Are most police officers lawful good?

Are most police officers lawful good?

No.

In D&D? Depends on the race/town.
In real life? Depends on whether you like the laws.

Depends of the counry. I'd say most are Lawful Good or Lawful Neutral.

Yes.
They uphold the law in the name of doing what is good.
Literally the definition of lawful good.
But, then again, that's "most".
A corrupt cop might be more Lawful Neutral, or even Lawful Neutral.

>or even lawful neutral
I fucked up, meant to type Lawful evil.

Lawful neutral.

Isn't corrupted cop more of a True Neutral?

Well, I mean, neutral is looking out for your own interests/not caring about the law enough to uphold it or fight it, so maybe.

In D&D most ordinary NPCs are true neutral. A few have one shift on one axis.
In real life: alignments don't apply as we have no gods and morality is not an externally-applied constant. Real life has no moral or ethical references outside human thought, and they vary wildly from human to human.

Yes.

Lawful does not require following the written law to the letter, instead it means desiring order and strongly following A set of rules, creed or code. Most, if not all, police officers do that.

Good does not mean always being nice, it means acting for the sake of a greater good, even if it sometimes means being harsh, making hard decisions and using non-excessive force. Again, most police officers do that.

Individual outliers and assholes don't change the fact that the vast majority of law enforcement personnel pursue their careers out of philanthropy and the desire to make the world a safer place.

Is that true?
I mean, I guess it makes sense your average individual might be neutral, but I guess I figured they'd be more lawful.

No. Most cops are LE types who get off on having power over others. Truly LG police are a tiny minority.

I'd say lawful neutral.sage

A "corrupt" police officer, literally subverting the law for personal pleasure, runs into Evil.

True Neutral is effectively 'a normal person'.

>t. BLM-Activist

Criminal detected.

Lawful Neutral by default

depends on what system is he upholding and how he upholds it

In theory and ideally? Lawful neutral.

Police are bound to follow the law even if it impedes an investigation or the execution of their duty as a civil servant because they are the ones upholding it.

Most people follow rules for the most part, except when they are really in the way. They like freedom and expression, except when people are being dicks about it. They act in the interest of others, except when it's hard. They try and look out for themselves, but won't do anything messed up for personal gain.

Most people are neutral.

Now, most PCs and Named NPCs have a real alignment because they have a strong internal drive which usually equates pretty well with some AL flavour other than TN.

But, aren't the alignments:
Lawful = Upholding the law
Neutral = The law is irrelevant
Chaotic = Fuck the law
Good = Helping others is what matters
Neutral = Helping myself, my kith, and my kin is what matters.
Evil = Hurting others is what matters

They uphold the law for the sake of order, not good. I'd say that they are lawful neutral. Remember that a lawful good aligned person would have little qualms about disobeying the law when they thought it would be good, however an officer of the peace cannot do that and therefore is more neutral force. You can see this demonstrated in some of the planes of DnD which are neutral aligned which clearly adhere to an approach of order and law like our own, just taken to an extreme.

No, not objectively. It's open to interpretation by the individual beyond some basic conceptions.

There is no objective interpretation of the alignment system, it's a guideline and a tool, not a be-all and end-all. Alignment debates are dumb

D&D puts "selfishness" as "Evil". It's somewhat unrealistic due to Economics, but that's how it goes.

A "corrupt" police officer is betraying public trust and damaging the ability of society to combat threats. It's hurting others, and knowingly, if less directly.

Lawful neutral would make more sense, as they are devoted to upholding the laws of society more than an abstract moral good. While you could argue that those laws reflect the morality of society, it really depends. Giving people tickets for drinking on the beach doesn't seem to be absolutely good despite its civil function.

I'd say its about
80% LN ("Just doing my job ma'am" types who'll ticket you even if you were only going 5 mph over the limit and it's completely empty)
15% LG ("Don't worry about it, just don't do it again" types who will let you off if it's something dumb)
5% LE (Corrupt types)
Here anyway, it may be different in other places.

>Evil = Hurting others is what matters
I don't think Evil alignments necessarily mean the person is malicious. It could just mean that you're totally out for number one and you don't care who gets hurt. If helping someone else advances your own personal goals or power then a Neutral Evil person would do it in a heartbeat.

>There is no objective interpretation of the alignment system
Yes, there literally is. It's in the rulebooks. They have specific objective actions for each alignment. Ex. "Torture is always Evil."

Aarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggg my long post!

Summary:
Lawful: Yes
Good: Depends on person.

Much like the military life Cops tend to be regimental all day long at their work, and that spill over into their personal lives. They begin regimenting their everyday life. This is NOT because they feel they must uphold the law all day long, it's just something that rubs off.

Most cops tend to be good, and even bring work home with them sometimes (Which I can a test too), but I've known at least one that watched me do some no so legal stuff and not care when he was off duty. But I'd still classify that fellow as Lawful all round.

In my country the are usually Neutral Evil.

I would argue the "no gods" idea is actually kind of silly to say.
Regardless of if God is real or not, plenty of people still believe in him - and it can shape the morality of the police officer that does. Whether that leads to good or bad behavior depends on his interpretation of the scriptures

>criminal scum

Those are very narrow.

Lawful represents control. A lawful character believes there should be some sort of order to life, be it by law or some other method.

Chaotic characters believe that order can't encompass life, and that there are times when the law should be ignored.

This doesn't mean a chaotic character has to hate laws. A CG character is very likely to not have a problem with laws against murder or theft, for example, but he's also more than willing to break those laws if he believes that they're going to do more harm than good(for example, killing a dangerous criminal).

On the same side, a lawful character doesn't have to follow the rules blindly either. He might be willing to bend the rules in certain situations, and he might work to get a law changed or repealed if it's not doing what it's meant to do. There's also the whole monk/self discipline sort of thing, where a character might have more internal lawful tendencies and doesn't much care about other laws(Though he's still far more likely to follow them than a chaotic character).

So, for example, a man with a code that requires him to kill someone would still be lawful even though he's breaking a law against murder.

The ugly RP aspect to this is that you need to make sure the code is well defined, otherwise it's just an easy excuse to be lawful without the lawful tendencies.

They're Neutral Good like the vast majority of irl people.

They usually start off Lawful Good.

Years of repeat offenders and dealing with the dregs of society tends to make them Lawful Tired-of-your-shit.

D&D (in almost every played setting) has active physically verifiable gods and supernatural beings bound into a framework of moral/ethical behaviour boiling down to the alignment system as presented to players. It's testable, verifiable and makes core parts of the cosmos work as they do.

Contrast our world, where the stars do not care who you fuck, nobody has ever come back from the dead and the gods (if we have them) are silent.

In my experience, on duty they usually try and b Lawful Neutral with a splash of good here and there.

Most of them off duty would dearly like to be Lawful Good.

Oh my sweet summer child...

The lack of modern verifiable evidence doesn't stop Christianity alone from having 31% of the world's population alone as active followers, nevermind other faiths such as Islam and Sheikism.

>Contrast our world, where the stars do not care who you fuck, nobody has ever come back from the dead and the gods (if we have them) are silent

That's simply your perception on the matter, and you're allowing it to colour your opinions on those of other people. Lots of those people do believe in a God (or Gods, eg. Hinduism) and see their works not in the flashy displays of power that D&D and other games have, but in the little miracles of the everyday, and thank them for the good parts of their lives. Literally billions of people believe without needing to see a priest call down lightning on their enemies or call back Lazarus like Jesus. They believe because it was either part of their upbringing, or because they simply want to believe that there's some inherent force of good in the universe that's looking out for them.

And you're damned right that plenty of those people are in law enforcement.

But it's not relevant to the question at hand.
Many LEOs in our world are religious. Many are people with laudable personal qualities. Many are, I'm sure, what I would call 'good' in normal conversation.
None of them have any alignment, because our universe does not run on an objective moral code.

>because our universe does not run on an objective moral code
If you think that you're in the minority worldwide. Most people are religious and follow an objective code.

It IS relevant because real-world religions encourage certain behaviors as much as fictional ones do.

Scriptures encouraging peace, justice and humility aren't magically neutral because an atheist judges the basis of their religion as false.

A Christian police officer is going to have words like stories like The Good Samaratin in his head when he goes out to help people, man.

Fucking looter scumbag. Morality can be derived from first principles.

A is A.

>Subjective interpretations of scripture that change through the ages and depending on the sect
>Objective code

>Implying axiomatic logic isn't fatally flawed

But people believe it's absolute.

