[5e] Thorough explanation of why it's terrible?

[merxa]

People here are very confused.

Yes, in the universe of d&d it does map and does mean exactly what it says on the tin.

We're not discussing actual normative philosophy, we are talking about a game. Yes, in the real world, outside the game world of d&d, ethics is complex, and discussion of objective truths within it are difficult, and of course the toy game alignments in d&d don't have a whole lot to do with Christianity or Platonism or whatever other objective moral philosophy people want to discuss.

But in the toy game world of d&d, being capital G good means being objectively good as stated by the metaphysical and physical laws of the game universe, it doesn't matter if that doesn't jive with my opinion or your opinion of goodness, it doesn't matter if you believe there is or isn't such a thing as objective goodness, in the game world it's just an objective state, like having resistance to fire.

[...You Lost Me]

Hmmm...does that mean that "objective Good" can mean something different for different Paladins, depending on who they worship? Some of them kill goblins babies, some don't?

It's definitely possible. Then the PR team for the anti-killing-goblin-babies paladins would square off against the PR team for the pro-killing-goblin-babies paladins over the right to tell everyone that their source of paladin powers are the real "objective good".

--

Semi-related note, I have a different issue with Rawbeard's point.

morality is really not complicated in D&D. good and evil are real forces that exist, not just value judgements based on societal standards. getting bent out of shape over "evil races" when you can literally detect and even measure the evil in them is... weird.

I don't see how this matters at all. D&D books don't sell because they have a consistent metaphysics, they sell because players enjoy playing with them.

To use your example of good & evil being real forces: players clearly enjoy having Good and Evil being mystical force, so you need to write spells like detect evil / detect good and monsters like planetars / hezrou. Does this lead to weird, uncomfortable moral questions? Probably. But you can mind caulk them because it's your job to make a world that players want to play.

Recently, more players have decided they don't like seeing IRL parallels of racist stereotypes where the light-skinned races are sophisticated representatives of Good while dark-skinned races are the treacherous and/or savage representatives of Evil. Your job is to make sure those people feel included and can play the game, so you need to write an orc that doesn't look like a racist caricature and doesn't play for team Evil.

[Orion]

People here are very confused.

Yes, in the universe of d&d it does map and does mean exactly what it says on the tin.

We're not discussing actual normative philosophy, we are talking about a game. Yes, in the real world, outside the game world of d&d, ethics is complex, and discussion of objective truths within it are difficult, and of course the toy game alignments in d&d don't have a whole lot to do with Christianity or Platonism or whatever other objective moral philosophy people want to discuss.

But in the toy game world of d&d, being capital G good means being objectively good as stated by the metaphysical and physical laws of the game universe, it doesn't matter if that doesn't jive with my opinion or your opinion of goodness, it doesn't matter if you believe there is or isn't such a thing as objective goodness, in the game world it's just an objective state, like having resistance to fire.

There's different levels of impossible. There's things that are impossible in our universe, but you could imagine a universe where they happened. But there's also stuff you can't even imagine being possible. It seems like it would be possible to have different animals evolve than the ones that actually evolved. We can imagine some aspects of physics or chemistry working differently. You can't imagine a universe where colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Personally I think that objective morality inhering in fundamental forces is like a colorless green idea, I think that's a logical impossibility that can't even be imagined. People may think they're imagining it, but I think those people are mistaken. It's not how anything works, ergo it can't be how D&D works.

[merxa]

Again applying strenuous logic to d&d is like having an argument with a door.

If a rule as written doesn't make sense, it doesn't make the rule not exist, and to say it can't be the rule because it doesn't make sense is to ascribe a level of perfection to a game that's ridiculous.

I don't think anyone is arguing that the objective morality presented in d&d is satisfying, is true to life, and a valid way to conduct yourself in the real world.

As to claim whether the illogical can exist is itself an axiomatic ideal that may or may not be true. Heck in 5e everyone lives in a hyperbolic geometry where the circle has been squared, that certainly doesn't make any logical sense, but that's the rules.

