To kill or not to kill. Pacifism (Cannot Harm Innocents)

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Ronnke

At -10pts, P(CHI) is really generous. Kill your enemies and anyone that wants to fight you, but don't hurt the uninvoled. That's pretty much the default position of every PC. It's not really much of a disadvantage when you think about it.

It's a huge disadvantage when compared to the wide range of tactical and strategic choices available to PCs without such scruples. Most of the weapons that make modern armies many orders of magnitude more effective than primitive ones carry with them risks of collateral damage.

Artillery, air power, drone strikes, suppressive fire, etc., all of these can kill innocents as well as enemy combatants. With Pacifism (Cannot Harm Innocents), PCs are much more constrained than realistic warfighters* when it comes to dealing with their enemies.

Without any such Disadvantages, PCs can deal with their enemies by poisoning their water supply, rigging bombs where they might be travelling or any number of other ruthless, but effective stratagems. The PCs won't need to confirm that any given person is in fact their enemy before killing them from ambush or by remote controlled detonator, but can just kill them all and let the GM sort them out.

PCs without any such disadvantages won't have as many incentives to do typical PC hero/protagonist stuff, it is true. Therefore it is desirable, in many genres, that PCs have such disadvantages, just as it is desirable that they have Codes of Honour, Sense of Duty (Adventuring Companions) and other heroic Disadvantages.

*Who already have a wide range of limitations on their tactical and strategic options, due to international law, political concerns and other factors.

[Gnome]

Originally Posted by Icelander

No, it doesn't.

GURPS Honesty is a pathological belief in an external authority as a source of immuatable ethical law. It represents the complete abrogation of personal integrity, morality or honour and the replacement of personal judgment with an appeal to established authority. The ethical position of someone with GURPS Honesty is that everyone should follow the rules set by the ruling political elite in any given polity.

Someone who has GURPS Honesty may lie, cheat, murder and steal, as long as it is always done within the strict letter of the law whereever he happens to be. In fact, someone with GURPS Honesty can deliberately choose a jurisdiction to carry out a dishonest piece of business based on its laxity when it comes to whatever immorality the character feels like committing.

Adolf Eichmann probably serves as the best examplar of a character with GURPS Honesty.

I have never read Honesty this way. The description specifically excludes murder, for example. In an area with no political elite and no law, you still follow the laws of your home (I assume this represents a basic moral position, not that you literally think your home laws apply elsewhere).

To read Honesty as an amoral trait (or even as an abrogation of personal morality!) is to focus way too much on the "follow the law as it is written" constraint and ignore the other constraints (follow what the laws should be, keep your word, try to ensure others act lawfully, etc.).

There's nothing pathological about Honesty--I think it's a fairly common human trait (perhaps with higher SC numbers, as most GURPS disadvantages as written are somewhat exaggerated versions of the real-life qualities people commonly have). There are plenty of people who believe it's wrong to break the law, or who believe that there are moral reasons we should all act lawfully all the time (some say Kant's categorical imperative implies this for example). Honest people say things like "society would fall into chaos if we all tried to make our own laws--we should all follow the same set of laws regardless of individual circumstances, because ours is not to question the judgment of those in authority."
You may think this moral position is deeply flawed (and I would agree with you if you did), but you can't claim it's not a moral position, or an abrogation of one's personal integrity, or a "pathology."

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Ronnke

Kill your enemies and anyone that wants to fight you, but don't hurt the uninvoled. That's pretty much the default position of every PC.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Your experience with PCs differs from mine.

Same. My first D&D game I ran, my cousin decided to get every NPC in the keep from Keep on the Borderlands into an isolated location and murder them, one by one. And then take their stuff, and trash a lot of stuff he didn't take, like as happens when some ******* robs as house. I was like, nine, he was in his 20s, you'd think he'd be a responsible adult, but noooo apparently that was my job.

Frankly, I played a character that once ate someone I'd consider an innocent bystander (It made sense at the time). He was a jerk, but that doesn't count as violence or threats of violence, and certainly doesn't justify eating him.

EDIT: The number of times players in my fantasy games have killed all the orcs/collapsed the goblin tunnels/filled the Kobold warrens with freeking napalm death and poison smoke - pretty much highlights that they do not have Cannot Harm Innocents. All those noncombatant children and the eldery, possible captives or slaves, all very definitely dead by the mass destruction? Yeah.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by roguebfl

Except it is, it's the meaning of honest that used in "honest Man", "honest merchant" and "Honest attempt"

This is actually relevant to CHI too. The "innocent" in that construction is not the opposite of "guilty" - there's no relationship to that whatsoever - but of "nocere", which derives from a verb meaning "to injure" and survives in modern English as "noxious". A lot of ambiguity goes away if you read it that way.

