Moral power sources OTHER than Good/Evil, Order/Chaos?

[Gef]

Not sure if this is helpful, Molokh, but my fantasy campaign now has a bipolar religion where the poles are, roughly, Good and Law - neither side admits to evil or chaos although the other might condemn them for it.

When I say Law, I really mean "blind" justice. And when I say Good, I mean social justice. You can make moral arguments for each, but they're mutually exclusive in the limit. Should the judge be impartial, or should he take pity on the defendant and take his circumstances into account?

GEF

[Lord Carnifex]

Originally Posted by Randyman

Can you give the same kind of "how Praxis views the others/how the others view Praxis" as William? I really like where this is going.

Praxis on Pathos: The search for pleasure leads one to become a passive absorber. True pleasure comes from the untainted action.

Praxis on Ethos: Abstract ethical ideals must always fail against pragmatic concerns. The real world demands practicality, not high morals.

Praxis on Logos: Too much reason leads to overanalysis and missed opportunity. Attempting to intellectually find the most logical course misses the fact that initiative and daring will always change the equation.

Pathos on Praxis: Acting without regard to one's own feelings and the feelings of others leads to cruelty and callousness.

Ethos on Praxis: Humans are endowed with the ability to follow moral and traditional codes of behavior. Acting without regard to higher ideals makes man simply an animal.

Logos on Praxis: Acting without thinking leads to irrational behavior and incorrect responses. Do what is best instead of assuming the best of what you do.

[Inquisitive Raven]

Originally Posted by nyu2

Rationality/Science vs Religion? They seem to be at odds a lot in America right now...

I think a better distinction might be faith vs. inquiry. Someone who puts high importance in faith is going to trust in some designated authority whether deity, sentient computer, tribal elder or what have you. Someone who puts high importance on inquiry is going to want to see the evidence, or at least know where to look for the evidence. When there's enough information that no one can possibly examine all the available evidence about everything, the person who follows a path of inquiry will only trust others who have produced or examined evidence on a subject. Now figuring out how inquiry works as a power source is the tricky part. Enhanced senses perhaps?

[Azinctus]

Great thread! I wish I had more time to write about it, but various people have mentioned my ideas already so I'll just comment on one small part:

Originally Posted by nyu2

Rationality/Science vs Religion? They seem to be at odds a lot in America right now...

Science vs Religion is an unsolvable debate and therefore a fine opposition for a game. However I do not think it is fair to put rationality on the side of science. Theology and science are both rational. They both use reason to develop from their basic premises. Which could be:

Religion
The gods exist
The prophets are never wrong

Science
Man is the highest authority (think Occam's razor, as in you're not allowed to posit a first cause, or all powerful being)
No authority is beyond challenge

What I'm trying to get at is that these two world views have different criterion of truth. No amount of reasoning will damage theology because its conclusions are perfectly logical given its premises. And vice versa science refuses to accept the premise "the gods exist" regardless of the evidence (if you tell a scientific atheist that gods speak to you he will assume you are insane). Science won't accept faith as a valid argument.

[Figleaf23]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

What magic powers do people get from Liberalism?

The power to build wealthy and beneficent societies.

[Vaevictis Asmadi]

Originally Posted by Inquisitive Raven

I think a better distinction might be faith vs. inquiry. Someone who puts high importance in faith is going to trust in some designated authority whether deity, sentient computer, tribal elder or what have you. Someone who puts high importance on inquiry is going to want to see the evidence, or at least know where to look for the evidence.

Not necessarily. A person can put a high importance on inquiry simply by insisting on finding their own answers to religious questions instead of accepting dogma from somebody else. Since religion isn't about evidence in any scientific sense, a personal search for spiritual meaning doesn't fit either of your categories. A broader definition of the Inquiry side could be that a person who follows Inquiry wants to see/hear for themselves a reason to accept some fact or concept, but their own world view and what their inquiring after will vary, so their criteria may be scientific evidence, personal spiritual experience, just personal experience of any kind, or whatever. There's probably also degrees of this... if a person disbelieves everything that anybody else tells them, does that mean they disbelieve the newspaper, the encyclopedia, etc? Where is the line between Inquiry and Skepticism?

