In Canon several races are born with an "evil" alignment as per the whim of the god that created them, philosophically a creature that lacks freewill can not be blamed for its actions, therefore a creature that does bad things because it is forced to is not a creature that is categorically evil. The only creatures that can be considered evil are those that have a choice to not do bad things.
tl;dr Elves, humans, and gnomes are on average more evil than orcs and goblins.
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All humanoid races have the free will to change their alignment regardless of their racial deity.
By your logic demons and devils who can never choose to not be evil by the nature of their existence are even less evil than orcs.
The concept of good and evil breaks down when you add the question of choice. Ultimately alignment is just a game mechanic used to describe a creature's behaviors in easy to understand categories.
In truth, no creature or entity in D&D has free will, even gods, as they are all subjects to the whims of authors, DMs, and players.
I disagree with you, OP. We speak of 'evil acts' and 'natural evil'. By your definition, these would not actually be 'evil', since only free agents can be evil. IRL, the existence of objective morality is an active debate, but in the worlds of D&D, it is a given - because Gary Gygax said so (i.e. the venerable but much-maligned alignment system). Therefore, even if evil creatures have no free will, they can be called evil.
Therein lies the question - are orcs, et. al., evil by nature or nurture? If by nature, are they pre-disposed to evil but able to choose freely? Or do they truly lack free will? But if they are able to choose in what way to act evilly, can they truly be said to lack free will? And even if they do lack free-will, is it not the obligation of all good creatures to root out evil? Yea, even to destroy it?
Therefore, the point is moot.
In my world, they have more a chaotic and aggressive pre-disposition but are not inherently evil.
Do "good" and "evil" only exist as chosen expressions of free will? You say a creature that is forced or lacks free will "cannot be blamed" for its actions, does this make the actions any less good or evil? How much compulsion is required to force an action to the point where the actor cannot be blamed?
Evil by nature orcs that were created to be evil may be held blameless for their evil in one sense, but does that make them or their actions any less evil? If an orc that was created to be evil by a malign deity slaughters children, do we now say that action was not evil because the orc had no choice in acting that way? Or is the orc only blameless for having its evil nature but not for acting upon it? Unless orcs are literal puppets, lying about inert except when the will of another is animating them, they must posses at least some free will to act, and therefor accountability for the good or evil of their actions.
Of course in 5e per the Monster Manual no creature is required to be evil. It does not break any actual rules to have a Lawful Good Fiend or Death Knight, or a Chaotic Good Beholder. It may be extremely unlikely but the alignments given are only the default and may be freely changed to suit the needs of your campaign.
As for the nature or nurture question that will have to be answered by each DM on a campaign by campaign basis.
Some good points. I actually much prefer the modern races can be any alignment system but for this thought experiment default alignments are a divine given predisposition.
Actions are definitely evil but should your possessed PC be called evil for the acts committed under possession?
And what about a measure of evil?
Is an orc that burns down a village just as evil as a halfling who does so?
Or is a goblin that saves a life (because they want to) doing more good than a paladin who does so because their god commands it?
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You sure do like the hard questions. Did you even read my tl;dr?
Good and evil are societal concepts. So the measure of good and evil should be taken from the point of society as a whole. And we are defined by our actions and specifically our choices.
Actions are definitely evil but should your possessed PC be called evil for the acts committed under possession?
No, because they did not choose to commit evil, and may even be completely unaware of the evil committed while possessed.
Is an orc that burns down a village just as evil as a halfling who does so?
Or is a goblin that saves a life (because they want to) doing more good than a paladin who does so because their god commands it?
Yes then No, respectively. (Assuming all factors are the same besides race.) Maybe if you only choose to do something because you were commanded, amd would not have done it otherwise, you may be more neutral. But a creature with free will can always choose to disobey a command that violates its alignment, good or evil.
If Good and Evil exist as universal absolutes it should be possible to compile definitive lists of which actions are good and which are evil. To answer questions of what is good or evil one would then only need to work down the lists. Circumstances like Possession or mind control magic could be added to the list as factors to consider.
if "burning down a village" is on the evil list than both the orc and the halfling are equally evil for doing it.
If saving a life is on the good list than the goblin and the paladin are equally good for doing so.
Good and evil are societal concepts. So the measure of good and evil should be taken from the point of society as a whole.
That's one theory. The problem with morality being relative to culture is that the relativist is left saying all sorts of really uncomfortable things. Was the slavery that existed in the US prior to the civil war only immoral because we now think it was immoral--but it was actually not immoral then, because it was socially accepted? That's a theory, and there certainly are relativists around. But as I said, being forced to make claims like that often makes people uncomfortable :)
It's also possible that morality is objective--that there are actions that are good and bad regardless of what our beliefs about them are. That the vast majority of cultures that have ever existed believe stealing is wrong is, for many, somewhat convincing evidence of objectivist morality. The problem for the objectivist is explaining exactly what those rules are, and why those are the correct rules. But the fact is, I think, that most people reject relativist morality. Maybe not for good reasons, but they do.
But for D&D, the answer can somewhat easily be given--in that D&D worlds have gods/creators as an accepted fact. Morality that is legislated by the gods would be an objective matter--meaning that the beliefs of mortals wouldn't change the facts of morality.
I say it's 'somewhat' easy because there are two big issues that can complicate this even for D&D, if the DM and players want to get into it.
1) Did the gods in the D&D world actually create the world? This is a game where quite often mortals can become gods. So the gods of D&D are often not omnipotent creators like monotheist gods of the 'big three' Middle Eastern religions. So appealing to those gods might not explain exactly who determined morality.
2) The second big issue is the classic Euthyphro Dilemma, from Plato. If the gods created morality--if nothing was good or bad before the gods decided it was--then they didn't base their decisions off of anything. When the gods decided 'murder is wrong', murder wasn't wrong before that, and if it wasn't wrong before that, the gods could have made murder good. So that leaves the gods as arbitrary--they could have ordered morality any way they cared to. So calling them 'good' just means saying they had opinions and enforced them. Like tyrants.
If the gods did not create morality...then who or what did? And you're back at the original question of whether or not it's subjective or objective.
If Good and Evil exist as universal absolutes it should be possible to compile definitive lists of which actions are good and which are evil. To answer questions of what is good or evil one would then only need to work down the lists. Circumstances like Possession or mind control magic could be added to the list as factors to consider.
Some people think it is easier to make a general list than people think. For example, we could claim that there's more or less universal agreement that in general we have the following moral duties:
Justice - duties for example to see that innocent people aren't punished and guilty people are
Beneficence - duties to help other people when we can
Non-Maleficence - duties to not hurt other people when we can avoid it
Gratitude - duties to repay people when they do things for us
Reparation - duties to make it up to people when we have harmed them
Promise-Keeping - duties to do what we have said we will do
Veracity - duties to tell the truth
Self-Improvement - duties to improve our own situation with respect to things like intelligence, virtue, or pleasure
These sort of duties show up in really every moral code that's existed, in some form or another. And it's an unusual person who claims that we do not have general duties to do these things (for example with Beneficence, it's odd for people to say there's nothing wrong with walking past the elderly old man who has fallen in the middle of the crosswalk, when you could help him).
What's trickier is providing 'definitive' lists that are more specific, particularly when these duties conflict. For example, if truth-telling will harm someone in a specific situation, you'll find people agreeing that in general we have to tell the truth and not hurt people, but you'll find a lot of disagreement about whether in this case we should do one or the other.
I think most Orcs are evil, and the others have to struggle against their natures to be good or neutral.
I like it like that tbh. Also I think Kobolds are mostly evil out of spite then anything else. Freaking gnomes do that to your god and of course you're going to be feeling defenseless as the tiny dragon people that you are.
Good and evil are societal concepts. So the measure of good and evil should be taken from the point of society as a whole.
That's one theory. The problem with morality being relative to culture is that the relativist is left saying all sorts of really uncomfortable things. Was the slavery that existed in the US prior to the civil war only immoral because we now think it was immoral--but it was actually not immoral then, because it was socially accepted? That's a theory, and there certainly are relativists around. But as I said, being forced to make claims like that often makes people uncomfortable :)
It's also possible that morality is objective--that there are actions that are good and bad regardless of what our beliefs about them are. That the vast majority of cultures that have ever existed believe stealing is wrong is, for many, somewhat convincing evidence of objectivist morality. The problem for the objectivist is explaining exactly what those rules are, and why those are the correct rules. But the fact is, I think, that most people reject relativist morality. Maybe not for good reasons, but they do.
But for D&D, the answer can somewhat easily be given--in that D&D worlds have gods/creators as an accepted fact. Morality that is legislated by the gods would be an objective matter--meaning that the beliefs of mortals wouldn't change the facts of morality.
I say it's 'somewhat' easy because there are two big issues that can complicate this even for D&D, if the DM and players want to get into it.
1) Did the gods in the D&D world actually create the world? This is a game where quite often mortals can become gods. So the gods of D&D are often not omnipotent creators like monotheist gods of the 'big three' Middle Eastern religions. So appealing to those gods might not explain exactly who determined morality.
2) The second big issue is the classic Euthyphro Dilemma, from Plato. If the gods created morality--if nothing was good or bad before the gods decided it was--then they didn't base their decisions off of anything. When the gods decided 'murder is wrong', murder wasn't wrong before that, and if it wasn't wrong before that, the gods could have made murder good. So that leaves the gods as arbitrary--they could have ordered morality any way they cared to. So calling them 'good' just means saying they had opinions and enforced them. Like tyrants.
If the gods did not create morality...then who or what did? And you're back at the original question of whether or not it's subjective or objective.
The Euthyphro dilemma is largely resolved by appealing to God's nature as the source of objective morality - that is, God commands the good because he is good, rather than it being a random thing he decided on, or some quality independent of him. As you say, D&D is polytheistic, so this solution doesn't really work... unless you appeal to Ao. But then, I'm not sure if Ao is Good or Neutral (I don't know enough lore). If Ao is Good, then the evil gods are objectively evil. If Ao is Neutral, then we're back to square one and the good and evil are relative, in which case we have to appeal to a higher power once again - Gary Gygax.
The Euthyphro dilemma is largely resolved by appealing to God's nature as the source of objective morality - that is, God commands the good because he is good, rather than it being a random thing he decided on, or some quality independent of him. As you say, D&D is polytheistic, so this solution doesn't really work... unless you appeal to Ao. But then, I'm not sure if Ao is Good or Neutral (I don't know enough lore). If Ao is Good, then the evil gods are objectively evil. If Ao is Neutral, then we're back to square one and the good and evil are relative, in which case we have to appeal to a higher power once again - Gary Gygax.
