matter the circumstance is a defined Evil act whether you know what you are doing is Evil or not.

This is not true for all types of Good. Plenty of types of Good Viewpoints recognize that people can be tricked or fooled and won't hold that against a person to an extreme. No matter what a person does, Good won't harshly judge them in the worst way.

Also most Good does teach and preach Wisdom. So even if you are ''tricked" into thinking Innocent Bob is a demon...you should NOT just run over and kill him NO MATTER WHAT. You can knock Bob out or capture him or something like that, but no Murderdeathkill.



There is nothing Evil about the Ritual of Association and presumably you could have been Wished to be associated with Evil instead. Would you still know that you are now Evil? And what of the LGCE succubus?

Well, I don't know about this specific ''Ritual of Association". Is this from some D&D rulebook?


.
But what if you were to create a fresh demon and immediately sanctify it. Would it know that it is Chaotic Evil and Lawful Good?

Guess it depends on what you think between:

1.Any ''created" being is created with a full personality, background, intelligence or whatever else the creator wants them to have. So if the creator wants them to know all about alignment, then they will know that.

2.Any ''created" being is a blank slate. So it would ''know nothing". So you'd need to teach it whatever you want it to know or otherwise give it that.

[Ruethgar]

This is not true for all types of Good. Plenty of types of Good Viewpoints recognize that people can be tricked or fooled and won't hold that against a person to an extreme. No matter what a person does, Good won't harshly judge them in the worst way.

It is defined as Evil by the Pact Primeval in the Fiendish Codex II as well as the Book of Vile Darkness. It is forgivable, but it is undoubtedly Evil.


Well, I don't know about this specific ''Ritual of Association". Is this from some D&D rulebook?
Savage Species

Guess it depends on what you think between:

1.Any ''created" being is created with a full personality, background, intelligence or whatever else the creator wants them to have. So if the creator wants them to know all about alignment, then they will know that.

2.Any ''created" being is a blank slate. So it would ''know nothing". So you'd need to teach it whatever you want it to know or otherwise give it that.
Well, the only way I can think to create life without divinity is severe abuse of Prestidigitation’s creation feature which would be a blank slate, but a LG caster Sanctifying a demon, no matter it’s alignment or lack thereof, will make it count as LGCE.

Edit: It’s late/early. Sort of feel like I’m not putting together coherent enough thoughts and partially detailing the thread.

To answer the questions. Yes it is entirely possible to not know that you are Evil.

Your example is extreme but D&D defines several things as Evil acts. Regardless of how you rationalize them repeating them consistently should make you Evil despite your intent.

Evil in D&D does not require intent for the defined Evil acts in BoVD, FC, DMG etc. however undefined evil acts are in a grey area up to GM discretion.

Cold blooded murder is one of those automatically Evil acts via Fiendish Codex. So yes, killing peasants to stop hunger or disease is Evil.

[Darth Ultron]

It is defined as Evil by the Pact Primeval in the Fiendish Codex II as well as the Book of Vile Darkness. It is forgivable, but it is undoubtedly Evil.

Right, again, THAT is just one type of Good. So, yes, by the Allmighty Rulebook Good it is what it is. But, again, the scribbles of a couple mad folks is not the end all and be all of good. If the scribbles work for you...then fine, have fun with that.

And if the ''rules" do say if someone is tricked or forced to do evil then they are undoubtedly Evil...oh, well, sucks to be them. It's not fair, but it's what the rules say...so, All Hail the Rules.



Savage Species

Well, the Ritual of Association has no effect on alignment.



Well, the only way I can think to create life without divinity is severe abuse of Prestidigitation’s creation feature which would be a blank slate, but a LG caster Sanctifying a demon, no matter it’s alignment or lack thereof, will make it count as LGCE.

Well, there are no rules...at least in 3.5E to ''create life". Unless you count Constructs as ''alive", or ''living" Constructs as alive. Some spells like Simulacrum can ''create life", so can "Clone", and maybe Wish/Miracle. Plolymorph other can ''create" life.

Though Sanctifying a demon makes it lawful good, chaotic good, or neutral good. Period.

[Goaty14]

The issue is, regardless of what you were taught, there are objective measures of Good and Evil readily available. It's difficult to think you're on the side of angels when there are actual, physical angels pointing their flaming swords at you.

What if the angels are chaotic good, you're lawful good, and you're met with pointy sticks because you're oppressing the peoples or somesuch?

[Ruethgar]

Right, again, THAT is just one type of Good. So, yes, by the Allmighty Rulebook Good it is what it is. But, again, the scribbles of a couple mad folks is not the end all and be all of good. If the scribbles work for you...then fine, have fun with that.

And if the ''rules" do say if someone is tricked or forced to do evil then they are undoubtedly Evil...oh, well, sucks to be them. It's not fair, but it's what the rules say...so, All Hail the Rules.

Well, the Ritual of Association has no effect on alignment.

Well, there are no rules...at least in 3.5E to ''create life". Unless you count Constructs as ''alive", or ''living" Constructs as alive. Some spells like Simulacrum can ''create life", so can "Clone", and maybe Wish/Miracle. Plolymorph other can ''create" life.

Though Sanctifying a demon makes it lawful good, chaotic good, or neutral good. Period.
If you are not going by RAW then what metric would you use?

It is an undoubtedly defined Evil act and it is suggested that repeated Evil action should make you Evil and does not take intent into account. You can of course be forgiven, Attonement is a spell and plot hook for a reason, but that doesn’t make it any less Evil to begin with.

Ritual of Association(Evil) makes you count as Evil for all purposes that relate to qualifications of alignment.

Eggs are defined as objects via Dracinomicon even if they are fertile and have a fully developed creature inside. Prestidigitation can make objects without the non-living limiter of True Creation and is one of the uses that doesn’t have a time limit, though it is up to your GM to determine what such a fragile life would be susceptible to(normally use the spell Nurturing Seeds to bypass that but have to keep this one a demon not a plant creature).

Oh, also Craft Construct, Incarnate Construct that one Spell to apply Half-Fiend and then a quick PAO to full Feind.

Sanctification does not remove subtypes. So a demon sanctified by a LG caster is LGCE for all purposes that check for alignment. Makes you wonder where conflicting subtypes people go when they die since that checks your alignment.

[Florian]

If you are not going by RAW then what metric would you use?

Please, don't call that RAW. Thing is that D&D tends to either ignore parts of it itself, or is purely contra dictionary because the authors didn't know what they do. This is especially true when it comes to alignments and maybe part of the reason why BoED and BoVD are so damn bad.

[Particle_Man]

In first edition this would be easier. People actually had alignment languages so you knew exactly what you were! :smallbiggrin:

In d20 it is *possible* to not know that you are evil, but there are various easy ways to find out (a bit less so in Pathfinder). I mean, there are people today that don't know how computers work but if their computer breaks they know enough to call someone that does. I don't have to know about quantum physics to have an idea that there are people that know this stuff and that there is something objective to know. If anyone is wondering whether they, or someone else, is evil or not, there are ways to find out! It would be like me finding out what my blood pressure is.

In D&D land, priests and clerics and paladins exist, angels and devils and demons (and their respective home planes) exist, and the clerics can detect certain energies associated with the angels (and their home planes) and other energies associated with the devils and demons (and their home planes). If a cleric or paladin or angel tells you flat out that you are registering a certain "evil energy field" that is often associated with demons, devils, serial killers, etc., well, you have to wonder why. Now maybe Joe the evil commoner who regularly beats his wife and kids will not ever encounter a cleric or paladin or angel or anyone with the ability to detect evil while he lives out his npc life harvesting beets for his lord, but the possibility could always exist (less so in Pathfinder so long as Joe never advances beyond 4th level as a commoner). And anyone that PCs encounter could have that detection brought to bear on them. And the more narratively significant the NPC is to the setting or to the PCs, the more likely that those PCs will bring this detection ability to bear on them.

Now there may be some innocent explanation for why you register as "radiating evil" without you being evil, but the edge cases are relatively well known. OOTS gives the example of Roy registering evil to Miko and it is explained (by the Cleric Durkon, I believe) that this is because he has the crown that the evil lich Xyhon was wearing for a long time, and the evil rubbed off on it. Similarly, if someone slipped an undead skeleton of a kitten in your backpack, it might register as evil and so you, being in pretty much the same spot as the kitten, might be thought to be evil if a detect evil spell is cast in your area.

Oh, and I suppose that if you were somehow an awakened lead golem, or always wore magical lead full plate armour, you might be evil but never detect as evil since the lead might block the detection powers of the spell detect evil. :smallbiggrin: Again, this would be an edge case that would be explainable in that world to those in the know about how detection magic works.

[Bohandas]

The issue is, regardless of what you were taught, there are objective measures of Good and Evil readily available. It's difficult to think you're on the side of angels when there are actual, physical angels pointing their flaming swords at you.

Objective detectors. Detect alignment spells, as written, do practically nothing to tell you how good or how evil a creature is (the strength of the aura depends primarily on hit dice)


In the D&D world where 'good' and 'evil' are tangible things, is it possible to not know you are evil?

Like, if you were out and about doing things for what you believed was the greater good without taking any moment to weigh your actions and never questioning cutting off that orphan's head because you needed something to throw at the necromancer, and honestly believed all your actions are warranted and righteous, could you actually be evil?

Or, does ~EVIL~ require some direct intent? Is someone killing off peasants to stop a hunger crisis evil or just Neutral Stupid?

I'd say it's equivalent to gambling, or a business loan, but with karma in place of currency. You're going into karmic debt in the hope of a larger karmic return

[Darth Ultron]

If you are not going by RAW then what metric would you use?

Well....anything else. Common Sense works. But by all means, stick to RAW if you wish.



It is an undoubtedly defined Evil act and it is suggested that repeated Evil action should make you Evil and does not take intent into account. You can of course be forgiven, Attonement is a spell and plot hook for a reason, but that doesn’t make it any less Evil to begin with.

Guess it depends on if you follow RAW to the scribbled letter and if you ''take the suggestion".

Depends on the ultimate ''what are you asking?"

