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On The Gods and their Alignments
Posted 2010-11-20/03:02 in category: explanations
Golarion has been aware of magic for longer than we have surviving written records. We have also been aware of the existence of many planes: sets of places that it's impossible to go between without magic. Golarion and Earth are both on the Prime Material plane, the plane of ordinary matter where mortals are born, live, and die. There are also the elemental planes of Earth, Water, Air, Fire, Positive Energy, and Negative Energy, inhabited by beings of those elements. There are the Ethereal, Astral, and Shadow planes, which are too weird for this post but might get their own at some point. And there are the outer planes.
The outer planes are shaped by two pairs of opposing forces: Good and Evil, and Law and Chaos. There's an Outer Plane for each of Lawful Good, Neutral Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Neutral, Neutral Neutral, Chaotic Neutral, Lawful Evil, Neutral Evil, and Chaotic Evil. Each outer plane is populated by outsiders, beings who fully embody the plane's alignment. Some of them are naturally occurring and appear out of nowhere, and others started out as living people, were sent to that plane when they died, and gradually transformed to be more like the plane they were on.
When a mortal being capable of making moral choices dies, they are judged by representatives of Pharasma, the creator of the universe, and sent to the afterlife corresponding to the effects they had on the world in life. This is a pretty okay system as far as Good and Neutral people are concerned, but it's a terrible system for Evil people because the Evil afterlives are very very bad. I'm not going to get into detail on this. The good afterlives are working hard at making sure as few people go to the Evil afterlives as possible.
The most powerful outsiders on the outer planes are the gods. Gods are tremendously powerful, but there are many of them of all alignments working in opposition to each other, so rather than exhaust themselves striving against each other, they agree among themselves to limit their interventions on the Material. On Golarion, these interventions consist mostly of empowering clerics and paladins [. . .]
Yes, it says they understand either mercy or large numbers. Let's go with an "eye for an eye" definition of what people deserve, which seems like the most punitive it makes sense to try. The world population was around 2.5 billion in WWII, which lasted about six years. Let's assume Hitler was far worse than even he was and made life as bad as Hell is, for all 2.5 billion of those people, for the entire duration of the war. That means he caused 15 billion years of suffering, and deserves at most that much.
That is nothing compared to forever, even with the worst possible assumptions for how bad Hitler was.
Nope! Nobody deserves anything! Insofar as desert exists. everyone deserves literally everything they want! Torture is bad, or to be more precise not giving your victims safewords is bad! This doesn't depend in any way on who you're torturing!
(Bulletbiter does not get clericed by Sarenrae, partially because they don't know anything about Her but mostly because they're Chaotic Neutral.)
No one “deserves” eternal paradise and communion with God, it is only by God’s mercy and grace through Jesus Christ that anyone gets into Heaven.
Yes, it says they understand either mercy or large numbers. Let's go with an "eye for an eye" definition of what people deserve, which seems like the most punitive it makes sense to try. The world population was around 2.5 billion in WWII, which lasted about six years. Let's assume Hitler was far worse than even he was and made life as bad as Hell is, for all 2.5 billion of those people, for the entire duration of the war. That means he caused 15 billion years of suffering, and deserves at most that much.
That is nothing compared to forever, even with the worst possible assumptions for how bad Hitler was.
imagine there was a serial killer running around your country. not as bad as hitler, not even as bad as the nine, but definitely someone who's killed many innocent people. they get away with their crimes for years, but eventually the law catches up to them. at the last minute, as the cops are closing in around them, they decide to "repent" and turn themself in.
obviously, I'd want them thrown in prison, but if I found out that their prison was regularly lighting prisoners on fire as an extra punishment, and the person telling me this was advocating for them to be thrown in a regular high-security prison, or given the death penalty, I'd be pretty sympathetic to that. prison should be a real punishment, I'm not the sort of bleeding-heart who thinks criminals should have x-boxes and puppy therapy, but it doesn't need to involve actually lighting people on fire.
but if someone told me that the serial killer's prison liked to set prisoners on fire, and their solution to this was that rather than throwing them in prison we should send them on an all-expenses-paid vacation to a lovely tropical resort, where they could spend their days tanning by the poolside and enjoy expensive catered meals, free massages, and nightly live entertainment, I would not be okay with that! that might be Good, but it's not good, and if your ethical system is in favor of that it seems like a knock-down case against your ethical system.
and if I had to choose between sending the serial killer to the prison that tortures people and sending them to the beach resort, I would choose the torture prison every day. even if the prisoner was immortal, even if they realized at the last minute that it was wrong to be a serial killer, even if it was some kind of high-security luxury beach resort that they certainly wouldn't escape, even if the person advocating for the beach resort had a way to guarantee that other prospective serial killers would think they were in regular prison. I definitely wouldn't change my mind just because someone did some math about whether serial killing hurt the victims more than the fire hurt the serial killer.
my dad likes to say that he thinks good people go to heaven and bad people just go to sleep and never wake up. if you wanted to do that, sure, fine, I'd personally like Hitler to face some justice but I can cope. but don't try to tell me that lavishing eternal happiness on him is right.
Insofar as desert exists. everyone deserves literally everything they want!
Dude. Have you been to Nevada? Desert most definitely exists. I do feel that saying everyone deserves everything kind of takes the meaning out of the word.
Also (this may blow your mind) some people want things other people don't want, while knowing about it.
Torture is bad, or to be more precise not giving your victims safewords is bad!
