Tuesday 18 February 2020

Shades of Evil

So what are Lawful Evil, Neutral Evil, and Chaotic Evil, exactly?

The best way to conceptualise these alignments is, I think, to describe them as being circumstances in which the excess of law, neutrality or chaos becomes indeed so excessive that it turns to evil.

Neutral Evil is the easiest to explain in this way. Here is a character who has no interest in the furtherance of anything beyond himself, and especially not in the grand conflict between Law and Chaos which permeates the multiverse. He is completely self-centred and devoted to his own pleasure and success. That this can turn to evil is obvious.

The more difficult questions are where Lawful Neutrality and Chaotic Neutrality turn to evil. Lawful Neutrality - the absolute insistence on the letter of the law and the preservation of order - can clearly have negative consequences where it results in harsh or unmerciful application. This is Javert from Les Miserables in a nutshell; a man for whom the enforcement of the law is everything and who therefore becomes blinded to unfairness or injustice as a result. That falls short of evil, because it lacks the necessary intentionality - it's not that Javert is a bad man; he's just misguided. Where the excess of law becomes evil is I think where anything which is outside of or orthogonal to established norms becomes seen as inhuman, worthy of extermination, and open to whatever forms of abuse one wishes to subject it to - it is Nazis casting aside human "impurities"; it is the Khmer Rouge expunging all bourgeous elements. The insistence on a hypertrophied sense of purity or orderliness taken to the point at which it justifies any form of brutality or depravity. It doesn't have to be racial or political purity as these examples are, of course - it could be, for instance, a religious person who insists on absolute orderliness and inflicts horrible torture on anybody who strays outside of accepted boundaries, or a village elder who enforces cultural norms with sadistic glee. (Is a girl being burned alive or stoned to death for daring to report a sexual assault committed against her by a teacher in Bangladesh an example of Lawful Evil in action?)

Chaotic Neutrality, similarly, can have very bad consequences. Think of Drop Dead Fred (I generally try not to think about that film, but this is one occasion where a character is a great example of an alignment). If that character were a real person, he would be the prime example of Chaotic Neutrality - he lacks any malice, but obeys no norms whatsoever. He is capable of causing physical devastation, pain and suffering as a result, but these are byproducts of his chaotic nature, not the result of intent. The Joker from The Dark Knight, on the other hand, is Chaotic Evil, because although he too emphasises disobedience of norms, the point of him doing so is to destroy those norms entirely such that he can give free reign to criminality and vice and "watch the world burn" or whatever the line is. Drop Dead Fred is merely capricious. The Joker is purposively so.

23 comments:

  1. Regarding Lawful Evil, you might be interested by 'The Atrocity Paradigm - a theory of evil', by philosopher Claudia Card. It is quite good and one of the few instances in which the concept 'evil' has been interrogated in a useful manner by modern philosophy.

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    1. Maybe I will, but I always find it hard to 'get' philosophical explorations of fundamental human emotions/phenomena like love, evil, etc.

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  2. I'm a big fan of Johnstone Metzger's characterization of "evil" in The Nightmare Underneath (which uses a five-alignment system: all normal people are Neutral, while weirdos like the PCs can be Good, Evil, Chaotic or Lawful). I'll quote it in full here:

    Evil means your primary motivation is to cause harm. You might be seeking revenge on a specific foe or you might be a violent psychopath. You might be righteous, you might have friends—you might even be generous and charitable—but you have enemies to fight and this is what consumes you, more than anything else.

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    1. That is interesting but I would have to use a different word than 'evil' for that - it sounds like something else to me.

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  3. Huh. My way of looking at this is far more...um...theological? Metaphysical?...in nature. But it's been sooo long since I've USED a nine-tier alignment tree that just writing it down here would end up turning into some crazy-long discussion touching on non-evil alignments as well. Think I probably need to take it over to my own blog.

    [I've been putting off a post or two on alignment for the last six months or so anyway]

    With regard to your post, I guess I'd lust have to say I disagree with this perspective (though it's not a BAD way to look at it)...for me, Law and Chaos are more shades "of man" (or, in D&D's case, "of sentients"): it is the extreme between civilization/order/organization and untouched wilderness. Between "the law" and lawlessness...or, I suppose, "the wilds." But the wilds are really "nothing," or rather the absence of law. I don't see it as an attempt to implement randomness, so much as an unshackling from an imposed worldview.

    But civilization taken "to the extreme" is not "evil;" it is simply mechanical. It may lack sympathy...as in the case of both the Javert and Bangladesh examples...but it does not necessarily fall into the realm of evil; at least, not as I define the term.

    I realize this brings up the question "is Satan/hell evil then, if they are simply serving a lawful purpose as God wills?" This gets into the metaphysics and it has to do with the fact that Lawfulness is on a HUMAN axis, not a divine axis. See what I mean about this being a long subject of discussion? Same goes for Chaos.

    Thanks for bringing up the discussion, man.
    : )

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    1. But can 'man' exist in untouched wilderness?

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  4. I like this characterization of the three shades of Evil, but it raises the question of what the corresponding shades of "Good" are about (not to mention the corresponding shades of "Neutral").

