Unanimous Good

[Talakeal]

Wow, busy thread today.

Before we get into this, I want to say that I am talking about general RPG philosophy.

My own system doesn't really care much for ethical matters, and my playgroup has problems between people who want to be Heroes vs. those who want to be Villains, we aren't really concerned about theft one way or the other, but about things like murder, torture, and war-crimes. Slavery and rape to I guess, although those are typically explored under the guise of mind-controlling magics that leave them divorced from the real world.

As for D&D alignment, it is incoherent IMO. The game simultaneously is built around three traditions:
1: A bronze age sword and sorcery setting with amoral heroes and where cosmic powers are chaos and law rather than good and evil.
2: A medieval high fantasy tradition where montheism and monarchy are the norm and all morality and authority ultimately comes from the same divine source.
3: A western ideal about a frontier that is the bulwark protecting civilization against barbaric savages.

Trying to do all three at one, along with needing to balance gamist concerns with the fiction and numerous authors over 40 years, and we get a mess.

These are contradictory statements though. All theft "deprives people of their possessions". Period. Ergo, all theft involves "harm", which you identify as "evil". Yet you start out stating that theft is morally nuetral.

That's not what I said though.

I didn't say depriving people WAS harm, I said it could cause harm.

There are plenty of rich people who have more money than they could ever spend and to whom any given unit of money is just a number in a ledger. Likewise, many businesses simply destroy or throw away unsold merchandise rather than giving it to the needy. I personally own tons of movies I will never watch, books I will never read, and minis I will never paint or play with.

Stealing excess goods from those who have plenty to spare does not by itself cause harm.

Smaug doesn't need a literal mountain of gold to survive, or even maintain his lifestyle, but he still goes into a murderous rampage when Bilbo steals a single cup because he is greedy and covetous, not because the loss actually arms him in any real way.

Taking things from people is harm. Harming people is evil. That's the default you should start from, or your moral system just can't work.

Disagree on all points.

And I'll point out that for decades the whole "Lawful means following the law" has been debunked and dismissed as an incorrect way to intprepret D&D alignment. Yet, here we are. Robin Hood was not a hero because he was opposing the law. He was a hero because he was opposing an evil person who had taken power and was abusing it for his own ends at the expense of the people he was supposed to be protecting and serving. The law/chaos axis is not just about obeying or not obeying the law. And it's absolutely absurd to exclude from the good/evil axis anything that is *also* a violation of the law. Because most "evil" things are also going to be illegal. Your position would assume that the moment we pass a law making murder illegal, murder is no longer an evil act, but a chaotic one. That's not very rational.

I agree, that is not very rationale. Good thing I never said that.

Law is, to me, about imposing rules on reality and then asking people to obey those rules. This could mean a code of laws, but it could also be the instructions for a game, it could mean a code of chivalry, it could mean the tenants of a religion or philosophy, or many other things.

I said several pages ago that good and evil come down to causing and alleviating suffering. Doing so against the rules is chaotic. Breaking the rules to help someone is CG, breaking the rules to hurt someone is CE. Helping someone within the rules is LG, hurting someone within the rules is LE.

The whole concept of ownership and economics is innately lawful, it is an attempt to impose rules on reality. It is pointing at things that exist and labeling them as belonging to one person or other.

And in a world with finite resources, that can either cause or prevent great harm.

When we throw in public vs. private lands, slavery, inheritance, patents, loans, contracts, stocks, taxes, corporate assets, royalty feeds, intellectual trademarks and patents, usury, fiat currency, fractional reserve banking, certain classes of people being exempted from the system, environmental degradation and pollution, rentals, etc. it gets a heck of a lot more complicated than simply saying "this is mine, you no take or you bad man".
And of course, then we get to the whole idea of colonialism where people plant a flag and then claim that they own entire portions of the natural world, with or without violently displacing the people who may or may not have already been there.

As an aside, its kind of interesting to think that this forms kind of an ethical horseshoe, on one end you can take it so far that you can say people can own one another to justify rape, torture, and slavery, and then on the other hand you could take it so far in the opposite direction to say that people don't even own their own body to justify rape, torture, and slavery. Not really here or there, just thinking about the logical extremes of this philosophy.

That's great. But can we also acknowledge that the vast majority of theft does not restrict itself just to those who don't need it while refraining from stealing from those who need it? The cases where thieves only steal from the uber rich and give to the poor is a vast exception, not a rule.

This is a convenient rationalization for theft IMO. While it may work on an individual basis for a specific PC in a game, it's not a great basis for an alignment determination. Most thieves are not (relatively) wealthy adventurer player characters governed by WBL rules or something. Most are poor. And they will continue to be poor because theft is not a great way to ever become anything other than that.

