Can a lawful and good cleric lie to destroy the evil?

Can a lawful and good cleric lie to destroy the evil?

I mean, Obi-wan lied. Worked out well enough for him.

Depends on the situation.

No. The cleric falls.

This is the answer you wanted.

An interesting question!

It's easy enough to break it down into two parts, then.

First, can it be lawful to lie, and second, can it be good to lie?

On first thought one would instinctively say "no, lying is against the law" and so it'd fail the first part.

However, there is actually no law against lying itself. There are laws against defamation, and there are laws against fraud, perjury, and making false statements, all of these are limited to specific lies:
Defamation is lying someone to blacken someone's name.
Fraud is when you lie to cheat someone illegally out of money.
Perjury is lying under oath.
False statements is lying when you're part of the US government, apparently!

So, there is no exhaustive law saying "you can't lie legally, period". Heck, if it were illegal then police couldn't legally have undercover officers.

A case could be made that lying in order to do harm to a person would bring a tort against them - by lying in order to bring about harm, then that is against the law. However, that is only the case if the harm itself was an illegality - if the harm being carried out upon the evil is legal under the rules of the land, then no restitution is necessary, and thus the lie is perfectly legal.

So! To sum up, a lawful cleric can lie to destroy the evil, as long as it's legal to destroy the evil in the first place.


What's that? About good? Eh, sure, good people can lie. That's just self evident, man.

Therefore: a lawful and good cleric can lie to destroy the evil, yes.

A better question is, "Would a lawful good cleric/paladin purposefully fall in the pursuit of destroying evil? And, if so, would such self-sacrifice warrant a redemption? And, if so, and the cleric/paladin is aware that redemption is possible, does the act still count as a self-sacrifice warranting redemption?"

Step your moral conundrums up, pleb.

Depends on the point of view

There is no philosophical/religious system that would condemn this. Well, except for Kant's categorical imperative but Kant is an autist and his entire political philosophy is just spruced up Rousseau so whatever.

>comparing the morality of our world with the morality of a game world, and insisting on functional analogues

You can find a different hobby any old time, friend. No need to stay if you don't like it; you can leave at any time.

Except the words "good" and "lawful" aren't elaborated on within the systems themselves except in the most vague and roundabout ways. In what may be a twist of irony, the game that describes an objective and clear system of morality presupposes an objective and clear system of morality in reality. Using real world morality for the sake of the game is not only possible, it's mandatory.

You're free to be a faggot somewhere else.

They sure can.
They're just more likely too if their personal code doesn't prohibit lying to destroy evil.

Yes, goyim yes.

Except that is quite literally wrong. The alignments are tied to the gods, who are described in very explicit terminology which provides explicit expectations of character action, especially when not over-analyzed by relativist idiots presuming their own version of morality over the top of the supreme commands of a divine being. The largest ties to reality that exist are those which exists between cognition, observation, and language, which can be entirely subverted as long as you remember that the information you're consuming was created in a mind external to your own and that your own interpretations of that information do not apply (which is what you should be doing, anyway).

I appreciate your attempt at an indepth analysis, but you've mischaracterized the entire arrangement. Feel free to take your pseudo-intellectual horseshit back to your high school humanities courses and cursory google searches.

If two passive aggressive college students are bickering endlessly, are they true neutral or neutral evil?

From my point of view, the cleric is chaotic evil.

>The alignments are tied to the gods, who are described in very explicit terminology which provides explicit expectations of character action
If it were this simple then alignment discussions wouldn't be even more divisive than edition wars, would they? The words 'good' and 'evil' also aren't chosen just because they sound catchy, they're supposed to correspond to concepts we're familiar with, which is probably why DMs are given so much leeway in the first place. If TTRPGs had their own internally consistent moral rulesets, then the book describing this moral code would be thicker and more convoluted than all other rules within that system combined. I hope I don't have to explain why that's no fun.

Chaotic Neutral, fite me.

Yes. Lawful does not mean following every law of your society, though it usually goes hand-in-hand. Lawful is adhering to a personal code of conduct. Just as Chaotic is acting on impulse, not ignoring every law ever.

If this wasn't the case, the situation would look like this:
>Kingdom has no laws against lying, only perjury and fraud
>LG: I am free to lie as I please, so long as I do not engage in perjury and fraud
>CE: I mustn't lie as a please, for that is allowed by law, but I will lie when it comes to perjury and fraud!

From a certain point of veiw

You and I seem to be playing with two entirely different communities playing two very different games.

The one I come from incessantly argues the semantics, technicalities, and philosophies of ideas that are frequently explained in exhaustive detail by the people who imagined them, simply because they insist on formalizing their own personal interpretation of the information instead of simply accepting what is communicated to them due to their own confusion of the content (causing almost entirely by their incapability to read the entirety of the provided text on the subject).

You seem to come from a community and game which rigorously evaluates all of the provided material and discovers it to be a piecemeal assembly of information they must collect and fuse with other available sources to create a functioning system for play.

Regardless, I know that I've read the system documentation thoroughly and have no issue whatsoever determining character actions which fall within the boundaries of the established alignments, and only discover any sort of difficulty when interacting with people who insist on applying their own definitions of morality over-the-top of the provided definitions within the rules.

Probably neutral evil, although I'd be more skeptical of the nature of the passive-aggressive third interjecting an attempt at wit.

Yes. He may commit a small sin to do a greater good. However, he has still sinned and must atone for said sin to regain the favor of his God.

I don't know, CAN you? Are you able to? Have you tried?

I'd say "Absolutely".
Lying, while a bad in honest and cordial conduct is a massively valuable tool in conflict or trying to extract information, and I don't want to see the god who would stomp on his followers for lying to further his agenda.

law enforcement practice deceit (such as exaggerating/fabricating evidence) routinely to get suspects to confess.

>CE: I mustn't lie as a please, for that is allowed by law
And you've gone full retard. Law does not describe things that there are not already legal concepts for, thus things that there are not already legal concepts for default to being allowed by law. Your interpretation of Chaotic alignment would prevent them from doing things the law hasn't already thought of.