Let’s talk about Law, Chaos, Good, Evil, and — the gods help us — Neutral 

I’ve been fascinated by the idea that evil is the absence of empathy. — John Connolly

I began playing D&D in 1980 and have been at it more or less nonstop ever since. How many discussions and debates about alignment do you suppose I’ve been part of?

After four-and-a-half decades of thinking and occasionally arguing over the words lawful, chaotic, good, evil, and (the gods help us) neutral, I finally decided to write down my take.

Law vs Chaos

Robert Sapolsky’s most recent book (Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will) inadvertently provides as neat a summation of chaos and law (in their good manifestations) as I’ve ever seen.

One of the most studied contrasts concerns “individualist” versus “collectivist” cultures. The former emphasize autonomy, personal achievement, uniqueness, and the needs and rights of the individual; it’s looking out for number one, where your actions are “yours.” Collectivist cultures, in contrast, espouse harmony, interdependence, and conformity, where the needs of the community guide behavior…

For gaming purposes, then, the law/chaos axis is best understood as a political spectrum. Law, our collectivist tendency, places the focus on the society rather than the individual. Chaos, in its more noble manifestations, argues that individual freedoms lead to the best collective results. Darker interpretations simply don’t care about people at all.

In the chart below, law is associated with (from good to evil) positive liberty, collectivism, egalitarianism, equity, order, hierarchy, autocracy, and domination. Chaos aligns with individualism, liberalism (in its traditional meaning), privatism, entrepreneurialism, personal autonomy, negative liberty, social Darwinism, and savagery. (More on positive/negative liberty in a moment.)

Law and chaos are partisan. They communicate your philosophy on how society should be ordered and governed. Each features positive expressions and each embodies tremendous potential for mischief. Kind of like most theories of government.

Freedom: A Note About Positive and Negative Liberty

One thing we hear, in both the gaming world and the real one, is that individualist/chaotic systems offer more “freedom,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action. Liberation from slavery or from the power of another.”

Put another way, it refers to the freedom from constraint.

In the 1950s philosopher Isaiah Berlin introduced us to the distinction between negative and positive liberty, with the latter focusing on the freedom to accomplish.

Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.

In other words, positive liberty is about having the power and resources to pursue one’s goals, even when faced with social structures like classism, sexism, ageism, ableism, or racism (let alone the sort of staggering poverty you find on the wrong side of most D&D towns). In its best incarnation, freedom of the positive variety would level the field for everyone, with a success or failure hinging only on that person’s abilities. In its worst incarnation you have, well, Harrison Bergeron.

This aside might strike some as academic and wonky (and it is a little), but it’s salient to gaming. There are, to my knowledge, zero societies on the face of the Earth where the word freedom is bad. There are some where the western interpretation of freedom — freedom from — might be seen as disruptive, and perhaps even a little sociopathic, but most societies see themselves as standing for freedom as they define it.

From a gaming perspective, it’s probably a good thing to understand that both law and chaos stand for freedom, even if those two interpretations of freedom differ.

Lawful ≠ Ruleful

Ergo, chaotic has nothing to do with being a galloping wanker (much to the chagrin of millions of players), and lawful likewise has nothing to do with laws or the law or rules or the established political / governmental order (or having a stick up your ass).

Power tends to corrupt. Many fantasy settings rely on some iteration of the feudal/medieval kings and empires settings, often of the dynastic/divine right variety, which means that the closer you get to the castle/palace, the more your Detect Injustice meters should peg.

Good vs Evil

Most of us know good and evil when we see it, but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts, I always had a hard time defining it. The consensus we see in Fandom.com (and several other places — I have no idea what the original source is) works well enough for most:

Good implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others.

Evil implies harming, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient or if it can be set up. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some malevolent deity or master.

This mainly defines good and evil according to what they do, though, and the dictionary can get circular in a hurry by telling us that good equals right or moral.

So what is the core essence of the good/evil spectrum?

Good and Evil is All About Empathy

Merriam-Webster again:

[empathy is] the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another

Greater Good, a Cal-Berkeley publication, goes a little deeper:

Contemporary researchers often differentiate between two types of empathy: “Affective empathy” refers to the sensations and feelings we get in response to others’ emotions; this can include mirroring what that person is feeling, or just feeling stressed when we detect another’s fear or anxiety. “Cognitive empathy,” sometimes called “perspective taking,” refers to our ability to identify and understand other people’s emotions.

In a gaming context, good would translate as an innate tendency to place yourself in the position of others and to act in a way that benefits them. Evil would be the opposite — active cruelty and the intent to harm.

This tracks pretty logically. Compare the charity and selflessness of deities like Hestia, Isis, Amaterasu, and Tyr with soul-tormentors like Orcus, for instance.

The Neutral Problem

This definition does call into question neutral alignments, though. If you’ve played more than 10 minutes, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the chaotic neutral who’s “only in it for myself.” You may will have been this chaotic neutral at some point. As the Fandom piece above puts it:

People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others. Neutral people are committed to others by personal relationships.

Really? So neutral means “uncommitted”? If I buy this, I have to see neutral people as good on the inside, but lacking the backbone to act on the outside. It isn’t a midpoint between two poles, it’s very close to one and not at all close to the other. We can define neutral according to this definition, but that would be like defining two as the number halfway between one and ten.

Pragmatic and selfish to a T, but wait … how many people do we know who are genuinely indifferent with respect to cruelty? Some, for sure (we all read the news), but I strongly suspect the percentage of genuine good/evil-scale neutrals is dramatically higher among PCs than it is the general population.

Why Would Goods Associate With (Good/Evil) Neutrals? A Case Study

The party approaches the city. By the side of the road two large, burly highwaymen are raping and dismembering a child and feeding the parts to a pack of wolves.

The good party members roll initiative (there’s no discussion — they attack instantly). The CN rogue says “I think I’ll sit this one out.” He plops down, pulls an apple from his backpack, and starts eating.

He’s being true to his alignment. The men don’t look like they have any money or magic. The child certainly doesn’t, and in addition to being poor, the wolves have large teeth. There’s nothing in this for him.

Once the thugs have been killed and the wolves chased off, the cleric will heal (or raise) the child. Then the party will turn their attention to their companion. If they don’t kick him out of the group (or worse), it’s only because the character is played by their friend, and it’s just a game, after all.

If these events actually happened in some parallel medieval universe, the good characters could be forgiven for not making a distinction between active evil and careless indifference to it, and the rogue would be in deep kim-chee.

If the rogue isn’t dealt with emphatically and I’m the DM, the Paladin’s next quarterly review with the high priest is going to be very uncomfortable.

Some Comments About Specific Alignments

LG

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. – Spock

It’s hard to argue with Spock. The word “needs” the focuses directly on the well-being of people, and “many” and “few” speak for themselves.

NG

A neutral good character sees the value in the collective well-being and also in the nurturing of the individual spirit. When possible, this person will be both/and, because a noble individual in a noble system is the best of all possible worlds. I suspect a significant majority of people are either lawful good or neutral good.

CG

The chaotic good follows the individualistic ideal. This ideology argues that people will look after each other and that philanthropy will assure that no one is left behind.

LN

If concerned at all about the well-being of the people in the society, the lawful neutral would argue that benefit arises from order.

N

True neutral is tough. It recognizes that nature is neither good nor bad according to the ethics of any sentient race, and a servant of nature might seek to protect that natural order. However, I suspect that when dealing with members of his or her own society, the average druid trends good.

CN

See above. If the chaotic good strives for the individualistic ideal, the chaotic neutral is closer to what happens in practice. This person genuinely cares only about the self in ways that would probably look like evil to most of us.

LE

The lawful evil believes that order and organization represents the easiest path to torment those he or she hates.

NE

It’s hard to imagine a neutral evil as anything other than a stone-cold psychopath.

CE

The pursuit of torment is a private and personal gratification.

I wrestle trying to distinguish CE from NE.

In Conclusion…

These are just some thoughts. I already find myself scratching out several sequels, and probably a few edits in revisions of this document.

I wouldn’t offer this up as something conclusive, but as I say above, I’ve been noodling on it for 45 years. I hope you’ll think about it, and maybe share thoughts of your own.