The God=Good appeal is interesting, but it seems to just collapse back down into one of the other views in equally problematic ways. If God just is good, then either he decided to be good, or he simply 'found himself' existing with this particular nature. God deciding to be good clearly collapses into the abitrariness of the one horn of the dilemma, because he could have decided for his nature to be anything. God being good but not deciding to be that way leaves the same questions about omnipotence--there are truths about the world, important ones, that God is not in control of or responsible for. Namely, what 'goodness' amounts to. That's the route that Aquinas eventually takes (although he tries amazing Aquinas backflips to avoid the implications)--that it is God's nature that actually prevents God from taking certain sorts of actions. God cannot commit evil acts because 'He is goodness' and his nature won't allow it. And that's more or less the same limitation that is one of the big concerns for the other horn of the dilemma, at least for the monotheist. There's still a standard of goodness that is apart from God's free choice.
The other concern for identifying goodness with God or his nature (as opposed to just predicating goodness of God's nature) is that you run the risk of giving goodness a definition that is unaccessable to mortals. God says "be good", and we ask "what does that mean", and God says "be me"...which is of course impossible. We can't even be 'like' God in this way if goodness is the nature of an eternal, omnipotent, omniscient creator of the universe. Toss in the argument from evil, for example, even with a good theodicy reply, and you get the result that God's goodness allows him to be good even while allowing horrible things to happen to people--while the goodness I'm supposed to pursue doesn't seem to allow for that. The goodness I can achieve is just not the same thing as God's nature. That's also something Aquinas grappled with--he eventually decided that God's goodness is analogous to human goodness. We can be 'good', but not 'God good'. His good is a better good :) And I don't think Aquinas really appreciated the problem with that sort of claim. Why doesn't my good include allowing people to die when I could save them, etc?
IMO, the Euthyphro Dilemma really does succeed in forcing one of those two choices, and I also think Plato's decision about which was the more acceptable choice is right--even more right for monotheists.
So, for D&D, pushing the problem off of the various pantheons and on to Ao is just kicking the can down the road. Same problem, different entity.
And even then, the Elvish equivalent of Sartre is stabbing his cigar at us and asking "Why do you accept Ao's opinion as somehow being definitional? Ao might have chosen who gets punished for what actions, and who gets praised. But mortal kings can do the same too. Why is Ao's declaration 'objective', any more than a powerful king's declaration would be?" :D
So, for D&D, pushing the problem off of the various pantheons and on to Ao is just kicking the can down the road. Same problem, different entity.
And even then, the Elvish equivalent of Sartre is stabbing his cigar at us and asking "Why do you accept Ao's opinion as somehow being definitional? Ao might have chosen who gets punished for what actions, and who gets praised. But mortal kings can do the same too. Why is Ao's declaration 'objective', any more than a powerful king's declaration would be?" :D
The other side is that, regardless of where objective morality would be grounded, in any given universe, the creator of that universe would determine what are the standards of morality. The little bit I understand of Ao is that he/she/it doesn't really care - which leaves us at something of a stalemate in terms of the D&D universe.
So, for D&D, pushing the problem off of the various pantheons and on to Ao is just kicking the can down the road. Same problem, different entity.
And even then, the Elvish equivalent of Sartre is stabbing his cigar at us and asking "Why do you accept Ao's opinion as somehow being definitional? Ao might have chosen who gets punished for what actions, and who gets praised. But mortal kings can do the same too. Why is Ao's declaration 'objective', any more than a powerful king's declaration would be?" :D
The other side is that, regardless of where objective morality would be grounded, in any given universe, the creator of that universe would determine what are the standards of morality. The little bit I understand of Ao is that he/she/it doesn't really care - which leaves us at something of a stalemate in terms of the D&D universe.
I agree about the stalemate if you have a mysterious entity like Ao.
My point about Sartre's question though, is that Ao might 'lay down some laws', and might determine what punishments and rewards there would be. But that's really just a scaled-up version of what a human king could do. Here are the laws, here's the punishment, whether you disagree or not. That Ao's punishment might be eternal doesn't seem to change the fact that it's still a law and punishment laid down by a (subjective) entity. :)
Robert Jordan answered this very question when he cowrote the wheel of time 3.5 book.
He utterly destroyed the concept of good and evil as archaic wishful thinking. Just because you believe you are good doesn't mean you are.
RL example: Christians to the new world or when Vikings first meet Christians after a few centuries apart. Or in todays world Muslims openly attacking westerners in western Europe, someone thinks they are doing good the rest know differently, who's right?
The problem with relativism where D&D is concerned is that, in the end. its handy to have a behavioral benchmark for the various races that can be encountered.
Eating human children alive and enjoying the screams might be a socially acceptable evening on the town for goblins but from the perspective of the average group of PCs, such things can clearly be called evil. Goblins are thus, labeled evil to indicate that, canonically, they enjoy things that cause suffering in others. DM's are of course, free to follow or ignore these guidelines as they please.
Personally, I like the idea that an entire race can be evil by nature (in game). It makes a D&D world a bit darker and more frightening knowing there are things in the dark that are smarter than you and would enjoy a chance to suck your brain out.
On topic. By most benchmarks I use, Orks naturally behave in a way I would describe as evil. So I call orks as a race, evil.
Robert Jordan answered this very question when he cowrote the wheel of time 3.5 book.
He utterly destroyed the concept of good and evil as archaic wishful thinking. Just because you believe you are good doesn't mean you are.
RL example: Christians to the new world or when Vikings first meet Christians after a few centuries apart. Or in todays world Muslims openly attacking westerners in western Europe, someone thinks they are doing good the rest know differently, who's right?
