Neil Mussett
My very first serious ethical debate was over a game of D&D. “I am going to switch to GURPS [Generic Universal Role Playing System]”, my friend Joe told me, “because character creation makes much more sense. It doesn’t have alignments, which is great. I mean, who really is ‘chaotic evil’?” I tried to argue that we sometimes do what we know is wrong, but he was the DM, and he didn’t listen (you know how they are).
As it turns out, accounting for the mechanics of willful wrongdoing has been a major problem for ethics from the beginning, and it has led to some very strange theories. Socrates and Plato simply deny the possibility. Aristotle tries to disagree with Plato, but fails in the end. Thomas Aquinas proposes a kind of genetic moral defect, but does not get much farther than Aristotle. Kant gives an account that even he admits is inconceivable. Dietrich von Hildebrand uses exotic metaphysical values and two scales of goodness. Hannah Arendt suggests that the majority of evil in the world is done out of stupidity.
While all these theories may be very interesting to the philosopher, the average D&D player only needs to know one thing: How do I play evil? If we evaluate these theories according to their playability, we can piece together a picture of the evil choice using the most game-friendly points of each theory.
Like good Dungeon Masters, we have to set some ground rules before we go. First: no denying free will. Richard Dawkins (chaotic neutral), the atheist/biologist, believes that although we feel free, our physical makeup actually determines our actions:
Even if you are in some sense a determinist … that doesn’t mean we have to behave as if we are determinists, because the world is so complicated, and especially human brains are so complicated, that we behave as if we are not deterministic, and we feel as if we are not deterministic – and that’s all that matters.1
Dawkins may be right, and we may not be free, but that effectively reduces us all to non-player-characters, which won’t do. No choice, no evil.
On the other hand, there can be no evil without morality. The English philosopher J.L. Mackie (1917–81, neutral) thinks that even though most people believe there really is such a thing as good and evil, they’re dead wrong:
Although most people in making moral judgments implicitly claim, among other things, to be pointing to something objectively prescriptive, these claims are all false.2
He has some wonderful arguments for what he calls moral subjectivism, attempting to show that all moral judgments are ultimately nothing more than expressions of personal preference. However, if there is no real difference between right and wrong, there can be no good or evil characters. Asmodeus might as well be a unicorn; gold and red dragons just have different styles. No standard, no evil.
Finally, no consequentialism. This is a bit more technical, but think for a minute about how the utilitarian John Stuart Mill (1806–73, lawful neutral) describes morality:
The motive has nothing to do with the morality of the action, though much with the worth of the agent. He who saves a fellow creature from drowning does what is morally right, whether his motive be duty, or the hope of being paid for his trouble; he who betrays the friend that trusts him, is guilty of a crime, even if his object be to serve another friend to whom he is under greater obligations.3
In other words, it does not matter why you made the choice; if your action made the world a happier place, it was a good action. If the opposite, then it was bad. Actually, the normal person doesn’t even have to think about the world’s happiness. Mill thinks it best for you to just take care of yourself and your friends.
Why is this a problem? It sounds realistic and comfortable, and it lets you take care of business: the show 24 might as well have been written by Mill. It is a problem because there is no way to play an evil utilitarian. Good and bad come from the effects of your actions, not your intentions. Sure, there might be some actions that tend to make everyone miserable, and you can try to do those as much as possible, but the DM decides what actually happens in the game. You might be such a pain that previously warring factions of elves unite to defeat you – which is ultimately a very good thing – which defeats the point of being evil.
Now that we have our rules set, we can introduce our characters. Who hasn’t heard of Socrates (469–399 bce, chaotic good)? You may know him from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and you may know that he had some sort of method, but it is easy to forget the details. He would have made a good DM: he spent most of his time in rowdy groups of young guys, asking them questions about magic rings, dungeon escapes, complicated mythical cities, and non-material worlds. One of his fans was a young man named Aristocles (nicknamed Plato by his wrestling coach). Plato (c.429–c.347 bce, lawful neutral) had parents who wanted him to be a lawyer, but he had plans to be a poet. When he met Socrates, he decided to combine the two by writing mini-plays about Socrates and his arguments with tutors, politicians, and other assorted Greek big-wigs. Socrates never actually wrote anything; everything we have is from Plato.