Say Good Joe is Bluffed or Complied against his will to think ''the innocent people in the house are demons". So Joe kills them all: an Evil Act, sure. Joe is caught, and it's found he was forced to act against his will. So the good people forgive him, atone him, and life goes on.




Ritual of Association(Evil) makes you count as Evil for all purposes that relate to qualifications of alignment.

Well, the Ritual of Association only gives a racial type, not an alignment type. Unless your not going by Almighty RAW. The Ritual of Alignment gives or changes alignment.

I guess a character might agree to pay a lot of gold and experience, and take a whole 24 hours to under go a ritual that they are clueless about and don't understand the effects of......but some how that would be rare.



Sanctification does not remove subtypes. So a demon sanctified by a LG caster is LGCE for all purposes that check for alignment. Makes you wonder where conflicting subtypes people go when they die since that checks your alignment.

Again, this is how you want to interpret RAW. And in your little corner of the world your free to say whatever you want.

And if you want to go by RAW, you can't effect outsiders with the evil subtype with the template of sanctified.

[Almadelia]

There's a difference between evil, as one might use it in the philosophical and moral sense, and Evil, that objective, mechanical property of the world. It's fairly trivial to simply dismiss Evil and evil as two seperate things and dismiss good and Good as two seperate things and there are nontrivial differences between what even a Good person thinks is right compared to what a Solar thinks is right. You couldn't meaningfully deny that you emit an aura of Evil if you actually do so, that would be sort of like a horrifically obses person insistently claiming that every single scale in the world is wrong and they're not actually 250 kilograms overweight. But it's possible to argue that - for example - it's not actually a problem since magic takes care of health issues for him and he just likes eating. Similarly, you could deny that the aura we conveniently call Evil is actually just a property (which it basically is) and that properties of reality don't have moral weight to them (it'd be a bit like saying there's inherently evil shapes or colours).

This is even supported mechanically to an extent. Nobody would normally argue, I think, that economic strength in a country isn't good (assuming you know nothing at all about how it was gained). But it turns out that in Pathfinder at least, a Lawful Evil country has a huge advantage over any country but Lawful Good in terms of economy, and even then Evil still has a decisive advantage, so for a ruler it's actually better to be Lawful Evil than to be any shade of Good. In other words, Lawful Evil is more likely to be judged as a "good ruler", even if they're evidently not a Good ruler. The same could be done easily in normal play - for example, someone whose end goal is effectively to take over the world because they think that if they have control, they can fix things, this person would probably be Lawful or Neutral Evil due to need for domination and control being the determining factor in their personality. But I'm sure they would argue that just because they're Evil, doesn't mean they're not also right.

[Lord Haart]

Clap.
Clap.

[Florian]

In the D&D world where 'good' and 'evil' are tangible things, is it possible to not know you are evil?

Or, does ~EVIL~ require some direct intent? Is someone killing off peasants to stop a hunger crisis evil or just Neutral Stupid?

Ok, let´s get a bit more in-depth with this.

Objective Morality basically means that all relevant questions have been asked and answered, therefore we have nine equally independent versions of "the Truth". Hence we don't talk about "evil", we talk about "Evil".

Subjective morality is a cultural thing. What is seen as "right" or "wrong", "good" or "evil" is strongly tied to culture, socialization and upbringing. For example, we have countries that see protecting the individual from the state as "right", we have countries that see empowering the state over the individual as "right".

Ok, using Golarion as an example here. The empire of Cheliax is ruled over by the devil-worshipping house of Thrune. The rulership and customs have an extremely strong leaning towards LE, but are not monolithic. A Hellknight or Diabolist feel right at home here and the "rightness" of their actions and moral stance are validated, because Cheliax works on the same principles. In a cultural context, they are not "evil", but the Diabolist is aware that his "home team" is Hell, while Hellknights are extremely L-based and run the range of Paladins down to Tyrants (LE Antipaladins), model themselves on the might of Hells armies and fully accept that their final destination might be Hell, but see this as worth the price when it helps their mission of eradicating Chaos in any form.

One of the neighboring countries is Andora, the first fully functional democracy. Both, the Hellknight as well as the Diabolist would be confronted with the "wrongness" of their actions and moral stance in this environment. What they do is "Evil" (Diabolist) and "Lawful" (Hellknight), in a sense that both are understood to be "evil" in a cultural context.

[Quertus]

I've played characters who were evil, and knew it.

I've played characters who were evil, and didn't realize it.

I've played plenty of characters who cared as much about their alignment as their blood type. Heck, if I played as myself, I'd probably be one of them.

And I don't recall a huge outrage that Milo needed prompting to realize that his alignment had changed.

So, uh, yeah, it's totally legit.

Also, clap.

[Edenbeast]

In the D&D world where 'good' and 'evil' are tangible things, is it possible to not know you are evil?

Like, if you were out and about doing things for what you believed was the greater good without taking any moment to weigh your actions and never questioning cutting off that orphan's head because you needed something to throw at the necromancer, and honestly believed all your actions are warranted and righteous, could you actually be evil?

Or, does ~EVIL~ require some direct intent? Is someone killing off peasants to stop a hunger crisis evil or just Neutral Stupid?

The whole alignment system is a framework to help players with roleplaying their character, I think. It plays a mechanical role when it comes to certain spells, such as protection from evil/good/etc. A character does not need to see him/herself as evil, but the player does need to see his/her character as evil in order to role-play correctly. I disagree with some views that good vs. evil are something cultural, instead, what we perceive as being good, or evil, is something universal, maybe flavoured by culture, but in essence similar. Good vs. Evil is often mistaken to be the the same as moral and immoral (or amoral). A moral person acts in accordance with religion, culture, and/or society. Evil can be moral, depending on the context, just as a good person can be immoral in a demon-worshipping society. The alignment system does not go this deep, it's a game after all, and simply bases good and evil on our worldly view of good and evil. In order words, good and evil in D&D is measured from, or a protection of, the definition of good and evil in our world, and therefor not an intrinsic property of in-game D&D religions and societies.
Not questioning authority is neutral, these people go about their own business, but will avoid coming in conflict with society in either direction. Actively going against an evil regime is good, or furthering the goals of an evil regime, when you know it's wrong, is evil.
So, intentionally killing peasants to stop a hunger crisis is murder, and by all means evil. Neutral would not go out of its way to kill people, but instead maybe keep to itself and simply not share the food they have. While good people would share their food, or actively rebel agains a society that approves killing off peasants in order to stop a hunger crisis.

These are just my opinions, so don't take them as being a fact. The alignment system is probably the most discussed topic, and there is hardly a consensus.

[Florian]

@Edenbeast:
The alignments basically go back to Moorcock and were initially limited to L, N and C.
The concept behind them is based on the idea that we have a cosmic struggle for dominance which "Truth" should ultimately prevail and the "Prime" will merge with the last surviving "Outer" plane and physical reality will adapt to the merger. (In the original sense, L would lead to static, C would lead to total randomness, N was simple the status quo between the two. Important point of the original setup was, you can only gain supernatural power by aligning yourself with either C or L)

[Deophaun]

Objective detectors. Detect alignment spells, as written, do practically nothing to tell you how good or how evil a creature is (the strength of the aura depends primarily on hit dice)
And litmus paper does virtually nothing to tell you how acidic a liquid is. Doesn't make it a subjective test.

[Bohandas]

And litmus paper does virtually nothing to tell you how acidic a liquid is. Doesn't make it a subjective test.

No, I agree the spells are objective, but they only detect, they don;t measure

[P.F.]

We've been over this so many times.

On the one hand, you have "evil," a real-world player-subjective moral judgement. On the other hand, you have [evil], an in-game rules-objective morality mechanic. And never the twain shall meet the rules for what's [evil] specify a few discrete actions, of which many, but not all, may be "evil" according to the players' worldviews.

Further complicating the issue, the list of [evil] actions is not exhaustive, suggesting that some subjectively "evil" actions are also [evil].

The question, as defined, is unanswerable in terms of game rules because its domain extends beyond rules defined topics.

[Malapterus]

Hello again!

I think the question has gotten pushed into areas that are a lot more technical than what I'm asking about. I don't mean a Paladin who has had someone stick a sign that says 'hail satan' on his back or a well-meaning person who has been tricked into something bad. I am talking about, free of external influence, intending to be good, can you still be of an Evil alignment?

example: The Goblin Slayer. He's a big powerful guy, lots of people look up to him, and he saves a lot of people from the goblins. He thinks killing goblins is a good thing and he has caused a lot of good having done so.
His motivation, though, is just to kill goblins. He doesn't car about anything else. If he sees a goblin, he kills a goblin. If he has to choose between killing goblins and literally any other task, he's killing the goblins. If bandits have kidnapped the princess and taken her west and there are two goblins smashing up a pumpkin patch to the east, he's headed east.
If a tribe of goblins becomes enlightened and realizes that they will be better off as a civilized race and forswear sin and savagery and start toward a golden age of peace, he'll never know, because he killed them all while you were reading that.
The Goblin Slayer is driven by nothing more or less than his desire to kill members of a certain race. He thinks they are bad, of course, but it's a consuming thing that he will take any means and make any sacrifice to achieve.

Clearly he's Lawful, and while people do love and respect him for what he does, he's also genocidal. He certainly thinks he's Good, but he obviously is not. Is he LN, or is he full on LE for his tunnel-vision bloodlust?

[hamishspence]

If a tribe of goblins becomes enlightened and realizes that they will be better off as a civilized race and forswear sin and savagery and start toward a golden age of peace, he'll never know, because he killed them all while you were reading that.
The Goblin Slayer is driven by nothing more or less than his desire to kill members of a certain race. He thinks they are bad, of course, but it's a consuming thing that he will take any means and make any sacrifice to achieve.

Clearly he's Lawful, and while people do love and respect him for what he does, he's also genocidal.



I'd say LE:

Lawful Evil, "Dominator"

He condemns others not according to their actions but according to race, religion, homeland, or social rank.

The Giant on the subject:

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?321374-Is-V-really-repentant/page3

[Florian]

@Malapterus:

He might think he's "good", but he might quite certainly not think that he is "Good". The Paladin is a ruthless exterminator of "Evil", but would stop at exterminating your example tribe and maybe actually help it along. Your LN Judge Dredd type would do the same, but without the helping. Only a true LE Dominator type would go for a full extermination, no matter what.

