Quote Originally Posted by Mechalich View Post
Generally I would say that fantasy comes at this from a religious, rather than philosophical question. Specifically most fantasy settings aren't 'all myths are true' they're 'this specific myth is true' and that specific myth usually includes a deity/deities who determine the moral system that governs the setting.

As a result, the question of what alignments represent, in a particular universe, is what the gods say they represent, and questioning the gods is pointless because the gods make the decisions and there's nothing a mortal living in such a setting can do about it.

I think a lot of players find this weird, in part because the kind of deity-derived moral certainty implied works better for a monotheistic system with a distant and presumably all-powerful creator entity rather than a polytheistic system where a bunch of gods squabble amongst themselves. This is why various writers working in FR felt obligated to create a level above the gods in the form of Lord Ao because the idea of FR deities, as presented, mediating an moral system at all was laughable. This is also probably why a huge amount of modern fantasy has retreated from polytheistic systems and back toward distant monotheistic non-interventionist creator deities. One god = one truth is simply a much simpler equation for addressing ethical questions when worldbuilding.
In most published D&D settings it is clearly not the case that the gods determine what is good and what is evil.

In the Forgotten Realms it's implied that Ao is the "over god" who actually gets to determine morality, but it's also implied in some places that Ao himself is subject to some other higher power.

In settings like Dragonlance good and evil are basically built into the universe and unchangeable by the gods, with no higher power visibly enforcing them. It's just the way the universe works. The BECMI immortals set worked like this too - the immortals there didn't create the basic laws of the universe, they are just very powerful beings who still have to work within them.

Eberron has objective morality but the gods may or may not actually exist, so nobody really knows why good and evil work they way they do - people just know that it's a law of the universe that magic can detect and interact with alignment. Eberron also made a point of removing most of the "always evil" or "always good" alignment restrictions for creatures.