Socrates was primarily interested in ethics at a time when other philosophers were interested in cosmology, chemistry, and physics. He gave us the famous line, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”4 Interestingly, Socrates didn’t base his ethics on religion or societal norms, but on calculated self-interest. Suppose you decided to live your life pursuing every pleasure you could. You did your best to satisfy every one of your urges. In the process, your urges would become stronger; you would spend more time trying to fulfill them, and less time feeling full. Socrates compares this to a man who tries to keep a room full of leaky jars full:
his vessels are leaky and decayed, and he is compelled to fill them constantly, all night and day, or else suffer extreme distress.5
Is this a happy life? We would use the word addict to describe the same thing, and it leads to “interminable trouble – leading the life of a robber.”6 It’s actually more trouble to be bad than good. It’s easier to live an orderly life, restraining your desires, because you’ll be more easily satisfied. You won’t have to work as hard at satisfying yourself, and you won’t live a foul life, producing pain and harm in those around you.
It seems obvious to say that we want to be happy. We want “wisdom and health and wealth and everything else of that kind.”7 We go to work, we study, we pay our bills, we do all sorts of things that only make sense because they lead us closer to our vision of happiness. Socrates refers to this as “the good.” It is our ultimate motivation:
everything we do should be for the sake of what is good … [T]he good is the end of all our actions, and it is for its sake that all other things should be done, and not it for theirs.8
Evil, the opposite of good, is unhappiness. So why choose it? Why would you do something that you know will make you miserable? Maybe you were carried away; your desires were just too strong. You wanted food or sex or armor so much that you indulged your desires until you were left in poverty, disgrace, and disease. You recognized your actions as evil, yet you freely committed them because you were led on and distracted by the pleasure they produced.
Socrates rejects this argument because it rests on a confusion: pleasure is just a weak form of good (happiness), and pain a weak form of evil (misery). Saying that I chose evil because I was overcome with pleasure is the same as saying that I chose evil because I was overcome with good, which Socrates considers laughable. No, choosing evil amounts to getting a bad deal, to losing on the cost/benefit scale, or as Socrates puts it, “getting the greater evil in exchange for the lesser good.”9
Here’s the problem: you really can’t knowingly choose evil under these conditions. If I see that, all things considered, choice A will make me happier than choice B, there is no way for me to choose B. If I did choose B, it must have been because I did not know A would have made me happier. You can try to raise all sorts of objections about masochists and irrational impulses, but in the end you can only explain a choice in terms of what was attractive to the chooser. If you chose something bad, it was because you didn’t know it would make you unhappy. Knowing what will make you happy is therefore the key to the good life. This is what Socrates meant by his motto, “virtue is either wholly or partly wisdom.”10
No one who either knows or believes that something else, which is in his power to do, is better than what he is doing, subsequently does the other, when he can do what is better.11
No evil. Just stupidity. As you can imagine, that caused some controversy.
What does this mean for D&D? First of all, it means that nobody chooses evil for the sake of evil, what some people call diabolic evil. My friend Mike, when he taught me to play, told me that being chaotic evil meant that if I see a frog on a log, the frog will be dead after I pass it. However, this does not quite make sense; there is nothing in it for me. I have to connect it to my own happiness, to something I want for its own sake. Yes, I may attack strangers, but it is because I want to keep them off my land so that I can dig for gold, or I want to build my own reputation so I can gain power. I may be “chaotic” in that I don’t want to establish some sort of army or have henchmen, but it will never be completely divorced from my vision of the good life.
If we are going to be pure Platonists, that means that our character will never act against our own happiness if we can help it. The evil character is deluded about life and how it all goes together, and so systematically chooses unhappiness. Not bad, just misguided.
Is this really the most playable theory? We’ve got 2,300 years of ethics; can’t we do better?
I was one of those geeky DMs who stayed up late at night reading Unearthed Arcana and Dragon Magazine, looking for material to incorporate into my worlds. I imagine that Aristotle (384–322 bce, lawful neutral) would have been much the same. Just as Plato was Socrates’ best student, Aristotle was Plato’s. Like Plato, he wrote dialogues, but unlike Plato, we don’t have a single copy. For the most part, we only have his students’ notes to represent his philosophy. They are a bit dry – I have heard them described as resembling VCR manuals – but what they lack in dramatic flair, they make up for in content. Aristotle covered all the bases – ethics, politics, drama, biology, physics, logic, you name it.
