Lawfully Good vs Lawfully Evil

Those of us who played Dungeons & Dragons and its many successors, well remember a concept called alignment. It was a way to measure a character’s ethical and moral positions. You had to place yourself on two distinct and orthogonal scales — whether you respected the law, and whether you would strive to do good or evil things. These two scales were unrelated, but intersected each other. Today, many people view life in the real world as a choice between Chaotic Evil (Satanic) or Lawfully Good (Godly).

However, the real world is not that simple and moral choices are not always that clear. I was reminded of this while digging through some of my archives, where I discovered some notes on an article about the conflict between Activists and Bureaucrats. The author classified them using the D&D terminology. According to him, an Activist such as Martin Luther King would be Chaotic Good, where as Bureaucrats would lean toward Lawfully Evil.

Lawfully Good vs Lawfully Evil: on Falkvinge.net

We need to have this discussion today, because of what is happening in the Republican Party. Standing in the self-righteous position of being Lawfully focused, people are making statements that are morally wrong and calling for people to perform immoral acts. And, they are doing this all in the support of the law and in response to the equally immoral actions of terrorists who also believe they are behaving Lawfully in accordance to their laws, using them to justify their evil actions.