Alignment thread? Alignment thread

Alignment thread? Alignment thread.

Where exactly would this guy fall? Sacrificing a few million to save billions, was he right?

Ends don't justify means where murder is involved.

Neutral Evil?

Lawful Evil, I'd say. He'll save the world and maintain order, even if he has to murder millions to do it.

Reminder that DnD was only suppose to have chaotic and lawful but then they tacked on nonsensical shit for no reason.

There's no gray area in this? Sacrificing millions of innocents to save billions is never okay?

Say a captain of a ship seals off a quarter of the ship from keeping a lethal plague from killing everyone on board, technically murder unless you wish to argue semantics. If he is indeed the smartest man, who are we to question with our simplistic ideas of morality?

I don't agree with the lawful part, nearly everything he did was outside of law. Just because you maintain order because it's convenient to your plans doesn't mean you are lawful.

I'm not even sure you can call him evil. This is a sacrifice a few to save the many scenario.

>Liking 1e over AD&D
What the fucking hell user

What about Galactus?

Assuming he is truthful about his motivations, he's Lawful Good, but executing his plan would've made him fall if he were a Paladin - not because it changed his alignment, but because it was an Evil act. Still assuming he's truthful, he would find that an acceptable cost.

Quick question, but does anyone find it hard to play a chaotic character that doesn't windup random or selfish?

Apples to watermelons user, everyone knows in a ship the risks involved and no it would not be murder as it would be the plague that is killing the crew. That is totally different that mind fucking a city to death with the overgrown science project that you made for a chance, I repeat a chance, and maybe stopping the cold war.

Also someone can be the smartest but lack wisdom in his actions.

Motivation means nothing, after all hell and good intentions make wonderful bed fellows. If he was truly lawful good he would have found another way instead of killing the city.

It's easier if you go with the system of
Lawful = Supports the idea of something being "above", like kings, gods, beliefs, etc
Chaotic = Against anything being treated more than its plain nature.

True Neutral force of nature

>>Deliberately killing an entire city on the entirely slim chance that it might accomplish *anything positive* is directly comparable to enforcing quarantine.

Chaotic Plot.

I think it's really interesting that Rorschach agrees with Truman's dropping of the bomb, but not Veidt's.

>lawful means following literal laws
When will this meme end?

In my amateur analysis, I'd imagine he agrees with the Bomb because it's a decision based on the kind of reasoning Rorschach operates with. You want to hurt someone, so you hurt them. It's straightforward. You could (and he probably would) even call it "honest".

Veidt was killing the people he wanted to help. People that considered him a friendly. I figure in Rorschach's head, that does not fucking compute. Killing the enemy is what you do. Killing your friends is murder. Lying about it is worse.

There is also the fact that dropping the bomb occurred in the past. Rorschach simply applied a moral judgment to the action in line with his own beliefs, he didn't have to actually contemplate the moral ramifications personally.

Nothing ends Adrian, nothing ever ends.

>who are we to question with our simplistic ideas of morality?
Who else but we? We can only try him with a jury of our peers, since he is the apex he has none.
Adrian was operating on the feeling that something, anything needed to be done to prevent utter annihilation. He hedged his bets on a radical idea and ran with it. The sheer relief he has when it looks like it works is incredible. However, even if he saved more lives than he took, he still subjected the rest of humanity to fear of a nonexistent threat. They're going to be living every day wondering and worrying about when the second squid is happening. He just replaced one kind of fear with another, untraceable kind. The Doomsday Clock means nothing now, it will always be nearly time for the next invasion for humanity. All Adrian did was break the watch, suspending humanity in the fear. For however long, who can say?

His actions though, were motivated by good intentions surely, but the means and outcome were unnecessarily cruel.

Alignments are stupid, because of situations like this, and in-fact one of the POINTS of Watchmen was to explore the contrast between narrative/mythological morality in a narrative/mythological world and post-modern morality in a post-modern world. It is the sudden awakening to post-modern morality that breaks many of the mortal heroes, The Comedian being the strongest example. Dr M is awakened forcibly and artificially to the truest and a-temporal form of this understanding, and it makes him stop caring. The whole thing is an exploration on how one can maintain an ethical center in a world that doesn't come down and hand you one on a silver punnet-square.

If you must, he was post-modern Neutral Good, and Rorschach ruined everything by being Mythological Lawful Good. Granted, relative to Mythological morality, post-modern Neutral Good looks like Lawful Evil (a-la mad scientist) but that's kind of the point of the story. However, relative to the post-modern world, mythological Lawful Good looks like Short-Sighted Stupid. If you're going to ask "who's to say who's right?" just look at who saved the world, and who fucked it up in the final panel, damming the world to a nuclear apocalypse without Dr M to save them.

