[Thought experiment] If alignments are objective how do we know what they represent?

[Chauncymancer]

Asked in a vacuum, with no goal stated, there is no answer to "what ought one to do?"

This is true regardless of moral systems, subjective or objective. "What ought I to do?" cannot be answered if you do not already know the answer to the follow up question, "In order to...?"

The lack of a qualifier is the "hidden component". Morality is the end onto itself in contrast to instrumental ends (maintain your car so that it doesn't break down). It is not "What ought one do in order to X?", rather it is just "What ought one do?".

When you turn around and ask, "What ought you to do?" you're asking for a judgment of which of those alignments you ought to be pursuing. It is possible for an objective moral system to have a definitive answer to this...assuming you have something you can settle on as a goal.

There is never an answer as to which alignment you ought to pursue. They are not their own end. Even if "I will be GOOD!" is your declared goal, you're pursuing it because you believe it will make you happy. It pleases you, and there's a reason why it pleases you. But if your goal is, "I WILL BE GOOD," then you ought to do what the Good alignment calls for.

I think a more correct way of phrasing what you wrote is this: "Objective morality means moral statements have a single truth value 'if we adopt the principle of universality: if an action is good (or evil) for others, it is good (or evil) for us.'"

"Right" or "wrong" make presumptions about what your desired end state is.

As a thought experiment to illustrate my point, let me ask you this: Why should I be moral?
The objective moral and ethical standard means that there is an objective standard by which you can determine (using D&D's general grid as an example) whether something is lawful or chaotic, and whether it is good or evil. It can answer what is moral by telling you what to do to align yourself with a desired alignment. This is an objective answer; it doesn't matter what alignment to which you belong, you can tell somebody what they ought to do to align themselves with any particular alignment (provided you are perfectly knowledgeable about the objective truth of morality and ethics). But it DOES mean you have to know what alignment they want to be, or what they want that will let you determine which alignment will get them what they want. Because just as an astronomer in America who tells an Australian rocket physicist to "go straight up for 10 light years and you can't miss it" would be extremely wrong in his directions if both of them use "up" from their position, so too is somebody who says "you ought to kill that witness before he can snitch, it's the right thing to do," is wrong (or lying) if he's telling this to somebody who wants to be good. But the drow matron mother telling that to her son that she's raising to be a CE assassin? She's absolutely right about that being the right thing to do.

And any objective observer who knows the facts of the situation, even if he finds evil to be reprehensible, would acknowledge that for an evil person, it's the right thing to do. He just hates evil and thinks people shouldn't be evil.


The problem here is that, once again, you say, "What you ought to do is be moral."

Well, why?

Why ought I to be moral?

I mean, there's a foundational problem, though: for any moral theory you care to outline, I can ask, "Why should I be moral?" There are ways to answer that, but all of them require things that have been rejected when I have proposed them. The trouble is that "should" and "ought" and the like require a purpose. They have a hidden assumption that there is a purpose for which you "should" do things. Without purpose, "should" is meaningless. When you say, "You should be moral," but define "moral" as "what you should do," you have a circular definition with no foundation.

So I ask this of anybody who cares to answer (though OldTrees1 is in particular invited to respond): "Why should I be moral?"

Okay so here's the thing. You know how dragons, giants, and gelatinous cubes are not just things that happen to not exist, but things that cannot exist in Earths physical conditions, and if the laws of physics clearly affecting your characters were applied to them they would just instantly die? Alignment has a relationship to real life ethical reasoning that you are going to find very comparable to huge sized monsters' relationship to the square cube law.

It is not a coincidence that four of the five authors who Gygax borrowed the concept of alignment from were Catholic, that Baator and Celestia are taken directly from the Divine Comedy, that the original writeup of holy symbols only gave the choices "wooden crucifix", and "silver crucifix", and that alignment makes perfect sense if you accept the moral theories of Aquinas and Augustine.

