Here's a working example of the Alignment table. Ten years ago, more or less, the philosopher Alain de Botton said that the city of Brisbane, Australia, offers "chaotic ugliness", as was so kind to point out in the "Australian politics" Thread.

So, if we replace the ethical Good-Evil axis with the aesthetic Beauty-Ugliness axis, the modified Alignment table looks like this:

Lawful Beautiful - Neutral Beautiful - Chaotic Beautiful
Lawful Neutral - True Neutral - Chaotic Neutral
Lawful Ugliness - Neutral Ugliness - Chaotic Ugliness

So, if we compare the two tables (the original one and the modified one) we arrive at the following conclusion, by deductive reasoning:

Chaotic Evil = Chaotic Ugliness

The moral of the story here is that the city of Brisbane has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. I don't share that opinion myself, in case anyone got confused or whatnot.

These are my thoughts on it:

I think we are justified in hypothesizing a continuum between lawful and chaotic, because many actions one might take in D&D could have values that reflect contributions to one's alignment that scale with the magnitude of the consequences of the actions or the degree to which the actions inherently represent one’s alignment. That just seems to suggest a continuum to me. But the existence of such a continuum requires some elaborating on if one desires to simply label a character "neutral" as it were:

If we do indeed surmise that there is a continuum between lawfulness and chaos, then it seems that there must be a bounded region on this continuum that consists of neutrality that the neutral character fits into through their actions. If that were not the case, we couldn’t always treat "neutral" as a discrete term describing a character when applying the system of alignment; a character would just be between lawful and chaotic and thus only more or less neutral. Furthermore, if we hypothesize that every action has a corresponding lawful or chaotic value, and the totality of one's actions is either more or less lawful or more or less chaotic, then on this continuum there must be an indicator delineating lawfulness from chaos for any given combination of actions (or so I think). Thus, we can sum these actions (lawfulness corresponding to positive values and chaos corresponding to negative, or vice versa) to represent a sort of neutrality value measured around the indicator. This neutrality value would have to exist within the bounded region representing neutrality on the continuum for the character in question to be truly metaphysically neutral.

Thus, if there is a continuum between, say, allowing one’s decisions to be totally controlled by strict ideology and not being controlled by ideology at all, and one were actually inclined to try to apply some sort of alignment system, there might be some calculable bounded region that corresponds to a happy middle ground we could label "neutral" or "reasonable" or something. This could apply to other things too. But I’ll just see what everyone thinks of what I just wrote before continuing.

Thanks, ToothyMaw! Very insightful comments there, I'll have to think about them.

I'm going to keep going.

Beyond mythology, perhaps this could be interpreted in a purely physical sense, as the difference between determinism and freedom. — Arcane Sandwich

This post is directed at compatibilists mostly. When I use the term "free" in the following post, I just mean being able to do as one wishes uninfluenced by external factors. I am not making a metaphysical claim about libertarian free will in the premises of the following argument unless stated otherwise.

Taking into account my last post: if one positions at one end of a continuum “totally free” (metaphysical libertarianism) and the other “determined” (determinism), then we might have a way of measuring whether or not all of our actions, when summed, represent a value corresponding to having sufficiently free will. That is, if one grants that the sum of all of one’s decisions is either more or less determined, or more or less free, and that every action carries with it a degree of either freeness or that of being determined. Thus, if we would just agree on a bounded region on the continuum corresponding to having sufficiently free will, we could measure if people can be considered to have free will.

The application of this system would need informing from neuroscience and other sciences; there would be factors like “belief” to take into account - which, if sufficiently entrenched independently of one’s will, might be considered to determine actions in the way that being physically coerced might (although I could be wrong on that). There would also be clear applications of psychology, sociology, etc.

But the point is this: if we all agree on what level of determinedness or freeness constitutes having free will, we can, through science and an application of an alignment system, measure it. That is to say, this could resolve the issue of free will if those who believe in it would just agree on a region on the continuum that constitutes enough of a lack of determinedness of our actions such as to constitute having free will.

Well, in terms of D&D, this is mostly a rule-of-thumb to be interpreted in any way practical by the Dungeon Master. In terms of genre history (F/SF), I'd say it's a marriage of Tolkien and Moorcock, but the overarching morality systems here are not that compatible, I'd say. In terms of gameplay, I'd say the alignment system is primarily social - how you slot into society. So for example, to be a paladin you need to be lawful good; but I've always found this to be a requirement towards effort rather than personality: You should strive to be lawful good, no matter how difficult this would be for you psychologically. That makes a difference. But there is still a psychological component to this: it's not how other people expect you to behave, but how you think you should behave, and there's overlap here.

I've got a degree in sociology, and what the D&D alignment system has most reminded me of is a typology developed by Emile Durkheim in his book Le Suicide. Durkheim was trying to establish the discipline of sociology as an academic discipline at the time, and we was relying on Comtean positivism. He chose the topic of suicide, because it's a very personal topic and at the time was considered the domain of psychology. If he could show that sociology has something to say about the topic, he could clearly demarcate what sociology as a positivistic science has to say about society.

He examined suicide rates of different countries and came up with four types of suicide, three of which he considered relevant (and one of which he only named in a footnote). These are: egoistic/altruistic and fatalistic/anomic. These are two pairs, and the relevant dimensions are:

- integration into society
- regulation by society

I've always thought that integration (egoism/altruism) corresponded nicely to good/evil, and that regulation (fatalism/anomie) corresponds neatly to law/chaos. It's certainly not the only way to look at it, but it just feels like it could fit.

Note that under this view "evil" would label a lot of people as evil who we don't particularly consider evil: it's more a measure of outsider status. And this might not be the intention. So for example, someone who hasn't internalised any of the local values, and on the surface keeps to the "laws of the land" would be lawful evil, even if he showed basic human traits such as compassion to people in need.

Another problem is that alignment would be relative to any particular group: a member of the mafia could be lawful good when the reference group is the Family, but neutral evil when the reference group is wider society. You social integration/regulation spreads out in concentric circles, so to speak, and different allegiencies can create inner conflict. So it's not clear at all, if the social model is what we're after (depends on what we need the model for, for starters).

No conclusion really, just thoughts.

Some really cool thoughts there!

Another thing to consider is that every alignment is connected to an Afterlife plane. For example, after death, Lawful Good characters go to Mount Celestia ("Heaven"), while Lawful Evil characters go to Baator ("Hell"). Chaotic Good characters go to Arborea ("Valhalla"), while Chaotic Evil characters go to The Abyss (it has no equivalent in any real-world religion), etc.

Back in the day (1977-85_Bx, NYC), my geek-bros and I didn't use "alignments" (or THACO, HP, XP, classes, levels, static defense or Vancian magic for that matter) in our games because "good, evil, chaos, law" seemed useful for OOC (non-diegetic, bird's eye view) storytelling but not useful for PoV (diegetic, frog's eye view) roleplaying which was our focus – pretending to be Adventurers (anti-heroes mostly) exploring an Earth-like, post-Imperial collapse, dangerous & fantastic world (much closer to Howard & Leiber than Tolkien & Moorcock).

Once we'd found that "alignments" in play restrict characters (& threats) to being stereotypes or cartoons, we had to ditch them and instead we used the Adventurers' oaths versus local customs-taboos (with risks of magical / spiritual consequences for either keeping or breaking them). We'd discovered that the more down-to-Earth (i.e. quasi-historical) the fantasy tropes were in our games, the more fantastical our roleplaying experiences tended to be. :nerd: