Subject: Depends on whether it's absolute or relative morality
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Posted on: 2010-06-03 20:59:00 UTC

D&D, where alignments started, uses an absolute morality system--that is, if someone's evil, they're always evil, no matter on who is looking at them. That has an interesting social impact, especially with the reality of afterlives in the picture (evil people are basically hoping to end up on top of the heap). Motivations do play into alignment; but alignment isn't a matter of perspective.

Now, you can create a world in which alignments are relative; but then you'd have to re-define "evil" as "something I don't like" and "good" as "something I like", which is an altogether different thing from the concepts of good or evil themselves; so in those worlds you'd be better off saying that good and evil simply don't exist than tangling yourself up in semantics.

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