As for whether d&d should or ought to have objective moral forces of good and evil and whether intelligent races should or should not radiate these forces are other questions, and I think it's clear a lot of people have various issues with this, and if you go to any game forum and look up any discussion on falling paladins it will be very clear people have lots of different opinions on what is 'The Good', and that's not going to change anytime soon, and it ought not to.

[Lago PARANOIA]

As to claim whether the illogical can exist is itself an axiomatic ideal that may or may not be true. Heck in 5e everyone lives in a hyperbolic geometry where the circle has been squared, that certainly doesn't make any logical sense, but that's the rules.

There's a practical difference between a logical impossibility that never comes up (like what happens when a bridge is 120% real with shadow magic) and a logical impossibility that comes up frequently like, oh, objective morality. People can only mind caulk and doublethink so much before it becomes an active impediment to engagement.

Morality comes up a LOT in D&D, because logical character motivation (of which morality is a huge subset thereof) is one of the most basic elements of any character-driven story. It's literally like asking someone to enjoy a novel where pages are randomly ripped out. And not just one or two out of a hundred, but every third page.

[merxa]

Objective moral systems are more popular and more commonly practiced than any other in real life. I'm sorry to inform everyone of this, but religion is very popular and dear to billions of people.

D&D, having an objective system, is more readily understood, at least from a intuitionist perspective. Generally groups can broadly agree on Good and Evil, at least enough to play the game and get along. This retroactive claim that people haven't been able to play d&d for the last 50 years is on the face absurd.

Again, trying to truly imagine the hyperbolic geometry of 5e isn't really possible, but the game goes along just fine, and often it's even easier to calculate movement then otherwise.

My personal opinion is that the objective morality presented by d&d is interesting and distinct, and I've enjoyed it at times. But if 6th edition or 5th revised removed this or greatly modified it I'd be fine, and maybe even happy since alignment for PCs usually causes arguments when such arguments weren't needed and won't be missed. Hopefully this hypothetical new edition or revised edition will still have enemies PCs can defeat without too many qualms -- as I play games to get away from the complexities and problems of real life or at least play games in a safe space that such things can be explored without fear or serious repercussions.

[Shiritai]

Yes, in the universe of d&d it does map and does mean exactly what it says on the tin.

We're not discussing actual normative philosophy, we are talking about a game. Yes, in the real world, outside the game world of d&d, ethics is complex, and discussion of objective truths within it are difficult, and of course the toy game alignments in d&d don't have a whole lot to do with Christianity or Platonism or whatever other objective moral philosophy people want to discuss.

But in the toy game world of d&d, being capital G good means being objectively good as stated by the metaphysical and physical laws of the game universe, it doesn't matter if that doesn't jive with my opinion or your opinion of goodness, it doesn't matter if you believe there is or isn't such a thing as objective goodness, in the game world it's just an objective state, like having resistance to fire.

"What it says on the tin" is literally meaningless - no edition of DND defines what "objective good" is, and obviously there's no agreed-upon definition of objective good either. The game wouldn't function without peoples' opinion on what goodness is - for all the explanation that DND gives, you might as well replace every instance of "Good" and "Evil" with "Laut" and "Blark".

[Shiritai]

Objective moral systems are more popular and more commonly practiced than any other in real life. I'm sorry to inform everyone of this, but religion is very popular and dear to billions of people.

You're saying that religions have objective moral systems? If you were a lifelong atheist, that might excuse your ignorance. But seriously, show me a religious group that doesn't argue about morality.

[Kaelik]

If you hypothesize that in D&D word there are four special particles, goodions, badions, lawions, and chaonions that congregate around you if you undertake certain acts (or are certain kinds of outsiders who are somehow mostly only capable of taking those acts) then it makes perfect sense that, if these are detectable, that you would have people develop moral theories about how it is "right" to collect or avoid some subset of these particles and thus, actions that accomplish that are "right." That's the Cosmic Force.

And it would be fair to say you are "objectively" accruing more Goodions or fewer, but obviously which set of 9 possible states you consider the "right" one would be entirely subjective, and "Good" and "Evil" would not mean to the people of that world the things they mean to ours, but instead would mean something that, while different, is a parallel to "deontologist" and "consequentialist" or "rules utilitarian" and "act utilitarian" and when people say "Good" they would know they are not talking about the thing that is objectively "Right" but instead articulating one of a set of possible moral positions that is commonly believed by moral philosophers.

And then there would be alignment non cognitivists/skeptics who tell people that while acts may collect particles around you that doesn't actually tell you anything about those actions aside from particle collection.

[Orion]

This retroactive claim that people haven't been able to play d&d for the last 50 years is on the face absurd.

People definitely haven't been able to play D&D for 50 years. 50 years ago we had the OD&D "white box," which is not actually a playable game. I'm not sure what the earliest version of D&D one could actually play is, but every version has contained some unplayable rules or rule-like text objects.

EDIT: I used the wrong link above, try this one[/url]

[merxa]

I more or less agree with Kaelik, it seems people are tripping over words and meaning.

I think a lot of this confusion comes from not having the necessary distinctions required to think through this clearly.

Most religions make authoritative claims to objective moral truths. Of course religions are highly opinionated both within and without, leading to disagreements, holy wars etc. Disagreements doesn't preclude their claim to objective moral truth -- and saying that since two people disagree about some truth means such truth doesn't exist is about the level of intellectual sophistication of a grade schooler.

But this has nothing to do really with d&d, and I'll be stepping away after this post since the topic is becoming toxic as is common in online discussions on alignment in games.

Within the metaphysics of d&d, alignment has been objective, Goodness exists, entire planes of existence are made from goodness, literal Angels walk the multiverse, made up of Goodness, and the clear intention is to map such things to a superficial understanding of goodness, the efficacy of this achievement is clearly in disagreement, but outside contrarions being contrary, if you survey people and ask them if Angels are meant to be good they'll shrug and say sure.

Of course in game, a PC or NPC could be a devil, or worship some Demon Lord and make claims how they are truly the 'good' because they value freedom or don't oppress others to their ways or make whatever other arguments, but per the game and the rules, they will detect as evil, protection from evil will work against them, etc etc etc. That's just how the game has been, and sure let's change it to whatever else, but people engaging in Orwellian rewriting of history to say this isn't and was never true is bizarre, it's just a game folks, we don't need to get into twists of logic to justify how some passage on alignment written 20 or 30 years didn't really mean what it meant.

Anyway, have at it, at this point I'm just repeating myself.

[Orion]

I also agreed with everything in Kaelik's post, and almost everything in your latest. The only place where we disagree is that I don't think it's accurate to say that only contrarians coming from outside the D&D paradigm question the association between "the Good alignment" and "the moral good." AD&D, for instance, explicitly made room for "True Neutral" characters, which are basically characters who believe that the Neutral alignment is in fact morally superior to the alignment called Good. The contrarian perspective has always been coming from inside the house.

[Mechalich]

I also agreed with everything in Kaelik's post, and almost everything in your latest. The only place where we disagree is that I don't think it's accurate to say that only contrarians coming from outside the D&D paradigm question the association between "the Good alignment" and "the moral good." AD&D, for instance, explicitly made room for "True Neutral" characters, which are basically characters who believe that the Neutral alignment is in fact morally superior to the alignment called Good. The contrarian perspective has always been coming from inside the house.

The true neutral perspective isn't that neutrality is superior to good though, it's that it is essential that balance exist for the universe to continue and therefore absolute devotion to good is actually advocating for a bad ending. This is built around the somewhat counter-intuitive idea that, since humans (and other sapient species) are imperfect beings and therefore all contain at least a little bit of evil, in the case where good triumphs forever we would all cease to exist because there would be nothing afterwards but eternal oneness with the all-good.

"And worse would the good ones do; they would drive torment from the multiverse - destroy misery if they could - and end forever all suffering and despair." - inner monologue of the Lady of Pain, Pages of Pain, Troy Denning

The idea that the destruction of all evil would be a bad outcome, and therefore good must not be allowed total victory is something that is now quite common in fantasy (the Wheel of Time concludes with an explicit rumination on this, among others), but that doesn't mean that good is not good, it just means the fictional universe is inherently imperfect and that this cannot be changed without the destruction of free will.