>Scriptures encouraging peace, justice and humility
They don't. If they encourage judgements made without evidence, they cannot support or sustain real world peace or justice.
That is why despite much of the world believing in those scriptures, war after war happened.
They claim to support peace, but remove the tools to actually do so, like evidence based learning.

You're still missing the point that those interpretations can and do influence people's behavior. Things can and do change, but that doesn't mean the current form doesn't mean that those things don't have influence in their current form.

Imagining that a religion doesn't effect people's behavior simply because you think their god(s) doesn't exist is farcical. You can even find evidence in the worst followers of these religions. Folks like ISIS and the Westborough Baptists are certainly having their behavior effected by their own religious teachings, regardless of whether or not their God is real

That doesn't make it objective you dongus.

Fucking looter antireason faggots can't even come up with their own system because anti reason is anti creativity. They just spend all day denying affirmative statements, passing the buck, and getting the government to rob creators of value. Reeeeeeee.

>however an officer of the peace cannot
Actually, in the real world, police officers(at least in the USA) generally have pretty wide discretion and can often choose to ignore things.

t. ethnically-challenged American.

>You maintain this is true
>Everything below your post is bickering
Jesus Christ, I'll try talking slower.
There is no Detect Alignment in the real world. There is no single framework explaining and reconciling all religions. There is no afterlife that we can point to. There is no extraplanar system base on alignment in the real world.

The real world has morals and ethics purely based on human thought, and that results in a huge morass of behaviours considered noble or base by different viewers.

In D&D morality is like gravity, a facet of existence that cannot be argued or explained away differently.

Our two worlds are so different that the simple and somewhat arbitrary quanta of one does not map exactly onto the other.

Once again that's not the point. The point is, once again, that there is no universal objective morality dictated by some objective being. The fact that some people believe is irrelevant because they do not believe the same things and cannot be compared to each other as one can compare and rank things according to alignment within a created setting where in objective truths exist such as the entire concept of aliment in the first place.

When someone is asking "what alignment is X", they're basically asking you to compare the D&D alignment attribution properties to reality.

D&D is a fiction based on Earth-observables, so the characteristics of it can be overlayed, without the 'magic'.

Lawful Neutral

Unfortunately, as we cannot see the interior of anyone's soul here in Real Life, asking after any one person's alignment is fruitless. We can make a good guess with perfect knowledge of all their actions birth-to-present, comparing them to cited positions in the various player's handbooks, but even then who can say what evil lurks in their inner thoughts? After all, in D&D even your inner hopes and wishes are measured, and not always forgiven.

Or we can stick to our position that there is no mapping alignment to the real world, threads like these are deeply stupid, and OP would have been better served posting up his game notes or character sheet and background for peer review and critique.

You essentially summed up what I've been trying to say much more concisely. Thankyou very much

Defense Attorney here - most cops outwardly claim they like protecting the public and enforcing the law but privately - the truth is they are attracted to the job because of the power and thrill of it. You don't become a cop strictly to help people - there are many other ways you can do that. People become cops because they like throwing their weight around and having authority.

Lawful neutral, they may start out just wanting to do the right thing but after you meet enough angry drunks and stupid kids it just becomes another mess you have to clean up before you get to eat dinner.

Tldr, a job like any other.

>as we cannot see the interior of anyone's soul
There is literally no such thing. That concept was invented by people who didn't even know the brain did anything.

These threads by contrast ask everyone's opinion on what D&D alignment criteria the target fits best. Ex. "Serial killer who loves murder and has no special criteria for victims is Chaotic Evil."

The problem isn't alignment, the problem is the proliferation of guns and the training cops get to deal with that.

Guns are common in America, and people who carry guns on them is also common.

Because of this, Police in America have to assume that people are armed and dangerous until proven otherwise. The alternative is a lot of dead cops. In order to keep their officers alive, the police are trained to put their safety first whenever there is room for doubt as to how dangerous the situation is.

Which is a reasonable policy in theory, but in practice creates a bubble of fear culture on the job. When you pull someone over for a speeding ticket, he has an automatic weapon in the passenger's seat until proven otherwise.

This is why people keep getting shot for stupid reasons, because the officer is SCARED. He is worried that today is the day that HE is going to get shot. In that state of mind, fucking anything looks like drawing a weapon in the heat of the moment. Or you get that cop who shot a retarded man in the street and afterwards couldn't give a good reason for why he did it.