>Implying Adrian didn't fuck it up

The whole point was that the super heroes of Watchmen were people that tried to use force and violence to change the world while failing to make any actual change within themselves. They're post WW2 America and the parallel is drawn between Adrian and Nixon. They both want to plow under a few to save many, but both are revealed to be dicks because they don't trust normal humans to solve their own problems without coming in to save them like violent gods from on high.

Remember the scene in New York right before the squid hit? Remember how our real life non-superhero world survived the cold war?

The problem in Watchmen is not the humans. The humans were starting to come together to solve things.

The problem is the superhumans.

Adrian didn't bring peace anywhere as firm or lasting as real life did. The USSR still exists because of his actions. Think about how fucked up that is. No glasnost. Just a tense peace waiting for the next shoe to drop.

He made a peace funded on fear of a fictional threat. A religious fear of which he is the first high priest.

Adrian is Vietnam. He's LBJ and Nixon. He's the guy that promises if you just do this one violent act and lie about its cause and effect then you'll have only good things.

He's the lie of the superhero. That if you just do this one violent act things will be okay. Violence is the answer!

But the solution isn't to solve violence with violence. Again, remember New York. The normie supporting cast were coming together to stop two guys from fighting and then Dr. Doom drops a squid on them.

Alan Moore isn't even subtle about it and people still for some reason dick ride Adrian.

But then again people dick ride Dr. Doom. I guess there's something appealing about a big asshole that promises to solve all your problems if you just do what he says.

The point was that Rorschach and Ozy were both bug-fuck in their own special way. They were both "evil".

They both try to apply comic book solutions to complex real life problems. The whole point of Watchmen was that doing to was dangerous and wrong.

Rorschach applies comic book hero solutions. Ozy applies comic book super villain solutions. They're two sides to the same DON'T DO THIS EVER coin.

What is the lawful good solution to the trolley problem?

Except the comic itself demonstrates that literally everything Veidt does works.

>Perhaps I'll start carrying a gun
>Dan and Laurie literally living under assumed identities with the implication that their next in line like how Ozy killed everyone else involved with project squid
>"Nothing Ever Ends"
>The pirate comic

Read between the lines user. The peace is a smokescreen. It's as hollow as any promise built on a giant violent lie.

Like American dropped atom bombs on Japan.
I am sorry I killed this thread.

The discussion's way ahead of you user.

Nicely put

>Since he is the apex he has none

Remember this is a satirical piece. Moore shows that none of the characters are beyond the flaws of humanity. Even Dr. M who claims to be so beyond humanity has moments where you can tell he's just as human and emotional as everyone else.

And remember how the comic treated that with the Hiroshima Lovers and cold war anxiety and Dan having dreams about nuclear destruction.

Did the atom bombs save the world? Did they bring peace? How about the giant blue walking talking super-atom bomb? Did he bring peace?

Did the comic ever show big violent acts resulting in lasting peace? Its almost as if its a theme...

Do you think changing atom bombs to super-squid will save the world?

Grab the train and fly away with it.

As much as I like Watchmen, you can tell it's meant to express a certain kind of political view.

Nuclear arms have done nothing but be instruments of peace since their creation. Not enough people in power are anywhere near dumb enough for them to ever be used, and they've prevented large scale military conflict between world powers for more than half a century. I don't see that changing any time soon, ignoring potential future technological developments.

>Nuclear arms have done nothing but be instruments of peace since their creation.
In this case so did the Squid.

>Lawful Deontological

You don't touch the lever. Some things are not made for humans to choose. Do what you can to slow the train down and help the survivors.

>Lawful Consequential

You pull the lever. One for many is only right. Its a hard decision but one that has to be made.

>Lawful Good

You know, I think the morality system is fine as long as you keep it as a heuristic. "Are you a good guy or a bad guy?" That's good and evil.

"Are you like Obi Wan, Luke, or Han Solo? A knight, a guy in between, or a Robin Hood guy" That's Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic good.

They break down when you bring philosophy class problems into the mix because they aren't design to be complex. They're to give you a quick and easy understanding of how the character generally behaves.


I sort of agree, but I'm speaking to the themes of the book. Within the themes of Watchmen nukes are bad.

They dropped nukes on a country that had no remaining military infrastructure and was incapable of operating outside its own territorial waters.