Can I torture Hitler if I make the safeword "I swear I am very sorry for all the everything and also Jews are great"?
Forcing other people to lie (or for that matter forcing them to say the truth) is bad.
Anyway, the important part of all this is all the advances in dubcon we'll get. Detect Thoughts is a spell! Imagine the stuff you could get up to with that!
Doesn't it take years to become a wizard, or something? We only have two of those left! Nobody will be able to learn to cast Detect Thoughts or anything else.
I’m not a D&D player, but I was looking through a list of D&D spells to see if there’s anything really gamechanging, and I think I found one! There’s a spell called Detect Evil that can check whether anyone in the area of the spell is Evil, and not only is it a first-level cleric spell but it lasts ten minutes per level (so I think it should last at least an hour for Samora). The government could have Samora (and other clerics, if we get any!) sweep major cities for Evil people and arrest them all — you’d probably catch a ton of criminals who’ve just managed to escape detection somehow, and it could be especially valuable for crimes that are hard to prosecute or where the victim is unlikely to report.
Book of Exalted Deeds is really bad. If Samora is actually working on D&D rules, though:
revenge is not an acceptable cause for violence, although violence is an appropriate means of stopping further acts of evil (as opposed to paying back evil already committed).
...
Yes, delivering a person over to be tortured, even if that person is thoroughly evil and the torturers are a legitimate authority, is evil.
Last year I thought that was Wizards giving DMs advice on how to stop paladins from walking around with Detect Evil up and killing or arresting everything it detects! Apparently it's real now. Just as bad an idea in real life, and more people die this way.
Did you even read the excerpt you quoted? Because it supports my point, not whatever point you believe you're making.
1. I never said anything about killing or torturing people. I'm not saying we should have the death penalty for being Evil — I'm sure plenty of Evil crimes aren't death penalty offenses.
2. Arresting people isn't intently violent. There's always a chance that it will become violent, since the target might try to resist arrest, but in that case violence by the police would be self-defense (which surely isn't Evil).
3. Even if you did count arresting people as violent, arresting Evil people stops them from doing more Evil things, which is specifically allowed!
Well:
- You can't put people in the Birdcage, that's torture. Also everyone who has ever helped put someone in the Birdcage might detect as evil.
- You can't hurt someone because of previous actions, only future actions. "History of being evil" is not enough. Do the police ever hurt people who broke the law? That's evil. Have you ever helped the police with that on account of "you are legally required to do this"? That's evil.
- Are you planning to hurt the people you detect or threaten to do so? Remember, avoiding arrest is not an evil act! Any violence involved in catching someone is evil! If so, this is turning people over to evil authorities, which is evil. (I guess that's fine for clerics, these rules are written for paladins who can't do anything evil. Still.)
- How much does this compare to, like, murder? Probably not as bad! Theft? I have no idea! Obeying a rule you think is stupid three times? (That's a 3-point act of obesiance, Fiendish Codex II page 31, nine points and you go to Baator when you die unless you give up any benefit you received as a result of following stupid laws and also get an Atonement over it.) Resolved a dispute in a lawful way five times? (That's 2 points. Each.) Surely not but the rules do seem to say that!
About a third of humans are evil and it's probably not the third you want. Because the rules are terrible. Seriously, the last decade of alignment books has constantly involved WotC finding ways to make "detect all the evil people and then do something to them" not workable. I'm sure Samora doesn't use all those rules! She says more than nobody goes to a non-evil afterlife so she can't possibly be using all of those! This still won't work.
2. Arresting people isn't intently violent.
WHAT kind of world do you live in? Of course it's violent! Even if you somehow aren't afraid of what the arresting people might do to you, and you might even if you're wrong but 99% of the time if this had happened earlier in history you'd be right to be… it's still taking you away from your life for some indefinite time, and you know they'd stop you if you resisted. Can you imagine if someone that wasn't with the government did that? Kidnapping is a crime for a reason.
Dude. Have you been to Nevada? Desert most definitely exists. I do feel that saying everyone deserves everything kind of takes the meaning out of the word.
Good. We'd do well to get rid of the idea.
Anyway, I don't know about either D&D or Pharasmin Goodness, but as common-sense ethics goes, I don't like 'desert' because it's just so pointlessly complicated to keep track of. Whether a person you're helping is secretly unrepentant evil in their heart, whether a punishment is allowed or proportionate or whatever, whether this person 'could' have done different with what they knew (determinism in physics rears its ugly head, what does 'could' even mean)… Naive consequentialism is great precisely because you don't have to care about any of that. You can just… point yourself at having there be more Good things in the world and less Evil ones, such as, you know, people being tortured. And if this would make me Evil, well, I'd rather be Neutral, but, honestly, I'd be very surprised if Samora checks up on her healing patients' life history, and she hasn't done an Evil act yet by healing everyone she can, has she, if she's anything like how she presents herself?
Samora, have you considered interviewing these so-called Wizards of the Coast? I feel they might know something.
everyone who has ever helped put someone in the Birdcage might detect as evil.
If Dragon had detected as Evil I'm sure Samora would have said something by now.
Good. We'd do well to get rid of the idea.
Alright, that's a step too far. How about you get rid of Evil first and then we'll talk, you Chaotic Neutral anarchist you.
Gladly. When we get rid of Evil (retributive violence being one of the kinds of Evil, but only one), you'll be the first I invite to the party for the occation.