Conventional theories on law and chaos have been a bit restricted in the great alignment debate. Law, in particular, has forced itself into the dichotomy between Legality (whereby obeying the law per se is the most significant aspect) and Order (where the law as such is largely secondary to a stable code of conduct). Both theories of Law have hit major problems: the first is the question of whether one follows a tyrant, and the second the counter-example of the character traditionally seen as "chaotic" whilst following a distinct code or set of rules. A better synthesis is required for Law, and from that will hopefully follow corresponding theories of Neutrality and Chaos.
What follows isn't truly original: in particular my theories have been greatly influenced by the philosopher of jurisprudence Ronald Dworkin and the late libertarian philosopher Bob Nozick, but I'm sure that they hadn't planned on their theories being transposed to D&D. In essence, I would argue that Law, Neutrality and Chaos are to be determined in relation to their attitudes to Legislative Rights and Personal Conscience, particularly where the two come into conflict. Under my new notion of Law and Chaos, Law believes that Legislative Rights exist and supersede Personal Conscience, Chaos believes that Legislative Rights do not exist at all (since no government or other authority has any validity stemming from itself) and Neutrals accept the existence of Legislative Rights but believe them to be secondary to Personal Conscience.
How does this pan out in practice? It doesn't mean that Joe Lawful-Good will follow the tyrant simply because he's the law. A sufficiently tyrannical regime will lose its Legislative Rights altogether since it is not a valid authority: it is illegitimate. This does not mean that Legislative Rights don't exist as such; just because I recognise the laws of one government does not mean that I recognise the laws of all. Yet it does mean that if I recognise the legitimacy of the tyrannical regime, I have a duty to follow it since its Legislative Rights are superior to my Personal Conscience. Conversely, a Lawful Evil character, whose Personal Conscience is based upon his advancement, accepts that the maintenance of a stable society is paramount, and hence will follow the law.
Let's take a worked example. A LN regime passes a new law, calling for a capital levy on adventurers. Adventurers of all alignments are aghast. What do they do? By this theory, the following:
LG: Pay the levy. He may personally disagree with it, but the Legislative Rights trump his Personal Conscience.
LN: Pay the levy, for the same reason.
LE: Pay the levy. The most important determinant of long-term personal good is a stable society, so short-term goals must be deferred and Legislative Rights accepted.
NG: Refuse to pay the levy, but accept its validity. If arrested, he will gladly go to prison etc.
TN: Refuse to pay the levy, but accept its validity. Likewise, though he might be more prone to resist arrest.
NE: Refuse to pay the levy, but accept its validity in general. The government has a Legislative Right to levy, but I have a right to refuse since it clashes with my Personal Conscience. Moreover, I have a right to injure those trying to arrest me, resist arrest by whatever means etc. BUT I acknowledge that if captured the levy is legitimate. I protest at *my*imprisonment, but I don't feel that the levy is illegitimate as such.
CG: Refuse to pay the levy. If confronted by guards, will try to flee and will only submit to arrest if resisting arrest would cause net harm to the law enforcers.
CN: Refuse to pay the levy. Resist arrest and perhaps injure the law enforcers, but try not to injure them unnecessarily.
CE: Refuse to pay the levy. Resist arrest, kill the guards and do whatever is in my ultimate arrest.
Phew! Apologies for the long post, but hopefully this will get an interesting discussion going.
Legislative rights is a very slippery concept, particularly when dealing with countries that have little or no legislature. When the law of the land is the local lord, there isn't really a distinction between legislative rights and personal loyalty. What is important to my mind is the matter of legitimacy of authority. The lawful would acknowledge that an authority has the right to override him, while the chaotic would argue that nothing does.
The problem with putting 'personal conscience' at the other end of the pole is that it isn't universal across the alignment system. A neutral good character might well cite personal conscience as something that overrode even a legitimate authority, but for a chaotic evil character, personal conscience is unlikely to be a consideration -- he ignores authority because it has no value to him, not because it is overridden by another concern.
Going on to the various alignments, I'd say that there is no more reason to suppose that a lawful good character would pay the levy than a lawful evil one. The lawful neutral probably would, the lawful good would pay unless they thought either the cause, the law, or the authority to be evil, in which case there would be a conflict. Similarly a lawful evil character might well be tempted not to pay the money, should he feel that the cause, the law or the authority were identifiably good. In either of these cases, they might still pay the money. Even if the money would notionally support a cause to which they were morally opposed, the law is the still the law, and a strong argument in favour of ignoring moral considerations.