They already had de facto peace when they decided to genocide a couple of cities.

They wouldn't have nuked them without good cause. They wouldn't have nuked two without better.

The first was to ensure that Japan would surrender on their terms with no possibility of having to go to Operation Downfall. The second was to prove to Russia they had more than one nuke, so they wouldn't have Operation Unthinkable on their hands.

>Operation Downfall
>Operation Unthinkable

Those codenames are fucking sick. They're the kind of thing supercorps name their covert ops in Shadowrun.

>Remember the scene in New York right before the squid hit? Remember how our real life non-superhero world survived the cold war?
I do, but you know who didn't..... Alan Moore writing the story before the cold war ended.

Those are names of literally entire war plans, so of course they get the coolest names. As you progress down the scale the codenames get progressively more complicated and less cool.

Pretty sure they only dropped the second bomb because the japs didn't immediately call for peace.

Because chaos is inherently a disregard for societal expectation witch is the driving force of altruistic behavior.

They were getting there.

It's kind of up in the air, the why of it, but it ultimately just boils down to them having a second one handy. They only had two ready to go, and they used both in extremely short succession.

>Sacrificing millions of innocents to save billions is never okay?
The problem is his whole thing was built on chance.

There's a big difference between for example shooting a guy who is about to kill 10 people, and sacrificing people for some complex plot that might not work out.

Gorbachev already took over in 1985. Tensions were easing between US and USSR in spite of Rocky IV.

I think Moore was making the point super heroes ramped up tensions in contrast to the real world. USSR was still around but glasnost was starting. Compare that to the Watchmen world.

Yet the country still refused to surrender, tha's clearly all Americas fault and they should have invaded the country sacrificing their own citizens.

Or should they have left a country they were at war with alone to rebuild and strike at them?

There's no solution to that problem, war is shitty.

Maybe you weren't alive, but people were still scared shitless. Maybe it wasn't a valid fear, but the cultural consciousness that birthed Watchmen was not one of comfort that we had safely averted the cold war.

I'm one of the first to admit that japanese culture is mental, but their military was 'stuff of legends' level crazy. The country wouldn't ever have rebuilt, it would either have gone into civil revolt or turned into a more starving version of North Korea. They did not have the infrastructure, agriculture or natural resources to rebuild even as far as their pre-war barely-a-credible-threat levels.

>Scar.
>Not Lawful Evil as well

He wouldn't have done everything in secret with the Hyenas if he was Chaotic, he'd have just done it himself in front of everyone and killed anyone else who argued with him if he was CE.

You want a CE cat? Just post a picture of LITERALLY ANY HOUSECAT. SERIOUSLY.

>Just post a picture of LITERALLY ANY HOUSECAT. SERIOUSLY.

You trifle with powers you are not meant to understand, human.

I'M ON TO YOU SLASHENFURHER!

A few million deaths to save the lives of billions and the future of the species is a relatively small price to pay if I'm honest.

It's not an easy decision to make, but in such dire circumstances it is the best option.
And it sucks for the individuals that die, but it's the best choice for the species.
Going extinct is a lot worse.

That seemed less like respect for the rules and more like him and the hyenas not having much of a chance against the pride.

By D&D alignments clearly LE
By real world morals, he did the wrong (and stupid) thing for (what he thought) were the right reasons.

Lawful has nothing to do with following laws you complete and utter waste of oxygen

Lawfulness is an almost unquestioning belief in hierarchy and authority, be it bureaucratic, monarchic or theist (i.e. religious morality). Your life is a meme if you can't wrap your head around that.

>Your life is a meme if you can't wrap your head around that.

I laughed really hard at that.

...

...

Spy and Sniper should be where Engineer is. Engineer should be on the same square as Demo.

The chart was obviously made by a Pyrofag which is, by association, the same as a ponyfag.

A lesser evil is still evil

They dropped the first because despite Nihon being unable to maintain an agressive war footing, they were not surrendering. They were still trying to spout no surrender slogans and to the death propaganda. Any attempt to invade under those circumstances would have lead to even more dead civilians. Orders had been given to the army air corps to continue bombing with all available weapons until the Japanese surrendered or they were ordered to stop to prepare for the invasion. After the first, another ultimatum went out to the Imperial government, that we would continue until they surrendered. The second bomb hitting and the day after declaration of war from the Soviet Union broke their backs. At that point they finally surrendered. And saved millions of civilian lives.

