this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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If your personal morality allows you to do anything, as long as you profit from it in some way, you don‘t have any morality at all. You‘re evil.
Okay then what's the difference between someone who's apathetic and someone who actively likes hurting people? Nothing? Those are the same alignment? I don't get why this is so hard to understand.
If you're apathetic because it's none of your business or you're afraid for your family, that's neutral. If you're apathetic to their pleas for mercy as you evict them into the snow so you can make more money, that's evil.
The core question is: are you willing to hurt others to benefit yourself?
It‘s dependent on context. If you live in an oppressive regime that commits atrocities in front of your eyes, you may let them happen because you fear for your own safety if you intervene. That‘s the neutral way. A good person would join a resistance group, even if it means putting yourself in danger. An evil person would apply as a henchman to the evil overlord, not because they‘re a sadist that craves harming other people, but because it‘s an easy job and it pays well.
I feel like the actions matter less than the intent for matters of morality. If your character wants to save a village overrun by monsters, but the monsters were actually people who had an illusion spell cast on them, your character isn't evil for slaughtering a village because their desire was purely noble. Neutral is having both good and evil desires, usually for personal reasons that make sense for the character. A rogue is going to steal from a town guard as readily as they'll steal from a goblin, they want the gold, they don't care about the morality behind it. Evil is wanting to slaughter the village just to see what adjacent towns would say, it's doing something bad for the sake of it.
Slaughtering a village for the evulz and just to see what happens is murder hobo alignment, not evil.
You‘re putting examples against each other that cannot be compared. Let‘s take the village overrun with monsters and present it to three different characters of each alignment. The good one fights the monsters to free the village. The neutral character assesses the risk and if they don‘t fight, they at least inform the next village they pass through. The evil chatacter doesn‘t bother because they don‘t care.
Yeah you just don't get it. Characters can do different things regardless of their alignment, you just think they'd do something different so you disregard what I'm saying.
Well, that‘s ok. You obviously didn‘t read my posts anyway.