Neutral good and neutral evil characters might pay the money if they felt that by doing so they were supporting a good cause. Their loyalty to the law of the land might well vary depending on the goodness or evilness of the authority to which they were paying. A neutral good character is no more likely to accept the authority as legitimate or entitled to the money than an evil one.
Chaotic characters would, as you identify, resist the levy, although again if the levy serves a strongly good or evil purpose, that might change the mind of a chaotic good or chaotic evil person.
So in general I agree with your categories. However, I don't see the distinction between paying the levy and accepting its validity. Lawfulness is only important when faced with _valid_ authority, and conversely such validity isn't going to be as important to a neutral person as a chaotic one.
I also don't see the distinction you paint between lawful good and lawful evil. You've described them differently, but they seem like they should be more or less the same in their reaction to authority.
Finally, the distinction between neutral good and neutral evil seems somewhat artificial. There is no reason for a neutral good person to be glad to go to jail, or for a neutral evil person to uphold the right of authority to imprison people. These people are neutral, and not lawful. While authority is allowed to do some things, others cross the line. There is no reason to suppose this particular levy is one that all neutral people would agree is permissible.
Every time someone claims to have "discovered" the definitive theory of alignment, all posters with a modicum of sense ought be cautious.
One problem with any definitive theory of alignments is that there are literally infinitely many sets of moral commitments. Put another way, there are far more than nine ways to live. “In situation X what would a LG character do?” doesn’t have a definite or single answer. In the case of your example tax I can imagine one LG character paying it for the reason you describe but another LG character refusing to pay it. Why? Because the lawful part of their alignment refers to their unquestioning loyalty to their church’s set of laws, the laws of the secular powers just don’t interest them. A fanatic for Church law is still lawful, he just likes another set of laws. Maybe you want to counter with “Ah, but said fanatic is still nodding to legislative rights, he just only recognizes one legislator as legitimate!” And true enough, but I’ll come to that in a minute.
I would argue that Law, Neutrality and Chaos are to be determined in relation to their attitudes to Legislative Rights and Personal Conscience (snip) Law believes that Legislative Rights exist and supersede Personal Conscience, Chaos believes that Legislative Rights do not exist at all (since no government or other authority has any validity stemming from itself) and Neutrals accept the existence of Legislative Rights but believe them to be secondary to Personal Conscience.
I’m vague on how you are using the term “rights”. For Lawful characters I’m taking you to mean that they believe they have a moral duty to obey the commands of legitimate governments (what is a legitimate government can be a question for later). That seems clear enough. Chaotic characters seem equally clear in that they don’t believe government mandates place any moral obligations on them. What I don’t follow is the Neutral description of believing in “the existence of Legislative Rights but believe them to be secondary to Personal Conscience”
The most natural reading of that sentence is that a Neutral looks at a recently passed law and says both, “The law creates a moral obligation, since it was passed by a legitimate government with the right to legislate” and also says, “But I can ignore that moral obligation if I want to, since my personal conscience (convictions?) trump that right.” If that’s what you mean then I don’t understand you. How then is a Neutral character any different than a Chaotic? An “obligation” I can be justified in ignoring if I don’t approve of it isn’t an obligation at all. In what sense does the government have a ‘right’ to enforce its rules if all of the people (according to Mr. Neutral) have a trumping right to ignore rules they don’t like? A better incorporation of neutrality might be the position that legislative rights sometimes trump personal rights, and sometimes personal rights trump legislative ones. Under such a scheme the lawful position would be that legislative rights always trump and the chaotic position would be that personal rights always trump.
I’m also unclear as to what legislative rights are supposed to be anyway. Consider the following example. Suppose a nation passes a law saying children may not be named “William.” People would reasonably object to such a law and ask why the nation passed it. Legislative rights can’t be the right to pass any old law you like. The nation can’t plausibly respond, “Well, we’re the government, we don’t have to offer any justification for our laws other than our legitimacy as an elected government.” (Substitute another criteria for legitimacy if you like). Their right to pass such a law has to rest on something more substantial than that. They have to be able to show some public benefit, some requirement of justice, some added civil efficiency, *something* to ground that right. If they can’t, they’re left with a “Cause we said so!” defense of the indefensible “No Williams allowed!” law.
The trouble is, if they have some more substantial justification for the law then they don’t need to invoke legislative rights at all. Suppose they have conclusive evidence that people named William all turn out to be murders, if they’ve got that then *that* serves as the foundation of both their right to pass a law against Williams and for my moral obligation to obey. Put another way, if they’ve got a good reason for a law they don’t need a special legislative right, if they don’t have a good reason legislative rights won’t plausibly help.
I can’t imagine anyone outside of a libertarian straw man actually advocating that the government has a right to pass laws for no other reason than they are the legislature. Bob Nozick is a slippery guy in this regard, watch his explanations of opponent’s positions very carefully.
How does this pan out in practice? It doesn't mean that Joe Lawful-Good will follow the tyrant simply because he's the law.
Right. But it does open up the question of what constitutes a legitimate government. Unfortunately as written your system leaves that question as unimportant to Chaotic characters, since they don’t believe any government has a right to legislate regardless of legitimacy. On the contrary I would think that questions of what constitute legitimate authority make up the heart of such classic Chaotic philosophies as anarchism or libertarianism (neither of which reject all forms of authority except in their most extreme forms).
-Stephen
I may be splitting hairs here, and this may not be what you were looking for. I did find your points most interesting, however, and will be considering them further as a means to explain my own game world in reference to the whole alignment quandary.
The first is that lawful doesn't imply political law in D&D. (You said this but I'd like to say it in different words.) It closer resembles a way of describing patterns of behavior; order versus disorder (law vs. chaos in game terms). These have connotations of their own, only because we live in a governed society that labels and judges everything it can. Even when disorder occurs, we have to find a way to order it. Despite the way this world works, order and disorder shouldn't have any positive or negative connotations; they are simply two different behaviors (in the sense of alignment).
But the second thing I have to add almost nullifies what I said, and largely the most questionable aspect of Dungeons and Dragons. The alignment system doesn't represent a broad enough scope of options. That is to say, the alignment system is inadequate.
The alignment system lacks preference -- if someone is lawful good, it is untold as to whether they will obey law or good, should the two come into conflict (and they do, believe it or not).
And the second reason the alignment system is inadequate is that humans (and presumably the other core races) do not practice absolutely. One man's good is another man's evil at the exact same time. This is proven through political conflicts such as the legality of abortion, stem cell research, even down to the Spanish Inquisition. Alignment doesn't even discern whether the circumstances or the intent is what counts. Additionally, it doesn't cater to whether one could change their mind about what constitutes good or evil.
One could argue with me at this point whether or not the absolutes extend to law and chaos. Presumably, one could be entirely dedicated to order, and another toward disorder. This is also untrue. Just as two men could disagree on morality, so can they disagree on law and chaos. It would probably be rarer than the morality conflict, I'll admit. But it could (and realistically would) exist.
Accepting the alignment system as valid, your post is quite valid.
The only thing that I can see that beggars argument or questioning is the matter of what does or does not make a legitimate authority. A chaotic character may well support an authority that places the individual freedom as its highest priority, and structures its laws around that premise, but he would throw aside his support of this regime a lot faster than a lawful character. In fact, a lawful character may need to be guided by a superseding authority before he would cast aside the established order. (The paladin who wont work against the lord until the lord transgresses the established laws of the paladins church . . . ) Looking forward to a response to this, because based on the writing of the original thread, you should be able to put this into pretty good order!
So from this I take it that you see a character's lawful or chaotic alignment as a method of looking at his or her good or evil, a methodology, of sorts, for interpreting the dictates of the character's personal conscience. An objection could be raised that this renders the law/chaos axis, supposedly independent of good or evil, in fact dependent on it; indeed, the independence of the two axes is one of the aesthetic high points of the DnD alignment system. Though this is something of a loss, I would reply that the law/chaos axis is de facto subordinate to good and evil already; certainly in most campaigns LG and CG characters join forces to battle evil much more readily than LG and LE join forces to battle chaos. There are certainly campaign settings where the reverse is true, and law/chaos is the primary axis - Rokugan springs to mind - but in these campaigns one could simply give the whole system a 90-degree rotation, such that good and evil are methodologies for interpreting the dictates of legislative rights, rather than vice versa.
Your particular example is a bit confusing, by my interpretation of your intent, in that all the characters have the same dictate of personal conscience: namely, not to pay this levy. Furthermore, what you describe unaligned characters as doing seems chaotic to me; most of humanity is UN, and most of humanity pays their taxes. Furthermore, these unaligned characters' actions are just peculiar for the conventional wisdom of their alignments; a "pure good" character being hypocritical? I think my problem has its roots in your breakdown of lawful/unaligned/chaotic, specifically that the key dichotomy is between lawful and unaligned, and the distinction between unaligned and chaotic is far less significant. After all, the entire point of your post is whether a character puts his personal conscience or legislative rights first, and you put this dichotomy between lawful and unaligned. I propose an alternate definition vaguer but more pleasing to the intuition. Lawful respects legitimate authority; what "legitimate" means is defined by the character's good/evil alignment. Unaligned generally respects legitimate authority, except when his personal conscience or plain expedience strongly suggests otherwise; a needy UN person is certainly not above stealing, but he or she won't do it unless he or she really needs to. Again, good/evil is a strong factor here; I picture a UE character having less compunction about theft than a UG one, probably because it's a matter of the good, charitable personal conscience going hand-in-hand with the law, while the evil, selfish personal conscience runs counter to it. And with that, we get to chaotic characters, who respect legitimate authority only when its dictates happen to parallel those of the character's own personal conscience. This is probably a more frequent occurrence for CG characters than CE characters; one's personal conscience dictates not to do murder, another's doesn't.