This idea seems to have very Abrahamic roots, in that the development of human awareness and sapience was tied, through eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, to original sin, and that the end of sin and suffering necessarily implies the end of the world - which in Christian thought takes the form of the Revelation.

[Shiritai]

I more or less agree with Kaelik, it seems people are tripping over words and meaning.

I think a lot of this confusion comes from not having the necessary distinctions required to think through this clearly.

Most religions make authoritative claims to objective moral truths. Of course religions are highly opinionated both within and without, leading to disagreements, holy wars etc. Disagreements doesn't preclude their claim to objective moral truth -- and saying that since two people disagree about some truth means such truth doesn't exist is about the level of intellectual sophistication of a grade schooler.

But this has nothing to do really with d&d, and I'll be stepping away after this post since the topic is becoming toxic as is common in online discussions on alignment in games.

Within the metaphysics of d&d, alignment has been objective, Goodness exists, entire planes of existence are made from goodness, literal Angels walk the multiverse, made up of Goodness, and the clear intention is to map such things to a superficial understanding of goodness, the efficacy of this achievement is clearly in disagreement, but outside contrarions being contrary, if you survey people and ask them if Angels are meant to be good they'll shrug and say sure.

Of course in game, a PC or NPC could be a devil, or worship some Demon Lord and make claims how they are truly the 'good' because they value freedom or don't oppress others to their ways or make whatever other arguments, but per the game and the rules, they will detect as evil, protection from evil will work against them, etc etc etc. That's just how the game has been, and sure let's change it to whatever else, but people engaging in Orwellian rewriting of history to say this isn't and was never true is bizarre, it's just a game folks, we don't need to get into twists of logic to justify how some passage on alignment written 20 or 30 years didn't really mean what it meant.

Anyway, have at it, at this point I'm just repeating myself.

The bolded is for you to reflect on.

Whether "objective moral truth" exists has no bearing on the usability of alignment rules in an RPG. What does matter is shared expectations - if your players agree on how gravity works, you don't need to define in your game what objects fall and how fast they fall. If your players agree on how combustion works, you don't have to define what real-world materials are flammable and in what conditions. But there isn't shared consensus on what Good means, and there aren't comprehensive rules on it either. That's the issue. It doesn't matter if all your players believe there's an absolute morality if they disagree on what that is, and if the rules don't clarify it either.

[Emerald]

The true neutral perspective isn't that neutrality is superior to good though, it's that it is essential that balance exist for the universe to continue and therefore absolute devotion to good is actually advocating for a bad ending. This is built around the somewhat counter-intuitive idea that, since humans (and other sapient species) are imperfect beings and therefore all contain at least a little bit of evil, in the case where good triumphs forever we would all cease to exist because there would be nothing afterwards but eternal oneness with the all-good.

It's also based around the idea that there's a lot of space between "status quo" and "absolute Cosmic Goodness forever" in which Good having the upper hand wouldn't necessarily be a good thing.

If a DM describes a homebrew setting with a premise of "there was a big tussle between Good and Evil and Evil won," what that means depends a lot on which particular forces of Evil won. Is it a dystopian nightmare because devils took over everything? Or a postapocalyptic wasteland because demons wiped everyone out? Or endless horrifying war because Acheron got fused with the Material Plane? Or millions of acres of evil Jello because Juiblex the Faceless Lord carried out some fancy evil ritual and turned the local Material Plane world into a copy of his Abyssal layer? And so on.

Likewise, while in the abstract "the whole Material Plane becomes more Good" sounds like a great thing, that could mean a bunch of different things, all of which aren't all that appealing to various groups. Free-spirited types would hate to see archons turn all governments into LG theocracies, dwarves would hate to see eladrins bring a CG elf's idea of paradise to their civilization, pacifists would hate to see the world turn into Ysgard, masochists would hate the eternal bliss of Elysium, and so on. And druids were originally always TN because they serve and draw power from the force of capital-N Nature of the Material Plane, and outsiders of any alignment replacing that with the pseudo-nature of their home plane would be terrible regardless of which alignment they happen to be.

This idea seems to have very Abrahamic roots, in that the development of human awareness and sapience was tied, through eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, to original sin, and that the end of sin and suffering necessarily implies the end of the world - which in Christian thought takes the form of the Revelation.

I'd say it also has some more pragmatic roots, in that any end in which one faction wins and you can no longer play in that setting is a bad one from a game perspective, and a scenario in which there are good reasons why one wouldn't align themselves with Good every time offers more possible PC backgrounds and motivations.

But there isn't shared consensus on what Good means, and there aren't comprehensive rules on it either. That's the issue. It doesn't matter if all your players believe there's an absolute morality if they disagree on what that is, and if the rules don't clarify it either.

There doesn't have to be a single consensus, because Good PCs don't get their morality from abstract ultimate cosmic Goodness, they have it filtered through various Good gods and factions which might very well disagree with each other.

If a DM presents an all-paladin party with the stereotypical "after wiping out the orc warriors you find a bunch of orc babies, what do you do?" scenario, it's perfectly in-character for an elf paladin who serves Corellon Larethian to argue that orcs are intrinsically evil and they should be killed for the greater good, a paladin who serves Rao to argue that orcs are intrinsically evil but that everyone can reach enlightenment and so the orcs should be saved instead of killed, a paladin who serves St. Cuthbert to argue that orcs are encouraged to be evil by their society rather than being innately evil and so there's no good reason to kill an orc deprived of its social context, and so on.

The fact that there's not a single straitjacket-y definition of Goodness, or even of each Good alignment, only becomes a problem if two players have wildly different ideas about it and can't talk it out like reasonable people, and that applies to every flavor disagreement from "what does 'low-magic' mean" to "how do you feel about the portrayal of drow" and more, it's not at all unique to alignment.

[Chamomile]

I mean, technically, it totally is,

No, it literally isn't. Like Orion's "colorless green force" example, an objectively good force is a contradiction in terms. it's not just different from our world, it's impossible in any world (okay, standard cop-out for absolute statements: It's impossible in any world comprehensible to the human brain, but the GM and audience are human, so if the world is incomprehensible to the human brain, it's unplayable). No matter how many spikes and baby murders you attach to a force of nature you've invented, that still doesn't make that force of nature objectively evil.

Thanks to Book of Vile Darkness and Book of Exalted Deeds, 3.5e is a universe where you ping as Force A if you do too much BDSM and Force B if you are too much of a furry, and they called Force A "Evil" and Force B "Good," but that doesn't mean their labels are objectively correct. The number of ways you can ping as Force A by undertaking actions most people would consider to be neutral or even good is long and well-documented. These labels refer to objectively real forces (within the fiction), sure, but that doesn't mean that they're objectively moral because objective morality is a contradiction in terms. Someone can claim that the particles measured by Detect Good correlate to inherent goodness, but so what? Someone can claim that the particles measured by blue wavelengths of light correlate to inherent goodness and we wouldn't say they have discovered the objectively true set of morals just because they attached a measurable phenomenon to it.

Objective moral systems are more popular and more commonly practiced than any other in real life.

No they're not. People claim to have objective moral systems a lot, but they don't, and we know they don't because if they had an objective moral system they'd be able to find measurable proof that their moral system was inherently superior to everyone else's. That's what "objective morality" is. What the Hell would that even look like? What properties could a particle or wavelength or whatever possibly have that would result in it being objectively good? It's an incoherent concept. People like to claim that they have an objectively correct system of morals because they like the results of that claim: It means that literally anything they do can be instantly justified without argument. But ask them to describe the process and they've got nothing. You can always keep asking "but how does that make something objectively good?" and whatever their answer is, it will always be wrong.

[Thaluikhain]

Within the metaphysics of d&d, alignment has been objective, Goodness exists, entire planes of existence are made from goodness, literal Angels walk the multiverse, made up of Goodness, and the clear intention is to map such things to a superficial understanding of goodness, the efficacy of this achievement is clearly in disagreement, but outside contrarions being contrary, if you survey people and ask them if Angels are meant to be good they'll shrug and say sure.