If you know Bad Guy is a serial killer who'll hurt somebody else if you let him go, you can shoot him without warning. If he's just a sneak thief, or killed somebody for personal reasons and you are certain he would never hurt anyone else, he's an innocent, and pulling a gun on him in the first place was wrong, never mind trying to wrestle him as he escapes.

You can only hurt him if he's an immediate threat to you is "Self Defense Only", which is a stronger form. Cannot Harm Innocents is a similar limit, but not confined to self or immediate - you can hurt things in the defense of others, or that aren't actually hurting anybody right now if you are absolutely certain they will if you don't act.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by malloyd

If you know Bad Guy is a serial killer who'll hurt somebody else if you let him go, you can shoot him without warning. If he's just a sneak thief, or killed somebody for personal reasons and you are certain he would never hurt anyone else, he's an innocent, and pulling a gun on him in the first place was wrong, never mind trying to wrestle him as he escapes.

My innocent-eating PC example slots in nicely here - the victim tried to blackmail us. My character was barely more than a person-shaped crocodile demon (achem, intra-dimensional refugee thankyouverymuch), and solved the problem by making him go away, and eating all the evidence.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Gnome

I have never read Honesty this way. The description specifically excludes murder, for example. In an area with no political elite and no law, you still follow the laws of your home (I assume this represents a basic moral position, not that you literally think your home laws apply elsewhere).

Murder is, of course, a legal term as well as an ethical one. It's that first one that the GURPS Honest character needs to care about. In a jurisdiction where certain minorities don't have basic human rights, nothing prevents him from killing them in a way that is nothing short of murder, ethically.

Originally Posted by Gnome

To read Honesty as an amoral trait (or even as an abrogation of personal morality!) is to focus way too much on the "follow the law as it is written" constraint and ignore the other constraints (follow what the laws should be, keep your word, try to ensure others act lawfully, etc.).

What keeps me from regarding it as any kind of moral trait is that the character is not compulsive about obeying one particular legal code*, but actually makes a point of compulsively obeying, and doing his best to force others to obey, every jurisdiction he visits.

That means that he'll go out of his way to turn subjugated minorities in to their persecutors when he visits countries where homosexuality or certain religions are punishable offences, but one plane ride later, he'll be turning anyone who agrees with the religious police he was helping in for hate speech.

Someone with GURPS Honesty would have cheerfully enforced the laws of Nazi Germany before making a full confession at Nuremberg and demanded to be hanged the moment the Allies retroactively made his actions illegal. He couldn't help it, compulsion.

Hmm... actually, considering that the Internet is a worldwide publishing platform, it is very likely that any character with GURPS Honesty who is active on social media has to start his visit to many countries by turning himself in for illegal speech, as he is very likely to have posted something against the law in the new jurisdiction.

GURPS Honesty, as written, represents the deep-seated belief that morality is defined by the whims of whoever has the authority to make laws whereever the character is located and that he should proactively help them enforce that morality, regardless of whether it is at all compatible with what he believed on the other side of a border. Philosophically, that's a possible, if odd position, but it's fundamentally alien to most people.

Functionally, most characters with GURPS Honesty probably haven't ever considered questions of morality. After all, they don't have to worry about it, as they don't need any concept of right or wrong, good or evil. Just legal or illegal. I'd guess that most such characters are parochial people incapable of systemic philosophic analysis, who've internalised peer pressure to the point that they confuse whatever vague idea they've got of the law of their home country with universal morality. The issue of multiple jurisdictions doesn't come up for them, because they never travel.

*That may be synonymous with justice for him.

Originally Posted by Gnome

There's nothing pathological about Honesty--I think it's a fairly common human trait (perhaps with higher SC numbers, as most GURPS disadvantages as written are somewhat exaggerated versions of the real-life qualities people commonly have). There are plenty of people who believe it's wrong to break the law, or who believe that there are moral reasons we should all act lawfully all the time (some say Kant's categorical imperative implies this for example). Honest people say things like "society would fall into chaos if we all tried to make our own laws--we should all follow the same set of laws regardless of individual circumstances, because ours is not to question the judgment of those in authority."
You may think this moral position is deeply flawed (and I would agree with you if you did), but you can't claim it's not a moral position, or an abrogation of one's personal integrity, or a "pathology."