[ezekielraiden]

In the D&D world where 'good' and 'evil' are tangible things, is it possible to not know you are evil?

Yes, it is possible in typical D&D. Killing other people isn't inherently evil, for example--it's killing the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, that tends to be evil. (Otherwise, Paladins would have some pretty ****ed up gods, intentionally giving them tools-of-violence and then shouting 'gotcha!' when those tools actually get used.)

Note that this, and every other statement I make here, needs the disclaimer:
Not all DMs will agree, and not every universe works like standard D&D. This cannot be applied to every table universally.


Like, if you were out and about doing things for what you believed was the greater good without taking any moment to weigh your actions and never questioning cutting off that orphan's head because you needed something to throw at the necromancer, and honestly believed all your actions are warranted and righteous, could you actually be evil?

Yes. As a one-off or a semi-justifiable thing, like the occasional excessive destruction prompted by fighting the cult that murdered your entire extended family, "evil" actions probably won't stick to you hardcore, especially if you do later stop and reflect and try to make amends. But if you do something particularly egregious and never think twice about it, you're Evil. A particularly dangerous form of Evil in fact--the one that honestly believes in the trappings it cloaks itself with.


Or, does ~EVIL~ require some direct intent? Is someone killing off peasants to stop a hunger crisis evil or just Neutral Stupid?
Evil doesn't require that you intend to be Evil, otherwise the vast majority of even super duper ultra evil beings would not be evil. And, indeed, a person's alignment would shift solely based on their perspective of themselves, which exactly contradicts the idea that Good and Evil physically exist. However, your second question here raises an actually interesting conundrum. Is it evil to kill a few to prevent everyone from dying?

The example as given is probably at least a very dark Neutral or outright Evil, but a very small tweak makes it a hell of a lot more ambiguous. There's a plague; it's really really bad. It can't be cured even with magic. Quarantine has kept a certain city safe, but requires imprisoning the sick, and even people who just might be sick. The people trapped in the quarantine area will almost surely die, but it will spare the rest of the city. If the quarantined people are set free, they'll live slightly better lives for a little longer, but they'll infect the rest of the city and it's very likely every single person will die. Is the quarantine evil? You're consigning a few people to definitely die, to save a lot of other people from dying. But somehow that feels solidly Neutral, rather than the borderline-or-outright-Evil of the "kill some to save the rest from starvation." So: why, what is different?

I think the difference is that everyone is equally starving in the hunger crisis thing, while only the infected are at risk of death by the plague. The people who are starving are no different from the ones who aren't, and there's a feeling of arbitrariness, of treating the slain as a means to an end rather than as ends in themselves. Such concerns can't apply to the quarantine (if it is honestly and consistently enforced) because it's not arbitrary, there is something different between the infected and the not-infected, and that difference wasn't the result of the quarantine-enforcer's choices.

That said though, if you just casually kill people because of a hunger crisis, without any self-reflection or even attempts to consider other alternatives? You ain't Good buddy, and I'm hesitant to even call you Neutral.

[hamishspence]

In the D&D world where 'good' and 'evil' are tangible things, is it possible to not know you are evil?


Some Evil aligned characters in splatbooks are called out as not being aware they are evil, or not being willing to admit to themselves that they are evil, certainly.

So there is precedent.

[zlefin]

re: op's repeated question a few posts op.
I'd say the described goblin-slayer is solidly LE
especially since he'd go after goblins who're trying to be better. it might be different if he only goes after goblins because in that universe and area goblins are all raiders.

[Almadelia]

Hello again!

I think the question has gotten pushed into areas that are a lot more technical than what I'm asking about. I don't mean a Paladin who has had someone stick a sign that says 'hail satan' on his back or a well-meaning person who has been tricked into something bad. I am talking about, free of external influence, intending to be good, can you still be of an Evil alignment?

example: The Goblin Slayer. He's a big powerful guy, lots of people look up to him, and he saves a lot of people from the goblins. He thinks killing goblins is a good thing and he has caused a lot of good having done so.
His motivation, though, is just to kill goblins. He doesn't car about anything else. If he sees a goblin, he kills a goblin. If he has to choose between killing goblins and literally any other task, he's killing the goblins. If bandits have kidnapped the princess and taken her west and there are two goblins smashing up a pumpkin patch to the east, he's headed east.
If a tribe of goblins becomes enlightened and realizes that they will be better off as a civilized race and forswear sin and savagery and start toward a golden age of peace, he'll never know, because he killed them all while you were reading that.
The Goblin Slayer is driven by nothing more or less than his desire to kill members of a certain race. He thinks they are bad, of course, but it's a consuming thing that he will take any means and make any sacrifice to achieve.

Clearly, he's Lawful, and while people do love and respect him for what he does, he's also genocidal. He certainly thinks he's Good, but he obviously is not. Is he LN, or is he full on LE for his tunnel-vision bloodlust?

The Goblin Slayer doesn't quite have an actual alignment, as he's completely and utterly insane, which you would know had you read the source material. He certainly doesn't think of himself as Good, in fact he barely thinks of himself as anything.
Also if you had read the source material, you would know that a Good goblin is roughly as impossible as a Good devil, because they were made by an Evil deity more or less playing them as a race in a tabletop RPG game played by the gods - hence the Goblin Slayer's catchphrase as a DMPC, "he lets no one roll the dice". The goblins, in this case, are effectively predestined to be evil due to who designed them, so while you think of this as an Orc Baby conundrum you're already headed down the wrong trail.

[Almadelia]

That said though, if you just casually kill people because of a hunger crisis, without any self-reflection or even attempts to consider other alternatives? You ain't Good buddy, and I'm hesitant to even call you Neutral.

If you don't consider alternatives, you're neither Good, nor Evil, nor Chaotic, nor Lawful. You're simply stupid. Which I think is one of the biggest problems facing definitions of the tags, this idea, very human idea, that anyone who doesn't share your personal morality is a complete goddamn idiot so threads fill up with people describing this or that alignment as completely moronic shades of whatever their actual alignment is. Lawful Good doesn't mean letting everyone starve because "just work harder, work together, we're all going to make it haha" the same way Chaotic Evil doesn't mean killing everyone because "tee hee blood is red and that's totes my color" (well both could if you were of godlike power, but anyone of godlike power has different approaches to everything).

[hamishspence]

The Goblin Slayer doesn't quite have an actual alignment, as he's completely and utterly insane

Derro are completely and utterly insane in D&D. And CE.

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/derro.htm

[Almadelia]

Derro are completely and utterly insane in D&D. And CE.

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/derro.htm

Right but they sort of have a thought process going
The Goblin Slayer arguably is barely sentient when thinking about anything but how to kill goblins. He's more like a golem, or some sort of undead with instructions, than a real human being. So I feel hesitant to give him a meaningful alignment.
In any case, CE is arguably the best alignment for him if we need to give him one. His other motto is "I am the goblin to goblins", which effectively means he's the CE goblin to goblin society. He doesn't harm his own society or anything sure but then neither do Goblins, they mostly target humanoid settlements.

[noob]

A fun thing is that if you put an helmet of alignment change on a demon then this demon after death out of the abyss goes to a Lawful Good afterlife AND regenerates in the abyss.
If that demon dies in the abyss it merge with the abyss AND goes to a lawful good afterlife so possibly it brings the whole abyss in the lawful good afterlife in one go.

[tiercel]

Here’s the thing: people are often really good at rationalization.

It’s possible that in D&D, where, e.g., the Hells are a physical place you can actually visit during your lifetime using powerful enough magic, and where magic detects and targets alignment, that rationalization takes a little more effort (or, alternatively, willful ignorance), but it’s certainly possible.

For instance:

The gods require worship to maintain their power. To gain that power, they try to mold us into the beliefs and portfolio they stand for — including what they have, between themselves, chosen to label “Good” and “Evil,” “Lawful” and “Chaotic.”

So it’s true that your spell may show that I, for instance, glow red with your so-called “Evil.” But what is that? Nothing more than what the gods have defined, and what sapient beings as a whole have come to accept. So yes, any spell cast right now by any caster might show me as “Evil.”

But this is because of our collective choice to believe what the gods have peddled to us; let us not forget, they are beholden to us for their power. Should we decide, as a whole, to change our view of “Good” and “Evil” to something more sophisticated, more thoughtful than that simply handed down to us.... if power comes from belief, then what is to say that the very workings of magic itself do not depend on belief?

Is it not dangerous to trust an over-simplistic magical red glow over the powers of observation and judgment that our rational minds make possible? By what reasoned justification am I actually then “Evil,” and in what sense? For your spell may well only represent the blind belief of a spoon-fed majority, not any true moral measure.

Such a BBEG (or... BB”E”G) might have a primary aim of shifting the collective belief of his world to effectively redefine the nature of Evil, shifting the apparently “objective” functioning of alignment-sensitive magic. He might be insane; he might be too good at self-justifying rationalization; but he might, in a given campaign, even be right.

(It would explain a lot about the inconsistencies of alignment if alignment effects were actually the result of a collective subjective belief, rather than an absolute set of strictures which have a strangely large number of seeming inconsistencies.)

[ezekielraiden]

If you don't consider alternatives, you're neither Good, nor Evil, nor Chaotic, nor Lawful. You're simply stupid.

I didn't say the person never considers more than one course of action. I said that they don't consider whether their actions might have been wrong.

The former is, as you said, stupidity: failure to even think that there might be other courses of action, even if you'd never take them. The latter is a failure of self-reflection, and it is quite possible to be an extremely intelligent person and never engage in self-reflection, never look back on past actions and re-evaluate them.

Edit: Though I grant that the words I used were not particularly good. I didn't mean "it never even crosses your mind that there might be something else to do," but rather that one never considers the moral contrast between different approaches. It's "not considering" in the sense of "not comparing," as opposed to the sense of "inability to even potentially conceive them."