Sure, but what does any of that actually mean? Or more importantly, what does that mean to the players?

Now, you could just say "We are Team Good from the Good place and we will go to the Evil place and fight Team Evil", and that answer would work. Not very complex, but good enough, no pun intended.

Anything more complicated than that and you have to sit down and write out rules for what makes someone good or evil.

Personally, though, I'm leaning towards the question of killing orc babies being less important than the question of, regardless of how you answer that, did you answer that at the beginning of the game or waited until the PCs found some orc babies to kill or not.

[Cervantes]

Yes, in the universe of d&d it does map and does mean exactly what it says on the tin.

We're not discussing actual normative philosophy, we are talking about a game. Yes, in the real world, outside the game world of d&d, ethics is complex, and discussion of objective truths within it are difficult, and of course the toy game alignments in d&d don't have a whole lot to do with Christianity or Platonism or whatever other objective moral philosophy people want to discuss.

I think merxa is touching on something that might be obvious here but I think is worth noting: the intention of Good and Evil in D&D is that of objective morality. That's why they're called that, that's what it's trying to do.

When we talk about how Good has Angels and holy light, that's because that's what Good "looks like". I think for some players that's going to be fine if they don't bump up against moral questions and Alignment Confusion. It works perfectly if you don't use it.

None of this defends the system they wrote, because it's really easy to bump up against the contradictions. And even worse, as Orion and Chamomile note, "objectively good force" is a contraction in terms (but note that this is different from "objective moral truths").

At the very least, if there's an insistence on ignoring that part and going through with Good = Force A, at least make it a consistent moral system. Especially same for Law and Chaos. Include a copy of Kant's "Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals" for DMs to refer to if they need to decide if a Paladin's actions were bad enough to cut off its power.

[amethal]

Personally, though, I'm leaning towards the question of killing orc babies being less important than the question of, regardless of how you answer that, did you answer that at the beginning of the game or waited until the PCs found some orc babies to kill or not.

Assuming the "you" in this case is the DM, then the PCs only find some orc babies if you want them to find some, so you need to have already decided what the consequences of killing them will be.

(Admittedly the players could in theory decide to make encountering orc babies the focus of the campaign, and turn down every plot hook that doesn't seem likely to result in an encounter with orc babies. That would be an unusual campaign.)

As a player, I've had a few instances where it became clear that the DM and I had different interpretations of morality, and it's hard to avoid feeling like it is the player's morality which has been tested and found wanting, rather than the character's. Which is not a nice feeling amongst friends.

As a DM, I put in dilemmas because I am genuinely interested in what the characters will do. It's not so I can punish people for not making the "right" choices. In the rare instances where I feel the choice made will have in-universe consequences for the character - paladin falling, a cleric losing access to spells - then I'll warn the player ("you suddenly feel that Shelyn wouldn't approve of you flamestriking the art gallery") so they can change their mind IF they want to.

The one time I did get upset (and it was sadness rather than anger) was when the players did not see any decision to make, each one independently coming to the conclusion that the obvious way to proceed was with a surprise attack and the mass murder of a rival group of treasure hunters. I'd have liked them to at least consider the possibility of not-murder, and felt that they'd deprived us all of the more interesting outcome.

There were zero in-game or out-of-game consequences, apart from a sadder but wiser DM.

[deaddmwalking]

Good and evil in D&D are not objective.

An objective property can be accurately discerned by measurement. If a particular object is a shade of purple, we can measure what wavelengths it reflects accurately. We can argue about whether it is more red or more blue, but we can also get a palette sample and determine exactly what color it is. Anyone claiming that the thing is, in reality, yellow, can be dismissed.

Killing orc babies is a useful example - if there is an objective morality in D&D terms, it should be obvious whether that is good or evil. In fact, for every possible act it should be possible to discern the alignment association (and items like a phylactery of faithfulness are supposed to do that. But objective reality requires even more.

Different observers must be able to consistently come to the same conclusion.

Since there are tables where killing babies if they ping as evil is 'good' and there are tables where killing babies if they ping as evil is 'evil', would mean that in order to be 'objective', it would also have to be inconsistent. Our purple object sometimes is truly yellow and that's not a feature of observation - the nature of the object would have to change intrinsically or it would just be inaccurate measurements/observations.