Like Socrates and Plato, he believed that ethics is about happiness:
Now such a thing happiness, above all else, is held to be; for this we choose always for self and never for the sake of something else.12
So far, so good, but isn’t this just a platitude? What does happiness mean anyway? Aristotle wants to give a meatier definition. The happy life is the good life, and when we talk about anything good, we are talking about meeting some sort of standard. A good DM is someone who has a good story ready when we show up and doesn’t drive us crazy looking up rules. A good player is someone who stays in character and doesn’t hog the barbecue chips and Jolt. Being good means living up to your unique role. It means exhibiting the appropriate excellence, or virtue.
What is unique about mankind? The closest thing to us is the higher animals, who have everything we do except for our minds. We have a special kind of rationality, and we can organize our lives accordingly. As humans, our highest virtue is to live the rational life in the society of other people. Other virtues flow from this, like courage, generosity, and honesty. We can obtain these virtues through habit, by repeatedly performing courageous acts, for example. Possessing these virtues is something pleasurable – a generous person enjoys giving, for instance. A happy life, of course, is pleasurable, but it is something more: it is fulfilling all of your potential. We even use a special word for Aristotle’s brand of happiness: eudaemonia.
What about evil? By all accounts, Aristotle was more grounded in the real world than Plato. He developed much of his philosophy through observation of the world around him. He knew about politics, and he knew that some people are very wicked.
He didn’t like Socrates’ theory of wrongdoing. Socrates said that you only choose the bad because of ignorance. But this does not jibe with our experience. I did not hit you over the head with a bottle because I thought I it was the right thing to do. We know first-hand that there are times we act against our best judgment (which he calls being incontinent13).
Aristotle gives a shot at various ways out of Socrates’ position: Maybe I didn’t really know it was wrong. Maybe that was just my opinion, and when it came down to it, my appetites were just too strong for anything but certainty. I knew that getting my hands on your vorpal sword would make me really, really happy, but I only suspected that there was something wrong in feeding you to a gelatinous cube.
Aristotle doesn’t buy this one. If it were just a simple judgment call, a case of a strong conviction beating a weak one, people would sympathize with me. As it is, “we do not sympathize with wickedness, nor with any of the other blameworthy states.”14 It is not the sort of thing the virtuous man would do.
Maybe having a strong desire is like being drunk, or crazy, or asleep. I know that it’s wrong, but my gold lust temporarily blinds me to my knowledge of the fact that I shouldn’t rob members of my party. Aristotle reminds us that “outbursts of anger and sexual appetites and some other such passions … actually alter our bodily condition, and in some men even produce fits of madness.”15 In that state, you could still talk about right and wrong if someone asked you to, but it would be like the “utterance by actors on the stage”; you wouldn’t connect the universal rule to your particular circumstances.
Aristotle likes this answer, but it presents a problem. A big problem. The problem is that it really isn’t any different than Socrates’ answer. He admits as much:
the position that Socrates sought to establish actually seems to result; for it is not in the presence of what is thought to be knowledge proper that the affection of incontinence arises (nor is it this that is “dragged about” as a result of the state of passion), but in that of perceptual knowledge.16
You don’t choose what you know is evil, because the only way to choose it is to be driven so mad with desire that you forget that it is wrong. Aristotle sounds depressed at the end of the chapter:
This must suffice as our answer to the question of action with and without knowledge, and how it is possible to behave incontinently with knowledge.17
Is there anything we can use from Aristotle’s philosophy beyond what we got out of Socrates and Plato? Yes: the concepts of virtue and vice are supremely useful. When you have a virtue, you enjoy exercising it. If you are courageous, you enjoy being brave. If you aren’t an honest person, you may be honest in this or that situation, but it will be more difficult for you, and you won’t get a warm, fuzzy feeling when you do it. It would be interesting to have a character who is brave and honest, but not generous or forgiving.
It is also important to keep in mind that you act differently depending on your state of mind. Aristotle distinguishes between impulsive and deliberate actions, between voluntary and involuntary actions, by what is going on inside your head and heart. Your choices depend on your knowledge, your experience, your emotional state, and your long-term habits. An elf who is in the habit of keeping her cool will be able to avoid distractions, but a berserker may sabotage his own plan by losing his temper at the wrong moment. You can’t play your character as a mere game piece – only the perfect person makes completely rational choices.
You knew we had to have one, so here he is: the lawful good philosopher. St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) is our only philosopher who was born in a castle and carried a sword (at least while he was young). Armed with relics, he wandered a medieval world with a ragtag band of adventurers, gaining experience, and getting into (intellectual) fights. Like Plato, he grew up rich and well connected, and like Plato, he disappointed his parents by rejecting their wish that he go into politics. His father actually locked him in a tower to keep him from joining the begging friars, but his Mom arranged his escape and he became a cleric.
In Thomas’ time, most Western philosophers followed Plato. It was only recently that scrolls of Aristotle were available to the Christian world (they had been preserved by Arabic philosophers). Thomas’s teacher, St. Albert the Great (c.1193–1280, lawful good), was a famous scientist, and Thomas himself was more attracted to Aristotle’s grounded, sense-based approach to the world than Plato’s dreamy idealism.
Thomas was part of the Christian tradition, which had a heightened sense of the role of choice in good and evil. For Christians, there is one deity who is the embodiment of goodness. There is also a supremely evil being, who actually makes it into the Monster Manual under a few different names, and was once the most perfect creature, until he chose to reject God and led an army of fallen angels in a rebellion. A relatively junior angel named Michael led the army against him, and succeeded in expelling him from Heaven. He was then imprisoned in another location that appears surprisingly often in D&D modules. We live in a post-rebellion (aka fallen) world, where our choices in life determine which, ahem, plane will be our home for eternity.
Thomas sounds just like Aristotle in his definition of happiness:
Now, the ultimate end of man, and of every intellectual substance, is called felicity or happiness, because this is what every intellectual substance desires as an ultimate end, and for its own sake alone.18
However, Thomas takes a few steps beyond what he got from Aristotle. If we agree that happiness is living up to our fullest potential and the perfection of our powers, we also have to consider the fact that we are never completely happy in this life. There is no limit to our wants; we are never completely fulfilled. God is the one who gave us our desires and abilities, and God is the only one who can fulfill them. The things that will make us happy also happen to be the things that will draw us closer to God. We don’t have to know this (most of us don’t), because they have that effect on us whether we know it or not.
What is evil? Thomas defines evil as a privation. A privation is when something should have some sort of perfection, but it doesn’t. Good examples of evil for Thomas include an iPod with no battery, or a backpack with no twenty-sided dice, or decaf anything. It is always a loss, a defect. There are different kinds: natural evil (toothaches, sauerkraut) and spiritual evil (murder, rape). We can put up with some natural evils like having our diseased arm cut off if it is going to give us something better, like not dying. The problem with spiritual evil is that what is lost is closeness with God, who is the only source of long-term happiness.
Thomas loved the writings of St. Augustine (354–430, chaotic good), who wrote a great deal about the effects of original sin. According to Augustine, “the deliberate sin of the first man is the cause of original sin.”19 We were never supposed to die or be miserable. The first man, Adam, was punished with death when he disobeyed God. This punishment was passed down to us, his children, much like a hereditary disease. We also inherit a predisposition to act like our first parents and do what we know to be wrong when it will get us something we really want. We commit our own personal sins because of the effects of the original sin.
Original sin opens the door to willful wrongdoing. Like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, Thomas agrees that we are only motivated by the good, which is tied to happiness. Like Aristotle, he talks about passions clouding our minds and making it more difficult to choose the good, but he also believes that we can act with certain malice, to “sin deliberately, as if one chooses what is bad knowingly.”20 Our insides are out of order, so to speak. I can choose the bad deal, ignoring the fact that it is going to burn me in the end. There are two main reasons I do it: first, it may be a weakness in my personality due to temperament or education, so an angry dwarf is more likely to get into fights he can’t win, and a halfling raised in a thieves’ guild will cheat at cards. Second, I may find myself in a situation where the normal obstacles to evildoing (e.g., punishment, castle walls) are lifted, and I can’t control myself.
Once we commit evil, we make a habit, which makes it easier to become evil, because:
to anyone that has a habit, whatever is befitting to him in respect of that habit, has the aspect of something lovable, since it thereby becomes, in a way, connatural to him, according as custom and habit are a second nature.21
In other words, once you steal that pack of Chewy Spree from the convenience store, the next one is much easier. Do it enough, and it’s fun. An evil person is just a person in the habit of doing evil.
Thomas won’t go as far as saying that you can completely rewire your sense of right and wrong, however. Virtue is a habit, too, and any time you do something good, you weaken your malice. Also, you can’t change the natural consequences of your actions (that mob with pitchforks might cause you to reconsider your leadership style).
How does this help the game? First of all, we have the idea of fallen creatures. Men are fallen, meaning that they start out basically good, but with a certain limited vulnerability to doing evil. Unless you were raised in Mordor, you can only become an evil character with practice, and that has to be included in your backstory. Dwarves and halflings seem to have the same weakness. My sense from reading Tolkien is that he saw elves as un-fallen, which means that something awful and unnatural has to happen to an elf to make it evil (I never quite got the drow thing).
Secondly, Thomas introduces a notion of malice that is simply not there for the Greeks. Obviously, they understood what wicked people could do, but when they got around to describing it, it sounded like just a bit of stupid selfishness. Thomas tries to introduce a stronger sense of evil, and it worked – Dante’s Inferno was based on Thomas’s philosophy.22
Because he was so closely tied to Aristotle, however, there are those who don’t think Thomas was able to get away from Socrates’ original problem. If I can’t help but want to be happy, and I see that a choice is not ordered to the good, then how can I choose it unless I am blinded by passion (and therefore not responsible)?
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804, lawful neutral) was a German philosopher whose habits were so regular that people literally set their clocks by his daily walk. He was … tidy in his approach to philosophy. He would be the player who not only knows every rule in every edition of the game, but would be deeply upset about any conflicts (no matter how obscure). Although he was mild-mannered, he turned things completely upside down in several areas of philosophy, including ethics.
Kant gets a lot of flak for being a terrible writer, but you have to admire this:
If a man who delights in annoying and vexing peaceable people at last receives a right good beating, this is no doubt a bad thing; but everyone approves it and regards it as a good thing, even though nothing else resulted from it.23
In other words, some guys need to get their butt kicked.
I say this half-joking, but think about what it means to say that it is a good thing for him to get pounded, “even though nothing resulted from it.” The Greeks try to argue for morality based on happiness. That is very appealing, because they don’t need to introduce God or rules or anything outside myself to make me want to be good. However, it does take away the notion of deserving. Socrates would say that getting knocked down would be a type of healing for this yahoo, but without the healing effects, punishment is simply pain, which is bad.
Kant disagrees. Unlike our first three philosophers, Kant is not a eudaemonist. Nowadays, his brand of ethics is called deontology, which is a combination of the Greek words for duty and logic. It takes a very different approach, with a very different starting point: “The only thing that is good without qualification or restriction is a good will.”24 Being smart is good, right? Depends on the person. Smart Gandalf? Good. Smart Morgoth? Bad. Just like in D&D, Kant believes that our attributes are independent of our alignment. Health, wealth, comeliness, wit, hairstyle, and even happiness itself can be bad if the person who has them is a lunatic serial puppy murderer. Good intentions are always good, and do not need anything else to make them good. Moral good and evil are about motives. My intentions are what make the difference.
You have to be good. This is a special kind of “have to,” different than the same words in the sentence, “You have to use a tiny ball of bat guano and sulfur in order to cast the fireball spell.” In the sentence, what is necessary is that you do X (use the bat poop) in order to do Y (cast the spell). Strictly speaking, do you have to use the poop? No. However, if you want to burn a path through those kobolds, then you do. Kant calls this a hypothetical imperative because of the whole if … then thing.
We don’t experience morality as an if … then issue. “If you want to make friends, then you should not set fire to widows’ houses.” Or, “Since you want to stay out of jail, you should not murder that shopkeeper.” Or even, “You want to be happy, so you must not sell your mother into slavery.” Kant believes that we experience these as unconditional, absolute, “categorical” imperatives, which would be better phrased using the stronger “Thou shalt not …” formula.
Morality comes to us as a law, universally valid for all people. Kant calls this law a “a fact of reason” and “undeniable.”25 What is the law? It is close to the Golden Rule: do to others what you would be willing to have them do to you. Act using principles that you would be willing to turn into laws for everybody. Don’t use or exploit people; treat them as an “end in themselves.” If you do something hoping that other people won’t follow your example, it is a bad thing.
The principle of your action, what Kant calls the maxim, is what is important, not the details. In other words, I do not have to hope that everybody moves to Buffalo and eats at this particular Ted’s Hot Dogs. I do have to want everyone to follow my restaurant etiquette (e.g., don’t cut in line, don’t steal other people’s Loganberry drinks, don’t squirt ketchup on the elderly couple in the next booth).
OK, so if we accept Kant’s claim that we have to be good, how on Earth (or The Outlands if you use those rules) can we be evil? Kant gives three main sources:
Who is evil for Kant? Everybody. Experience tells us that human nature has a universal propensity to deviate from the moral law. Aquinas calls this original sin and Socrates calls it weakness of will. Even the best of us has it; it is “woven into human nature.”28 This does not mean that we can choose evil for its own sake; Like the eudaemonists, Kant believes that “Considered in themselves natural inclinations are good.”29 However, we can choose to satisfy them at the expense of our duties.