The description of the Disadvantage, as best I recall, specifies that the character 'is compulsive' about following the law as written. That describes a patholical condition, not a moral position. There are excellent arguments for following the law, even when you believe it's wrong, but those arguments hinge on making a choice in each situation, not acting out of compulsion.

More than that, laymen often don't realise just how many laws a modern society has. Just knowing all of them is pretty much impossible. Following them all, at all times, is functionally impossible. Everyone breaks the law, usually both accidentally and deliberately.

There are people with GURPS Honesty. They are, however, not very capable of adventuring, as they spend most of their time wasting the time of police and petty bureaucrats by informing on their friends and family, demanding that an ever increasing hodge-podge of laws is actually enforced, even though it is flat-out impossible to do so.

Or they elect to live almost entirely outside society, in order to reduce the amount of decisions they have to make each day, in order to try to avoid breaking any laws accidentally. Realistically, most of them would probably fail on a regular basis, but since they keep confessing to astonishingly minor infractions due to their compulsion, the police would probably decline prosecution and leave them to a good therapist.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Murder is, of course, a legal term as well as an ethical one. It's that first one that the GURPS Honest character needs to care about. In a jurisdiction where certain minorities don't have basic human rights, nothing prevents him from killing them in a way that is nothing short of murder, ethically.

As I point out every time we have this discussion, the fundamental problem is GURPS Honesty doesn't actually say that. It's really three traits stuck together - the first two paragraphs make it sound like that Geas (obey the law), the second two make it sound like Code of Honor (be a good citizen) offering you a host of exceptions and expected behaviors whether they are legal or not, the fifth makes it out to be a positive Reputation.

In fact those traits that can exist independently of each other, and in certain cases might not go together *at all*. Your slavish obedience to the dictates of the recent conquerors doesn't score you a positive reaction from your neighbors! For whatever reason SJG has consistently declined to clarify the intent. I think there's an equally legitimate case to be made that if you slavishly obey a legal code that does allow you to kill non-persons that you cannot take Honesty at all - i.e. that holding to an evil or unpopular law code is undefined as a disadvantage.

[Kalzazz]

One example I recall of a PC I played who definitely did not have CHI

Bad guys had failed to pull off a hit on my PC, a provincial governor, and seized a girl while trying to escape, and were brought to bay in the palace courtyard with 1000 guardsmen drawn down on them

Me 'Surrender now or die as you stand'
Bad guy, 'Let us leave in peace governor, and the girl will not be harmed'
Me, 'All units, open fire!'

[Engurrand]

Originally Posted by Icelander

It's a huge disadvantage when compared to the wide range of tactical and strategic choices available to PCs without such scruples. ... (snip)

That makes perfect sense to me. I think you're right that the disad would limit the options available to soldiers, commando squads, or terrorist cells. This is relevant in warfighting games.

Originally Posted by Ronnke

At -10pts, P(CHI) is really generous. Kill your enemies and anyone that wants to fight you, but don't hurt the uninvoled. That's pretty much the default position of every PC. It's not really much of a disadvantage when you think about it.

I still agree with this in any game in which rule of law has a presence. Well structured societies will fiercely punish indiscriminate collateral murder. I would expect the disad as described to be the default assumption in a wide array of campaigns, from Monster Hunters to Indiana Jones, to Star Wars, to Ocean's Eleven. In all of those genres it's expected to kill people who oppose you, and the definition of evil to kill people who don't. In many such genres, "not evil" isn't a disadvantage. (Edit: Clarification: I mean that it's a campaign feature. Whether or not it disadvantages you is thus immaterial).

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Ronnke

Could a person with Pacifism (Cannot Harm Innocents) snipe an enemy soldier on watch duty?

I'm of the opinion, no they could not, the fact that the foe is an enemy combatant makes no difference. You are still not permitted to use deadly force on a foe until they attempt to cause you serious harm.

Pacifists would make poor snipers.

Thoughts?

A sniper has to overcome his psychological inhibitions far more then a line soldier who can simply fire in the direction of his enemy and use his "fight or flight" to keep him going. That does not mean a sniper has to be a sociopath or sadist, in fact such people will probably be written out in an efficient training course. And snipers have made perfectly decent citizens in private life. But they have to have a quirky way of distancing their emotions to enable them to shoot at people who are in contexts where they are obviously not just uniforms.

So a sniper should have CoH(otherwise he would be an inconvenient fellow to have around) but I think you are right that Pacifism probably would not do.