Originally Posted by Azinctus

And vice versa science refuses to accept the premise "the gods exist" regardless of the evidence (if you tell a scientific atheist that gods speak to you he will assume you are insane). Science won't accept faith as a valid argument.

You are not quite correct here. Science is not atheistic. Science is essentially agnostic: there is no evidence for or against the existence of any divinity, but that only means that science cannot be used to study them, to verify their existence, or to refute their existence. It is not the same as having hard evidence against their existence. They are not falsifiable, so there can never be evidence against their existence. A hard scientific conclusion can only be drawn by evidence for or against a falsifiable hypothesis or theory, not by a lack of evidence for a non-falsifiable concept. There is no evidence against the existence of deities in the way that there is evidence against, say, a hypothetical planet orbiting between Earth and Venus. Said planet is falsifiable. Gods aren't.


Conversely, it is perfectly possible to be a scientist without being an atheist.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Figleaf23

The power to build wealthy and beneficent societies.

What, you point your finger and a wealthy society appears before you?

[c2h5oh]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I think Truth/Illusion is a pretty good one. Zoroastrian cosmology is nominally good vs. evil, but if you look at the theological writings they map respectively to Truth and The Lie. And as supernatural practices, they go respectively with magia and goetia, or control over real forces versus "the deceits of the Enemy."

Bill Stoddard

If you'll pardon the dissenting voice, how exactly is truth/illusion a moral division? I would have classified it as a division of the general nature of things. I have the same opinion of other divisions such as magic/technology or yin/yang. So far, the only good (a subjective measure, for which the yardstick will be my opinion for the duration of this post) example that I have seen beyond the old stand-bys of order/chaos and selflessness/selfishness is individual/group. Everything else seems to be a natural division.

I'm not a professional philosopher, but the criterion by which I would judge a division to be a moral one is "how does the position I choose for myself on this axis govern both my actions and my opinions of the actions of others?" To rephrase the criterion in roleplaying terms, "how does my position on this axis translate into character traits (reputation, status, code of honour, sense of duty, etc) that I must adhere to lest the GM deduct character points for poor roleplaying?"

[c2h5oh]

For a definition of morality. There are sure to be many others, but this is the one that I found fastest and liked the most.

A couple of other moral dimensions that I found.

Relativism / absolutism - my take was that this was equality for all versus special treatment/status for some.

Stoicism / self-determinism - I'm not so sure that my chosen yardstick (see earlier post) works with this one. I also think that this might be a variation on the division of natural and artificial mentioned earlier, so that I may have been wrong to dismiss it.

[Inquisitive Raven]

Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi

Not necessarily. A person can put a high importance on inquiry simply by insisting on finding their own answers to religious questions instead of accepting dogma from somebody else. Since religion isn't about evidence in any scientific sense, a personal search for spiritual meaning doesn't fit either of your categories. A broader definition of the Inquiry side could be that a person who follows Inquiry wants to see/hear for themselves a reason to accept some fact or concept, but their own world view and what their inquiring after will vary, so their criteria may be scientific evidence, personal spiritual experience, just personal experience of any kind, or whatever.

I specifically wanted to separate faith/inquiry from religion/science because that distinction seemed too narrow. I don't think I stated what constituted evidence to the inquirer either which leaves room for what you're describing.

Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi

There's probably also degrees of this... if a person disbelieves everything that anybody else tells them, does that mean they disbelieve the newspaper, the encyclopedia, etc? Where is the line between Inquiry and Skepticism?

I don't think there is a line between inquiry and skepticism. Skepticism is all about the evidence. However, lots of believers of one sort or another tend to paint skeptics as having a knee jerk disbelief reaction. This, of course, is not helped by Hollywood portrayals of skeptics. What I think you're calling "skepticism" is really cynicism, but it does suggest a third polarity: Denialism. Denialism is the refusal to believe that any authority is telling the truth, unless it happens to already match your worldview, and then you'll believe they're telling the truth for the wrong reason. This attitude leads to serious conspiracy mongering. Denialist powers would probably be something along the lines of the Mundanity Advantage from IOU (to keep it in GURPS terms. Going outside of GURPS, the Newton Effect from Tales From the Floating Vagabond would also fit).