>The country wouldn't ever have rebuilt, it would either have gone into civil revolt or turned into a more starving version of North Korea. They did not have the infrastructure, agriculture or natural resources to rebuild even as far as their pre-war barely-a-credible-threat levels.
Did the American government at the time have reliable knowledge of any of that?

So superheros are a complicated allegory for nukes?

Alignment charts were a mistake.

They did, it just wasn't a total enough surrender because they wanted to keep the Emperor in power and protect him from prosecution.

Then MacArthur let them do that anyway later, despite their complete surrender, because he was a weeb.

The second bomb was mostly aimed at the Soviets.

>The second bomb was mostly aimed at the Soviets
Pretty sure it was aimed at Nagasaki

I know Americans and aiming are a common joke but that's a hell of a distance out.

This whole thread has reminded me of the DS9 episode where Dr. Bashir teams up with the group of genetically engineered autists to work on plans for the war with the Dominion.
Eventually, they do the math and determine that it is statistically impossible for the Federation to win, and therefore the only morally viable option to save most of the lives in the Federation would be to surrender.
They confirm the math and Bashir is so wrapped up with the numbers and math that he desperately tries to convince Sisko to give up the war until Sisko snaps him out of it and he remembers that life is about more than math, numbers, and optimal scenarios and that there are reasons to fight, struggle, suffer, and die that go beyond survival.

You can't just do enough math to equal out the equation so that murdering your friends and a city of relatively innocent people is suddenly a good thing.
He is Neutral Evil.

Really it's just like every other alignment chart ever, some characters are hamfistedly shoved into boxes for the sole reason that those ones aren't filled yet.

>What is the lawful good solution to the trolley problem?

Throw yourself on the tracks before the trolley gets to the junction.

The great thing about that episode is that when Weyoun and Dukat are discussing future potential rebellions to the Dominion after conquering the Federation, Weyoun believes it'll arise on Earth, just like in the GE autists' prediction.

So he plans to completely wipe out the entire population of Earth to nip that in the bud, which would completely fuck up the GE Autists' plans for eventually making a comeback after the surrender plan.

Too bad they were too incapable of putting themselves in the mindset of their enemies to see that coming, making the entire foundation of their theories fundamentally flawed.

I don't know if I made that connection when I watched it.
I just wanted to put Jeff Goldbloom's character from Jurassic Park in a room with them and watch the ensuing verbal explosion.

that depends on whether or not the captain brought the plague on board.

because the ironic part of ozy's peace through genocide plan was that he basically the one who escalated tensions between the US & russia in the first place

In RPGs I like to pretend reality is moral, or karma is real so you will.

To actively kill one innocent no matter what you perceive the outcome will be, will cause a shift the universe to evil and cause it to become worse. Any perception to the contrary is based on your small horizon, have faith.

I'll leave uncaring universes and the fundamental shit show of the human condition to RL.

Alignment is irrelevant, he considers it his right to manipulate and control the lives of others through indirect means as he considers himself above his own kin.

Kill him, burn his memory from the world, find the next one. This kind cannot be tolerated.

Either answer can be justified in a Lawful Good paradigm. All that matters is how far in advance you make the decision, whether or not you consult a higher authority to make that decision, and/or whether or not your personal attachments to any of the endangered people affects your decision. And which of those three things makes a difference to whether or not you're Lawful Good is something that will vary from person to person. This is why the alignment system is terrible. Its entire function is to describe characters, so the very fact that alignment arguments happen so often means that the alignment system has failed.

The Federation won the Dominion War, so obviously it wasn't a statistically impossible outcome, so the problem here is that the genetically engineered autists are bad at their job. Also, why would a rebellion against the Dominion be more likely to succeed than the Federation itself, with significantly more resources, communication, and transportation capabilities?

>The Federation won the Dominion War, so obviously it wasn't a statistically impossible outcome, so the problem here is that the genetically engineered autists are bad at their job.
More that they were overconfident in their assessment of the variables.
They did not anticipate the Cardasian rebellion or Odo and the Changeling plague, among other things.
Or the Dominion slaughtering them to prevent such a rebellion.
>But it should work on paper!

>Also, why would a rebellion against the Dominion be more likely to succeed than the Federation itself, with significantly more resources, communication, and transportation capabilities?
More likely to, in a generation or so, without devastating casualties.

It's a "can't see the forest for the trees" deal.

By AD&D rules he is the definition of Chaotic Good.
His goals and desires are benevolent, and he gives not a shit what others think about his methods.

Try to derail it by throwing it as it's passing the switch, if it multitrack drifts and kill everyone ... oh well, you tried.