But the fact that people disagree is not by itself evidence that there's no fact, either. People disagree about whether there is intelligent extra-terrestrial life. We can say "who's right?", and even point out that neither side seems to have conclusive evidence. But there is a fact of the matter, completely independent of those beliefs :)
Jordan didn't 'utterly destroy' the concept of objective morality. Someone who thinks morality is objective in fact rejects the notion that 'you are good just because you think you are good'. If you take religious morality as objective morality, you will find every religion readily agreeing that someone can think they are acting morally and still be wrong.
It's in fact subjective ethics--not traditional objective ethics--that Robert Jordan seems to be arguing against. The radical subjectivist says "morality is just about what you think, there are no actual rules". It may be that Jordan is also trying to highlight the difficulty for the objectivist of determining what those rules are--and that's the biggest hurdle for the objectivist. Culture A slaughtering Culture B may think their moral rules are correct. But to say "and Culture A could be wrong about that" is to actually admit that there is objective morality. If Culture A believes they are right, and they are incorrect, then there must be an actual, objective standard of what 'right' is.
If there is no fact of the matter about what right and wrong are, then no culture could be wrong in their beliefs.
All humanoid races have the free will to change their alignment regardless of their racial deity.
By your logic demons and devils who can never choose to not be evil by the nature of their existence are even less evil than orcs.
The concept of good and evil breaks down when you add the question of choice. Ultimately alignment is just a game mechanic used to describe a creature's behaviors in easy to understand categories.
In truth, no creature or entity in D&D has free will, even gods, as they are all subjects to the whims of authors, DMs, and players.
Tl;Dr Don't think about it so hard.
This ignores the fundamental premise that we all accept when discussing in world philosophy and morality, which is that we are discussing these things under the assumption that these entities exist independent of the humans at a table imagining them together.
Rather than being an insight into the question being posed, it is a dismissal of the idea of the question as valid to pose, which is not a useful addition to the discussion.
TO the OP: You're right, and it's a fundamental problem with how alignment works in DND. Thankfully, orcs aren't racially evil anymore. Sadly, they've backtracked on some other races, regressing Gnolls especially into automatons of destruction when they have been people with conscious Will for the last few editions. 5e gnolls are less than the hyena's they hang around with, which is both boring (imo) and disappointing compared to the excellent stories that could be told with them in previous editions. I wish the Wayfarer's Guide to Eberron would get an alternate Gnoll writeup.
But back to the point, there are two kinds of evil in dnd.
Elemental (Cosmic) Evil is the evil of gnolls, demons, devils, and evil gods.
Mortal Evil is the evil of a murderer.
Orcs in 5e are more often Mortal Evil than Mortal Good, but they aren't Elemental Evil anymore. They have destructive inclinations, and are guided by an evil god, but they can choose to reject all of that. OTOH, they are less responsible for their actions in some ways than an elf murderer.
This raises some moral issues around presenting fictional races in this way, and telling stories in which the savages aren't really morally responsible for their savage ways because they don't have the cultural touchstones of Good like the prettier civilized races. This is what people refer to when they say that DnD has issues with colonialist or imperialist framings of ficitonal cultures and races, because these ideas mirror (and are drawn from) the attitudes of colonizers and imperialists of the real world past,and writers who wrote from that mindset (like Kipling).
Sometimes it's fun in my group to crash into this problem with magic weapons, and make a group of adventurers who are all on the wrong side of this mindset, present this mindset as the "norm" for the civilised races, and go from there. Other times, we work to dismantle this issue and divorce our games from it, so that orcs simply aren't treated in this way by the narrative, and create worlds more like Azeroth than classic Toril.
This raises some moral issues around presenting fictional races in this way, and telling stories in which the savages aren't really morally responsible for their savage ways because they don't have the cultural touchstones of Good like the prettier civilized races. This is what people refer to when they say that DnD has issues with colonialist or imperialist framings of ficitonal cultures and races, because these ideas mirror (and are drawn from) the attitudes of colonizers and imperialists of the real world past,and writers who wrote from that mindset (like Kipling).
Indeed, good stuff :) If you look back at when the Barbarian was brought into the game (and really, just look at the class name itself), here's a paragraph from the class description (Unearthed Arcana, 1st Ed):
Many of a barbarian’s abilities depend on the native territory of the character. It is mandatory that barbarian characters come from some out-of-the-way barbaric state or area within the campaign. Typically they are cavemen, dervishes, nomads, or tribesmen. Only such uncivilized backgrounds can generate the necessary surroundings to produce individuals of the stock from which barbarian fighters would be drawn.
So 'tribesmen' and 'nomads' are equivalent to cavemen, and are 'uncivilized' and 'barbaric'. Never mind that tribes have civilizations, they are 'uncivilized' compared to the admittedly Euro-centric (they talked about this in the preface to Oriental Adventures) setting of the rest of the game :)
Tolkien had his orcs created explicitly by Morgoth to be evil--so there's no question in that world of their ability to be good. They can't be. But Tolkien also said of his orcs "...they are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."
And D&D drew heavily from Tolkien. The history is right there.
That said, it's never been because of considering these issues, but I've always preferred to run my 'evil monster races' as being hostile to 'PC races' 'willing to serve megalomaniacal wizards' by culture, not by some intractable nature. And that culture isn't 'evil', it's 'Orc-First'. (LOL MOGA!) I love throwing a hermit goblin living alone in the ruins at my players, see if they pause long enough to find out he's not evil, and might actually help them.