If evil is universal, are we still to blame? Yes. If we are talking about how we choose, what sense does it make to say that something else caused it? Either it is a choice or it is not. Nothing is evil except for our own deeds. We can choose how to act, and we can choose the maxims that guide our actions. If I incorporate the (occasional) deviation from the moral law into my maxim, then I am evil, and nothing else is to blame.
So, how can we play-test this one? There is no denying that Kant is a bit on the complicated side. There is a lot more jargon to learn, and I don’t envy the DM who tries to incorporate Kantian ethics into his rules. However, there is some interesting material to take away from his analysis: unlike our other philosophers, Kant places good and evil in the motivation of the character. Motivation will naturally lead a bad character to do bad things (and vice versa), but evil is there even before the bad effect. This changes evil into something more than bad judgment and self-destructive choices. There is an edge to evil in Kant that does not seem to be there for the first three.
His threefold scheme of weakness, impurity, and depravity give us a nice framework for character development. There can be different kinds of evil characters, and characters can advance from lesser to greater evil.
The “maxim” thing can actually be helpful. Each character has one maxim that guides his or her actions. Whatever does not fit in with the character’s maxim is sacrificed, unless weakness comes into play. A purely good character will identify his or her duty and sacrifice everything (health, safety, experience, wealth) to live up to it. Evil characters will choose some other ambition (happiness, wealth, friendship) and sacrifice everything else, including duty, to fulfill that. Choosing a maxim is so important that it should be on page 1 of the character sheet.
As you can imagine, Kant’s ethics is controversial. The authority of the moral law is obvious; doing good should be painful; everyone is evil; our inclination to evil is our fault: these claims are difficult to accept. Is there another approach using the same basic tools?
If there is one absolutely inescapable cliché in ethics, it is Adolf Hitler (1889–1945, lawful evil). For obvious reasons, Hitler is used as the ultimate example of human evil. Believe it or not, Hitler’s ambassador to Austria believed that one of “the worst and most dangerous enemies of the Third Reich in Austria” was a philosopher. The ambassador informed Hitler that “the moving spirit behind these [anti-Nazi] machinations is the well-known emigrant, Professor Dietrich von Hildebrand.”30 Von Hildebrand ran an underground printing press, distributing an anti-Nazi newsletter in Austria. Hitler ordered him killed, but friends smuggled him to the United States, where he taught at Fordham University.
Compared to our other philosophers, von Hildebrand (1889–1977, lawful good) is relatively obscure. However, he got a pretty good first-hand look at evil, and it gave him quite a bit to say.
For von Hildebrand, ethics is about motivation. Not just anything can motivate us:
Were we to ask a despairing man the reason for his sorrow, and were he to answer, “Because two and two are four,” … We would suppose either he is putting us off for some reason, in refusing to tell us the true object of his sorrow, or else that he superstitiously connects these facts with some evil.31
Most of the facts around us are completely neutral. They have nothing that can move us, motivate us to act, or make us feel joy, sorrow, hope, or fear. Von Hildebrand would say that there is nothing important about them. Some things, like the location of a drinking fountain, may normally be neutral, but become important to me when I have just finished an ARMA workout.
Importance comes in two flavors: good and bad. Rabid dogs are as important as Christmas morning, but with a different character. The first repels me, inspires fear, and motivates me to high-tail it to the nearest lockable door. The second attracts me, inspires hope, and motivates me to procrastinate on sending out cards to my friends and family. Negative importance is what we call bad and vice versa.
The real key to von Hildebrand is what he calls the categories of importance.32 There is not just one type of good and bad. On one hand, you have simple pleasure and pain, which is important only because of its connection with the things I like and don’t like to experience. Next, you have things that are really good (or bad) for me, regardless of how I feel about them. A root canal is bad in the first sense because it is not subjectively satisfying, but good in the second because it is an objective good for me.
Then we think of Mom. I would like to call my mother good, but in what sense? She is not neutral, like the drying rack. If I call her good in the first sense, I am saying that she is only good to the extent that she puts me in a good mood. Take that away and she becomes as neutral as the color grey of the sidewalk. If I call her good in the second sense, I am really only saying that it is good for me to have a mother. Like hydration and daily vitamins, she is only important because of her beneficial effects. Von Hildebrand says that there is a third category of good specifically associated with people, that they have a value, a worth, even apart from my wants and needs.
