Why No One Understands
Alignment
Travis J. Rodgers
Alignment was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons as a
character (NPC or PC) attribute. It wasn’t rolled for; it was typically
selected, but sometimes a particular alignment was necessitated by the
character’s race or class. But what is ostensibly a kind of “outlook” piece,
cross-indexing a regard for law and chaos on one axis and good and evil on the
other is at best a concept evolving across game versions. This fact would
explain why long-time gamers, or at least gamers who have played multiple
iterations of D&D, might view alignment differently from others. At worst,
however, it’s essentially meaningless. There’s a middle path, which may be its
original intent, one according to which alignment is both meaningful and quite objective
– but then it’s extremely contentious. My considered view is that alignment is either
meaningless or objective in a way that many players do not like (which is accurate
is undertermined – the descriptions aren’t clear enough). Thus, I urge you to “commit
it to the flames.”
Gygax
In 1978, the AD&D Players
(sic) Handbook was published. I presume
Gary Gygax himself penned the following on alignment:
Lawful
Evil: creatures of this alignment are great respecters of laws and strict
order, but life, beauty, truth, freedom, and the like are held as valueless, or
at least scorned. By adhering to stringent discipline, those of lawful evil
alignments hope to impose their yoke upon the world.
The law aspect is
clear: such characters see the value in strict order and laws. The evil aspect is also clear: beauty,
truth, and freedom are at least scorned and are perhaps valued at nothing. Such
characters literally seek to control the world, so far as they are able,
through discipline, regardless of whether that tramples upon beauty, truth, and
freedom.
Cook
Just over a decade later, (I presume) Zeb Cook wrote the
following in AD&D 2nd Edition’s PHB:
Evil is the antithesis of good and
appears in many ways, some overt and others quite subtle. Only a few people of
evil nature actively seek to cause harm or destruction. Most simply do not
recognize that what they do is destructive or disruptive. People and things
that obstruct the evil character's plans are mere hindrances that must be
overcome. If someone is harmed in the process . . . well, that's too bad.
To the evil character,
harming others on the way to pursuing one’s goals is a viable path. It’s again
not a question of the character’s explicit motives. As philosophers in the
virtue ethics tradition have noted, the virtues are “salience projectors”
(Howard Curzer, for instance, notes this; but he’s cribbing W.D. Ross). Being
good requires being sensitive to things, and evil characters are either
insensitive to the things, or they sense them and value them at nothing. What
sorts of thing? Gygax said it well – beauty, truth, freedom.
Note: There’s a final
sentence in Cook’s explanation that I’ll call the addendum. I’ll leave it out
for now and return to it in a moment.
Tweet Et Al.
In 2003, Jonathan Tweet and others produced D&D Version 3.5.
The language on evil follows:
“Evil” implies hurting, oppressing,
and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others
and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil,
killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master.
Evil characters do
these things – either explicitly and intentionally or through ignorance. Either
they know what they are doing and take it as their project or they
insensitively hurt and oppress others. Of Lawful Evil characters, the 3.5th
PHB says the following:
Lawful Evil, “Dominator”: A lawful
evil villain methodically takes what he wants within the limits of his code of
conduct without regard for whom it hurts. He cares about tradition, loyalty,
and order but not about freedom, dignity, or life. He plays by the rules but
without mercy or compassion. He is comfortable in a hierarchy and would like to
rule, but is willing to serve. He condemns others not according to their
actions but according to race, religion, homeland, or social rank. He is loath
to break laws or promises. This reluctance comes partly from his nature and
partly because he depends on order to protect himself from those who oppose him
on moral grounds.
Lawfulness is now
explicitly stated as a relative concept – the characters operate within THEIR
(okay, “his”) code of conduct, without regard for harms to others. Tradition is
a relativizer here – relative to what traditions? The evil aspect is clear, too: freedom, dignity, life are of no explicit
value to such characters. This matches up reasonably well with Gygax’s and Cook’s
formulations.
Rodgers
On one hand, the threat of evil is pretty clear – there are
things that are unimportant to evil characters. This was true in Gygax’s
formulation, and it rings true through Version 3.5. On the other hand, there is
an increasing move toward relativizing both the Lawful and the Evil
component. First, consider the development; then consider the criticism.
In Gygax’s explicit formulation, good and evil are quite
clear. On the side of good there is truth, beauty, and freedom. On the side of
evil there is at least falsehood, ugliness, and subjugation. Lawfulness is a respect
for both law and for order (what law?). In Cook’s formulation, things are
slightly more relativized: although harm and destruction are pretty clear
indicators of evil, the character need not seek them out; they could simply arrive
there. Harm (of what?) and destruction (for what purpose?) are fairly
objective, but it’s the addendum that casts the relativistic die. Cook writes, “Remember
that evil, like good, is interpreted differently in different societies.”
We can read Cook’s addendum in one of two ways. The first is
the “wrongness of evil” way and the
second is the “relativism of evil”
way. On the “wrongness of evil” view, evil is wrong – and that’s a fact. People
in different societies create codes of morality as they go through the process
of exploring the world and discovering the facts of evil. At any given time,
their code is almost certainly partially flawed; this is simply to say that the
society’s code is not fully correct. They have not yet discovered the full
truth of good and evil (and perhaps they cannot or will not), but they might think they have. This view makes
the inquiry into evil analogous to inquiry into physics. Aristotelian physics
was false but helpful and not totally without basis; Newtonian physics was better
(closer to the truth and more useful for predictions). But more complete models
of physics have continued to arise. In this way, alignment makes perfectly good
sense (to me), and your evil character is a scumbag and should be doing pretty
awful things.
On the “relativism of evil” approach, what IS evil (not what
is recognized as, or believed to be, evil) varies from society to society. This
sounds tremendously plausible to some, but I ask you to put aside the plausibility
of this view as a philosophical view; consider just what this means for an RPG.
If orcs like to harm and destroy, then, on the “relativism of evil” approach,
isn’t that good “to them”? So, an evil orc is one who doesn’t harm and destroy.
Slaving isn’t seen as evil to many slaving societies; so, such characters aren’t
evil? Whatever your answer to these conundrums (probably not conundra), alignment
doesn’t seem able to play the role it’s supposed to play in an RPG.
Consider if there were an attribute called “bigness” – which
measured your bigness either against an objective standard or against a
changing, societal or species-specific approach. On the first standard, bigness
would be equivalent to something else – like height. On the second approach, a
massively “big” kobold might be four feet tall, while a massively “unbig” human
might be four feet tall. What is gained by having a relativized attribute like
this? I suggest nothing is gained, but massive amounts of unclarity are interjected
into the game.
In brief, lawful evil characters are either truly lawful
evil – exploiting, harming, destroying, disrupting, and aptly called “diabolical”
(as Tweet et al. noted, “because devils are the epitome of lawful evil”), or alignment
doesn’t have a meaning.
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