Icy Magebane wrote...
KainD wrote...
leaguer of one wrote...
No it's not. People can easily kill others for wealth and not even need that wealth to servive. In most case they are just doing to to make sure they can still live comfertly.
Life on it's own has no value. There always that something that you can take away from a person that will make them no want to live, and plenty suicides happen. People would rather die than be poor, live alone, live poorly, live in harsh conditions etc, etc. Comfort > Plain survival.
And if it is acceptable to kill for survival then it's is 2x acceptable to kill for comfort, without which you wouldn't even want to live in the first place.
If this is how you feel, how can you consider yourself qualified to discuss morality? The very nature of morality presupposes that human life does have value, therefore actions that benefit or cause harm to individuals can be observed and categorized.
Modern theories of morality don't necessarily presuppose that. Instead, they work on the assumption that what people value should be given consideration by others, within reasonable limits. This means, for instance, if you don't value your life because it lacks a certain commodity you do value, and you want to kill yourself because you see no way to acquire that commodity, it is immoral to forcibly prevent you from doing it.
Having said that, there are certain built-in values we have by virtue of being a member of the human species, which have evolved in our species' biological history in response to our development as a social species whose survival depends more than any other's on co-operation. We value things like survival, freedom from pain, loyalty, acceptance of legitimate authority and fairness. Our cultural and personal morality is mostly defined by the comparative importance of those values rather than their presence or absence. A nice example for how this works we can find in DA2: the Saarebas we accompany to the coast in Act I clearly values his life, but he values his loyalty to the Qun more - and so, since the latter requires him to die, he kills himself. I hate the Qun, but I find it immoral to interfere in his personal choice as it does no harm to anyone else.
Getting back to the topic, I see the greatest evils in history as having been committed because of a greatly unbalanced value hierarchy. Fascism worked not because too many people were evil, but because it appealed to the values of loyalty and acceptance of legitimate authority and made them absolute, eclipsing fairness and avoidance-of-harm.
I can easily see DA characters going that route, particular if you're a pro-templar or pro-mage extremist. Pro-mage extremists would overvalue autonomy ("I only want the same freedom others have to move about with no restrictions at all"), giving no consideration to community-oriented moral principles, and pro-templar extremists go the same way as the fascists in real-world history, giving no consideration to individual autonomy. Those are evil, but interesting to play.
Then there are those utterly selfish jerks, those with no consideration for anything that doesn't benefit them. While I wouldn't object to a game that accommodates such a playstyle, I think most stories, especially in RPGs, don't make sense with that kind of character, since among other things, they'd be averse to taking personal risks. It might be possible to play DA2 with such a mindset, but DAO is already stretching it.
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