Was Martin Luther King jr lawful good?

I'd argue so. The inherent idea of civil disobedience (and satyagraha, which influenced it) is that the protesters accept the legal consequence of their actions, and thus publicize the moral absurdity of the laws they are breaking.

As such, while people who practiced civil disobedience violated the law, they do so fully accepting and expecting the legal consequences of the law. I'd argue that this translates to a legal acceptance of the law in order to reveal its moral unacceptability. As such, the Civil Rights protesters conformed with the law even if they opposed it with their conscience. I'd say that's Lawful Good.

Seconded.

No, he was a nigger, and niggers are chaotic evil.

>>/pol/

...

Do you always respond to incredibly lazy bait?

Specifically J. Edna

I'd also add that the scopes trial is a similar example of a lawful good action, in that John Thomas Scopes knew he was breaking Tennessee state law when he taught evolution in school and was perfectly willing to pay the fine the court upon him for doing so, but acted nevertheless because it conformed with his moral beliefs. On the other side, William Jennings Bryan argued in favor of the law but paid Scopes' fine because he believed that Scopes acted in good faith. In that fashion, both of them are lawful good, in that they accepted the law and judgement pronounced, but acted in accordance with their moral beliefs.

It's like saying a paladin isn't lawful good because he was too busy saving some orphans and was late to return a library book. If he comes back, accepts his fine in good faith and pays it, he is still acting lawfully in that he fully accepts the consequences of his actions. The procedure for penalizing the violation of the law is also inherently part of the law. Being lawful is not keeping every single law, but in accepting legally imposed consequences once the law has been broken.

This to be quite honest

That cap is describing chaotic good in the last post. Disregarding the law always gets you shift towards chaotic.

In private a known womanizer and completely unfaithful to his wife. Though his public life is worthy of admiration.

Holy crap, only two pol-tier posts! And everyone else is being fairly neutral and staying on topic! Nicely done TG, I'm proud of you!

Anyway, I'll add my hat to Neutral Good. He preferred peaceful methods and rule of law, but he also saw riots as a means to an end and didn't entirely condemn them, even if he thought calm, passive assemblies were the better path.
A solid argument could be made for Lawful Good, but I think he was comfortable with a certain amount of disorder in the name of justice and benefit over trying to keep things as orderly and within the system as possible.

Minor chuckle.

There's more than one level of "law" in play at any given time. Disregarding one law in order to uphold a superseding one occurs with almost any action one can take, and disregarding one man's dictates in order to uphold a higher ranked official, constitution, or even divine will is still Lawful Good.

Are you always a faggot /pol/ack?

This nigga exposed his arguments well.
You don't have to be Dredd levels of law to be LG. Y'all need some AD&D in your lives to understand the alignment system.

Let me write up a helpful guide for you:
Chaotic Good: You don't give a rat's ass about the law or social expectations, you value freedom and what you consider good above all else.
Neutral Good: You recognise the law of the land, and agreements made by the society, but only follow them when it matches up with your own moral code.
Lawful Good: You hold tradition, hierarchy and the rule of law above all else, except when following it would make you directly do evil.

In LG world, there is no room for your personal views. You may be good before lawful, but if you think it's acceptable to disregard the law, you are neutral at best.

An example: you catch red handed a murderer who surrenders. The corrupt justice system would release that man without a sufficient punishment, what do you do?
Chaotic: take justice into your own hands and deliver whatever you feel is necessary.
Neutral: you value your own moral code before the rule of law, so punishing the perpetrator is acceptable if it is reasonable to expect that the justice system wouldn't act.
Lawful: you must let the rule of the land deal with it.

Another: A city has prohibited carrying weapons inside their walls. You have a shortsword you could conceal. What do you do?
Chaotic: take it in anyway if it's unlikely you'll get caught.
Neutral: depends on what your moral compass says. Do you feel like you have an unalienable right to carry arms? Taking it would be in character.
Lawful: you must give up your blade.

Conflict between law and chaos is entirely as valid as conflict between good and evil. Do you find following laws of the land a hassle? Roll NG or CG. You enjoy extra challenge and moral dilemmas? Roll LG.

>You don't have to be Dredd levels of law to be LG
Especially since Dredd is LN

>The moment when instead of filling a report for seeing a post breaking a global rule, you just look funny at the /pol/ack that spat it out so naturally.

Honest wake up call to janitors and mods.

Yes, but there are some people arguing that LG is LN + G, and that is wrong. LG is about 60% G + 40% L

I always saw it as:

LG: Justice Above All
NG: Morality Above All
CG: Liberty Above All

LN: Order Above All
TN:Peace Above All
CN: Self (or friends and self) Above All

LE: Control Above All
NE: Power Above All
CE: Destruction of All

MLK comes off as NG to me as well. Not lawful enough to be called Lawful good but not enough of a rebel to be Chaotic Good.

>Lawful Good: You hold tradition, hierarchy and the rule of law above all else, except when following it would make you directly do evil.

That's Lawful Neutral.
Also, you seem to have a really limited understanding of just how much personal views come into play when being lawful.

Laws are rarely simple and straight-forward. That's why there's judges, several tiers of judges in fact, who have to interpret the law to the best of their ability. Two judges, both who wish to uphold the law and both who wish to do good, can end up with complete opposite rulings on the same case because of their personal understanding and interpretation of the facts presented.

Your examples? That's largely just your personal point of view, and in fact they both contradict what the player's handbook says. A lawful good person respects LEGITIMATE authority, and a corrupt system or a system with severe shortcomings is hardly legitimate, and it would be contrary to the good aspect of their alignment to follow those laws if they could justify how the laws would directly result in some evil, which wouldn't be hard to do.

Lawful good simply means you are good and you work well with authority and respect governments and ruling bodies, not that you are some sort of automaton who has to listen to every crazy king and follow every short-sighted law or risk alignment shift.
You can have plenty of "challenges" and "moral dilemmas" without simply stripping the player of any ability to actually decide for themselves at what point they need to bend or break a law they disagree with in order to uphold another one. In fact, that's the only real way you actually have a dilemma.

NG bordering TN.

He certainly wasn't too honorable at times.

I like MLK so I'm going with Neutral Good, Lawful Good is just another form of evil.

That's a contradiction based on a misinterpretation.

Well, more a lack of loyalty to his wife and plagiarism.

If a person understands that laws are fallible, and people who uphold those laws can be corrupt, and use that to disregard the law and go with what your own concience says, you're no longer lawful.

Lawful good is desire to do good and respect the law, and lawful neutral is law above all else. A lawful good character would be justified in ignoring the law when it directly conflicts with his desire to do good. Otherwise, he is bound to follow the law. He may do his utmost to change the laws, but if he takes justice into his own hands, he's started on the path to chaotic.

Conversely, a lawful neutral character would follow the law even if it compelled him to do evil.

I mean with that argument someone could call Hitler LG.

He was. He had a desire to do good to his people, and he legitimately thought that jews were to blame for everything.

>If a person understands that laws are fallible, and people who uphold those laws can be corrupt, and use that to disregard the law and go with what your own conscience says, you're no longer lawful.

It sounds like you want to force anyone who plays a lawful character to have to play "lawful stupid". Understanding laws to be fallible is just being intelligent, not chaotic.

Imagine if you forced Chaotic people to follow the same level of extreme stupidity, and forced them to oppose every law they come into contact with, regardless of whether or not they agreed with it. That would be the very picture of Chaotic Stupid.

>A lawful good character would be justified in ignoring the law when it directly conflicts with his desire to do good
And, as simply as that, you've opened up a "loophole" that says "do what you feel is right, even if the law says not to."

A lawful character respects the law and does his best to uphold it, but that includes not being an idiot and actually thinking beyond the immediate "The King said X so I must do X." A lawful good character has the added benefit of using "I am good" to justify breaking the law more often, since when good and the law come into conflict, he's perfectly within his alignment to say "This law is a bad law, and while I'm reluctant to break any law, I'm even more reluctant to endorse laws that work against the forces of good and justice."