D&D metaphysics is supposed to rely on creatures being objectively good or evil (ie, it is a quantity you can detect and measure) but that doesn't actually give you any information about how a character will act in a given situation. Crucially, it doesn't tell you what action would be good/evil in a given circumstance, or whether alignment infractions are warranted.

Alignment has some elements that are consistent (characters have an alignment written on their sheet and it can be discerned), but that doesn't make it objective reality - even if detecting of alignment qualifies. What's written on the character sheet indicates a general alliance, not any set of objective actions required to fall into that category.

[malak]

Another is a rewrite of Counterspell that rebalances the action economy.

I tried two variants. First one is that counterspell always requires a DC check, the other one is make it an opposed check between the casters. Both seem to work reasonably well.

[Orion]

People claim to have objective moral systems a lot, but they don't, and we know they don't because if they had an objective moral system they'd be able to find measurable proof that their moral system was inherently superior to everyone else's. That's what "objective morality" is.

I think it's worth drawing a distinction between objectively validated moral standards, which are not a real thing, and objective moral standards. which are real and common.The opposite of an objective moral system is a subjective moral system. In a subjective system, moral facts are dependent on human beliefs about moral facts. In other words, unjustified homicide is wrong because people believe that unjustified homicide is wrong. Some subjective systems are more granular than others. In coarse-grained subjective systems, the fact that people generally agree that unjustified homicide is wrong means that unjustified homicide is wrong. In fine-grained subjective systems, unjustified killing is only wrong for the people who believe it's wrong. I don't subscribe to subjective morality.

I believe that morality is objective, in the sense that what's wrong for me is wrong for thee. I believe that moral facts are objective, in the sense that they don't change when opinions change. If an almighty alien used a mind control device to re-write all our moral opinions with something terrible, he wouldn't have actually changed morality, he'd just have made us all deluded about what's moral. When I make a moral claim, telling you what I think is moral to do in some particular situation, I'm not just stating a preference, I'm telling you what I think is actually good. At the same time, I'm aware that I cannot objectively validate my moral beliefs, that all the moral evidence I can muster is grounded in moral intuitions that are not themselves grounded in anything. I just have to hope that I'm lucky enough to have moral intuitions that get me reasonable close to the objective morality.[/i]

[Thaluikhain]

In other words, unjustified homicide is wrong because people believe that unjustified homicide is wrong. Some subjective systems are more granular than others. In coarse-grained subjective systems, the fact that people generally agree that unjustified homicide is wrong means that unjustified homicide is wrong. In fine-grained subjective systems, unjustified killing is only wrong for the people who believe it's wrong.

Pretty sure that more or less everyone agrees that unjustified homicide is wrong, they just have very different ideas about what constitutes unjustified.

[Orion]

In other words, unjustified homicide is wrong because people believe that unjustified homicide is wrong. Some subjective systems are more granular than others. In coarse-grained subjective systems, the fact that people generally agree that unjustified homicide is wrong means that unjustified homicide is wrong. In fine-grained subjective systems, unjustified killing is only wrong for the people who believe it's wrong.

Pretty sure that more or less everyone agrees that unjustified homicide is wrong, they just have very different ideas about what constitutes unjustified.

The phrase "unjustified homicide" assumes that homicide requires justification, that is, it depends on the assumption that it's generally wrong unless there's an exceptional circumstance that justifies it. Someone who had no moral compunctions about homicide wouldn't object to an unjustified homicide, they'd object to the notion that homicide requires justification.

[Emerald]

No, it literally isn't. Like Orion's "colorless green force" example, an objectively good force is a contradiction in terms. it's not just different from our world, it's impossible in any world (okay, standard cop-out for absolute statements: It's impossible in any world comprehensible to the human brain, but the GM and audience are human, so if the world is incomprehensible to the human brain, it's unplayable). No matter how many spikes and baby murders you attach to a force of nature you've invented, that still doesn't make that force of nature objectively evil.