We mostly hear about this in cases where race comes up, because that makes for the splashiest headlines. But its still the same thing. The racism (real or imagined) might be what made them scared, but the fear is what made them pull the trigger.

Unfortunately, there are no good solutions here. Reducing the number of guns in circulation to remove the reason for the fear is both unconstitutional and simply impractical. No legislation of that nature would ever get passed.
Changing how we train our officers and focusing on the fear culture for the profession is probably our best bet, but implementation matters a hell of a lot more than theory on that one. What do you tell them to do instead? Not worry so much about maybe getting shot? Have every on-duty officer be loaded up with bulletproof armor all the time so they are like fucking robocop and fear no puny bullets?

>There is literally no such thing.
If you refrain from kneejerk tipping it's obvious he's referring to souls as an abstract concept.

>>as we cannot see the interior of anyone's soul
>There is literally no such thing.
Yeah, no shit.
>opinion on what D&D alignment criteria the target fits best
Opinion. On something that real life people do not provide enough information to judge. That needs a COSMOLOGY to exist where it does. That tells you frankly very little about people unless you are a questing murderer from the treasure chest dimension. That doesn't recognise the forces at work here on our home plane like economics, pragmatism, mental illness. That is mired in the philosophy of the Greeks and Romans, but only the ones whose teachings fit on the back of a beer mat.

This is worse than a bunch of Trek fans meeting in a garage to try and build a working warp drive. 10,000,000 out of ten. I exceedingly mad.

>Tipping your fedora over a figure of speach
user pls.

I wish everyone would post an image meme every time someone told the truth.

>On something that real life people do not provide enough information to judge.
They do, as per the 'serial killer' example. You just want to add sophistry to a casual for-fun discussion about tabletop roleplaying games.

You may as well intervene in 40k threads about "which historical figure could be The Emperor" while you're at it.

a corrupt cop would by definition be lawful evil

Your serial killer strawman is as futile as the discussion we're having. What alignment are all his victims? What's his delusional reason for doing it? If he purely kills for the sake of it, and has no particular victim profile, he might well be a Chaotic Evil monster.
Or he might be a true neutral level one barbarian if all his victims are evil. And if we're really getting into it, Alignment follows race and now we're in a /pol/ thread and what the fuck do we do about it?

However, in any thread more subtle and complex than "DAE think A=A?" the alignment debates collapse even faster. Because humans are complex, and to make objective judgements of us takes gods, and sometimes not even then.

This whole discussion, especially as it's about a whole PROFESSION of people over an unspecified geographical and historical range, is worthless. You have driven me into prolonging it by being articulate in your idiocy, and now I'm simply replying in the hope that others turn against you and restore my faith in Veeky Forums as a board for right-thinking grognards.

>Or he might be a true neutral level one barbarian if all his victims are evil.
"Has no special criteria for his victims."
An implicitly indiscriminate serial killer is always Chaotic Evil, even if he has not yet killed a non-Evil creature.

Maybe it's just that YOU don't know the D&D system, and so cannot apply it to Earth.

Yes but a few bad apples spoils the bunch. The other thing is that most cops are just doing there job and don't actually want to take risks. I've known the cops to literally refuse to send officers to a situation because it might be dangerous.

Killing evil creatures is not evil. Maybe if we specify he's a torturer, we might be getting somewhere. Hell, modern neuroscience gives us dozens of ways to fuck with the "creatures incapable of moral action are neutral rather than good or evil" line in the alignment part of the SRD. There's no end to the quibbling.

But then all you've done is literally restate the Alignment guidance for Chaotic Evil and asked if that makes you Evil with a capital E instead of a wider discussion of that kind of character in a game, or how to play one adequately. You've worsened the board, you fucking mong, cut that shit out.

Careful with the insults, you might drop your alignment.

But the D&D system does take motivation into account. Evil killing Evil in the service of its love of murder does not make the first Evil 'more good'.

Your argument of inapplicability is just busted. This thread proves that implicitly. You just don't like fun exercises, user.

>You will never live in a world where every policeman is a lawful good enforcer of absolute JUSTICE
Sadness covers me like a blanket. Tuck me in, let me die.

>nobody has ever come back from the dead

I dunno man, Voodoo Zombies, while not "truly" dead, are pretty fucking close, and the process is largely irreversible.

That bitch fucking deserved what she got...