See here's the thing: In the model of human minds used in the specific form of Objective Morality that I consider relevant to D&D, it is 100% of the time the case, for every living sapient being that has ever existed that having an alignment causes wanting things. If you could somehow cancel out someone's alignment, they would stand stock still and stop breathing until they suffocated to death. There is no such thing in this model as having a goal and then choosing a code of ethics, people only have goals because they have codes of ethics. (Saint Augustine specifically claims that people who hold any of the eight non LG alignments don't actually have Free Will.)

So in this model, a Universal Ethical System (which is one of the components of the definition of Objectivity in this case) must answer the question "What should I do?" with the exact same answer, no matter what someone's actual goals are.. The reason this "makes sense" is because it's explicitly a religious argument with an assumed teleology for all sapient beings. Humans (and elves, dwarves, and orcs) are tools they exist to do a job and ethics is the field of figuring out how that job applies to seemingly irrelevant situations.

And while nobody currently writing editions of D&D actually expects you to ride that train, the shape of alignment that was written into 1e, was written by people who basically thought that was how the real world worked. You can discard those assumptions, but you're going to have to do a ground up rewrite of how alignment works.

Now, D&D is tricky in that some small portion of evil people, like 0.01% or something, actually manage to beat the system. While 99.99% of those who perish with the evil tag applied to their alignment are doomed to an extremely long period of abject misery and suffering as a Larva, Lemure, Manes, or other low-level denizen of the Lower Planes until they are ultimately destroyed in the Blood War, a lucky few manage to escape this fate and ascend the fiendish hierarchy. 'It is better to rule in hell than serve in heaven' is arguably true in D&D, but only for those souls that manage to win the evil lottery. Most people who end up in Hell are getting the full course torture package. However, almost everyone who self-acknowledges as 'evil' in D&D parlance thinks they'll be one of the lucky ones, which means that willful embrace of evil, in D&D, involves an immense level of delusional thinking. Which is just very strange.

The real issue I find D&D has is that it presumes people like this are common. There are, among humans, a small number of 'people who just want to see the world burn' but they're extremely rare and tend to flame out spectacularly. Somewhere along the lines D&D committed to the idea that, if the Blood War came to an end the forces of evil would drastically outnumber the forces of good and overrun the multiverse and that just doesn't make any sense, mathematically.

I do not think it is a coincidence that these statements are all perfectly compatible with the philosophical claims made by Gygax's specific religious denomination at the time he was writing D&D. They're also eminently gameable, which has allowed them to persist under writers of different creeds.

I don't get where this idea that people who go to the upper planes are transformed into objects comes from. What source actually says this?

Planescape I believe. Maybe Forgotten Realms wall of the faithless.

No. If you're a masochistic worshipper of the god of pain in life you are probably sufficiently delusional as to rationalize to yourself spending eternity in a put full of flaming spikes would be awesome, but that isn't actually true, and the suffering is exactly as bad as a neutral observer thinks it would be. Someone who's brain chemistry is actually sufficiently messed up to enjoy spending time immolating while being impaled is sufficiently mentally disturbed as to preclude any alignment other than chaotic neutral.

Neurotypicality and mental illness are orthogonal to what alignment you are. There are explicitly multiple creatures with alignments that don't even have minds. Nothing is stopping our inverted pain receptor person from being LE.

But yes, in the divine sphere the various designers of D&D failed to properly differentiate between gods who are evil - because they are unrelenting violent or can't control negative impulses or whatever - and gods of evil which are manifestations of negative impulse given form. Various mythologies include lots of gods who are evil, but very few gods of evil. The exception, of course, is monotheistic traditions which tend to include a single benevolent creator and a single perfectly malevolent oppositional figure. But the number of people who willfully chose to serve such adversaries - as opposed to being blackmailed, tricked, enslaved, or intimidated into such service - is quite small.

I kind of get the impression that the religious orthopraxies of Hellenic paganism that informed the myths that all D&D gods are based off of, do not actually take the position that the gods have free will at all. The god of plagues can't just stop giving out plagues, you can just make sure that he gives the plague with your name on it to someone else.