No more Detect Good. Detect Holy instead.

[NigelWalmsley]

Establishing a definition doesn't make communication difficult. On the contrary, it's what makes communication possible at all.

Establishing a definition that contradicts established use makes communication difficult. If I want to talk about the number between 2 and 4, calling it 3 is useful. Calling it 2 is not.

Whether or not people change their mind about some silly trolley problem is absolutely irrelevant to any of this.

How people feel about ethical problems is at the core of your ethical system. If your "objective Good" doesn't change people's minds about questions of morality, then it isn't a moral property. It becomes exactly the same as "Cold" or "Fire" -- an arbitrary property with mechanical effects, but no relevance to ethical decisions. By insisting we use ethical terms for it, all you are doing is increasing confusion.

Firstly and most obviously because White/Black/Blue/Red/Green don't directly map to Good/Evil/Law/Chaos/Neutrality, either in terms of their relationship to each other or in terms of definitions, so the idea that the swap is just replacing moral terms with team labels is incorrect; and secondly because the colors also include things like personality, technology levels, and such that alignment explicitly doesn't.

This seems like a weak argument. Obviously the thing we want to replace alignment with won't be the same as alignment. Otherwise why replace alignment? The color wheel is generally superior, because it's a set of terms with definitions that are easily agreed upon. If you really need the properties of e.g. the Great Wheel, you should use Planar Alignment as your replacement (in no small part because that is what the Great Wheel actually is already).

but go back to the earlier periods when the Republic is led by Jedi, they're opposed by the Sith Empire, Force-users are a credit a dozen, and the Force is almost visibly shaping events on a grand scale, and it's very much the case that the two are closely intertwined.

If you're going to bring the EU into things, it needs to be the whole EU, and when you do that the notion of the Force as binary really falls aparnt.

This is a double standard. Claiming that you know how "Motive Utilitarians" act just from the name but have no idea how "Acheronians" act just from the name just means that you think you have a handle on the former but not on the latter

I have no problem with "Archeronian" as an alignment. By problem is specifically with the Good/Evil and Law/Chaos axes D&D uses, because I don't think they're useful or meaningful.

If they're a bunch of punch-clock villains just wearing skulls on the armor and committing garden-variety crimes, sure, there's no need for any kind of alignment system. But as soon as you stick Sir Kills-a-lot the Death Knight at the head of your Legions of Doom and make the plot about the clash between him and his gods vs. Lady Saves-a-lot the Paladin and her gods, you need an alignment system of some kind, just like how as soon as you make a game involving combat you need a combat system of some sort.

Why? That's the plot of The Stormlight Archive, which doesn't have an alignment system, at least not in the way D&D does.

The alignment system has demonstrated more than enough that it doesn't promote collaboration at all. It promotes divisiveness if anything.

Exactly. I don't understand how you can think "these behaviors are Objectively Good" is a stance that promotes collaboration.