The Campaign Builder's Guild

With my settings Dystopian Universe and Haveneast this sort of thing is handled in different ways. DU, which is my flagship setting, is a setting that mostly sees alignment as relative, although you might also say it has "good", "neutral", and then several kinds of "evil". There are definitely moral and ethical atrocities committed, but generally good can be attributed best to happiness and security. That doesn't mean the terms won't be used; any of the Alliance cultures might peg M.O.T.H. as an evil group, and while they certainly have a horrific way of doing some things, a lot of the people and actions undertaken by the organization aren't any more evil than those in others.

Haveneast, on the other hand, has clearly defined good and evil, but as I said in a thread a few days ago, one's faction is almost always more important. Conveniently sometimes these factions will have strong alignment tendencies, and the use of magic and aligned artifacts has almost total effect on alignments compared to factions (there are only a few spells that target followers of specific organizations/beliefs). While individuals and groups can certainly peg other such groups as evil, you'll find more often than not that they're pegged as enemies of Justahn or his parallels/perpendiculars at the same time.

Doesn't racism stem from societies that developed apart and then clashed? If black people had been common in western society from the stone age and up would they still have been treated as inhuman when Africa was discovered and exploited?
Not to say that they wouldn't be treated differently; much in the same way that albinos were always treated differently. But if skin colors hadn't been tied to places seen as "less civilized" by western society we would never have had the same foundation to build our oppressive views on.    
In accordance with this, any cosmopolitan setting with several races would have trouble developing overt racism/speciesism. Yes, they would be perceived as different and strange, but if you are just as likely to end up working for an orc as another human it is difficult to develop actual racism. Sure, stereotypes will develop but just because danes joke with swedes being dumb (no offense meant :p ) doesn't mean that we'll treat swedes as inferiors.
and yes, in our globalized world a nazi could end up working for a black man while still being a racist, but his views have the necessary foundation and history to exist and are more of a result of the past than the present.
This might sound slightly naïve, but i reckon there is an actual point if you look close enough :)

Quote from: SteerpikeRight, so the deer could be set up to provide the wolves with periodic sacrifices in return for, say, protection from other predators.  A long-standing, formalized tradition of reciprocal assistance and symbiosis.

Actually I'm thinking more of the idea that if a wolf can take down a deer who can't defend themselves then the other deer might instead of deciding the wolf has done murder just see this as a natural part of nature.  They don't have to like it, just not tie morality to it.

Quote from: SteerpikeIt's like the old Mayan sacrifices - at the end of the day, even if human sacrifice was part of a rich religious tradition, it's still murder.  Or like the burqa - even though the women wearing burqas may do so voluntarily, they're still going to be malnourished and sun-deprived, and they're still participating in a system that most of the rest of the world recognzies as oppressive and patriarchal.

But you're using your own system of morality to judge these systems.  "It's still murder": that's because that's what you judge it to be.  To them it isn't.  Who knows what their sacrifices thought, but maybe they didn't think of it as murder but just as something to be avoided highly but not tied into judgment.

My point is that you are assuming your system of judging on people who are not you.

[blockquote=Llum]Now as to how it works in settings, usually I forgo alignment/good and evil altogether. This is most likely because I don't play tabletops, and have no reason for need an "evil race" or bad guys. Usually conflict come from inter-cultural clashes or political machinations.[/blockquote]
This brings up the 'Game Utility' issue, albeit from the backwards perspective.  Sometimes, especially when the world is created to run games in, it's fun to have something you don't have to worry about attacking.  Different setting might have different percentages of "Automatic Badguys", but I think that the issue of fun is realted to this, for many settings.  Even my convoluted mess has a few, in that 99% of undead will be mindless servants or evil, and I know my PCs love running into them.  
Personally, the thread I see that Sentience seems to be the delineator for many of us.  If it can think for itself, in many settings, you need to check context before starting the bloodbath.
How do our players feel about this?  