There are lots of things in D&D that are impossible under real physics and any version thereof comprehensible to humans. In D&D, fire isn't a chemical reaction, it's an element and a Platonic ideal, and elemental fire not only burns forever with no fuel or air required but it comes in solid, liquid, gaseous, and energetic varieties.

"Solid inert fire" is also a contradiction in terms, yet people accept it just fine because it comes from way over there in the Elemental Plane of Fire and is distinct from Material Plane fire--which is technically an alloy/melding of fire, air, and positive energy--which works the way you'd expect (as long as fire spells and such don't get involved), so you don't really need to think about the physical and metaphysical implications of "pure elemental fire."

In the same way, Pure Ineffable Cosmic Good is a thing that's way over there at some undefined point past the Upper Planes, Good outsiders and paladins and such are amalgamations of Good with other things, and this cosmic Good is distinct from Good-as-instantiated-on-the-Material-Plane so you don't need to think or care about it in the normal course of events.

Thanks to Book of Vile Darkness and Book of Exalted Deeds, 3.5e is a universe where you ping as Force A if you do too much BDSM and Force B if you are too much of a furry, and they called Force A "Evil" and Force B "Good," but that doesn't mean their labels are objectively correct. The number of ways you can ping as Force A by undertaking actions most people would consider to be neutral or even good is long and well-documented.

BoED and BoVD say a bunch of dumb things about good and evil, yes, but (A) that's an issue with those specific writers shoving a bunch of contradictory Judeo-Christian monotheistic peanut butter in D&D's chocolate and pretty much everyone acknowledges that they're outliers relative to all the other writings on alignment, and (B) as I mentioned, even those two books are clear that they're mostly talking about Good and Evil through the lens of various gods and exemplar lords rather than Ineffable Cosmic Good and Evil.

Killing orc babies is a useful example - if there is an objective morality in D&D terms, it should be obvious whether that is good or evil. In fact, for every possible act it should be possible to discern the alignment association (and items like a phylactery of faithfulness are supposed to do that. But objective reality requires even more.

Different observers must be able to consistently come to the same conclusion.

Since there are tables where killing babies if they ping as evil is 'good' and there are tables where killing babies if they ping as evil is 'evil', would mean that in order to be 'objective', it would also have to be inconsistent. Our purple object sometimes is truly yellow and that's not a feature of observation - the nature of the object would have to change intrinsically or it would just be inaccurate measurements/observations.

Firstly, just because a given act is objective doesn't mean it's obvious. A given math problem can have an objective answer and yet multiple people encountering it for the first time might have different ideas and intuitions about what the solution might be, because they don't have all the context or aren't trained in math or whatever.

Paladins have an evildar in Detect Evil, but they don't have perfect knowledge of morality, only whatever guidance their code (and whatever patron deity they might follow) provides. In fact, the phylactery of faithfulness alerts the wearer to things that "affect his alignment and his standing with his deity," so it's possible for two different paladins each wearing a phylactery to get different answers to "Will this make me fall?" for exactly the same action if one of them serves a very stern and uptight patron and the other's patron is more forgiving.

Secondly, Good isn't pure and monolithic. Good-as-instantiated-on-the-Outer-Planes comes in three different varieties, being "alloyed" with Law, Chaos, and Neutrality, and each is its own distinct thing with its own morals and ethics, exemplars, home plane, etc., not just Ineffable Good with a different paint job. It's entirely possible for Ineffable Cosmic Good to say that the one true objective answer to the paladin-and-orc-babies dilemma is X, but for Lawful Good's one true objective answer to be Y, Neutral Good's answer to be Z, and Chaotic Good's answer to be W.

And thirdly, D&D physics can vary by location. An orc from Oerth is made up of air, earth, fire, and water atoms (plus positive energy atoms and a soul and all that) because those are Oerth's four fundamental elements, while its identical twin from Rokugan would be made up of earth, fire, water, metal, and wood atoms because those are Rokugan's five different fundamental elements. So it's entirely possible for the paladin-and-orc-babies dilemma to have two different objective answers based on the local alignment physics (read: a given DM's views on what Cosmic Good has to say about it).