Among many awesome books that were gifted to me yesterday (upon the occasion of my 44th birthday), “Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy: Read and Gain Advantage on All Wisdom Checks” has grabbed my attention most fully in relation to roleplaying.
Coming, as it does, on the back of a final decision about D&D5e, the book challenges me to rethink the way I apply Alignment in my gaming.
Most especially, the book wonderfully helps us to consider what we might mean by “Good” and “Evil”, and how to apply them as a GM.
Von Hildebrand’s Evil
In his article, “Is Anyone Actually Chaotic Evil?”, Neil Musset proposes that the most playable model of Evil is that of Dietrich von Hildebrand. Without getting into the why of this (which you can explore by reading the article yourself), let’s outline the practical upshot of this idea.
In short, ethics is about motivation. Most of the facts around us, from the colour of my chair to the action of my typing, are essentially neutral. They have, “nothing that can move us, motivate us to act, or make us feel joy, sorrow, hope, or fear” (D&D&P, Musset, p51).
These facts around us become important to us in two flavours: good and bad. Cleaning out the rats and eating a bacon sandwich are as important to me this morning, “but with a different character”. Good is positive importance, bad is negative importance. Can you guess which is which?
For von Hildebrand, the key is what he calls the “categories of importance”. There is more than one type of good and bad:
- Simple pleasure and pain: important because it’s what I like or dislike.
- Things that are really good or bad for me: regardless of how I feel about them, some things are just good for me – like, I am repeatedly told, eating my “five a day” instead of bacon sandwiches.
- Good that is specifically associated with people: that people have a value, “a worth, even apart from my wants and needs.”
You are free to evaluate your actions using any of the three categories of good. Evil, however, is using the pleasure scale to evaluate people.
Von Hildebrand believes that the purest motive is love. The morally good person also enjoys doing good. And doing good, “is a love response to the value of people around me.”
In simple terms, then, playing an evil character is easy to understand: at some point, that evil character made a choice to place some other ambition over the value of the other people around them. Repeating that choice steadily blinds the evil person to the value of other people.
Good vs. Evil
Good becomes interesting with this approach: the Good characters are concerned with the value of others, and act lovingly towards others, over all other ambitions. Thus, my Lawful Good Paladin can follow the law of the land in a manner which is about promoting the welfare of others as valuable beings in their own right. Should a conflict between Lawfulness and Goodness arise, that which is Good will be of higher priority. Nice.
As a GM, I can characterise Chaotic Evil as that which promotes the betrayal of relationships for another ambition – which can be one of many options – as well as a willingness to ignore the Law in doing so. Ultimately, people become a means to that character’s own pleasures or ambitions.
But what about Neutrals?
Arendt’s Evil
The nice thing about this article is that it reviews a range of philosophical approaches to the question of Good and Evil, seeking the most playable. Musset ends with applying Hannah Arendt’s view of evil as a means to roleplay Neutrals.
For Arendt, the above idea of Evil is what she calls “wickedness”. For her, true “evil” exists in those people who live the unexamined life and who never give the time to reflect on their actions:
“The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their mind to be either good or bad.” (Arendt, quoted by Musset, p56)
This approach leads to a life of convention, simply living up to the code of conduct given by your society. What better description could we have for the Neutral? Simply plodding along, minding your own business, and never questioning whether the moral expectations of your society are morally good or evil?
Making More of Morality
For me, this provides a practical means by which I can roleplay (and recognise the roleplaying of my players) in relation to Good and Evil:
- Good folk are those who act for the welfare of other people, valuing people as distinct from other things.
- Evil folk are those who choose, to a greater or lesser degree, to put other ambitions ahead of other people.
- Neutral folk simply fail to consider the morality of their actions, following the conduct expected of their society.
Good and Evil have some playable meaning here. They also make Alignment more important as a challenge in roleplaying: if I am Good, then I must act as such; if Evil, then I get to choose and pursue my higher ambition.
This sounds like a lot of fun. It also gives me a means by which I can hang the GM’s task of presenting moral dilemmas as spice to the adventure. But that’s another post for another time.
Game on!