>It sounds like you want to force anyone who plays a lawful character to have to play "lawful stupid".
That's because being lawful is by definition being stupid.

>Understanding laws to be fallible is just being intelligent, not chaotic.
The further you move from the codified law, the less you are lawful. What was that not-lawful thing that wasn't quite chaotic again... Oh, right, neutral.

>And, as simply as that, you've opened up a "loophole" that says "do what you feel is right, even if the law says not to."
Yes, that's called being chaotic good.

>A lawful character respects the law and does his best to uphold it,
Agreed.
>but that includes not being an idiot and actually thinking beyond the immediate "The King said X so I must do X."
Not quite so. He would seek out the king to change the law, but in the meanwhile, would be compelled to follow it. I might allow it if the law was especially silly, like having to wear a yellow hat every weekday that starts with a T.
>A lawful good character has the added benefit of using "I am good" to justify breaking the law more often, since when good and the law come into conflict, he's perfectly within his alignment to say "This law is a bad law, and while I'm reluctant to break any law, I'm even more reluctant to endorse laws that work against the forces of good and justice."
Lawful enough to recognise the authority of law, but chaotic enough to ignore it when it is at odds with his own code. You just described Neutral Good.

>That's because being lawful is by definition being stupid.

I'm sorry, this discussion is over.
You don't understand alignments well enough to discuss them.

He was a real person and broadly good and D&D alignments are a completely useless construct for describing any real or fictional person's moral outlook.

How quaint. You're only missing a smug anime face and it'd be perfect.

You mean he wasn't?

Seriously. I recommend you read a bit more about alignments, or at the very least actually read what the various player handbooks have to say about them, before you try to discuss them again.

Be sure to look at the examples of various alignments they present, and also try to understand that you can be intelligent or stupid with any of the alignments.

Until then, enjoy.

...

>It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.

MLK is often portrayed as lawful good in modern media, but was actually at most neutral good, and given the above quote is more likely chaotic good.

>While as strict in their prosecution of law and order, characters of lawful good alignment follow these precepts to improve the common weal. Certain freedoms must, of course, be sacrificed in order to bring order; but truth is of highest value, and life and beauty of great importance. The benefits of this society are to be brought to all.

/pol/ alignment thread.

>truth is of highest value

If you don't have conflict between law and chaos, then you might as well not have the horizontal axis at all.

No, he was black.

Plus, you know. A cheater and a plagiarizer.

This thread doesn't even have 60 replies yet and I can almost hear someone dusting off a Masters thesis on Ethics.
This is why I come here.

Nope, there's non-whites in the good category. /pol/ would never do that.

Given that the Law-Chaos axis represents how strict one's own moral code is, MLK would fall somewhere between Lawful and Neutral.

On the Good-Evil axis, he's definitely good- he worked his ass off for the sake of others, shut down violent protestors, and was generally a pretty cool guy. Shame that so many people ignore what he's said.

So yes, maybe LG, maybe NG.

>Episode
When does this meme go?

See, i can see it both ways.

On the one hand, he promoted unlawfulness in certain circumstances.
On the other, he was working to change the law for the better, if he was just NG i feel it would have been more likely to be changing peoples circumstances rather than the legal situation regarding said circumstances.

The only thing I disagree with about this is the part about this is the part about killing bandits because of your duty to the dead. I suppose it's slightly different in a universe where afterlives and resurrection explicitly and demonstrably exist, but even so, your duty as LG is to serve life. If it's your judgement that those bandits are just surrendering so they can live to murder more innocents, you would be justified in killing them. If you think you can bring them back to the path of life, then you should spare them. Either way, you make your decision and you live with the consequences.

>Luffy
>lawful good
That guy don't give two fucks about the law.
His motives are chaotic neutral as fuck, he just doesn't rob people to achieve them.
This is the same guy who spent the majority of the Arlong Park story arc napping because he didn't have a single fuck to give about some shitty town's fishman problem until the conflict affected a personal friend.