She came out of nowhere though.
I'm still not quite sure how she didn't see, or how no one told her, about the extracurricular rape activities of her commander.

That said, I'm just waiting for Esdeath to win now. That's all that matters.

Why would a corrupt cop be "lawful" at all?

He's breaking the law isn't he?

>being lawful means you follow the law of the land

I work with the fuzz.
Mostly Lawful Neutral I'd say, with a not insignificant LG presence.

Officer here, it mostly varies between Lawful Neutral and whatever "Response is mostly based upon how close the person comes to stopping, apologizing, and leaving." is.

Some go into it with the best of intentions, some go into it because they're sad jackoffs looking for power over others, but for most I'd say it's just a job.

>It's somewhat unrealistic due to Economics
>impliying economics aren't evil by definition

That's is what it means in most cases.

A town guard who takes bribes from adventurers is not Lawful user.

Same thing with corrupt cops.

No. Most are "Lawful". Some are "Neutral". Few are "Chaotic".

But for Goof Neutral Evil, that's a pretty broad possibility. I'd say there's an even split between the three, IRL.

>he might flippantly break the law in the name of naked self interest but taking bribes is consistent with his internal moral code!!!!!!!

That makes 99% of people lawful good because they act in compliance to their personal morals and personally believe those morals are good.

They are human, not uniforms.

>nobody has ever come back from the dead

Ave Maria you fucking heathen

Most cops are like most people.

Lawful Neutral or Neutral Evil.

Confirmed for not understanding the word Objective.

Among other things, morality has difficulties because it can't be observed with instruments.

That's a bit misanthropic mate.

It's just how things are.

Most people are concerned primarily with the wellbeing of themselves and those in their social group. Police are no different - it's a job, not a divine calling that strips its officers of basic human flaw.

It's be a misanthropic viewpoint if I used it as an excuse to act misanthropic.

>morality is subjective guys
>there's nothing objectively wrong with raping and disembowling innocent children even though every civlised society since the dawn of time considers it evil

Moral relativists are the worst.

Here, I'll do you a favor.

adjective use-

1. (of a person or their judgment) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts

2. not dependent on the mind for existence; actual:

We've all kinds of reasons to believe religion depends on the mind for existance and influences people's personal feelings.

That isn't to say things like 'thou shalt not kill' are wrong. They're bloody obvious and we wouldn't have been around long enough to conceive religion as a concept otherwise.

I think you're projecting.

I'd argue that most people get into law enforcement due to a moral conviction of wanting to do good and uphold the law even though they often fail to live up those ideals.

In theory a policeman is sworn to uphold the law to maintain peace and order within society, this belief is lawful good

in practice, a policeman would be no more lawful, or good, than he is capable of being, and while there are many officers who joined because they genuinely believe that they are doing great work by enforcing all the laws that make civilized life possible, there will always be cops who joined solely to give out beatigns to people they dont like

Moral relativists don't say that though. You're just an idiot that doesn't understand anything more complex than caveman philosophy.

There's nothing innately wrong with any action. But we, as thinking beings, have codified means to make out lives more tolerable. None of these codes are sacred, but they reduce suffering, and without any kind of absolute moral axis, this is the only worthy aim, as we cannot get on with our lives with an overabundance of suffering upon us.

I think most people get into it because it pays.

Never underestimate how directionless and shallow many people are. Very few people actively want to do good and fewer people care about the law beyond that it protects them.

>there's nothing wrong with raping children guys I swear
>fucking moralfags
>you're just an idiot that doesn't understand anything more complex than caveman philosophy

There is something wrong with it. It causes suffering.

There's nothing cosmically wrong, because right and wrong are not tangible cosmic forces. But it decreases the quality of life of the victims and the people around them, and ultimately this is all that matters, as all we have are our lives. Everything else is fabrication meant to comfort us or give us direction, which is a form of comfort in and of itself.

Your belief in a cosmic force of good is stupid, but not objectionable, as it achieves the same aim as my moral system.

I don't know where you live but here in the UK law enforcement doesn't pay that well.

If it's money you're after, you're better off getting an office job in the city.

>Very few people actively want to do good and fewer people care about the law beyond that it protects them.

Projection. Most people aren't indifferent to the suffering of others.

>There's nothing cosmically wrong, because right and wrong are not tangible cosmic forces
>Your belief in a cosmic force of good is stupid
>now excuse me while I fap to this snuff film