[Clistenes]

His motivation, though, is just to kill goblins. He doesn't car about anything else. If he sees a goblin, he kills a goblin. If he has to choose between killing goblins and literally any other task, he's killing the goblins. If bandits have kidnapped the princess and taken her west and there are two goblins smashing up a pumpkin patch to the east, he's headed east.

One of the themes in the manga, and his main motivation is that there are plenty of adventurers fighting the big evils like dragons and demons and similar stuff, but while they do that, goblins are having their way with defenseless villages because nobody in power thinks of them as dangerous enough to merit decisive action... That's the reason he focus so much on goblins; every day and every hour of the day goblins are killing or raping people, and, if he doesn't stop it, nobody else will...



Hello again!
If a tribe of goblins becomes enlightened and realizes that they will be better off as a civilized race and forswear sin and savagery and start toward a golden age of peace, he'll never know, because he killed them all while you were reading that.

I'm fairly sure that's impossible in his setting. And everybody who every gave goblins a chance to redeem themselves got betrayed and murdered by them.


Hello again!
The Goblin Slayer is driven by nothing more or less than his desire to kill members of a certain race. He thinks they are bad, of course, but it's a consuming thing that he will take any means and make any sacrifice to achieve.

Mmmmm... I'm quite sure he would put saving his friends above killing goblins.



Clearly he's Lawful, and while people do love and respect him for what he does, he's also genocidal. He certainly thinks he's Good, but he obviously is not. Is he LN, or is he full on LE for his tunnel-vision bloodlust?

I don't think he sees himself as good. As a matter of fact, he openly says that he fully intends to be as bad to goblins as they are to humans...


The Goblin Slayer doesn't quite have an actual alignment, as he's completely and utterly insane, which you would know had you read the source material. He certainly doesn't think of himself as Good, in fact he barely thinks of himself as anything.

This too...

[Particle_Man]

I am curious as to whether a paladin would detect the goblin slayer as evil and if so what the goblin slayer would say to a paladin that said “my divine powers detect you as evil!” Would the goblin slayer have an “are we the baddies?” moment?

[ezekielraiden]

I am curious as to whether a paladin would detect the goblin slayer as evil and if so what the goblin slayer would say to a paladin that said “my divine powers detect you as evil!” Would the goblin slayer have an “are we the baddies?” moment?

By RAW? I mean, if the guy's evil, he detects so.

As for his response, it'd probably be either denial or rationalization. That's generally the response to anything of this nature--even in a world where good and evil are physically discernible things.

[Zanos]

Clearly he's Lawful, and while people do love and respect him for what he does, he's also genocidal. He certainly thinks he's Good, but he obviously is not. Is he LN, or is he full on LE for his tunnel-vision bloodlust?
I am going to say LE based on his conversation with the Priestess near the beginning. He acknowledges that it's possible for a goblin to be good, but kills the children anyway because it's a slim possibility and the risk was too great. The ends justify the means, so even if he's protecting people from the real threat of goblins, he steps over the line when he kills them before they have done anything. That's an Evil solution.

But this brings up my earlier comment, is Evil necessarily wrong? In this case I'm not going to call GS a bad person for his outlook here considering how tremendously and consistently horrendous goblins are in that setting. If there's a more effective way to deal with the problem it certainly hasn't presented itself.

Not really sure that GS is insane, not that insanity gets you a pass on the alignment chart. He isn't seeing things that aren't there or reacting irrationally to the situations he's put in. Damaged, yes.


As for his response, it'd probably be either denial or rationalization. That's generally the response to anything of this nature--even in a world where good and evil are physically discernible things.
I doubt he'll care unless the Paladin is trying to prevent him from killing goblins. In which case he'll deal with them the same way GS deals with anything that stops him from killing goblins.

[noce]

The Culling of Stratholme by hand of Arthas Menethil comes to my mind.

For those who don't know, Arthas was a human prince that decided to kill personally every citizen of Stratholme, because the town was infected by an undead plague.
He thought that killing a town would have prevented the plague from spreading to more populated cities.

He kills by his own hands lots of innocent people, by he does it for a greater good.

He obviously thinks of himself as a good person, but is he?

[Florian]

I am curious as to whether a paladin would detect the goblin slayer as evil and if so what the goblin slayer would say to a paladin that said “my divine powers detect you as evil!” Would the goblin slayer have an “are we the baddies?” moment?

The answer to this is actually a bit setting dependent. In a setting that forces you to pick a patron deity and stay within a certain alignment range of your patron, the goblin slayer should not be surprised.

[ShurikVch]

Murdering orphans is hard to rationalize as a good deedIn the Mercenaries of Destiny series, from time to time mentioned the Curse of Aldric - it demands for all babies of affected people to be given into foster families, and later (upon certain age) - returned back to the parents; failing to fulfill the demands of the Curse will cause the baby to reborn into soul-eating demon.
Thus, if you're seen an orphans from the people under the Curse of Aldric, it means:
They weren't given into a foster families.
They're have no parents to return to.Thus, transformation is unavoidable.
Kill! Kill! Kill!

[5crownik007]

Here's my two copper pieces.
Alignments are confusing because of the words used to describe them, which is why debates regarding alignment will continue until the end of time.
Evil is normally associated in the minds of many people with things that are distrustful, dangerous, or even absolutely abhorrent, which can be true.

In my eyes, the term Evil in the context of alignment has to do with self-interest. Evil characters will put their goals ahead of the common goal of people. Lawful Evil characters seek to make their goal and the goal of society to be one. Dictators are Lawful Evil.

Good, in terms of alignment has to do with people who put goals of others ahead of theirs. This isn't to say that their goals don't matter to them, it's that they will align their goals in a manner that helps the most people.

With that said, can someone know if they are evil? Well, people can certainly know that they're putting their own desires ahead of other people's goals, and that means that they do know they're evil. With that also said, that doesn't mean that Evil characters won't help other people. In fact, such a thing as selfish altruism exists, the idea that by lifting other people up, they will in fact, lift everyone up with them.

Two copper pieces delivered.

[Bohandas]

The alignments being really real might actually make them easier for people to ignore or handwave. After all, who in the real world gives a thought, philosophically, to electricity, or to the strong nuclear force.

[Bohandas]

Here's my two copper pieces.
Alignments are confusing because of the words used to describe them, which is why debates regarding alignment will continue until the end of time.
Evil is normally associated in the minds of many people with things that are distrustful, dangerous, or even absolutely abhorrent, which can be true.

In my eyes, the term Evil in the context of alignment has to do with self-interest. Evil characters will put their goals ahead of the common goal of people. Lawful Evil characters seek to make their goal and the goal of society to be one. Dictators are Lawful Evil.


Major dictators are lawful evil (or occasionally neutral evil). Minor tinpot dictators are often chaotic evil and erratic.

[ezekielraiden]

The Culling of Stratholme by hand of Arthas Menethil comes to my mind.

For those who don't know, Arthas was a human prince that decided to kill personally every citizen of Stratholme, because the town was infected by an undead plague.
He thought that killing a town would have prevented the plague from spreading to more populated cities.

He kills by his own hands lots of innocent people, by he does it for a greater good.

He obviously thinks of himself as a good person, but is he?

Uh, no, he's pretty clearly not. The story makes that very obvious. Like, this is explicitly his Start of Darkness. Uther, the older and wiser Paladin, explicitly tells him what he's doing is horrifying and wrong, that he's crossed a line. Arthas has to pull royal rank in order to make Uther leave, as (properly speaking) Uther is his superior in the order. So he's both abusing authority for personal motives (not Lawful) and doing something a well-respected, senior Paladin explicitly says is unacceptable, twice (not Good):

Uther:You are not my king yet, boy! Nor would I obey that command even if you were! [llater] You've just crossed a terrible threshold, Arthas.

If Warcraft Paladins worked like 3e ones do, he'd have lost all his powers the moment he murdered that first peasant. Since their powers work as long as the user believes in the righteousness of their cause, he keeps using them. (Only very rare exceptions in-lore allow foe the undead to use Light powers, which is why only one in-game canonical undead paladin, Sir Zeliek, exists.)

Point being, Arthas has two different people (nominal love interest Jaina and mentor/superior officer Uther) tell him what he's doing is wrong. He is completely unwilling to entertain other courses of action proposed by others; his love of his people has already been twisted into "sparing" them by killing them. His belief that only swift and dramatic action will solve issues has made him believe murder is the only acceptable action. "We had to burn the village to save it" is a reviled argument for a reason. If he lived in Warhammer? He'd almost surely be right to do this. Azeroth is not that kind of universe, and scorched-earth solutions are evil.

He genuinely believes he's doing the only morally acceptable thing. He's wrong. His companions tell him so. His subsequent wicked deeds in the name of "justice" (actually vengeance) further prove it. His slow descent into madness and eventual corruption are all started with this event. It wasn't inevitable, but as Uther said, he crossed a threshold here. It's very difficult to walk back from that--indeed, impossible for most people, narratively and IRL.

[Zanos]

If he lived in Warhammer? He'd almost surely be right to do this.
Only if he blew up the whole planet and put a bullet in the head of the heretic who dared question it. The Emperor Protects.

[Gwyllgi]

In the D&D world where 'good' and 'evil' are tangible things, is it possible to not know you are evil?

Like, if you were out and about doing things for what you believed was the greater good without taking any moment to weigh your actions and never questioning cutting off that orphan's head because you needed something to throw at the necromancer, and honestly believed all your actions are warranted and righteous, could you actually be evil?

Or, does ~EVIL~ require some direct intent? Is someone killing off peasants to stop a hunger crisis evil or just Neutral Stupid?

I think it's impossible after enough deeds to realize it. In the real world the concept of good and evil is at least as old as Zoroastrianism. Take into further account that in D&D otherworldly creatures are abound and active in daily life that understand what evil is and attempt to spread its effects and look evil.

[Florian]

The alignments being really real might actually make them easier for people to ignore or handwave. After all, who in the real world gives a thought, philosophically, to electricity, or to the strong nuclear force.

I think the opposite is true. When you have 100% certified proof that an afterlife exists, is directly connected to alignments, and you will end there eventually, that should give you some pause and a strong nudge to get thinking.

[Jay R]

It's pretty close to impossible to be Evil, the official alignment, and not know it -- at least for any length of time.