So, to revisit your example of the levy, I see the following:
UG: Pay the levy, unless your personal conscience - you know the money is being used to perform evil, for example - or expedience - if you pay your family will starve - strongly oppose it. Note that the expedience scenario must outweigh the inexpedience of arrest and whatever punishment the government sets for not paying.
UN: Generally the same scenario as UG, except that if the money is going to a good cause, but expedience opposes paying, a UG char will pay and a UN one won't.
UE: Don't pay the levy. You effectively have no personal conscience - you just want to keep your money - and, because you have no conscience, your expedience threshold is considerably lower - it's a lot easier for you to just kill people and resist arrest than it would be for the other two unaligned characters to go to jail.
I hope I've at least provoked some thought.
NE folk would resist paying the levy unless they absolutely had to, but would have no qualms about co-opting the process to benefit themselves, perhaps roping a group of adventurers into pooling their resources to pay as many levies as possible and would then steal the extra and report the bunch for not paying the tax, receiving a possible reward. NEs really are pains after all.
Chaos, by contrast, doesn't regard any legislative authority as having ipso facto status, and hence treats every law as a moral judgment rather than a binding legislative order. He follows the laws he agrees with, ignores the ones he doesn't and insists that he has a moral right to ignore them. He will resist arrest, since a guard or policeman has no more moral authority to arrest him than he has to arrest them.
In a nutshell, to reiterate, lawfuls accept the validity of the authority and hence all of its laws, neutrals accept the validity of the authority but not necessarily all of its laws, and chaotics reject the validity of the authority altogether. This is not to say whether or not they will follow the laws: a LE might break the law but he acknowledges that it is morally wrong to do so, just as a CN might follows all laws because they coincide with his personal code. It is, rather, about the degree of validity the character gives to legislative authorities.
The Law/Chaos axis represents, to me, the particular outlook of one's social philosophy. Lawful PCs would be those who see the benefit (personal or otherwise) of having a codified set of ideals that govern how people behave to one another. Even if those ideals are flawed in places, they are overall preferable to the uncertainty of having no core ethics or morality to govern people. Tradition is important, because it helps establish an ideal over the course of time.
Chaos, on the other hand, would represent the belief that no central ideal is perfect, and that none should necessarily be followed. The Chaotic alignment rebels against too much tradition or authority, because it doesn't want to set up any permanent ideal that cannot be easily removed when it becomes flawed or unwanted. Some would do this more out of a need to keep society dynamic and evolving, helping bring in new ideals to replace outmoded ways of thinking. Others would do this purely for the sake of keeping things unstable, so that society never became centralized or focused. Whatever the reason, Chaotic PCs would do as they saw fit, for whatever reason.
Neutrality represents either a blending of these two ideas, or a lack of them. The balanced view says that some ideals are universally worthwhile and necessary, while others may need to be changed or gotten rid of. Neutral PCs would likely adhere to tradition until it was obviously inferior to a new ideal; at that point, the new ideal would be used until it failed, and so forth and so on. The other side of Neutrality is being amoral, that is, without morality. Such people likely don't think much of any ideals, or their place in society, or even the world/universe. They probably just do what they do to survive, and unless that survival is threatened in some way, they probably don't bother with events outside their own home.
Well, that's my view on it, anyway. Your mileage, as always, may vary...
Lawful alignment means aligned with law. There is a strong enough lawful element in what the character does to mean that he has found common ground with the lawful parts of the cosmos. Matters that aren't covered by the good/evil/law/chaos paradigm aren't morally unimportant, they just aren't tapping into the game world's cosmic principles. Similarly, the game world also presupposes 'elements' of air, earth, fire and water. This doesn't mean you can't get complex creations like human beings.
In game, the consequence of this is that tapping into pure forces gets you support. A priest dedicated to good will develop divine authority, even if they aren't dedicated to a particular deity. A monk and a barbarian develop abilities and immunities in line with the forces they embrace. Alignment works best not so much as a universal morality system, as it does a system for working out what part of people's actions will attract cosmic sanction and support.