EDIT: Ooh, just flipping through Oriental Adventures before heading home, noticed this tidbit. In the PHB (1st ed and 5e), the standard European setting, there is one Common language. It's human, although both books admit there might be obscure dialects that some humans speak. Otherwise, for simplicity's sake, right, there's a common language. And because the players are humans, it's human. :) But in OA, there is no common language. The different countries all speak their own languages, and some might be more common than others, and there's a cobbled together 'very limited vocabulary' trade language. But no common language. Add in the constant referrals to things being 'exotic' in OA, and even what's generally a pretty respectful treatment of non-European cultures shows signs of an assumption of a bit less civilization. Even when they also say things like "when was the last time politeness and proper manners really mattered in your campaign?" :)
This raises some moral issues around presenting fictional races in this way, and telling stories in which the savages aren't really morally responsible for their savage ways because they don't have the cultural touchstones of Good like the prettier civilized races. This is what people refer to when they say that DnD has issues with colonialist or imperialist framings of ficitonal cultures and races, because these ideas mirror (and are drawn from) the attitudes of colonizers and imperialists of the real world past,and writers who wrote from that mindset (like Kipling).
Indeed, good stuff :) If you look back at when the Barbarian was brought into the game (and really, just look at the class name itself), here's a paragraph from the class description (Unearthed Arcana, 1st Ed):
Many of a barbarian’s abilities depend on the native territory of the character. It is mandatory that barbarian characters come from some out-of-the-way barbaric state or area within the campaign. Typically they are cavemen, dervishes, nomads, or tribesmen. Only such uncivilized backgrounds can generate the necessary surroundings to produce individuals of the stock from which barbarian fighters would be drawn.
So 'tribesmen' and 'nomads' are equivalent to cavemen, and are 'uncivilized' and 'barbaric'. Never mind that tribes have civilizations, they are 'uncivilized' compared to the admittedly Euro-centric (they talked about this in the preface to Oriental Adventures) setting of the rest of the game :)
Tolkien had his orcs created explicitly by Morgoth to be evil--so there's no question in that world of their ability to be good. They can't be. But Tolkien also said of his orcs "...they are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."
And D&D drew heavily from Tolkien. The history is right there.
That said, it's never been because of considering these issues, but I've always preferred to run my 'evil monster races' as being hostile to 'PC races' 'willing to serve megalomaniacal wizards' by culture, not by some intractable nature. And that culture isn't 'evil', it's 'Orc-First'. (LOL MOGA!) I love throwing a hermit goblin living alone in the ruins at my players, see if they pause long enough to find out he's not evil, and might actually help them.
EDIT: Ooh, just flipping through Oriental Adventures before heading home, noticed this tidbit. In the PHB (1st ed and 5e), the standard European setting, there is one Common language. It's human, although both books admit there might be obscure dialects that some humans speak. Otherwise, for simplicity's sake, right, there's a common language. And because the players are humans, it's human. :) But in OA, there is no common language. The different countries all speak their own languages, and some might be more common than others, and there's a cobbled together 'very limited vocabulary' trade language. But no common language. Add in the constant referrals to things being 'exotic' in OA, and even what's generally a pretty respectful treatment of non-European cultures shows signs of an assumption of a bit less civilization. Even when they also say things like "when was the last time politeness and proper manners really mattered in your campaign?" :)
Yeah, exactly right. DnD is full of that stuff, though to a lesser degree as time winds on.
Evil orcs are just one iteration of the Eurocentric model of fantasy that has historically come hand in hand with the colonialist attitudes of the age of imperialism. We can fix that without letting orcs lose their adversarial nature, simply by setting the goals and needs of orcish and human cultures at odds with eachother. Sometimes it is more fun, for some of us, to instead play the orcs and treat the humans as imperialistic expansionists with no respect for the cultures and "humanity" (for lack of a better word) of races that don't look like them.
But sometimes, we just want to escape, and orcs and gnolls become simply two of the many cultures that make up the world in which we are playing.
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In Canon several races are born with an "evil" alignment as per the whim of the god that created them, philosophically a creature that lacks freewill can not be blamed for its actions, therefore a creature that does bad things because it is forced to is not a creature that is categorically evil. The only creatures that can be considered evil are those that have a choice to not do bad things.
tl;dr Elves, humans, and gnomes are on average more evil than orcs and goblins.
My Homebrew Races, Monsters, and Spells. Feel free to use or give feedback for.
Also this thread I would love input on.
All humanoid races have the free will to change their alignment regardless of their racial deity.
By your logic demons and devils who can never choose to not be evil by the nature of their existence are even less evil than orcs.
The concept of good and evil breaks down when you add the question of choice. Ultimately alignment is just a game mechanic used to describe a creature's behaviors in easy to understand categories.
In truth, no creature or entity in D&D has free will, even gods, as they are all subjects to the whims of authors, DMs, and players.
Tl;Dr Don't think about it so hard.
Oooo, philosophy and D&D!
I disagree with you, OP. We speak of 'evil acts' and 'natural evil'. By your definition, these would not actually be 'evil', since only free agents can be evil. IRL, the existence of objective morality is an active debate, but in the worlds of D&D, it is a given - because Gary Gygax said so (i.e. the venerable but much-maligned alignment system). Therefore, even if evil creatures have no free will, they can be called evil.
