I never really understood the alignment system perhaps I was already more influenced by Michael Moorcocks stories about the "Eternal Champion" with the order-chaos axis and that in the end both extremes are nonsense. Since I discovere the behaviour system in Pendragon I use this in a somewhat for my taste adapted sense and have it linked as virtues when you follow a god/goddess/hermaphrodite. This also is based on Pendragon I developped it only further.
So the personality of a character in my home-developped system (a simulation system) is based on four pillars. Motivation (also from Pendragon), virtues, quirks (inspired by GURPS) and the goals a character has (short-, middle- and long-term).
And yes I my setting is open landscape (aka sandbox). The players decide for their characters what to do and have to find an agreement in the group in which order they pursue which goal.
Singer is secretly a traditonalist. He's harkening back to the Romans and Spartans, who thought post-birth abortion should be legal too. :-D
Joking aside, I think the "circle of care" concept is Singer's one useful contribution to philosophy. I don't agree with him on anything of substance but that idea I found valuable. But if you wish to avoid even contemplating something he thought of, you can substitute "altruism," "ethical egoism," and "unethical egoism" for good, neutral, and evil and it still makes sense.
> Joking aside, I think the "circle of care" concept is Singer's one useful contribution to philosophy.
I'm not sure how much interaction you've had with the people who take Singer's ideas seriously. You have people advocating for human extinction on the grounds that humans are a menace to animals. People advocating destroying predatory fish species, I'm not entirely sure why the focus on fish in particular. But even without going that far, in practice circles of care are used as an excuse to neglect or abuse those in your near circles, in order to supposedly gain a somewhat abstract benefit for the wider circle.
Come to think of it, CS Lews has Screwtape discuss a very similar idea, as a way to tempt a man to evil:
> Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will. It is only in so far as they reach the will and are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us. (I don’t, of course, mean what the patient mistakes for his will, the conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real centre, what the Enemy calls the Heart.) All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from our Father’s house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there,
Some of Singers thinking is clearly correct if you start with the premise, and in turn shows you how disastrous the premise is. For example if out only definition of evil is suffering, and of good is enjoyment, you MUST end up in the absolute catastrophe he does.
Again circles of care are useful analytically but they do not form a proper structure for morality. Used analytically they give us a what Alex uses: a metric that is applicable BECAUSE it is arbitrary.
That said, Singer is either the greatest parody Poe to ever live, or he’s a terrifying indication of where our society is going. Tree of Woe article perhaps?
I never really understood the alignment system perhaps I was already more influenced by Michael Moorcocks stories about the "Eternal Champion" with the order-chaos axis and that in the end both extremes are nonsense. Since I discovere the behaviour system in Pendragon I use this in a somewhat for my taste adapted sense and have it linked as virtues when you follow a god/goddess/hermaphrodite. This also is based on Pendragon I developped it only further.
So the personality of a character in my home-developped system (a simulation system) is based on four pillars. Motivation (also from Pendragon), virtues, quirks (inspired by GURPS) and the goals a character has (short-, middle- and long-term).
And yes I my setting is open landscape (aka sandbox). The players decide for their characters what to do and have to find an agreement in the group in which order they pursue which goal.
Hey you gonna link a brother to a bigger copy of your thumbnail?
Wait, you're basing the Good-Evil axis on the philosophy of Peter "post-birth abortion should be legal" Singer?
Singer is secretly a traditonalist. He's harkening back to the Romans and Spartans, who thought post-birth abortion should be legal too. :-D
Joking aside, I think the "circle of care" concept is Singer's one useful contribution to philosophy. I don't agree with him on anything of substance but that idea I found valuable. But if you wish to avoid even contemplating something he thought of, you can substitute "altruism," "ethical egoism," and "unethical egoism" for good, neutral, and evil and it still makes sense.
> Joking aside, I think the "circle of care" concept is Singer's one useful contribution to philosophy.
I'm not sure how much interaction you've had with the people who take Singer's ideas seriously. You have people advocating for human extinction on the grounds that humans are a menace to animals. People advocating destroying predatory fish species, I'm not entirely sure why the focus on fish in particular. But even without going that far, in practice circles of care are used as an excuse to neglect or abuse those in your near circles, in order to supposedly gain a somewhat abstract benefit for the wider circle.
Come to think of it, CS Lews has Screwtape discuss a very similar idea, as a way to tempt a man to evil:
> Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient’s soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will. It is only in so far as they reach the will and are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us. (I don’t, of course, mean what the patient mistakes for his will, the conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real centre, what the Enemy calls the Heart.) All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from our Father’s house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there,
Some of Singers thinking is clearly correct if you start with the premise, and in turn shows you how disastrous the premise is. For example if out only definition of evil is suffering, and of good is enjoyment, you MUST end up in the absolute catastrophe he does.
Again circles of care are useful analytically but they do not form a proper structure for morality. Used analytically they give us a what Alex uses: a metric that is applicable BECAUSE it is arbitrary.
That said, Singer is either the greatest parody Poe to ever live, or he’s a terrifying indication of where our society is going. Tree of Woe article perhaps?