Going back to our original example, let's take a dashing highwayman (chaotic neutral), and a strict follower of principle, such as bushido (lawful neutral). What matters to the highwayman is not the nature of the curtailment of his personal freedom, but that it exists at all. He doesn't care if theft is illegal by custom, or by legislation, by decree of a tyrant, or by simply hue and cry of the robbed. He has principles, a desire not to hurt anyone more than necessary, and would probably count as neutral rather than good or evil. But his spirit is bound up in reaching beyond what is allowed, and what is lawful, and he is both admired and resented for it.
Similarly, consider a follower of bushido, given a fantasy interpretation rather than sticking with history. "Who is more true to bushido, a samurai who serves a good and noble lord, or one who serves a wicked and evil lord? The one who serves a wicked and evil lord, of course, for loyalty is the first principle of bushido...."
Now, leaving aside any consideration of whether this is a historically accurate portrayal of bushido, because I don't care and it isn't relevant for this discussion, the principle as laid out here is lawful neutral. Considerations of good and evil are discarded in favour of a lawful principle above all. Note that this includes supporting one's lord in, for example, his revolt against the Shogun. You aren't supporting manifestations of lawful authority in general, but simply following a lawful path.
Having dealt with lawful and chaotic by themselves we can then add good and evil. Lawful good is not a confusion between supporting law and supporting good, and hoping they don't conflict. It also encompasses someone who supports law as a tool of good, and good as the highest principle of law. Such as person would be very suspicious of laws without good (ie seemingly arbitrary laws) or good without law (Robin Hood). The former because laws exist to promote the good, and the latter because good can not be sustained without law.
Again the point here is not that legislation trumps everything because 'it just does'. The point is that order is in itself desirable, both in itself, and because it supports the cause of good (or evil).
Similarly, chaotic alignment is not just an expression of personal freedom, but may also be important because of the good or evil it enables in the world.
Your particular example is a bit confusing, by my interpretation of your intent, in that all the characters have the same dictate of personal conscience: namely, not to pay this levy. Furthermore, what you describe unaligned characters as doing seems chaotic to me; most of humanity is UN, and most of humanity pays their taxes. ... I hope I've at least provoked some thought.
Accepting your theory that the most of humanity is UN for the sake of the point of this thread. I would suggest that the reason that most of these UN (interesting acronym) people pay their taxes only if the system is such that it forces payment in some way. Either their taxes are payed in some automatic fashion or the accounting of the economy is efficient enough to detect tax avoidance. In the latter case the more they fear the penalties of not paying must be compared to the temptation of not paying. This balance affects how much tax they "voluntarily pay". Even if they totally accept the authority of the government collecting the tax and the benefits to society of having the tax, their immediate self-interests would determine what their "voluntary" actions actually were.
Fear governs everything. Fear of poverty, fear of missing out, fear of anarchy, fear of letting others down. Never underestimate the power of fear!
Personally I think that bravery has an impact on what any character will do regardless of alignment. If the tax is totally voluntary and not enforced, how many lawful good characters would find higher priorities to spend the tax money on? Even time is a factor. If the tax is voluntary, how many characters just would not get around to paying - we were too busy saving the world to come to town and do the tax thing.
There is no mechanism for determining how brave a character is in the system. A lawful good character might be a total coward. He does his best but he is only human. A chaotic evil character might be extremely brave and dangerous. He might gain a perverse pleasure of raiding and pillaging the tax collectors home, killing his family and beating his chickens. The real pleasure is paying the tax. The intensity of looking into the tax collectors face when the tax consists of the tax collectors personal treasures. "Sorry for the delay, I had to go out of my way to raise the money but this should be enough until next time." Alignment is a guideline but there is a lot of flexibility from character to character. Real personality is not adequately covered by alignment.
Good - Evil: the same as in standard D&D.
Law - Anarchy: respect for external law and order in general.
Discipline - Chaos: adherence to a personal code.
So, for example, faced with a tyrannical law, a Lawful Disciplined character would always obey it, if they really opposed it they would leave the kingdom rather than stay and disobey it. A Lawful Chaotic character would obey it unless they were very opposed to it or it caused them big problems. An Anarchic Disciplined character wouldn't obey it - or any law, even if doing so wouldn't cause any problems and would expedite matters. An Anarchic Chaotic character wouldn't obey any law unless doing so would help them at that moment.
Now let's take the example of a Lawful Good character faced with a dilemma: by defeating a dragon that is about to destroy a town, they help a demon complete its schemes. If they were Lawful Good Disciplined, they would have to strike out at both the demon and the dragon simultaneously, even if that would almost certainly result in failure. On the other hand, a Lawful Good Chaotic character could evaluate the situation and go for the greatest good.