What if alignments were a continuum and not mutually exclusive?

[OldTrees1]

for most people nothing would really change. roy would still be good, xykon would still be evil. varsuuvius, before he cast familicide, would still register as neutral, by virtue of being very weak in both good and evil.
but the option to be strongly evil or weakly evil, as well as the option to be both good and evil simultaneously, could help adding context to an alignment.

This already matches my existing understanding of descriptive alignment.

An alignment axis, much like the XY axes, is a one dimensional continuum that summarizes the complexities of the character relative to that axis. This summary is similar to the X coordinate from the sum of 14 vectors summarizes the left/right movement at the end of those 14 vectors. While this one dimensional description does omit some of the initial information, it does not delete that information. Looking at the x coordinate from the sum of N vectors does not tell you how many vectors existed, or how many pointed left/right, nor about the magnitude of any individual vectors. This means despite the x coordinate being a high level summary, there is more detail and nuance remaining if you want to look deeper. It is similar with alignments.

The high level descriptive alignment summary neither reveals nor erases the nuance in the details. A rather boring character living a life of non-action and inconsequence might be summarized as mildly good but mostly amoral. A character struggling to do the right thing in a complex and dystopian world might live a life with few amoral choices, a some moral failures, and a some good accomplished. They might also be summarized at the high level as mildly good but mostly neutral. However despite both having the same high level summary, they are quite different characters when we look at the nuances.



So, yes, alignment is a continuum and the characters are more nuanced than any high level summary. Water is also wet.

However your ponderings about the detect spells is new. I don't see it making a big difference whether the Detect spells work on the high level summary or on one level deeper.