As any number of internet arguments have proven, it is very easy to be Evil, the official alignment, and believe that you are not evil.

[Telonius]

I think it depends on a few things, mostly setting-related. How populous is the place you're in, how common is magic, and how likely is that a given person has ever had a Detect spell cast on them. A single casting of a Detect spell costs 10 gp. An untrained hireling makes 1 silver a day. So it's over three months' salary for your random untrained level-1 Commoner to have this spell cast on them.

Now, a more populous region (or a more active Cleric) might provide something like that for free. But if that isn't provided, then it's probably going to be pretty common for the random yokels to never find out for certain what their alignment is. The wealthier the person, the more likely it is they'd take the time and resources to figure it out.

[ezekielraiden]

It's pretty close to impossible to be Evil, the official alignment, and not know it -- at least for any length of time.

As any number of internet arguments have proven, it is very easy to be Evil, the official alignment, and believe that you are not evil.

...and what exactly is the difference between these two? How can you genuinely know you're evil, but genuinely believe you're not?

[Calthropstu]

if you're evil and you know it and you really wanna show it; if you're evil and you know it stab your friends.

[Florian]

...and what exactly is the difference between these two? How can you genuinely know you're evil, but genuinely believe you're not?

Objective Morality is fixed. Subjective Morality instead, well, it´s all in the name. Lower-caps "evil" is mostly a cultural thing, based on the norm of the society you're socialized in. I can genuinely know what Hell is all about and at the same time, I can hold the conviction that following the rules of Hell and pattern my behavior on that, will be the "right" (ex: "good") thing to do and benefit us all.

Maybe think back to the Cold War period: Both the Capitalists and the Communists saw themselves as being "right", the other side as being fundamentally "wrong" (Exchange that with "good" and "evil").

[ezekielraiden]

Objective Morality is fixed. Subjective Morality instead, well, it´s all in the name. Lower-caps "evil" is mostly a cultural thing, based on the norm of the society you're socialized in. I can genuinely know what Hell is all about and at the same time, I can hold the conviction that following the rules of Hell and pattern my behavior on that, will be the "right" (ex: "good") thing to do and benefit us all.

Maybe think back to the Cold War period: Both the Capitalists and the Communists saw themselves as being "right", the other side as being fundamentally "wrong" (Exchange that with "good" and "evil").

That's all well and good, but you referred to the same thing in both cases. Subjective morality didn't enter into it. Somehow, someone could both know they were Evil, "the official alignment," and yet also believe they were not Evil, "the official alignment"--that's what confuses me, you referred to exactly the same thing in incompatible ways. I agree that subjective vs. objective morality is A Thing, but I don't see how either saves the statement as given. Even if you accept that these things can be subjective--how can you know that you are subjectively evil, and also believe that you are not, and honestly express both things at the same time?

How can you know A, and at the same time, honestly believe not-A? Your original presentation has just the same flaw whether you substitute "subjective Evil" everywhere you wrote just "Evil." Only if you're using identical terms with different senses can you get out of this "I know A, and believe not-A" issue, 'cause surely if you genuinely actually know A, you believe A too.

[Florian]

That's all well and good, but you referred to the same thing in both cases. Subjective morality didn't enter into it. Somehow, someone could both know they were Evil, "the official alignment," and yet also believe they were not Evil, "the official alignment"--that's what confuses me, you referred to exactly the same thing in incompatible ways. I agree that subjective vs. objective morality is A Thing, but I don't see how either saves the statement as given. Even if you accept that these things can be subjective--how can you know that you are subjectively evil, and also believe that you are not, and honestly express both things at the same time?

How can you know A, and at the same time, honestly believe not-A? Your original presentation has just the same flaw whether you substitute "subjective Evil" everywhere you wrote just "Evil." Only if you're using identical terms with different senses can you get out of this "I know A, and believe not-A" issue, 'cause surely if you genuinely actually know A, you believe A too.

What you originally quoted was the statement that you can be both, "Evil", but not believe that you're "evil" at the same time.

When it comes to the cosmic alignments, each is right and fully functional in its own way. At the end of the day, both, the Abyss and Heaven, are both fully functional on their paradigm and "right" in their own way.

That is the major thing when translating objective to subjective. We have to work with the knowledge that each of the nine alignments is fully functional and "true" in its own way.
On the subjective side, or rather, the cultural side, we have to deal with the situation that things are weighted, that one thing is treated as being better or superior to the other.

Hm... I think you'll find a good example of this disconnect when taking a critical look at how most of our industries work. You have a higher order (Shareholders) and a lower order (Stakeholders) and what is considered to be "Good" and "good" varies according to the relationship.

[Darth Ultron]

...and what exactly is the difference between these two? How can you genuinely know you're evil, but genuinely believe you're not?

No. In in the D&D Universe.

The Cosmos defines the Alignments. Good, Evil, Lawful, Chaotic and Neutral are X. The Cosmos, the very Fabric of Reality says so.

A single person, somewhere in the Multiverse, can't just ''say'' what alignment they are: It does not matter what a person says or thinks. They are Alignment X, per the Cosmos, based on who they are and what they do. Sure they can lie or fool themselves, but that won't have any effect on their Alignment.

A great example is to think of each Alignment as a River. Each River leads to an Alignment Plane. A persons thoughts, actions and beliefs determine the river that ''catches" them...and moves their soul along to the afterlife.

So the person killing innocents is Chaotic Evil, as defined by the Cosmos. So the River of Chaotic Evil will push them to the Abyss. What the person says does not matter...it has no effect on the Cosmic River.

[tiercel]

What the person says does not matter...it has no effect on the Cosmic River.

Unless the River’s course is set by collective belief (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=23589676&postcount=44) in a similar fashion to how gods derive their power from, and depend for their existence upon, belief.

Even if that’s not actually true, it’s not that hard to imagine someone in-universe believing that it could be; it is a plausible alternative (and, perhaps more importantly, self-serving).

[ezekielraiden]

What you originally quoted was the statement that you can be both, "Evil", but not believe that you're "evil" at the same time.

When it comes to the cosmic alignments, each is right and fully functional in its own way. At the end of the day, both, the Abyss and Heaven, are both fully functional on their paradigm and "right" in their own way.

That is the major thing when translating objective to subjective. We have to work with the knowledge that each of the nine alignments is fully functional and "true" in its own way.
On the subjective side, or rather, the cultural side, we have to deal with the situation that things are weighted, that one thing is treated as being better or superior to the other.

Hm... I think you'll find a good example of this disconnect when taking a critical look at how most of our industries work. You have a higher order (Shareholders) and a lower order (Stakeholders) and what is considered to be "Good" and "good" varies according to the relationship.

Okay. I think I understand now. You used the lowercase e "evil" only at the very end, and I mistook it as you setting up a contrast between the first paragraph's subject and the second paragraph's subject. That was...partially my fault, but I would also argue that the post as structured made it very easy to be confused.

I had thought you were saying precisely, "You cannot be ignorant of being Evil, the official alignment, but you can believe you are not Evil, the official alignment." Which is why I was super confused, as this appears to be a contradiction. All you were saying really was "you know you're Evil By Cosmic Standards, but you approve of your own values." Which...sure? That's kind of a vacuous statement. Who the hell cares if your values are acceptable according to your value system? Grats, your values aren't inherently flawed to the point that you can trivially point out inconsistencies! That's not a selling point, that's a minimum competence.

By definition a rational agent should value the values they hold. To do anything else would be genuiney irrational. This is why the sudden development of a moral compass in a villain is often fatal: they suddenly see themselves and their actions as truly horrifying, and by their newly adopted values, the horror must be expunged or recompensed...and there is no recompense for many villainous deeds. Even if it's not suicide to avoid responsibility, it may be suicidal lack of self-preservation because a genuine belief has arisen that that self isn't worth preserving.

So...yeah. "People behave consistently with their values" is vacuous, not revelatory, and really has no bearing on "good" vs "evil."

[Jay R]

That's all well and good, but you referred to the same thing in both cases. Subjective morality didn't enter into it. Somehow, someone could both know they were Evil, "the official alignment," and yet also believe they were not Evil, "the official alignment"--that's what confuses me, you referred to exactly the same thing in incompatible ways.

No, I didn't. I differentiated "Evil, the official alignment" (with a capital letter), and "evil".

If you set off a Detect Evil spell, then you have the official alignment. Presumably, you know that Protection from Evil spells can stop you. But you can still believe that your plan to kill half the people on the continent to end the war is a good idea. It wouldn't be difficult to believe the spell is misnamed.

In Order of the Stick #760 (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0760.html), Tarquin says, "Son, words like 'good' and 'evil' are just words. Words with many possible capitalizations."

I once had a 2E Thief who, while arguing with the paladin, said, "That's because you're a paladin. You have to do what's Lawful, and what's Good. I'm just a thief, free to do what's right." [One of my role-playing goals for that game was for my thief to always act more morally than the paladin did.]

I've seen paladins do things I thought were evil. But since the DM didn't agree with me, they were not Evil, the official Alignment.

In any event, the descriptions of the alignments in D&D do not match any moral, ethical, philosophical, or religious system in history.

[hamishspence]

In any event, the descriptions of the alignments in D&D do not match any moral, ethical, philosophical, or religious system in history.

I thought one of the biggest complaints about BOED was that many of the statements did match a "real world morality" but one some readers disagreed with?

I once compiled a list of all statements in D&D splatbook sources about alignments:

http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?241789-Alignment-related-3-0-3-5-book-statements-summary

and the Evil ones at least, tended to match up loosely with what villains in modern fiction tended to be like, and the Good ones tended to match up loosely with what heroes in modern fiction tended to be like.

There will never be a perfect match - but there can be a loose one.

[Particle_Man]

At the very least, if you ping on the "Offical Evil Detector" you would have a burden of proof to show that you were not, in fact, Officially Evil, and would have a harder time proving that they are not evil (in some nonofficial sense) than someone that pinged Officially Good on the "Official Good Detector" would have proving that they are not evil (in some nonofficial sense).