I think that Steerpike means that it falls under the definition of murder: the premeditated taking of a life that isn't your own.
I'm quite sure Steerpike is a person who has a good grasp on the fact that ethics are human creations. (based on his settings and his education).
Of course, sacrifice might sometimes differ by the fact that the sacrificed person would do it voluntarily. Of course, most aztec human sacrifices were PoW taken in flower wars...

Quote from: Cataclysmic CrowI think that Steerpike means that it falls under the definition of murder: the premeditated taking of a life that isn't your own.

But the implication I got was that murder should be objectively seen as bad in every situation.  And to the human-sacrificing cultures of Central America it might not be in certain contexts.  That ties in to how in the context of a discussion on "evil": how do you take into account differing views on the same action?

When I go with the default Tolkienesque races. I generally run things as "Orcs are an Always Chaotic Evil race; an orc can be whatever he wants."  Basically, if you see an orc wandering towards your village, he could be anything from a mercenary to a wandering peddler...but chances are if you see a hundred of them, look out, it's going to get ugly.  Sometimes it's because the leaders are evil, sometimes it's because orcs tend to be selfish and violent, sometimes it's something else; it's a twisted sort of emergent complexity in that whenever you throw a bunch of orcs together, the whole is more evil than the sum of its parts.

And the same goes for all the other races, and not just for alignment--any given elf is probably a nice guy, quick on his feet, funny, and so on...but put a bunch of elves in the same room, and they'll probably act like stuck-up, too-conservative, overly-formal jerks (to keep up appearances, you know).  Individual dwarves don't really drink to excess in general, but if you have a bunch of them in a tavern, someone's going to challenge another one to a drinking contest to prove who's hardier.

This also helps me explain the multiracial nature of adventuring parties: adventuring elves get to let their hair down and not worry about protocol, adventuring dwarves don't have to keep proving themselves to their fellows, adventuring orcs don't have to feel guilty all the time about doing bad things to good people, etc.

@Pair-O-Dice Lost: That's actually something I never considered, but it could work.  I wonder if you could actually justify even some of the more stringent alignments that way, like all demons being evil.  Certainly creatures that generally go it alone like dragons you'd have to either work out another reason or drop alignment assignments.

hehe, demonic peer pressure.

In response to Silvercat: essentially what I'm trying to get at is that I'm sometimes frustrated by the inability to make any value-judgements that arises out of purely relativistic morality.  Certain facts cannot be denied in the Mayan sacrifice example: a life was extinguished.  Now, why was that life extinguished?  To appease the gods, in order to reap benefits for the rest of the community; prominently to have a good harvest.

Fact: it can be scientifically, demonstrably, and uncategorically proven that there is no causal relation whatsoever between sacrificing humans and obtaining a good harvest.  That was there belief, but it was a mistaken one.  I don't care that it's part of a beautiful cultural tradition blah blah blah; human sacrifices don't generate good harvests.  If this was made abundantly clear to the people in question, and the sacrifices-to-be, then the belief and the practice should be immediately abandoned.

Now, of course the Mayans didn't realize that their sacrifices were ineffective, so that goes a long way to mitigating their behavior; but it doesn't mean, for example, that another civilization that realizes the folly of human sacrifice should simply allow the Mayans to continue sacrificing humans, because their perspective is, quite frankly, superior.  Just as tolerating the concentration camps of the third reich would have been unacceptable: they were founded on the scientifically false belief system of eugenics.

However, in the specific example I'm using, colonial forces obviously did a lot more harm than good, and did a lot more damage than the Mayans were doing with their human sacrifices (small-pox, slavery, rampant assimilation, etc).  I'm not trying to justify Imperialism or anything of the sort.  I'm just saying that it's possible to still make value-judgements and progress as a species even starting from the principle that all morality is a human construct.  We shouldn't just stop intervening in any and all cultural affairs simply because we recognize that they're justified from the limited perspective of a given culture.