    Perhaps we could say that Good-Neutral-Evil simply defines a spectrum wherein the "Good" side is more informed by something like compassion or good faith or reasonableness, the "Evil" side is informed by something like literal-mindedness, monomania, bad faith, or unreasonableness, and Neutral is somewhere in between.

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    1. Having fairly recently read Iain McGilchrist's book, I want to put it as evil=left brain and good=right brain, but if you haven't read the book it won't make any sense to see it in that way.

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  5. I have felt for a long time that the degree to which anyone is good or evil depends on the amount of harm they are prepared to do in order to receive a benefit, weighed against the amount they are prepared to sacrifice in order to grant a benefit to someone else.

    There is an element of proportionality and necessity, such that one can steal a loaf of bread or a winter coat to save one's life without it being deemed an evil act. In other words, the defence of necessity applies.

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    1. Sure - I guess that is basically a consequentialist/utilitarian way of looking at it.

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  6. I prefer the original single axis alignment of just Law, Neutrality and Chaos. Good and Evil make more sense as aspects of Law and Chaos - Good being behavior in accordance with divine moral Law and Evil being behavior in violation of divine moral Law. Lawful Evil is an oxymoron; Evil is inherently Chaotic.

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    1. It depends on what you mean by 'chaotic' obviously, but I think it's hard to describe organised totalitarian regimes as chaotic - despite being evil. Or maybe you mean evil can only refer to individuals or individual acts rather than 'systems' or ideologies.

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  7. Lawfulness and chaos are concrete enough to define as a character trait; I interpret them as basically equivalent to the authoritarian <---> libertarian political scale with the fanatical extremes at both ends.

    Evil on the other hand can be defined in different ways by different cultures (obviously there's a lot of overlap, I can't think of any cultural reason to accept straight up murder for example), so I prefer to instead keep track of how PCs view/are viewed by the different factions in the world rather than trying to grapple with 2000+ year old questions about the nature of humanity. All that matters in terms of running the game is that fighting a war for example can be acting "for the greater good" for one faction, be an act of evil in the enemy's eyes, or be seen as a neutral "survival of the fittest" event by a third party. Even if the players' real-life, modern day morals will inevitably affect their decisions it's still a more useful metric to keep track of and provokes less interpretive debate.

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    1. It's really hard to fit the alignment system into modern political pigeonholes, I think. I think a lot of libertarians are very systems-oriented and not really all that chaotic, and a lot of authoritarians or traditionalists are very flexible in certain ways.

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  8. This is an old concept much debated, as you can imagine. I respect Gygax to the point of sympathising with his presentation of alignment, not as a moral fool's errand, but as a designation of war colours or standards, battle-standards. I am going to continue my blog at this point. Chainmail battle in the Judges Guild Wilderlands of High Fantasy. With play results.

    The AD&D universe at its highest level breaks down into nine armies. Not equally populated in any worldly reality but equally flamboyant, dramatic, extreme. As if nine freakish leaders determined the course of the human world and its universe. Believe me I could come up with a different ninefold moral-universe, and so could Tolkien, Eddison, Hodgson, Peake, Leiber, Wolfe, Vance, not to mention Lovecraft..It is a mistake in my view to try to join the dots (or chains) between fruitcake-demi-deities with extreme power, which are AD&D high level characters 15+, usually NPCS (I have only had players to the 11th lvl), and normal mortals.

    Regular folks (players), in my AD&D universe have an N/A alignment. This gives them freedom of action, because if they subscribed to one of Gygax's nine cosmic armies, they would be scolded by me for not playing according to alignment.

    I have looked into this sort of psychological partitioning deeply, for example arguing with people who can't see through the briggs myers notion. Human psychology is infinite.

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    1. The AD&D universe at its highest level breaks down into nine armies. Not equally populated in any worldly reality but equally flamboyant, dramatic, extreme. As if nine freakish leaders determined the course of the human world and its universe.

      I think that is the most interesting way to think about alignment and strongly reminiscent of Zelazny, Vance, Moorcock.

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  9. My quibble here is that if you have any kind of remotely even distribution of alignments then you have to have more banal and penny ante evil than people like the Joker. Quite obviously 1/9 of the population isn't made up of Jokers, not even 1/20. Most "CE" people are just penny ante douchebags, it's just that in desperate situations or when they think they can get away with it they can do some fucked up shit.

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    1. Is there any reason to think there should be an even distribution though?

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    2. I tend to think of penny ante douchebags as being Neutral Evil rather than Chaotic Evil. Basically self-centred and out for self-gratification but without any particular interest in rocking the boat.

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  10. But then you have the issue of making some alignments really rare which makes having a whole 1/9 of the alignment system dedicated to the sort of people we don't really see very much a bit of a waste. Think it's easier to think of average CE person as more Cartman than the Joker. The vast majority of evil people aren't running around murdering people left and right and blowing shit up, but when the shit really hits the fan or if they have a clear opportunity...

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    1. We don't see "Joker" CE people a lot humdrum life, but they're a significant part of any D&D game, particularly with demons, etc.

      I think it's very worthwhile for D&D purposes to have an alignment that represents "want to watch the world burn." We want to be able to distinguish Cartman-style jerks from monumentally evil monsters.

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    2. I agree with Ivan really. Yeah, there aren't many CE people, but there's a lot of CE monsters.

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    3. Also I think Cartman is totally NE.

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