You're mistaking laws for Law. Law is a more abstract concept, along the lines of justice or order. Law is the thing that laws are written in order to attain, at least in theory. In reality, laws are written by people, with individual desires and biases. Over time, individual biases compound and the laws begin to deviate from the ideal of Law. Being Lawful is not the same as following laws, especially in a society where time and politicking have trusted the laws, and people have forgotten that Law is the true goal. Being Lawful means ensuring that everyone is allowed their fair chance.

It's not Lawful Good to smite people without giving them ample opportunity to understand their mistakes and change their ways, and it's not Lawful Evil to be elected to a position as a legislator and have a law passed that says it's illegal to have hair and everyone that doesn't wax their head shall be executed. Lawful Good is giving people a chance to do the right thing by showing them that it's possible to have hope even in the darkest hours. A paladin's purpose isn't to murder anyone that's made a mistake or done the wrong that, it's to stand firm in the face of evil and remind everyone that it's never too late or too hopeless to do the right thing. Lawful Evil is about giving others their fair chance to be in power, so when you have dominion over them it's because you're simply better than they are. Demons are very powerful creatures, but can be bound by humans of significantly less innate power if they are able to perform the rituals exactly correct. Everyone has a chance to prove themselves worthy.

Mostly.

Question - to what degree can someone deviate from the "core" of the alignment while still being of that alignment? Does, for example, a lapse of ethics in one area (i.e. infidelity) cause someone to not be considered lawful, or can you be LG if you are, to use the percentage system NwN tried to show, 76% lawful, 87% good?

Racial modifiers mean the most Good-aligned he can be is either Chaotic Good -disrupting proper societal order for quasi-good reasons- or Lawful Neutral.

No, he was black

Not actually being American all I know is he was heavily involved in the civil rights movement.

What were the FBI investigating him for?

Alignment isn't all of the things you've ever done added together, it's what you're about to do next. If you did something awful in the past it doesn't mean that you're tainted for all eternity. Alignment shifts aren't something that abruptly change with a single action, assuming you're not awful at roleplaying. If you're playing a saint and all of a sudden you decide to go murder everyone in an elementary school, that's just horribly out of character. Alignment shifts happen slowly as you convince yourself that it's not a big deal if it's just this once, or this one other time, or maybe something else that's not really *that* much worse, until you've sunk so far that you're a completely different person and you're honestly not sure where you went wrong.

If fidelity and honesty are important traits to you, and you've found yourself in a situation where you've cheated and are continuing to lie about it, then you're on your way to shifting in alignment. The actual shift happens when it ceases to bother you and becomes just a thing that you do by rote.

The civil rights movement was seen as a threat to the status quo. Also, MLK opposed the war in Vietnam.

For being involved in the civil rights movement. Governments exist to oppress people, so refusing to be oppressed is seditious.

Well, enforcing a system of laws and order does exist for the primary purpose of both organizing people on a large scale than a basic tribal unit, as well as suppressing the elements of the population that actively harm the over all structure.

So yeah, actually.

This is actually an interesting question in-setting, as both St. Augustine's ruling and the Common Law are derived from Christianity yet in this instance come into conflict anyway. I'd say that they're different interpretations of LG (or if you're more cynical, NG for the case of the common law).

Er, LN in the case of the common law*

Don't forget his own staunch moral code; he was completely against biological weapons, passionate about the rights of animals (except gypsies) and did everything he could to prevent the deaths of civilians he wasn't horribly racist towards.

Admittedly, towards the end of the war, as he grew increasingly desperate, this did change, but that's an interesting character arc for you.

I very much doubt it, but I submit that we can't actually know. We're living too close to a torrent of propaganda about what a saint he was from people who are hardly neutral on the subject. It's like living in imperial China and hearing about the Emperor's poor departed father: was he a good man? Hell if I know, but you bet your arse the story is going to say he was lawful good. Contrary opinions are pretty much all Daily Mail-level of repute, and again, it's hard to tell actual quality of reporting because they'd be in the doghouse regardless of whether they did investigative reporting or made shit up and flung it.