I am free to evaluate my own actions using any of the three categories of good. In my own experience, I could see this when I taught an 8 a.m. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday ethics course. Ask any of my students at about 7:50 a.m. to evaluate the choice of sleeping in. On the pleasure scale, it ranks pretty high. On the good-for-you scale, it is the opposite. You can guess the result.
Evil is using the pleasure scale to evaluate people. For example, if I am heading to a great party, but I get a call from a friend considering suicide, I can either help him or not. I can choose to listen to the invitation of the party or the challenge of my friend’s need:
If we decide to help the person in great danger and thereby conform ourselves to the value and its challenge, we turn away from the attraction of the party … If we decide instead to go to the promising social affair, we exclude the point of view of the value. In this struggle the respective victory is the victory of a general type of importance, and not only of a single real possibility.33
Using von Hildebrand’s terminology, the eudaemonists have only one scale, happiness, which amounts to the second type of good. Given a single scale, it makes sense why nobody in their right mind would ever be able to choose what they know to be worse. Because we have the choice of scales, we can coldly and deliberately choose something we know to be worse on one scale (moral good) because it is higher on another (pleasure).
Like Kant, von Hildebrand would be a type of deontologist, but he believes that the purest motive is love rather than duty. For Kant, the highest motive is duty (and painful duty at that). The morally good person has mastered a kind of ruthless consistency of action. For von Hildebrand, the morally good person enjoys being good. Doing good is a love response to the value of the people around me; the more I respond, the more sensitive I become to their value, and the more I see value in others.34
I probably don’t need to say that I think this is the most playable theory of evil so far. If I have an evil character, he or she does not have to be crazy or stupid or out of control with a pleasure addiction. At some point, the character made a choice, ignoring the value of the people around him to pursue some ambition. Over the years, repeating these sorts of choices led him to a point where he is largely blind to the worth of the people around him, caring only for his family and his party (if that). Now, the character thinks only of his own happiness when making any choice. As he sinks into evil, he becomes increasingly focused on himself and his appetites, which has the ironic effect of robbing him of the ability to enjoy the pleasures of life. A purely evil character is guilt-free but miserable.
Good characters can be interesting, too. Evil characters are ultimately interested in only one thing: satisfying their desires. Good characters have the ability to focus on something bigger than themselves. They can dedicate themselves to a principle, a cause, or a person and sacrifice their own safety to support it. They can stick their necks out with little chance of gain. Because they can appreciate the worth of other people, they are also more interested in those around them.
If you didn’t know better, you would think that no woman ever played a role-playing game, judging by their packaging and themes (and by the existence of Macho Women with Guns). It’s the same thing with philosophy. There have been women philosophers from the very beginning, from Diotima (c.400 bce, chaotic good), who appears in Plato’s Symposium, to St. Catherine of Alexandria (early fourth century, lawful good), who is the Catholic Church’s “patron saint” of philosophy, to Edith Stein (1891–1942, neutral good), who was responsible for editing the early works of von Hildebrand’s teacher, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938, lawful neutral) in addition to her own work on empathy and feminism.35 However, it is only recently that being a respected philosophy professor and writer has been a real option for women, and so it is fitting that we have a woman running anchor for us.
Hannah Arendt (1906–75, chaotic good) is strangely tied with our other philosophers. She grew up in Kant’s home town, and wrote extensively on the relationship of his theory of judgment to Aristotle’s. She wrote her dissertation on Aquinas’ hero, St. Augustine. In her later works, she used Socrates as her model of everyday ethics. She had a romantic relationship with philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976, chaotic neutral), who studied under Husserl, von Hildebrand’s teacher, and like von Hildebrand, she was forced to flee the Nazis and ended up teaching in the United States.
Arendt is best known for her political philosophy, particularly regarding totalitarianism. However, she developed her own system of ethics, with a unique conception of evil. Looking at the history of ethics, she reflected that concepts like happiness, courage, and justice are easy to recognize, but difficult to explain:
These words … are part and parcel of our everyday speech, and still we can give no account of them; when we try to define them, they get slippery; when we talk about their meaning, nothing stays put anymore, everything begins to move.36
Here we are, thousands of years after Socrates, still trying to figure out what happiness has to do with justice. There seems to be no hope that we will reach a point when this is no longer necessary.
