Vigilantism and the Lawful Alignment in OotS

[Carry2]

He misleads people; he doesn't lie to them. It's Lawful deception, just like how a Good adventurer stabbing an Evil villain who was trying to murder orphans is Good violence...

It can be good based on indirect consequences, not based on the nature of the act itself. If violence was morally neutral, murdering orphans wouldn't be evil to begin with. Likewise, while deceit may have the indirect effect of increasing order in the world, deceit, in itself, is essentially a force for discord. In addition, it is not clear that all of Tarquin's lies (and yes, they are lies) have well-defined lawful side-effects.

Subversion of the legal system (perhaps I shouldn't say 'justice') might or might not be an evil thing, but it is definitely a chaotic thing to do, even when it's your own system.

Except that's not even a real rebellion; it's a staged one that he does to (once again) prevent rebellion...

Regardless of whether it's staged or not, he's still throwing out one government and installing a different set of folks to run the place. While the indirect effect is greater organisation, the act itself is chaos-aligned.

Also, you're taking the Giant's comments out of context. If committing Evil for some vaguely Good ideology could balance each other out, RC would be Good....

That is precisely my point. By the same logic that Tarquin is Lawful, you're basically a hair's breadth away from declaring Redcloak Good-to-Neutral. Since this rather contradicts my intuition on the matter (and, as it happens, the author's own position,) I can only conclude that there is something wrong with the logic.

Chaotic methods for a Lawful cause would be ignoring one major law to enforce another major law (see: Batman).

Ultimately, your primary issue seems to be an inability to differentiate between Chaos and Evil.

I believe I am capable of distinguishing the two. But we don't see Tarquin actually sitting down and paying particlar attention to drawing up something like the Code of Hammurabi. We don't see him going all Javert-on-steroids in the scrupulous enforcement of a bad system. (He does delegate that sort of thing to others, but ignores or undoes their efforts when it suits him.) We certainly don't see him pledging unwavering loyalty to a nefarious higher power, yet alone seeking to fill the universe with emotionless constructs.

As for the yet-another-Batman-example: I think the problem here is a tendency to (A) lump the various qualities of an example under one alignment heading and/or (B) cherry-pick the qualities a given person wants to dissociate. For example, "The Joker makes elaborate plans, the Joker is CE, therefore planning is not Lawful." No, it just means the Joker is, in fact, less-than-perfectly Chaotic, just as Batman is, in fact, less-than-perfectly Lawful thanks to technical violations of the legal system, despite having a strong LG batting average (no pun intended,) based on other stuff he does. This doesn't make planning any less Lawful or criminality non-Chaotic.

Likewise, to refer to a later post, it is conceivable that the Lords of Hell can be Lawful Evil despite underhanded dealings, but this does not make manipulation and deceit non-Chaotic, any more than the rudimentary pecking order among the denizens of the Abyss means that hierarchies are somehow non-Lawful. (Or maybe the source material is just confused or contradictory on this point: It wouldn't be the first time.)

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