If I had to take a guess, it would be at Chaotic Neutral.He wanted one particular law changed for the benefit of himself and his group, he wasn't going to go through the normal law-amending process, nor was he going to be a thug about it, but he hung out with people doing both and hint-hinted that you can deal with me or you can deal with my little friend here.

>One particular law

Martin Luther King Jr campaigned against a wide variety of unfair laws and the Civil Rights campaign was always intended to expand into an umbrella movement for all disadvantaged people - notably, his next project after the focus on race was going to be focusing on poverty and economic inequality. Yes, part of that was that his own community was strongly hit by poverty, but part of that was also motivated by, as far as we can tell from the information he presented, a genuine concern that great inequality in wealth was harmful to the foundation of an equitable, lawful society. The Civil Rights movement was a vast, sweeping thing with many goals.

>Does, for example, a lapse of ethics in one area (i.e. infidelity)
I think it is a pretty good deal and speaks some of the character.

We can say, sure it's just one thing, but we don't know that much about other people really.
We may know that 4 out of a 100 things and then when 1 of those 4 things is pretty unlawful then you have to take that into account for judging the rest.

>Admittedly, towards the end of the war, as he grew increasingly desperate, this did change, but that's an interesting character arc for you.
If you're not lawful good as a youth, you have no heart.
If you're not lawful neutral as an adult, you have no brain.

More like if you are lawful at all, you have no brain.

>I would agree with St. Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all.

Funnily enough, I don't think St. Augustine would agree with MLK very much, because St. Augustine was a shitlord who'd get howled down for racist dogwhistles if he repeated today what he said a little later in the same book about being unjust.

> "Can it ever be unjust that the wicked should be unhappy and the good happy, or that a well-disciplined people should be self-governing, while an ill-disciplined people should be deprived of this privilege? (...) Men derive all that is just and lawful in temporal law from eternal law. For if a nation is justly self-governing at one time, and justly not self-governing at another time, the justice of this temporal change is derived from that eternal principle by which it is always right for a disciplined people to be self-governing, but not a people that is undisciplined."

Look at that. Fucking look at it. Now you see where several centuries of colonial rhetoric about savages came from.

I understand being contrarian to "liberal" topics is all the rage these days, but MLK was more or less exactly the man everyone says he was. He had some pretty major marital issues, but that has very little to do with his civil rights campaigning still being a legitimate cause for good.

Found the chaos cultist.

>white people
>neutral good
>not lawful evil

Seems pretty sensible to me my good man.

But honor is a factor of law, you can still be good and not honorary. Ex: Robin Hood, stealing from the corrupted rich to feed the poor. Good? Definitly.Honorable? Definitly not. Robbery isn't something honorable anyone lawful would do, not before everyones eyes (ahem LE capitalism cartels), a cruel LE knight can be honored as well, honor is imo more factor of law than good. MLK is NG imo.

>civil rights campaigning still being a legitimate cause for good.

Nnnnope. Civil rights campaigning switched one flavor of micromanagement for another: segregation used to be mandatory by law, then became forbidden by law. At no point was free association permissible so that those who wanted to be segregated could do that, and those who wanted to be integrated could do that.

To use a less emotionally charged metaphor, if the law says "everyone shall have prunes for breakfast" and you get it changed to "everyone shall have sandwiches for breakfast", this may be an improvement overall, but it's still totalitarian bullshit. A legitimate cause for good would be getting rid of this category of law entirely. As it is, MLK falls firmly into Lawful Neutral: he made the bureaucracy slightly better, but it's still a bureaucracy unnecessarily dictating the terms of people's lives.

The original civil rights movement was mainly to repeal laws that dictate who can do what and where, not to reestablish new laws forcing others to comply with new laws. Free association is good, but it's an entirely different issue than the civil rights movement. Free association is a libertarian issue, while the civil rights was a humanitarian one.

No, that's not how it works. Free association by individuals is still permissible. Nobody's making you be friends with people of different races, or spend time with them.