Is that a problem? Arendt says no. Returning to Socrates (philosophers usually do), she notices that he never claimed to know anything. He considered his mission to be a gadfly, to wake people up by helping them to think so that they could be fully alive. He forced them to get rid of their unexamined prejudices. However, he did not do so to give them his own doctrine; rather, he often left them with only their perplexities.
This might sound like Arendt thinks that Socrates is a nihilist, someone who believes in nothing at all (yes, yes, I know you are thinking of The Big Lebowski,37 but this is a D&D book). However, she actually claims that Socrates’ approach is the only antidote to nihilism:
Nihilism may be seen as an ever-present danger of thinking. But this danger does not arise out of the Socratic conviction that an unexamined life is not worth living but, on the contrary, out of the desire to find results which would make further thinking unnecessary.38
What does it mean to have an examined life? It means that there have to be times when I take a step back from my life and reflect on what it is all about. Thinking is a “habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever comes to pass.”39 This is not easy because in this world, “I am never alone and always much too busy to be able to think.”40 Thinking is a kind of love, a never-ending quest for meaning (the word philosophy means love of wisdom). As in any other quest, I desire my object, and so evil and ugliness are excluded from the thinking concern. Like any other love relationship, there is no end point, no point beyond which the quest is pointless. That is why we still reflect on the meaning of happiness, and that is why we will never stop.
Thinking is not the same as judgment, which is the ability to say “this is wrong,” “this is beautiful,” and so on. Judgment connects the abstract concepts of thinking and applies them to my particular circumstances. My busy daily life is a never-ending succession of judgments. If I lead an examined life, if I take time alone to think about what is invisible, I will be able to tell right from wrong. This will have a liberating effect on me, particularly “in the rare moments when the chips are down.”41
Where do we get evil? “The sad truth of the matter,” says Arendt, “is that most evil is done by people who never made up their mind to be either good or bad.”42 She said this after writing about the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Eichmann was the lieutenant colonel tasked with managing the logistics of Hitler’s concentration camps. In other words, he was personally in charge of the murder of five million human beings. While covering the trial, Arendt was shocked to find that Eichmann was not evil in any classical sense. He was an ordinary, commonplace man whom even the Israeli psychologists certified as normal. She uses the term “evil” to describe this as opposed to “wickedness”:
We were here not concerned with wickedness, with which religion and literature have tried to come to terms, but with evil; not with sin and the great villains who became the negative heroes in literature and usually acted out of envy and resentment, but with the non-wicked everybody who has no special motives and for this reason is capable of infinite evil; unlike the villain, he never meets his midnight disaster.43
The primary sources of evil are indifference and self-deception. Both lead me to a life of convention, simply living up to the code of conduct given to me by my society. Arendt says that most people live like this; “they get used to never making up their minds.”44 I get used to being given the rules by which I lead my life and make my own small decisions. The problem comes when the society giving me the rules happens to be Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. I can, like Eichmann, proceed to do my best to live up to expectations, even if that means doing things that I would have thought immoral if I had taken the time to reflect on it.
I hate to admit it, but I’ve got a problem with Arendt’s analysis. As much as I love it (and I do), I cannot see how using it helps me play D&D. On one hand, this type of wrongdoing is specifically not purposeful. She says it herself: evil characters do not make good villains because they are just one of the “non-wicked everybody.” On the other hand, who would want to play it? It would be a masterpiece of playing in character to be able to play a completely unremarkable person, but how long can you keep that up? Her evil characters are repellent, but not in a good way.
I’ve got an idea: the DM. We can keep her theory by using it as the paintbrush with which we paint the backdrop of our campaigns. How does a DM portray the average citizen of Ravenloft? The temptation is to make each one of them a wicked, mustache-twirling villain. However, they can be evil, completely ruled by the Dark Powers, but be rather normal people living their lives in an uninteresting way. We finally have a use for the “neutral” alignment!
In my own education, I always wondered why this topic was so rarely discussed in ethics classes. I think Hannah Arendt’s explanation is the best – we don’t have much time to really think, and when we do, we don’t want to spend our time thinking about what is ugly and bad. It is much more comfortable to think of evil as something done by villains in movies. There is something rather disturbing about the thought that one can become evil gradually. Once you realize that you can be evil without knowing it, you realize that you can be evil without knowing it.
Because of the influence of bad habits, much about the moral life feels grey and fuzzy. If you do find yourself in a clear moral situation once in a while, take advantage of it to do the right thing, because good habits are just as powerful. It may cost you some levels, and you may have to switch deities, but you will be – happy.