The problem with these toy morality problems is they assume perfect information, binary choices and oracle prediction. None of these ever occur.

Philosophy always leads me to the same conclusion, philosophers are wankers.

By BoED rules he's evil.

Good is not utilitarian. Good is not about making smart tradeoffs, minimizing effort needed to reach a goal and making acceptable sacrifices. Good does not accept compromise on it's beliefs in order to make the solution easier. That's pragmatism, not idealism.

Good is about always employing the Right means to the Right end, regardless of their difficulty or apparent hopelessness of success. In the mind of one who is Good, a victory won by violating one's principles is tantamount to defeat. A Good man may be forced by circumstance to accept such a "victory", but only if the alternative is unacceptable and there's no time to take a different route, and only after putting forth their utmost effort towards solving it properly. Further, they'll consider it a failure and hate that they were forced to.

Ozzy was not Good. Good would do everything in their power to calm tensions through diplomatic channels and social works, mending feuds and building bridges. They would do everything in their power to DIRECTLY halt the outbreak of war. That might mean intercepting launch orders, sabotaging weapons, falsifying intelligence, or any number of other seemingly unsavory acts.

But Good does not preempt. It does not act on conjecture. It does not assume. It speaks of the future but acts on what is happening now.

Good does not seek to convince action based on circumstances. It does not require or seek to create events that illustrate it's point. It does not appeal to fear or cultural inertia. It does not need a counterpoint, a boogeyman to cast as the enemy.
Good appeals to Good. It argues from principle and ideals, independent of context. What is Good is always Good, and what is Evil is always Evil.

Ozzy gave up on what is Good in favor of what is Quick.

Throw the lever, then sprint like a mad cunt towards the one guy and get him off the tracks.

Every time user. Every time.

>philosophers are wankers

Most likely factual.

>it's morally justified to sit and watch billions of innocent people die when you could have saved them
Fucked up world desu

From a morale and emotional standpoint, he was bad

From a cold logical standpoint, what he did worked and made sense

Like I said, it was an Evil act. "If he was lawful good he would have..." is stupid reasoning; alignment doesn't tell you how to behave, it's how you describe a set of actions that already exist. Otherwise every character would be neutral for some inevitable failure to uphold the Platonic ideal of a more extreme alignment. When it comes to describing a character's alignment, motivation is everything, because people can fail, misunderstand, or be willfully blind to the implications of their actions. That's why characters can perform actions that don't have the same alignment as the character. Only Paladins are punished for that.

No, it's morally justified to pray it never comes to it before it happens (the PC is not some oracle). Also it's morally justified to be secure in the knowledge that committing an evil act to potentially have stopped it (still not an oracle) would have only caused greater evil in the end ... because that would actually be true.

In a RPG with a moral universe that is. Obviously not in the shit show we have to deal with, but I don't game for fucking realism.

It would mostly be jack stuttering and UH UH UH UH UH UH UH UH UH UH UH UH UH UH

>it's morally justified to be secure in the knowledge that committing an evil act to potentially have stopped it (still not an oracle) would have only caused greater evil in the end ... because that would actually be true.
What is this evil that is greater than allowing billions of people to die?

He's the world's smartest man. I'm sure he's got it all figured out.

Killing 61 billion people?

Now that's a proper hero.

He would be true neutral. Any argument of this and you dont understand alignments.

Some specter of the Evil alignment.
By reading the books properly, you can see that the countries were talking about reaching a common ground without Dr. Manhattan walking around being the strongest thing ever as always (thanks to Ozymandias plot, that I have to admit).
But that's not the point.

Ozymandias did everything because HE wanted to solve the problem, by his means, by his actions, following his own morality.
He's made the choice to end the life of a million of people mostly for the sake of his own pride, you can see that by how he acts. He's a narcissist who can't think of others at his level (think how much he broods on the 'lucky punch' of the Comedian, even going so far as killing him when he's drunk and still shocked by what he has seen in his island).

His wasn't the only plan, only HIS plan, and he applied it at the expenses of so many people, because he couldn't trust anyone other than himself, because he couldn't trust humanity.
That's Evil on my book.

He'd fall in the "This is why alignments are stupid outside of DnD" category, like literally every other major character in Watchmen.

He would be a White and blue thing in mtg.

Evil is selfish, not chaotic

Lawful Neutral or True Neutral. He knows that the murder of billions is wrong just to date his cosmic hunger, but because of the role of his duty (eat planets with sentient life forms on it to eventually use their energy ans matter to help kick-start the next Big Bang and the next universe when this one dies) knows it is for a good cause.