By your rules, a local street thief is at worse neutral alignment if they steal from their (equally poor) neighbors, because they are equally needy? That's... insane. Again. The vast majority of theft occurs between people in the exact same socio-economoc conditions. Thieves rarely prey on the rich because the rich have guards and walls and whatnot. They overhwhelmingly prey on the other poor people shuffling along down the street with a handful of coin they managed to earn that day, so they can feed their family (which the thief takes to feed his family, or more likely feed a gambling/alchohol/drug habit). Thieves guilds most collect protection money from those who don't have sufficient wealth to protect themselves (from the thieves). Theft almost *always* falls most heavily on those who can't afford the "harm" of theft. So I feel far more comfortable making any alignment assumption about thievery "evil", and only allow other determinations when specific cases really justify it.

Most people who do a thing do it for evil, therefore the thing is innately evil is not a logically sound argument.

But theft is an outcome. You take X dollars from someone. That X dollars buys exactly the same amount of "stuff" regardless of who holds it. The harm done is identical. Your argument is like saying that it's not assault to attack a 15th level fighter because he had plenty of extra hps, so he could afford to lose some. You are doing the same exact harm to someone with theft, just some people can afford to be harmed more is all.

That's absurd.

Of course the outcome matters!

Of course stealing money from someone who is scraping by is worse than stealing from someone who is living in luxury!

Of course attacking someone who is healthy enough to survive it is better than someone who isn't! That's why we have "battery vs. attempted murder" laws.

If some healthy young jocks are horsing around and one of them picks up another and body slams him into the ground, that's just ordinary rough housing. If the same man did it to his 90 year old grand mother, that's attempted murder.
Slipping spicy hot pepper into your healthy friend's food is a prank; slipping it into your friend who is deathly allergic to pepper's food is attempted murder!

It's still harm. And absent significant additional factors, it's still evil.

And this is why so many alignment discussions go in circles.

IMO it is not the methods that matter, it is the outcome. Actions which result in suffering are evil, actions which negate suffering are good.*

Labeling objects or actions innately good or evil is, imo, a symptom of rigid lawful thinking.

But ultimately, it doesn't really matter. Saying, "stealing is innately neutral but the consequences often make it evil" and saying "Stealing is innately evil but the consequences sometimes make it good" are essentially only semantically different.

*Of course, there are a whole lot of complexities; where one draws the line between pleasure and pain, how much intent matters, how much evil is acceptable vs. good, etc. but that's all ancillary to the discussion.

If you believe that possessing things is not a right - everyone is always just borrowing things from a shared social or environmental pool - then its not contradictory. In that case, you'd have two senses of 'theft'. Theft in the sense of 'removing something permanently from the social pool of resources' would be immoral. Theft in the sense of 'not respecting someone's claim that this thing belongs only to them' but which returns that object into circulation in the social pool or exercises the implied rights of use that any member of the society has towards that object would not innately be, especially if the thing in question was not being actively used or depended on. So in that moral system, stealing a painting from someone's vault would likely not be immoral, and not because of some counter-weighting good. Just because that moral system does not recognize property rights as being a thing in the first place.

Not saying this particular moral system is anything close to fantasy RPG alignment systems, but its something in the possibility space, and understanding that might make the rest of the conversation easier.

This is very close to what I am saying, yes.

Kender society in Dragonlance for example is more or less explicitly like this. "I'm not stealing it, I'm borrowing it!" is a fairly common refrain. Conflict arises when people from that sort of background enter other societies that aren't organized that way, but apply their moral framework from their own society to those others. That's an argument for falling on the law/chaos divide - ignoring or not respecting the local context in which actions are interpreted is a chaotic stance.

The argument would be, not all conflict is inherently evil. Disagreements can have winners and losers and there can be stakes, and as a result of those stakes fortunes can rise and fall, but not all interactions in which someone ends up worse off would necessarily involve evil. In a moral system in which there are permitted ranges of behaviors and specific things but not others are rights, actions which deny people value which they do not have a moral right to would not be evil, even if they were harmful.

I was actually going to use that very example.

Kender are presented as extremely chaotic good, and that manifests of not having a concept of personal property. They frequently steal things from other races, but the setting labels them as objectively Chaotic Good.

IIRC it was the general consensus that theft in D&D was not innately an evil act back in the old days when we used to have weekly alignment wars on these boards.

But at the same time, it labels poison use innately evil.

Which seems really odd to me, as that also seems to be something that is more about "honorable combat" than good and evil. Its absurd that, say, a race of intelligent rattle-snakes would be expected not to use poison and to label them as objectively evil as a result despite having an otherwise altruistic outlook. And it also says that euthanizing someone painlessly with an injection is worse than burning them alive.

Again, D&D alignment is really incoherent.