Therein lies the question - are orcs, et. al., evil by nature or nurture? If by nature, are they pre-disposed to evil but able to choose freely? Or do they truly lack free will? But if they are able to choose in what way to act evilly, can they truly be said to lack free will? And even if they do lack free-will, is it not the obligation of all good creatures to root out evil? Yea, even to destroy it?
Therefore, the point is moot.
In my world, they have more a chaotic and aggressive pre-disposition but are not inherently evil.
Do "good" and "evil" only exist as chosen expressions of free will? You say a creature that is forced or lacks free will "cannot be blamed" for its actions, does this make the actions any less good or evil? How much compulsion is required to force an action to the point where the actor cannot be blamed?
Evil by nature orcs that were created to be evil may be held blameless for their evil in one sense, but does that make them or their actions any less evil? If an orc that was created to be evil by a malign deity slaughters children, do we now say that action was not evil because the orc had no choice in acting that way? Or is the orc only blameless for having its evil nature but not for acting upon it? Unless orcs are literal puppets, lying about inert except when the will of another is animating them, they must posses at least some free will to act, and therefor accountability for the good or evil of their actions.
Of course in 5e per the Monster Manual no creature is required to be evil. It does not break any actual rules to have a Lawful Good Fiend or Death Knight, or a Chaotic Good Beholder. It may be extremely unlikely but the alignments given are only the default and may be freely changed to suit the needs of your campaign.
As for the nature or nurture question that will have to be answered by each DM on a campaign by campaign basis.
Some good points. I actually much prefer the modern races can be any alignment system but for this thought experiment default alignments are a divine given predisposition.
Actions are definitely evil but should your possessed PC be called evil for the acts committed under possession?
And what about a measure of evil?
Is an orc that burns down a village just as evil as a halfling who does so?
Or is a goblin that saves a life (because they want to) doing more good than a paladin who does so because their god commands it?
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Also this thread I would love input on.
You sure do like the hard questions. Did you even read my tl;dr?
Good and evil are societal concepts. So the measure of good and evil should be taken from the point of society as a whole. And we are defined by our actions and specifically our choices.
With those ground rules laid:
No, because they did not choose to commit evil, and may even be completely unaware of the evil committed while possessed.
Yes then No, respectively. (Assuming all factors are the same besides race.) Maybe if you only choose to do something because you were commanded, amd would not have done it otherwise, you may be more neutral. But a creature with free will can always choose to disobey a command that violates its alignment, good or evil.
If Good and Evil exist as universal absolutes it should be possible to compile definitive lists of which actions are good and which are evil. To answer questions of what is good or evil one would then only need to work down the lists. Circumstances like Possession or mind control magic could be added to the list as factors to consider.
if "burning down a village" is on the evil list than both the orc and the halfling are equally evil for doing it.
If saving a life is on the good list than the goblin and the paladin are equally good for doing so.
That's one theory. The problem with morality being relative to culture is that the relativist is left saying all sorts of really uncomfortable things. Was the slavery that existed in the US prior to the civil war only immoral because we now think it was immoral--but it was actually not immoral then, because it was socially accepted? That's a theory, and there certainly are relativists around. But as I said, being forced to make claims like that often makes people uncomfortable :)
It's also possible that morality is objective--that there are actions that are good and bad regardless of what our beliefs about them are. That the vast majority of cultures that have ever existed believe stealing is wrong is, for many, somewhat convincing evidence of objectivist morality. The problem for the objectivist is explaining exactly what those rules are, and why those are the correct rules. But the fact is, I think, that most people reject relativist morality. Maybe not for good reasons, but they do.
But for D&D, the answer can somewhat easily be given--in that D&D worlds have gods/creators as an accepted fact. Morality that is legislated by the gods would be an objective matter--meaning that the beliefs of mortals wouldn't change the facts of morality.
I say it's 'somewhat' easy because there are two big issues that can complicate this even for D&D, if the DM and players want to get into it.
1) Did the gods in the D&D world actually create the world? This is a game where quite often mortals can become gods. So the gods of D&D are often not omnipotent creators like monotheist gods of the 'big three' Middle Eastern religions. So appealing to those gods might not explain exactly who determined morality.
2) The second big issue is the classic Euthyphro Dilemma, from Plato. If the gods created morality--if nothing was good or bad before the gods decided it was--then they didn't base their decisions off of anything. When the gods decided 'murder is wrong', murder wasn't wrong before that, and if it wasn't wrong before that, the gods could have made murder good. So that leaves the gods as arbitrary--they could have ordered morality any way they cared to. So calling them 'good' just means saying they had opinions and enforced them. Like tyrants.
If the gods did not create morality...then who or what did? And you're back at the original question of whether or not it's subjective or objective.
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Some people think it is easier to make a general list than people think. For example, we could claim that there's more or less universal agreement that in general we have the following moral duties:
These sort of duties show up in really every moral code that's existed, in some form or another. And it's an unusual person who claims that we do not have general duties to do these things (for example with Beneficence, it's odd for people to say there's nothing wrong with walking past the elderly old man who has fallen in the middle of the crosswalk, when you could help him).
What's trickier is providing 'definitive' lists that are more specific, particularly when these duties conflict. For example, if truth-telling will harm someone in a specific situation, you'll find people agreeing that in general we have to tell the truth and not hurt people, but you'll find a lot of disagreement about whether in this case we should do one or the other.
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I think most Orcs are evil, and the others have to struggle against their natures to be good or neutral.
