The Greater Good

How much do you factor alturism into being good?

For example lets look at someone that can spam Healing all day. It costs them next to nothing to heal someone. If they charge someone for their help isnt this selfish/evil? If they dont charge then they are undercutting the local doctor and will put them out of business. If they heal the people of all their ills what reason do the people have to advance medicine or live healthier lives?

Therefore healsluts ARE evil

>cleric gets their power from a good-aligned god
>the god can choose to revoke this power at any time, but doesn't
>therefore, the god approves of it
>therefore, the action is good

And how often does a cleric even get talked to by thier god? It is a clerics faith in their god that gives them power; not the gods faith in the cleric. If the cleric thinks they are doing good they dont punish themselves.

Altruism is pretty fundamental to the common conception of good, and your questions mostly answer themselves if you look at the classical doctrine of religious medicine.

They healed those they could without payment, but asked for donations from those wealthy enough to do it. They cooperated with secular medicine to share the load and ensure the most people had the best done for them, and religious medical research was one of the largest sources of advancement in our world. In a fantasy world with magic that advancement might take a different form, but there's no reason to believe it would somehow reinforce a stasis.

>It is a clerics faith in their god that gives them power; not the gods faith in the cleric. If the cleric thinks they are doing good they dont punish themselves.

Oh, okay. I didn't realize we were talking about your specific setting that you just created to win this pointless argument.

Well, I guess you're right and healsluts ARE universally evil!

/thread

What is this bullshit. No, it's god giving them power, they don't gain power just because they have faith.

>there's no reason to believe it would somehow reinforce a stasis
If someone or a group can do/make enough of something that you know you cant compete faster, cheap, or better than why bother trying to while you have access to them? So long farmers. Goodbye craftsmen.

>it's god giving them power, they don't gain power just because they have faith.
Then how do you explain clerics of concepts (nature, the stars, etc)?

Because magic use is limited and most spellcasters in a D&D setting won't have that many spells per day?

I mean, you can go full Tippyverse stupid with it, but it's not hard to conceptualise a version of the setting where it's all coherent and makes sense, with magical tools like that enhancing and aiding that sort of progress, rather than inhibiting it.

>therefore more than once
How to spot a shit argument

>If someone or a group can do/make enough of something that you know you cant compete faster, cheap, or better than why bother trying to while you have access to them? So long farmers. Goodbye craftsmen.

Yep, those are market forces, and they actively fight certain kinds of altruism.

There are alternatives to such a system that a good character might want to pursue, but, like, we had a whole bunch of wars over that.

>If they dont charge then they are undercutting the local doctor and will put them out of business.
This is never how any society works. Ever.

If something is being done that is:
Cheaper
More Cost Effective
Able to be reproduced more

Then it simply becomes the new model of business. Furthermore the duties of a doctor are not limited simply to healing, and if the healing aspect were toned down their duties would shift toward the other things they are skilled at the Clerics are not educated for.

And if Clerics can do most of what doctors can do, then doctors would start becoming Clerics instead. Or simply go out of style.

Would you say Henry Ford was an evil man, by killing the Horse Wagon industry?

Or, a much better example.

The doctors themselves put the original "clerics" (shamans) out of business, since actual medicine was more effective than superstition.

Was that an evil act? If it wasn't evil for doctors to replace magicians, its not evil for magicians to replace doctors.

There are a few questions this raises. Are there enough healsluts for everyone to stay healthy at all times? How effective are the healsluts? Are time and space not an issue?

That was such a shitty run of moon-knight.

>Then how do you explain clerics of concepts (nature, the stars, etc)?
Don't exist in any settings and only as a discretionary options GMs can allow if a player does not like any gods or to not "unbalance"" the game in settings without active deities(which is a moot point because if someone writes a setting like that they probably don't want clerics running around in it period but whatever)

Its not hard to say one did something and the other one didnt. So, objectivly you can say the bullshit one is evil. This is more like A works, but B is works better. "Fuck A and give me B", the masses will say not knowing they themselves can ever do B.

One must assume there is some factor that limits the population of healsluts or everyone would be one. So, depending on the freedoms they are allowed and the general alignment of the society they be in, things can range from elite healsluts only the wealthy can see or healsluts force to tend to the citizens 24/7. In the later many of the peasants would argue the king giving them free healthcare is a greater good than a healsluts freedom or having to pay out of pocket for heals.

Things being "bullshit" is relative. Some herbal remedies and traditional folk medicine was moderately good, but still was phased out by science.

If magical medicine surpasses science, then the doctors become the "bullshit" and traditionalists while magic leads the way into the future.

*and if clerics are able to do what doctors can do, but better, easier, and cheaper then the business shifts to them and the doctors get treated the same way we today look upon old witch doctors.

Keepers of folk traditions at best, crazy cooks relying on out-modeled thinking at worst.

That said, there is always going to be something that can be incorporated by the latter. One example is that there is folk medicine that is being analyzed because if it worked back then, there must be something they didn't know about working beneath the sheets, which has lead to the development of medicine based on the interaction of certain chemicals that was present in folk medicine.

Not knowing alchemy isnt the same as casting miracles

Sophistry went out of vogue centuries ago.

In a setting that has gods that proclaim what alignment is, then who is anyone to argue? What is good or evil may seem arbitrary, but they are in control of the karma points.

> If they charge someone for their help isnt this selfish/evil?
Is everything that is not explicitely good necessarily evil?

>If they dont charge then they are undercutting the local doctor and will put them out of business
In medieval times maybe, but even then the church ministered the sick poor, funded by donations and their tithe

Dumbass.

I thought that was a gif and she'd start doing Double things.

P.S. To answer your question: the alignment system the way I understand it:
Fulfilling your promises and obeying laws and traditions is a lawful thing, the opposite is chaotic. If you are always true to your word and the law, you are lawful. If not always, you are neutral. If you are a liar and a criminal, you are chaotic.
Selflessly helping those in need is a good thing, causing harm or taking away from others for your benefit is evil. If you help everyone by default, and only harm those hostile to you or to the helpless, you are good. If you charge anything for your help, or help people because they helped you, or do good/evil things because you are a servant/slave/soldier and were ordered to do so, you are neutral. If you deliberately cause harm to or take away from others for your benefit, and only ever help those who will most likely be useful for you, you are evil.

> Healing all day. It costs them next to nothing to heal someone. If they charge someone for their help isnt this selfish/evil?
It's neutral. They help others for their own benefit.
> If they dont charge then they are undercutting the local doctor and will put them out of business.
But they ARE a local doctor. If they aren't though, they are probably a travelling doctor. Also, it depends on the system - if you can cast only "Cure minor wounds" all day, they won't put the doctor out of business, because there are plenty of various diseases and traumas they cannot cure. If they can cure all sorts of diseases, but it takes time and energy, it will still not put doctor out of business. If that takes no effort, what's the use of doctors in this setting?
> If they heal the people of all their ills what reason do the people have to advance medicine or live healthier lives?
No reason to advance medicine then. Living healthier lives means living longer and not relying on magical healers or doctors.