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Larks comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong
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My lawful neutral character attacked the rest of the party when they assaulted a group of innocent (until proven guilty) goblins in the first encounter.
Did he win?
Aren't goblins almost exclusively Evil?
Assuming: any given goblin is Evil with p=0.95
Assuming: 80% of Evil creatures are guilty of a hanging offense according to an authority
Assuming: 5 randomly-selected goblins in the group
The probability that all members of the group deserved death according to authority should be (0.95*0.8)^5 = 0.254.
Of course, that last assumption is a bit problematic: they're not randomly selected. Still, depending on the laws, they might still be legally entitled to a trial. Or perhaps the law doesn't consider being a member of an Evil race reasonable suspicion of crime, and they wouldn't even have been tried by Lawful Authorities.
It seems like a coherent position to me to assign negative utility to the lives of "evil" creatures in the first place, even if they haven't committed something that would legally be a hanging offense.
You might say that you target evil creatures because they're likely to commit offenses that are punishable under law by death, but then, you might say that certain crimes are punishable by death because they show that the perpetrators are Evil.
As a moral theory, it may not make a very good legal foundation in our world, but when we're dealing with a world where you can actually cast Detect Evil, and look at people, or even magical objects, and tell if they're Evil, things may be kind of different.
In a world in which you can cast "Detect Evil", but don't know which of these two is true, the word "Evil" attached to your "Detect Evil" spell may not have the semantic weight you think it does.
All you know is that you have a particular sensory action that you can perform, which returns a quantitative result when applied to a given target. We have chosen to call this quantitative value "Evil". To be clearer, let's call it their EQ (for "Evil Quotient").
You happen to know, experimentally, that beings with a high EQ tend to commit actions that decrease general utility in the population whose utility you care about. Now, you have an important question to ask yourself: is high EQ causative of that net decrease in general utility, or is it merely correlative?
You then have a further philosophical question: Should the utility of high-EQ individuals be weighed the same as the utility of other individuals when aggregating your global utility function? (This will depend on many things, one of which is the potential for "false positives", but another of which is the base assumption of whose utilities are worth considering).
You know a lot more than that. You know that they go to different afterlives than Good or Neutral beings, that they can be affected by different spells and abilities, and that depending on their class their own abilities might be affected by their evilness.
A moral theory that supports the eradication of Evil beings need not be utilitarian. I don't think a conventional paladin would function as a utilitarian, for example.
And these afterlives tend to be less pleasant, as I understand it. As an added wrinkle, there are also Evil energies and spells, for example the energy animating a non-evil undead, or certain spells cast by a non-evil cleric.
No. That's not how alignment works in D&D, you're either Evil or you're not. If you are, then you will actively seek to perform Evil acts.
Even in core, there is some concept of quantitative evil. For starters, look up detect evil. Evil supernatural beings and evil clerics are notably more evil than the evil bartender. And you can expect the kind and amount of evil acts they perpetrate to be much worse. It's noted prominently in some sourcebook (though I can't remember if it was a core one) that normal evil people might opportunistically steal but probably won't eat your babies, in contrast to (say) demons.
Also, depending on the edition you should expect to see a scalar alignment chart somewhere in the Dungeon Master's Guide, commonly used for tracking alignment drift. A character can be obviously evil and in no danger of an alignment shift (say, 0 out of 100 good points in Neverwinter Nights terms) or right on the cusp of switching to neutrality (30 out of 100 good points).
Nevertheless, if you know that the target is Evil, then you know that they will actively try to perform Evil acts - which, if you're Lawful Good, should be against the law. If your resident legal system is letting off Evil goblins, then it is broken, if not actively evil itself. Lawful characters are not obligated to follow corrupt legal systems - although their means of soling this problem should itself be lawful. In this case, however, I got the impression that the player had assumed "innocent until proven guilty" was itself the Lawful Good attitude to take, when in fact it is merely stupid (and, of course, he knew full damn well those goblins were guilty of something and would go on to commit more crimes.)
Still not necessarily true. Take Jim the reforming criminal. Jim already served his time, so should not be arrested just for having committed evil acts. And since he still detects as evil, he can still feel the evil impulses tearing at his soul at every turn. But he fights them every day, and (I'll stipulate) he manages to avoid doing anything evil for the next two weeks, after which 'detect evil' doesn't work on him anymore.
So when the cleric casts detect evil on Jim and the rest of the party decides to vigilante-slaughter him for his loot, what should our Lawful friend do?
Resisting these "evil impulses" is itself a Good action, or it would not result in an alignment shift.
And, once again, in a world running on D&D, Jim should, in fact, be arrested - because otherwise he will commit Evil acts. If the authorities have discovered a way to persuade Evil characters to act Good - perhaps with threats of punishment or magic - then good for them, and I doubt a Good character would object, but that is not the case in the example given - these are Goblins, and without any reason to privileged the hypothesis that they have somehow been induced to act for the good of society, stabbing them is better than allowing them to continue harming others.