I like it like that tbh. Also I think Kobolds are mostly evil out of spite then anything else. Freaking gnomes do that to your god and of course you're going to be feeling defenseless as the tiny dragon people that you are.
The Euthyphro dilemma is largely resolved by appealing to God's nature as the source of objective morality - that is, God commands the good because he is good, rather than it being a random thing he decided on, or some quality independent of him. As you say, D&D is polytheistic, so this solution doesn't really work... unless you appeal to Ao. But then, I'm not sure if Ao is Good or Neutral (I don't know enough lore). If Ao is Good, then the evil gods are objectively evil. If Ao is Neutral, then we're back to square one and the good and evil are relative, in which case we have to appeal to a higher power once again - Gary Gygax.
The God=Good appeal is interesting, but it seems to just collapse back down into one of the other views in equally problematic ways. If God just is good, then either he decided to be good, or he simply 'found himself' existing with this particular nature. God deciding to be good clearly collapses into the abitrariness of the one horn of the dilemma, because he could have decided for his nature to be anything. God being good but not deciding to be that way leaves the same questions about omnipotence--there are truths about the world, important ones, that God is not in control of or responsible for. Namely, what 'goodness' amounts to. That's the route that Aquinas eventually takes (although he tries amazing Aquinas backflips to avoid the implications)--that it is God's nature that actually prevents God from taking certain sorts of actions. God cannot commit evil acts because 'He is goodness' and his nature won't allow it. And that's more or less the same limitation that is one of the big concerns for the other horn of the dilemma, at least for the monotheist. There's still a standard of goodness that is apart from God's free choice.
The other concern for identifying goodness with God or his nature (as opposed to just predicating goodness of God's nature) is that you run the risk of giving goodness a definition that is unaccessable to mortals. God says "be good", and we ask "what does that mean", and God says "be me"...which is of course impossible. We can't even be 'like' God in this way if goodness is the nature of an eternal, omnipotent, omniscient creator of the universe. Toss in the argument from evil, for example, even with a good theodicy reply, and you get the result that God's goodness allows him to be good even while allowing horrible things to happen to people--while the goodness I'm supposed to pursue doesn't seem to allow for that. The goodness I can achieve is just not the same thing as God's nature. That's also something Aquinas grappled with--he eventually decided that God's goodness is analogous to human goodness. We can be 'good', but not 'God good'. His good is a better good :) And I don't think Aquinas really appreciated the problem with that sort of claim. Why doesn't my good include allowing people to die when I could save them, etc?
IMO, the Euthyphro Dilemma really does succeed in forcing one of those two choices, and I also think Plato's decision about which was the more acceptable choice is right--even more right for monotheists.
So, for D&D, pushing the problem off of the various pantheons and on to Ao is just kicking the can down the road. Same problem, different entity.
And even then, the Elvish equivalent of Sartre is stabbing his cigar at us and asking "Why do you accept Ao's opinion as somehow being definitional? Ao might have chosen who gets punished for what actions, and who gets praised. But mortal kings can do the same too. Why is Ao's declaration 'objective', any more than a powerful king's declaration would be?" :D
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The other side is that, regardless of where objective morality would be grounded, in any given universe, the creator of that universe would determine what are the standards of morality. The little bit I understand of Ao is that he/she/it doesn't really care - which leaves us at something of a stalemate in terms of the D&D universe.
I agree about the stalemate if you have a mysterious entity like Ao.
My point about Sartre's question though, is that Ao might 'lay down some laws', and might determine what punishments and rewards there would be. But that's really just a scaled-up version of what a human king could do. Here are the laws, here's the punishment, whether you disagree or not. That Ao's punishment might be eternal doesn't seem to change the fact that it's still a law and punishment laid down by a (subjective) entity. :)
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Robert Jordan answered this very question when he cowrote the wheel of time 3.5 book.
He utterly destroyed the concept of good and evil as archaic wishful thinking. Just because you believe you are good doesn't mean you are.
RL example: Christians to the new world or when Vikings first meet Christians after a few centuries apart. Or in todays world Muslims openly attacking westerners in western Europe, someone thinks they are doing good the rest know differently, who's right?
The problem with relativism where D&D is concerned is that, in the end. its handy to have a behavioral benchmark for the various races that can be encountered.
Eating human children alive and enjoying the screams might be a socially acceptable evening on the town for goblins but from the perspective of the average group of PCs, such things can clearly be called evil. Goblins are thus, labeled evil to indicate that, canonically, they enjoy things that cause suffering in others. DM's are of course, free to follow or ignore these guidelines as they please.
Personally, I like the idea that an entire race can be evil by nature (in game). It makes a D&D world a bit darker and more frightening knowing there are things in the dark that are smarter than you and would enjoy a chance to suck your brain out.
On topic. By most benchmarks I use, Orks naturally behave in a way I would describe as evil. So I call orks as a race, evil.
But the fact that people disagree is not by itself evidence that there's no fact, either. People disagree about whether there is intelligent extra-terrestrial life. We can say "who's right?", and even point out that neither side seems to have conclusive evidence. But there is a fact of the matter, completely independent of those beliefs :)
Jordan didn't 'utterly destroy' the concept of objective morality. Someone who thinks morality is objective in fact rejects the notion that 'you are good just because you think you are good'. If you take religious morality as objective morality, you will find every religion readily agreeing that someone can think they are acting morally and still be wrong.