All right, I can't say this is an exact count since I'm not sure when someone is explicitly in favor of an answer and when they're just arguing a point for some reason, but a rough count gives:

NG 8
LG 4
CG 2
CE 1
CN 1
LN 1

Plus a couple of half answers ranging from LG/NG to CG/LN.

To everyone saying he is good I propose the following question.

Equality is impossible, people are not equal so should not be treated equally. To deny this is to believe in this is to deny evolution. Someone who lies to people about people being equal (racial and sexual differences, it's all the same) and making them chase something that is not only impossible but destructive (Can't make a midget a giant, can cut off a giant's legs though) cannot be good. Equality is ultimately communist in nature which is basically genocide in a can for any who attempt it.

As such we have the question "Is telling people to aim for equality an evil alignment?"

In b4 calls of edgy and people can't defend equality with rational arguments.

Why not make the conflict be about how stupid chaos is and how it has to defy all laws instead?

Or, you can appreciate that both sides need to be relatively equal in regards to their good and bad points, so as to not essentially force people towards a particular alignment because of your personal preferences?

*>To deny this is to believe in this is to deny evolution
Should be
>To deny this you must deny evolution.

Chaos doesn't care about laws, they might as well not exist as far as they're concerned. All that matters is concience.

Actively seeking to bring about a collapse of all structure may be a CN thing, but not necessarily.

confirmed for never having visited /pol/

They are racist but not against all non-whites. Most racists couldn't care less about other races. They just want them to stay where they are and leave them be White/Asian in peace.

ur an edgy fag

The problem with your philosophical presentation is that you are advocating not only a might makes right policy, but total and complete anarchic breakdown of all systems.

The reason that 'treat everyone equally' came into existence was to stem the tide of fruitless and socially destructive progroms that blood feuds and anarchy insists be the norm. By treating everyone equally whether or not they are in fact equal one avoids disproportionate reactions to minor infractions and it makes possible a system of justice and laws that are not administered by the strong, but by the fair.

This has failed, of course, not because of true inequality, but because of oligarchy.

>No, that's not how it works. Free association by individuals is still permissible. Nobody's making you be friends with people of different races, or spend time with them.

You are either stupid or dishonest. Imagine going back in time to segregated America and saying "Free association by individuals is still permissible. Nobody's preventing you being friends with people of different races, or spending time with them." That would be missing the point completely, right?

My complaint, now as then, is at the institutional level not the individual level. It used to be illegal to (for example) run or manage a mixed-race baseball team. It's now illegal to create or advertise a single-race neighborhood. Certain hiring patterns used to be illegal, now other hiring patterns are illegal.
Then as now, people try pretty fucking hard to get around such laws. In the past, baseball managers would hire blacks for other jobs such as janitoring and "suddenly" realize they were short a batter and impress the "janitor" into "temporary emergency" service. Property owners today will advertise their rents with codewords, "good schools" being common, and use systems such as black-a-block to minimize diversity.

Again: this may be an improvement overall, but it's still totalitarian bullshit. Hence Lawful Neutral.

Because that's a childish interpretation of chaos.

Chaos defies order because it can, not because it has to. Chaos canchose to follow laws. It just doesn't have to. Forcing someone to not follow laws is as anethema to the concept of chaos as the act of following all laws would be.

Chaos is an individualist's doctrine. "Do as you will, save it harm none but thyself," would be a much more accurate interpretation of chaos.

Equivocation. Making everyone physically and mentally equal isn't possible, and isn't a goal we should reach. Making everyone equal under the eyes of the law, and giving everyone equal opportunities to succeed through their merits or fail through their flaws are both possible, albeit difficult, and both desirable.

>he was completely against biological weapons

That's easy when they're still in their infancy and would require massive investements to get anywhere semi-useful.

>Chaos doesn't care about laws,

No, Chaos opposes laws and Law.

>Actively seeking to bring about a collapse of all structure may be a CN thing, but not necessarily.

But actively deciding that you're blindly not going to follow any laws is just a Chaotic thing, the same level of stupid as blindly following all the laws.
If you're going to force one to be stupid, might as well force both of them, and Chaotic Stupid is a thousand times dumber than Lawful Stupid.