We have senses, we have brains, and relativistic morality doesn't negate all human reasoning.

Quote from: SteerpikeIn response to Silvercat: essentially what I'm trying to get at is that I'm sometimes frustrated by the inability to make any value-judgements that arises out of purely relativistic morality.
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I'm just saying that it's possible to still make value-judgements and progress as a species even starting from the principle that all morality is a human construct.  We shouldn't just stop intervening in any and all cultural affairs simply because we recognize that they're justified from the limited perspective of a given culture.

We have senses, we have brains, and relativistic morality doesn't negate all human reasoning.

And our decision to create morality does not negate the need to think about whether that construct is the right one in each situation we choose to employ it.  Because it is just that: a construct, something made-up.  I just feel that too many times when I read someone's thoughts on morality that they consider it a real thing, separate from human belief, and they take that to mean they don't have to think about it and are not responsible for the application of.  But it isn't separate, so therefore morality is not something you can apply without thought.  And not something you can later deny personal responsibility for.

Quote from: SteerpikeIf this was made abundantly clear to the people in question, and the sacrifices-to-be, then the belief and the practice should be immediately abandoned.

An argument could be made for saying this is evil. You're essentially tearing their religion and culture to shreds.

Also, it's isn't like they would believe you (little things like fact and logic/reason can at times be of little consequence to religious folk (or any folk) when they don't want to change).

Fair enough, Silvercat; I'm just saying that relativism doesn't (or shouldn't) equate to "anything goes," and an abandonment of critical judgement, or criticism.  If all moralities and ethical systems are constructs, we should be striving to build better ones, as best as we can define "better."  We should struggle to improve our own structures even as we realize they have no essential meaning.[blockquote=Llum]An argument could be made for saying this is evil. You're essentially tearing their religion and culture to shreds.

Also, it's isn't like they would believe you (little things like fact and logic/reason can at times be of little consequence to religious folk (or any folk) when they don't want to change).[/blockquote]This might sound conservative, but too bad so sad; I refuse to shed a tear for a religion that arbitrates abhorrent behavior for no real reason.  If human sacrifice worked, it might be a different story.  But it doesn't so the religion needs to change; perhaps not forcibly (this could cause way more damage than the human sacrifices did in the first place - see my point above about Imperialism), but that doesn't mean it should be ignored, or perpetuated, when empirical facts undermine the crux of its theology (that teh gods interven when presented with human sacrifice).

Religions change.  We no longer stone people to death for adultery, or for talking back to their parents.  I think almost everyone can agree this is a good thing.  Maybe an arbitrary, human-constructed, artifical one, but we've got a better construct now: less needless suffering, less needless pain, less rampant oppression.  I'll argue tooth and nail against anyone who suggests that a system with an abundance of suffering, pain, and oppression is really the same as (or isn't worse than) one without those things, even if the difference isn't absolute, divine, or essential.

EDIT: sorry if I'm coming off as cantankerous or unpleasant... I just really get into these debates... seriously Llum, Silvercat, I respect your guys opinions immensely, and I'm enjoying this very much.

Quote from: SteerpikeFair enough, Silvercat; I'm just saying that relativism doesn't (or shouldn't) equate to "anything goes," and an abandonment of critical judgement, or criticism.  If all moralities and ethical systems are constructs, we should be striving to build better ones, as best as we can define "better."  We should struggle to improve our own structures even as we realize they have no essential meaning.[blockquote=Llum]An argument could be made for saying this is evil. You're essentially tearing their religion and culture to shreds.

Heck, I agree with you, that's what I'm saying.  I just want our critical thought to be subjected to critical thought.

In other words, if the Mayans were a created culture (not a race) in a setting, Ritual human sacrifice would not be an evil act to them..But PC's outside it who felt differently would be acting eveily not to try to show the Mayans that they were, in fact, just painfully killing people for no reason...