It's in fact subjective ethics--not traditional objective ethics--that Robert Jordan seems to be arguing against. The radical subjectivist says "morality is just about what you think, there are no actual rules". It may be that Jordan is also trying to highlight the difficulty for the objectivist of determining what those rules are--and that's the biggest hurdle for the objectivist. Culture A slaughtering Culture B may think their moral rules are correct. But to say "and Culture A could be wrong about that" is to actually admit that there is objective morality. If Culture A believes they are right, and they are incorrect, then there must be an actual, objective standard of what 'right' is.
If there is no fact of the matter about what right and wrong are, then no culture could be wrong in their beliefs.
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This ignores the fundamental premise that we all accept when discussing in world philosophy and morality, which is that we are discussing these things under the assumption that these entities exist independent of the humans at a table imagining them together.
Rather than being an insight into the question being posed, it is a dismissal of the idea of the question as valid to pose, which is not a useful addition to the discussion.
TO the OP: You're right, and it's a fundamental problem with how alignment works in DND. Thankfully, orcs aren't racially evil anymore. Sadly, they've backtracked on some other races, regressing Gnolls especially into automatons of destruction when they have been people with conscious Will for the last few editions. 5e gnolls are less than the hyena's they hang around with, which is both boring (imo) and disappointing compared to the excellent stories that could be told with them in previous editions. I wish the Wayfarer's Guide to Eberron would get an alternate Gnoll writeup.
But back to the point, there are two kinds of evil in dnd.
Elemental (Cosmic) Evil is the evil of gnolls, demons, devils, and evil gods.
Mortal Evil is the evil of a murderer.
Orcs in 5e are more often Mortal Evil than Mortal Good, but they aren't Elemental Evil anymore. They have destructive inclinations, and are guided by an evil god, but they can choose to reject all of that. OTOH, they are less responsible for their actions in some ways than an elf murderer.
This raises some moral issues around presenting fictional races in this way, and telling stories in which the savages aren't really morally responsible for their savage ways because they don't have the cultural touchstones of Good like the prettier civilized races. This is what people refer to when they say that DnD has issues with colonialist or imperialist framings of ficitonal cultures and races, because these ideas mirror (and are drawn from) the attitudes of colonizers and imperialists of the real world past,and writers who wrote from that mindset (like Kipling).
Sometimes it's fun in my group to crash into this problem with magic weapons, and make a group of adventurers who are all on the wrong side of this mindset, present this mindset as the "norm" for the civilised races, and go from there. Other times, we work to dismantle this issue and divorce our games from it, so that orcs simply aren't treated in this way by the narrative, and create worlds more like Azeroth than classic Toril.
We do bones, motherf***ker!
Indeed, good stuff :) If you look back at when the Barbarian was brought into the game (and really, just look at the class name itself), here's a paragraph from the class description (Unearthed Arcana, 1st Ed):
Many of a barbarian’s abilities depend on the native territory
of the character. It is mandatory that barbarian characters come
from some out-of-the-way barbaric state or area within the campaign.
Typically they are cavemen, dervishes, nomads, or tribesmen. Only such
uncivilized backgrounds can generate the necessary surroundings to
produce individuals of the stock from which barbarian fighters would
be drawn.
So 'tribesmen' and 'nomads' are equivalent to cavemen, and are 'uncivilized' and 'barbaric'. Never mind that tribes have civilizations, they are 'uncivilized' compared to the admittedly Euro-centric (they talked about this in the preface to Oriental Adventures) setting of the rest of the game :)
Tolkien had his orcs created explicitly by Morgoth to be evil--so there's no question in that world of their ability to be good. They can't be. But Tolkien also said of his orcs "...they are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."
And D&D drew heavily from Tolkien. The history is right there.
That said, it's never been because of considering these issues, but I've always preferred to run my 'evil monster races' as being hostile to 'PC races' 'willing to serve megalomaniacal wizards' by culture, not by some intractable nature. And that culture isn't 'evil', it's 'Orc-First'. (LOL MOGA!) I love throwing a hermit goblin living alone in the ruins at my players, see if they pause long enough to find out he's not evil, and might actually help them.
EDIT: Ooh, just flipping through Oriental Adventures before heading home, noticed this tidbit. In the PHB (1st ed and 5e), the standard European setting, there is one Common language. It's human, although both books admit there might be obscure dialects that some humans speak. Otherwise, for simplicity's sake, right, there's a common language. And because the players are humans, it's human. :) But in OA, there is no common language. The different countries all speak their own languages, and some might be more common than others, and there's a cobbled together 'very limited vocabulary' trade language. But no common language. Add in the constant referrals to things being 'exotic' in OA, and even what's generally a pretty respectful treatment of non-European cultures shows signs of an assumption of a bit less civilization. Even when they also say things like "when was the last time politeness and proper manners really mattered in your campaign?" :)
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Yeah, exactly right. DnD is full of that stuff, though to a lesser degree as time winds on.
Evil orcs are just one iteration of the Eurocentric model of fantasy that has historically come hand in hand with the colonialist attitudes of the age of imperialism. We can fix that without letting orcs lose their adversarial nature, simply by setting the goals and needs of orcish and human cultures at odds with eachother. Sometimes it is more fun, for some of us, to instead play the orcs and treat the humans as imperialistic expansionists with no respect for the cultures and "humanity" (for lack of a better word) of races that don't look like them.
But sometimes, we just want to escape, and orcs and gnolls become simply two of the many cultures that make up the world in which we are playing.
We do bones, motherf***ker!