The Lawful friend will attempt to follow the law -- or, depending on the particulars, his code of honor / sacred traditions / whatever. If the Law says that criminals are innocent until proven guilty, then the Lawful guy would treat the criminal as such. He doesn't need to know whether the criminal is reforming, or struggling with his inner demons (of the figurative kind), or whatever; all that matters is making sure the Law is followed.
Thus, if the Law says, "you can't murder Evil people unless you have evidence of them committing actual crimes and/or atrocities", then that's that. Both our reforming criminal, and Stalin McHitlerguy, would be treated the same by a Lawful character who followed that Law.
Different DMs (and even different publications) might disagree with you. Moreso, if that is always true, then the addition of certain other sourcebooks and adventure modules produce an incoherent universe (regrettably I forget which ones) - which is part of my original point.
I was using the standard definition from Core. IIRC there are books specifically dedicated to alignment issues that contradict this, but those are optional and frankly have issues of their own. (The Book of Vile Darkness and the Book of Exalted Deeds spring to mind.)
Ok then, let's define this more rigorously, so we have something unambiguous to talk about.
If we're going with the idea that D&D "Good" and "Evil" are objective measures that follow your definition, then does the following make sense as a rigorous definition of them:
A being's 'Alignment' on the good-evil spectrum is a measure of how well its utility function is coupled to the utility functions of other beings in general.
A "Good" being is compassionate - that is, its utility function has a positive coupling constant (between 0.00 and 1.00, say) to the utility function of other beings in general; it seeks to maximize others' utility functions as a subset of maximizing its own.
Likewise, an "Evil" being is sadistic - that is, its utility function has a negative coupling constant (between -0.00 and -1.00, say) to the utility function of other beings in general; it seeks to minimize others' utility functions as a subset of maximizing its own.
Interestingly, once it becomes mathematically spelled out like that, the paladin's dilemma is just math - "slay evil" isn't a primary goal, it's just the only way to resolve the feedback oscillation inherent in wanting to maximize everyone's utility, including the utility of those whose utility is coupled to minimizing everyone else's utility.
That would clear up a lot of philosophical issues with the alignment scale (at the cost of making Evil beings rare outside of "a wizard did it" and very hard to play), but it's not especially consistent with the way D&D uses the words. D&D products tend to conflate Evil with selfishness; some (usually supernatural) Evil beings are described as taking the suffering of others as what we'd call a terminal value, but often they just have a weak coupling constant and happen to be pursuing zero- or negative-sum goals.
Then there are other complicating factors: a few zero-intelligence creatures (mostly undead) are described as Evil even though they don't have goals, for example. It's a mess, honestly; a hash of consequentialism and virtue ethics and deontology, and let's not even talk about how messy it gets once you take the Law/Chaos axis into account.
(Horrible nerd mode: DISABLED.)
That's not bad, actually. Hmm...
Yup, seems to work. I wonder how this ties into the cosmology ...
How does this system handle having strong loyalty to a group but being neutral to negative towards outsiders who are themselves not especially evil?
It depends on the interpretation, which differs from setting to setting (and from GM to GM, of course). In some of settings, the Law/Chaos axis determines your behavior as much, if not more, as the Good/Evil axis does. A Chaotic character is practically compelled to perform Good/Evil acts; a Lawful character, on the other hand, will follow the Law as much as he's able, even when doing so would prevent him from achieving his short-term Good/Evil goals.
Furthermore, "Evil" is sometimes defined as something closer to "selfish", whereas "Good" is something closer to "altruistic". Under this model, an Evil character would seek to increase his own wealth and power, or possibly just sit in the tavern all day getting drunk and playing tricks on the other patrons -- depending on what he's into. A Good character, on the other hand, will seek to help the villagers to live better lives, according to his definition of "better".
This makes "Chaotic Good" a truly terrifying combination (f.ex. see Planescape Torment), because a Chaotic Good character will seek to reshape the world in his own image regardless of whether anyone asked him to do it or not. If a few villages (or towns, or nations) need to be burned to the ground for the Greater Good, then so be it.
True. If the law took that into consideration, and precedent indicated that creatures that are most likely Evil are deserving of death unless evidence indicates that they are Neutral or Lawful or Good, then his actions would not have been justified. However, Larks indicated that that is not the case: goblins are considered innocent until proven guilty. Larks' character thus, refusing to be an accessory to illegal vigilante justice, attacked their party in self-defense on the goblins' behalf. In the long-term, successfully preventing the goblin's deaths would cause more legal violations, yes, but legally, they're not responsible for that. (I assumed the legal system is relatively similar to that of modern America, based on the "innocent until proven guilty" similarity and Conservation of Detail.)
Of course, if they assigned negative utility to all violations of law in proportion to severity and without respect for when they occur or who commits them, the best position would be as you described, and their actions were incorrect.
I got the impression that he assumed this was the "Lawful" attitude to take.
Goblins are "usually Neutral Evil". What this means is up to the DM, but in my experience is generally taken to mean that, while they can of course be other alignments (perhaps if raised by humans or something) their "default" in this setting is Evil. In other words, killing them is OK as long as you don't have reason to suspect they're Good, but actual genocide is frowned upon. Remember, these are adventurers, killing monsters and taking their stuff is part of the job description.