And in fact, if a character (PC or NPC) disagrees with the way the universe is in average D&D land, while they are living in it and subject to its objective rules on what happens to your soul and which afterlife you go to, it would be in that character's interest to suck it up and become "Officially Good" or at least "Officially not Evil" so as to avoid being tortured for untold centuries in a horrible, horrible afterlife by beings that don't care that you have a philosophical disagreement with how the universe is set up. Heck, that might be one of the major points behind Liches. "Anything to avoid the smoke".

Given *those* stakes, it would probably make sense for most people in that universe to want, while they are alive, some confirmation that they are not, in fact, Officially Evil.

[ericgrau]

It's weird because in the real world almost no one believes themselves to be evil, right down to Hitler. There's nearly always a purpose behind their actions. Whereas in D&D you can simply cast Detect Evil and find out what you are.

I think Redcloak does a pretty good job of handling it. Like the real world he has a justification, and even points out wrongs and unfairness. So "Evil" is just a label to them. They may even consider themselves "Evil" for the greater good, even when justified violence like what PCs do regularly still counts as "Good".

So... disbelief that there's anything wrong with being "Evil" perhaps, and/or even proud to be "Evil". It could carry a different connotation to them than it does to us. They might consider themselves good and doing what's right by a different standard, and that "Evil" is in fact the right way to do that good. They might not even disagree with the "Good" alignment, except that their way is more effective. Etc. Thy may even see another person of either D&D alignment and say he is a terrible person.

[Particle_Man]

The web comic adds another level because the characters are self-aware parodies. Redcloak might see service to his god as most important especially since in this world goblins were created as cannon fodder for others to level up on and he knows it. This would not give him much patience with the Good Guys.

But for a regular D&D world, I am not sure how much that would apply.

[Florian]

@hamishspence:

Both books have been written with a certain RL religious view in mind, one that is not even commonly shared as cannon for that religion.
That more or less leads to all of the follow-up errors. D&D has two "major conflict lines", with the L/C axis being equal to the G/E axis, with the same holding true for the "minor conflict lines" of the N-cross.
The inability to actually address the alignment system in total by using them stems from this combination. If you can´t accept that there's more than "good" and "evil" as based on your religious training and upbringing, you shouldn't write a book about that.

[ezekielraiden]

No, I didn't. I differentiated "Evil, the official alignment" (with a capital letter), and "evil".

If you set off a Detect Evil spell, then you have the official alignment. Presumably, you know that Protection from Evil spells can stop you. But you can still believe that your plan to kill half the people on the continent to end the war is a good idea. It wouldn't be difficult to believe the spell is misnamed.

If Good and Evil objectively exist and mean what their names say, I don't see how this is possible. If they don't mean what their names say, why do even omniscient beings refer to them as such? This is part of my problem. You're basically asserting that objective good and evil still don't exist in a world with real objective alignment: you just have teams with labels.


In Order of the Stick #760 (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0760.html), Tarquin says, "Son, words like 'good' and 'evil' are just words. Words with many possible capitalizations."

Yes. And Tarquin is explicitly evil--lower AND uppercase--a genuinely terrible person who thinks nothing of killing lots of people for personal gain. Oh, sure, it's got the gauze of "making a stable world where no one ever needs to fight again." It's still unforgivably evil. These words? These are words real people use to hurt real people. They are never okay to actually believe. He's not some irrational crazy person. He's not a mustache-twirling idiot. He's smart, self-consistent, and wicked to the core. That makes him realistic and extremely, extremely dangerous...and not the least bit less evil OR Evil.


I once had a 2E Thief who, while arguing with the paladin, said, "That's because you're a paladin. You have to do what's Lawful, and what's Good. I'm just a thief, free to do what's right." [One of my role-playing goals for that game was for my thief to always act more morally than the paladin did.]

If what is Good is not what is right, then it's not Good. By definition, in fact. And your paladin friend sounds like a rather badly-played paladin.


I've seen paladins do things I thought were evil. But since the DM didn't agree with me, they were not Evil, the official Alignment.

Many paladins are played extremely poorly. That doesn't say very much, I'm afraid. Actually being a Good person is hard, and requires rather a lot of things most people don't find fun to roleplay: humility, forthrightness, self-effacement.


In any event, the descriptions of the alignments in D&D do not match any moral, ethical, philosophical, or religious system in history.

Of course not--not perfectly, anyway. But they're close enough. Just as all real-world moral, ethical, and philosophical values systems (no need to carve a special group for religion, it's expressed in all three of those already) tend to be pretty different in details, but capturing the same Tao, as C.S. Lewis would put it.

Again: merely having logical consistency is not special. It's a requirement to be a (meaningful) values-system in the first place. It says nothing whatsoever about the people that hold it, except that they aren't hypocrites or in constant denial.

[Florian]

@ezekielraiden:

You're going at this with the wrong perspective in mind.

[Darth Ultron]

It's weird because in the real world almost no one believes themselves to be evil, right down to Hitler. There's nearly always a purpose behind their actions. .

I think plenty of evil people would say they are Evil. Unless they were trying to trick or fool someone.

[ezekielraiden]

@ezekielraiden:

You're going at this with the wrong perspective in mind.

Then I welcome being edified. Perspective of all kinds is healthy. What do I need here?

[ericgrau]

I think plenty of evil people would say they are Evil. Unless they were trying to trick or fool someone.
Quote 3.

Unless you mean in D&D where self-denial is a lot harder, then yeah totally.

[Zanos]

If what is Good is not what is right, then it's not Good. By definition, in fact. And your paladin friend sounds like a rather badly-played paladin.
I have some bad news for you if you think Good and Evil in D&D is 1:1 with real world morality.

[Florian]

Then I welcome being edified. Perspective of all kinds is healthy. What do I need here?

Alignment is not a morality system and as such can be a bit at odds with our sensibilities when it comes to judging actions and intentions.
The nine alignments rather present an outlook at nine different versions of how the universe could function if one of the sides would ever become dominant in the conflict - as above, so below.

As such, LG Heaven, LN Axis and LE Hell serve as paragons of how it could be when either the entire L-axis becomes dominant, or in detail how variations of the L-aligned spectrum could look like.

That said, alignment is descriptive, not prescriptive. You get aligned when your intentions and deeds start to mesh. When you start to think and act in terms of "Order, tempered by mercy", you will drift into Paladin/LG/Heaven territory sooner or later. But that is an overall stance, independent on how you understand "right" and "wrong" on the individual action.

As a stupid example, you can have a Paladin (LG), Samurai (LN) and Hellknight (LE) walk into a pub, accept a quest, together do the "right" things in whatever morality system to use to judge that and still stick to their alignments because that is shaped by their individual outlook.

[noce]

Arthas genuinely believes he's doing the only morally acceptable thing. He's wrong.

So, as I suspected, he is an example of an evil person not knowing to be evil.
It's not D&D universe, but it's similar enough.

[Pippin]

So, as I suspected, he is an example of an evil person not knowing to be evil.
It's not D&D universe, but it's similar enough.
I think in all religions, if you do something wrong but somehow you don't know that it's wrong, then you don't sin. Sin/evil must imply awareness, otherwise it doesn't make sense. Any action can be good, any action can be evil, it all depends on the intent. Is the act of killing a child necessarily evil, if you know his future life will be horrible and you want to spare him that?

[ezekielraiden]

So, as I suspected, he is an example of an evil person not knowing to be evil.
It's not D&D universe, but it's similar enough.

Though, to be fair? He doesn't stay in that state very long, either, narratively speaking. He very clearly stops caring about what the "right" thing to do is not long after arriving in Northrend--way before he encounters Frostmourne. Uther convinces Arthas' father to recall the ships and their crew, so Arthas hires mercenaries to burn the ships, and then attacks the mercenaries when he arrives. He intentionally double-crosses allies (paid ones, but still), in the name of revenge. Shortly thereafter, he outright ignores the (apparent) death of someone who was once a close friend and mentor (Muradin), explicitly saying that revenge is all that matters at that point. "Arthas: Damn the men! Nothing shall prevent me from having my revenge, old friend. Not even you."

A lot of people don't initially discard the belief that they are legitimately good when they take the first few (big) steps down the road to wickedness. It takes time for apathy or sardonic condescension to crust over the old values.


Alignment is not a morality system and as such can be a bit at odds with our sensibilities when it comes to judging actions and intentions.
The nine alignments rather present an outlook at nine different versions of how the universe could function if one of the sides would ever become dominant in the conflict - as above, so below.

As such, LG Heaven, LN Axis and LE Hell serve as paragons of how it could be when either the entire L-axis becomes dominant, or in detail how variations of the L-aligned spectrum could look like.

That said, alignment is descriptive, not prescriptive. You get aligned when your intentions and deeds start to mesh. When you start to think and act in terms of "Order, tempered by mercy", you will drift into Paladin/LG/Heaven territory sooner or later. But that is an overall stance, independent on how you understand "right" and "wrong" on the individual action.

As a stupid example, you can have a Paladin (LG), Samurai (LN) and Hellknight (LE) walk into a pub, accept a quest, together do the "right" things in whatever morality system to use to judge that and still stick to their alignments because that is shaped by their individual outlook.
But this assumes that whether they uphold their alignment actually does depend on whether they believe they do, and that's literally denied by the existence of objective, measurable moral properties. In a universe where Good and Evil not only exist, but are physically real forces and beings? Alignment doesn't care if your individual outlook says your moral choices were correct or that your values were self-consistent: it cares whether you actually lived up to the real standard. (Of course, "alignment" isn't sentient so it doesn't really "care" about anything, but I hope my metaphorical ascription of will and intent sensibly communicates what I mean.)

It would be like saying that a person can consider herself positively charged, based on where she arbitrarily set the zero point for her electrical charge units. But electrical charge has a single correct zero point: the state of carrying exactly as many positive charge carriers as negative charge carriers (including "zero of each"). Any other definition of "amount of electrical charge" is simply, physically, wrong. If she tries to evaluate any charge-related interactions, using her arbitrary zero point, those evaluations will always be wrong except by happenstance (e.g. when only the charge difference matters). Likewise, in D&D, good and evil are Good and Evil. In-universe, anyone who denies this is either mistaken (ignorant/misinformed/not thinking clearly or fully/etc.), irrational (asserting that X is not-X and Y is not-Y, practicing doublethink), or in denial (not actually holding contradictory positions, but suppressing the evidence that would reveal the issue).

The only way for there to be a logically-consistent divide between "Good/Evil" and "good/evil" is if you are in fact denying that alignment is moral at all. You have to assert that they're really, in truth, just teams. No different from Red vs. Blue, Shirts vs. Skins, Ducks vs. Beavers. That "Good" is literally only a label, and in fact a very very poor label, because it implies that the labelled thing has any relation at all to good when you're asserting it emphatically does not. At which point, good and evil no longer objectively exist. There are simply forces. Not to belabor my electrical analogy too much, but it simply reduces "Good" to "the aetheric force we happen to call positive" and "Evil" to "the aetheric force we happen to call negative," and suddenly it's not only possible but a perfectly acceptable thing to have a Paladin who is actually a raving sociopathic murderer, because being Lawful Good is exactly equivalent to wearing the colors blue and white and has nothing to do with whether you actually treat people by particular moral standards.

So: I'm asserting that you can't just say, "Well morality IRL might be subjective, so we have to have subjective morality in-game, so 'alignment' really is not at all morality but some weird and scary team-murder thing." Because I take it actually seriously that "Good" means good. It's nowhere near perfect--it was made by humans, after all--but it approximates the right ideas and can be refined as we, the players, get a better notion of what it actually should be (as Aristotle would likely phrase it, as we develop the wisdom to apply the virtues correctly).

D&D Good includes stuff like the ethic of reciprocity ("golden rule"), and explicitly calls out compassion, altruism, generosity, and humility as laudable and desirable traits. That's...a moral values system, if a relatively primitive one that runs into problems if you squeeze it too hard (as literally every values system does, eventually!) Similarly, D&D Evil values self-sufficiency, ruthlessness, cunning, efficiency, ambition, initiative, and the hard rejection of the ethic of reciprocity (people should do to others whatever they can get away with; or whoever is strongest can do whatever they like; etc.) Again, a values-system, because it has values and evaluates choices to determine their merit.

TL;DR: Unless you actually show that alignment definitely is not a moral values system--which is gonna be pretty hard, because it includes value judgments and is (by any definition I know) a values system and thus a moral framework of some kind--I don't buy any of this. We have to deny the fundamental premise-good exists, and you can speak to it if you like--in order to get to this point. You're going to have to do more than just bald assertions that that premise is false.


I have some bad news for you if you think Good and Evil in D&D is 1:1 with real world morality.

I didn't expect them to be. I do, however, expect that they shouldn't be so far at odds that the explicitly non-Good character is always and in all things more good than the explicitly Good character. That either means "Good" has such a broken definition that it no longer merits the name, or the person enacting it has (knowingly or unknowingly) so thoroughly failed to live up to its standards that they cannot accurately be called either one. Perfect correspondence isn't necessary; simply enough similarity. And, sure, that's a loose guideline, but again, the poster in question explicitly called out the notion that this Good character was in every way a more wicked, less "good" character.

~~~~~~~
Edit:

I think in all religions, if you do something wrong but somehow you don't know that it's wrong, then you don't sin. Sin/evil must imply awareness, otherwise it doesn't make sense. Any action can be good, any action can be evil, it all depends on the intent. Is the act of killing a child necessarily evil, if you know his future life will be horrible and you want to spare him that?

I think this is just a matter of poor phrasing on the poster's part. Arthas goes into it knowing what he's doing. He just doesn't think that doing this, in this situation, actually is Evil proper. It's bad--but so is killing any other human being ever. Sometimes, killing another to defend your own life or the life of someone else may be necessary, and we don't consider that evil or even illegal; we may even consider it noble and honorable. So clearly there is some situational leeway. Arthas' belief is that this situation is SO horrible, SO egregious, it justifies similarly egregious acts taken against it. But, as noted above, this motive gets stripped away almost immediately after he arrives in Northrend: his goal becomes pure revenge, without any actual "I must protect my people" in there at all. (After all, if he wanted to protect his people, wouldn't he want to take the soldiers back? They're Lordaeron people too!)

Also, while some allowance is usually made for ignorance...that allowance is also tempered by attempts to determine what someone would reasonably know/understand. A five-year-old child does not understand life and death yet, and cannot be meaningfully responsible for another's death. A twenty-five-year-old, on the other hand, can be reasonably expected to know what murder is and that it is wrong; it takes an active demonstration of mental disability or the like for us to conclude otherwise. We can reasonably expect certain actors to know that something is a bad course of action, and Arthas definitely knows people disapprove of what he's doing (Uther, Jaina, and Muradin all tell him so.)

[ATHATH]

In my headcanon, alignment detection magic calls data from a system set up by the gods to judge the morality/alignment of people based on an automated system set up by said gods. Said system also determines what plane you go to when you die (if you don't have a deity).

Naturally, this system has some bias- most notably, Ur-Priests are all branded as Evil by it, hence why that prestige class has an alignment prerequisite of being Evil. The system also doesn't factor in actions performed while shielded from divination magic (it doesn't try to catch up on what it missed by scanning the memories of people whose anti-divination wards have dropped because memories tend to portray things quite inaccurately/with quite a bit of bias) and is occasionally tampered with by legendary thieves and such. Some people might reject the system of morality that the gods based the system off of, some people might suspect that their records in the system has been tampered with (for whatever reason), and some people might just have a tendency to be under anti-divination wards while committing their evil deeds (or believe that the system didn't count all of those totally good (in their eyes) deeds that they did while under anti-divination wards). All of these are reasons that people might reject a reading of Evil from a Detect Evil spell as being "valid" or have a misleading alignment (which means that they might even show up as Evil in the first place, even though they probably should).

Note that I'm using "Evil" here to mean "aligned with the Evil alignment" and "evil" here to mean "morally wrong/bad".

[tiercel]

That "Good" is literally only a label, and in fact a very very poor label

Well, you mean the way that deathwatch has the [Evil] tag and so casting it is an Evil act regardless of who’s casting it or to what end? Or the way that a Lawful Neutral cleric of Lawful Neutral goddess Wee Jas who, for Lawful Neutral ends, rebukes/commands undead is committing an Evil act?

Or, if you believe Fiendish Codex II, that if you are Lawful and humiliate an underling nine times in your life, your soul is bound for the Hells no matter how much good you do (if you don’t formally atone), but committing murder for pleasure “just” once won’t send you to the Hells...

There’s a lot about D&D alignment that is, in fact, arbitrary. Anyone within a D&D world who understands the actual alignment rules in-world might not have a hard time making the argument “this is so arbitrary that it only makes sense as some kind of messed-up collective subjective belief, not any kind of self-consistent objective system of actual good and evil, much less Good and Evil.”

[hamishspence]

Given that Deathwatch is on the spell list of a "must be good aligned" class (the healer), did not have the [Evil] tag in 3.0 (Healer was one of the first 3.5 classes) and is on the spell list of a "Falls if they ever commit an Evil act PRC" (the Slayer of Domiel PRC) I'm inclined to think it having the [Evil] tag was a mistake made in the crossover from 3.0 to 3.5, that nobody managed to catch.

I blame Monte Cook. He recommended that the Deathwatch spell be given the [Evil] tag in the Magic section of BoVD (along with a few other spells).


I would guess he changed it during the process of writing the 3.5 PHB and nobody else on the WOTC writing staff was told - hence other 3.5 books written that same year not taking the change into account.

[Florian]

IIRC, the 3.0E version of the spell didn't carry that tag. The PF version definitely doesn't.

[hamishspence]

IIRC, the 3.0E version of the spell didn't carry that tag.

Yup. Hence my theory that the change to it in 3.5 was not well known, so the writers of two of the first 3.5 books (BoED and Miniatures Handbook) were not aware of it.

[Particle_Man]

So there might be some wiggle room at the edges, perhaps enough for someone that pings as Officially Evil to wonder if that means that they are in fact morally evil.

For the most part though, there is a lot of overlap in that Venn diagram.

Also, I would take it as small comfort if I believed that I was morally good but also knew that I was destined, when I died, to be tortured for untold centuries by Fiends because I was Officially Evil and that in the universe I lived in the Official measurements were the only game in town.

The safest course of action would be to be Officially Good first, morally good second. The more proactive course of action would be to be morally good and completely aware of all loopholes that let me escape being Officially Evil (for example, if I thought it a moral imperative to summon fiends (or cast other Officially Evil spells) to save a village of innocents I would first get training as a Malconvoker so that this didn’t count as Officially Evil).

The other option would be to make sure my soul avoided being tortured for centuries by Fiends even if I was Officially Evil. Perhaps (depending on the setting) by very faithful worship of a God (again, whether I considered that God’s rules morally good or not) that would accept me so I go to that God’s plane instead, or perhaps by going the lich route and staying out of trouble. These strategies would apply whether I considered myself morally good or morally evil.

Or one could make it an epic quest to change the metaphysical structure of the Universe itself, if that is the story the DM thinks would be fun for players.

[ezekielraiden]

Well, you mean the way that deathwatch has the [Evil] tag and so casting it is an Evil act regardless of who’s casting it or to what end?

See above on that--sounds a lot more like Monte Cook having an undue (and, as noted, not generally agreed with) influence. More fully, though, I see this as simply being (as noted) an example of how the human authors of this screwed up badly on a couple things. That they did so on the part of a moral values system that is easiest to do (whether or not certain actions are acceptable or unacceptable) is ironic, of course, but not terribly surprising.


Or the way that a Lawful Neutral cleric of Lawful Neutral goddess Wee Jas who, for Lawful Neutral ends, rebukes/commands undead is committing an Evil act?

Ah, yes, because Wee Jas isn't, y'know, the favorite of munchkins everywhere (RKV) and a blatant exception to a whole bunch of things. And she's certainly never been described as having "evil tendencies" (Dragon #88), no, that would be ridiculous. And any assertion that she has evil--horned devil, specifically--allies would be ludicrous! Even beyond that, though? A priest willingly choosing to mind control those who have been ripped from death and made into slaves? Yeah that's definitely not evil at ALL. :smallconfused: (Further, they could've chosen to turn instead, being the follower of an LN/TN/CN deity--willingly engaging in stuff that very likely involves evil is reasonably understood as an evil act, too. The whole "a thimble of sewage in a barrel of water is still sewage" argument.)


Or, if you believe Fiendish Codex II, that if you are Lawful and humiliate an underling nine times in your life, your soul is bound for the Hells no matter how much good you do (if you don’t formally atone), but committing murder for pleasure “just” once won’t send you to the Hells...

Fair. That whole mechanic is bull****. I'd literally never read this book until today. So...I don't really feel all that inconsistent by saying that this optional extension is not at all what I referred to, and is pretty antithetical to "good means good, however it's capitalized." No number of simple humiliations should ever be congruent to a murder purely for the pleasure of it--and, frankly, I have no idea why the authors thought that a murder for pleasure shouldn't send someone to one of the evil planes when they die unless they atone!


There’s a lot about D&D alignment that is, in fact, arbitrary. Anyone within a D&D world who understands the actual alignment rules in-world might not have a hard time making the argument “this is so arbitrary that it only makes sense as some kind of messed-up collective subjective belief, not any kind of self-consistent objective system of actual good and evil, much less Good and Evil.”

Would it help to restrict things to the PHBs and DMGs? I find the BoVD and BoED both incredibly ridiculous (as do most people--it's the second reason why they're banned, after the options being typically stupid broken, whether strong or weak).

Now, if it makes you feel better, I absolutely do agree that the Wall of the Faithless is explicitly evil, yet not Evil, and the designers were super dumb for even trying to include it. And opposing the wall is apparently Evil. That's super f**ked up, and if I had any character playing in an FR game where the Wall existed, I'd make destroying it a long-term priority. There has to be a better way to encourage divine faith than holding mortals for ransom unless they kowtow. It's both evil--unconscionably so, particularly for the so-called Good deities--and disrespectful. Holding people at gunpoint unless they do what you want.

But, as stated, I prefer to deal with these by the rather more simple approach of excising the stupidities, because it's interesting to see a world where Good objectively exists and actually is what it claims to be--and so does Evil--yet people still choose one or the other, often with full knowledge and intent. The Wall of the Faithless would never exist in any game I willingly ran or played in, or if it did, I'd fight against it (or make fighting against it a priority). Stupid rules for "a murder for pleasure is not damning by itself, but nine humiliations of a servant are," out the window. Because that's really not that hard--and the core rules meaning of "Good" and "Evil" without those self-inflicted, unnecessary stupidities are...not horrible. They aren't perfect either, but you work on them. And if something genuinely inconsistent comes out, you either make it a plot point in your game to deal with it, or you come to a table agreement that changes ("retcons" if you prefer) things to be what the table agrees makes sense.

[tiercel]

See above on that--sounds a lot more like Monte Cook having an undue (and, as noted, not generally agreed with) influence. More fully, though, I see this as simply being (as noted) an example of how the human authors of this screwed up badly on a couple things. That they did so on the part of a moral values system that is easiest to do (whether or not certain actions are acceptable or unacceptable) is ironic, of course, but not terribly surprising.

Deathwatch is a minor but glaring example, given how low level and (otherwise) available it would be, if it were not for its silly alignment tag. If it were a mere “mistake,” there would have been plenty of time for it to have errata; maybe Cook had too much influence, but it would have been very easy at any time during 3.5’s run to simply “Remove [Evil] descriptor from spell” (and possibly “foul unlife” fluff text) — but it didn’t happen.


Ah, yes, because Wee Jas isn't, y'know, the favorite of munchkins everywhere (RKV) and a blatant exception to a whole bunch of things. And she's certainly never been described as having "evil tendencies" (Dragon #88), no, that would be ridiculous. And any assertion that she has evil--horned devil, specifically--allies would be ludicrous! Even beyond that, though? A priest willingly choosing to mind control those who have been ripped from death and made into slaves? Yeah that's definitely not evil at ALL. :smallconfused: (Further, they could've chosen to turn instead, being the follower of an LN/TN/CN deity--willingly engaging in stuff that very likely involves evil is reasonably understood as an evil act, too. The whole "a thimble of sewage in a barrel of water is still sewage" argument.)

In point of fact, LN Clerics of Wee Jas must rebuke/command undead, unlike other morally-neutral clerics, who get to choose. (It’s in the PHB’s Cleric class description.)

Yes, that makes Wee Jas that much more of a “special snowflake,” but saying that she “has evil tendencies” flies in the face of the alignment system, does it not, if alignment is Absolute and Exactly Nine in Kind — unless we are going to tweak magical effects to react to LN(E) and LE(N) as well as outright LE and LN, you’re either Lawful Neutral or you’re Lawful Evil. (Admittedly, possibly the one canonical exception to this is the Great Wheel Cosmology, particularly since Acheron, Wee Jas’ home plane, sits at the LN-by-LE juncture.)

I’m perfectly happy to allow for descriptive modifiers to attempt to say where someone falls “within an alignment,” but the problem with allowing that is that it gets subjectivity into a putatively objective system — one more argument that maybe the “objective” system could just as well be a collectively subjective one.




Would it help to restrict things to the PHBs and DMGs? I find the BoVD and BoED both incredibly ridiculous (as do most people--it's the second reason why they're banned, after the options being typically stupid broken, whether strong or weak).

It would simplify things, certainly, given the problematic nature of BoVD/BoED/FC I/FC II. I should note, though, that even the PHB leaves room for the Pelor, the Burning Hate (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?443306-Pelor-the-Burning-Hate-quot-(from-Wizards-forum)) interpretation (though that theory really takes off with more supplements).


Now, if it makes you feel better, I absolutely do agree that the Wall of the Faithless is explicitly evil, yet not Evil, and the designers were super dumb for even trying to include it.

Don’t get me started on That Damn Wall. (I’m pretty much at the point as well that, yeah, if I’m going to play in a FR campaign, I pretty much have to sit down with the DM at some point before and ask, is there That Wall in this campaign, because if there is, whatever else the campaign is about, the campaign is going to be about tearing down That Wall if the PC party is going to be anything like good/Good.)



But, as stated, I prefer to deal with these by the rather more simple approach of excising the stupidities, because it's interesting to see a world where Good objectively exists and actually is what it claims to be--and so does Evil--yet people still choose one or the other, often with full knowledge and intent.

That’s fair; I would merely reply that I find it equally interesting to allow for the possibility that the “objective” morality of the campaign can be changed by changing the collective belief of beings in that world. In that sense, a “BBEG” (Evil but possibly/arguably not evil) on a metaphysical quest to redefine the very nature of Good and Evil is... interesting, and philosophically not so different from the quest of a canonically good-but-not-Good “hero” to tear down the Wall of the Faithless.

[ezekielraiden]

That’s fair; I would merely reply that I find it equally interesting to allow for the possibility that the “objective” morality of the campaign can be changed by changing the collective belief of beings in that world. In that sense, a “BBEG” (Evil but possibly/arguably not evil) on a metaphysical quest to redefine the very nature of Good and Evil is... interesting, and philosophically not so different from the quest of a canonically good-but-not-Good “hero” to tear down the Wall of the Faithless.

I'd have no problem with that. The only way a "change what morality is" plot has meaning is if Good already is (more or less) objective good and people follow it; break that link and suddenly the universe could go pear-shaped very, very fast. So it seems to me that either the status quo is basically what I'm looking for but it might be under threat, or in the "moral system broken, need heroes to fix, apply within" version the status quo is broken but there's hope that it can be made right. Both of those are okay by me.

(Reasonable agreement in an alignment thread?! What beautiful blasphemy is this?!)

[tiercel]

I'd have no problem with that. The only way a "change what morality is" plot has meaning is if Good already is (more or less) objective good and people follow it; break that link and suddenly the universe could go pear-shaped very, very fast. So it seems to me that either the status quo is basically what I'm looking for but it might be under threat, or in the "moral system broken, need heroes to fix, apply within" version the status quo is broken but there's hope that it can be made right. Both of those are okay by me.

(Reasonable agreement in an alignment thread?! What beautiful blasphemy is this?!)

This was indeed my earlier point about "how might Evil might not think it is -- or even, really, be -- evil" - especially if there's a plot to redefine Good and Evil :)

And reasonable agreement? Well, I'll just defer to They Might Be Giants:

Evil, evil is his one and only name
Evil, in his mind there is no other game!
When your name is Evil, that is good or so you think,
but you're so very wrong.
It's evil!
But being wrong is right, so then you're good again,
which is the evilest thing of all...

[Particle_Man]

While the quest to redefine the metaphysics of the universe could be interesting, it does sound like a high level play thing.

So what happens if it is a lower level campaign (say it will go from 1 to 8)? Does one simply shake one's fist at the unfairness of the universe?

[Calthropstu]

While the quest to redefine the metaphysics of the universe could be interesting, it does sound like a high level play thing.

So what happens if it is a lower level campaign (say it will go from 1 to 8)? Does one simply shake one's fist at the unfairness of the universe?

Pretty much.

[tiercel]

While the quest to redefine the metaphysics of the universe could be interesting, it does sound like a high level play thing.

So what happens if it is a lower level campaign (say it will go from 1 to 8)? Does one simply shake one's fist at the unfairness of the universe?

Not necessarily, not if the mechanism involved is changing/reinforcing the collective belief of what Good/Evil/etc. means. One might have to focus a little more than usual on publicizing deeds and their impact, and certainly higher-level characters can more easily/quickly impact more of the world with their deeds, but there’s no reason that the heroics and/or villainy, the appeals and/or propaganda of (say) 6th level characters couldn’t send ripples through society, since it’s all about word spreading and belief being influenced, not necessarily using high-level magic to directly impose one’s will.

Heck, just sufficient application of enthrall and Diplomancy, together with deeds and/or “election campaign promises” could go a long, long way....

The point here is that we are talking more “popular uprising” of opinion and not necessarily so much “PCs/BBEG storm the Gates of Heaven”; the former doesn’t have to require high levels, just cleverness, charisma, and patient work.