This is the fifth part in our ongoing series about trying to get a handle on just what we’re talking about when we talk about alignment. Click here to start at the beginning of the series and read each of the relevant posts so far.

If you’ve been following along so far, you know that there are quite a few proposed interpretations of what exactly alignment is that, shall we say, leave something to be desired, for one reason or another. Today, I want to look at one proposal which I think actually shows real promise…or at least gets a lot closer than any others have, in terms of describing what alignment is, based on how it works in the world of Pathfinder. The problem, as you’ll see, is that this success comes at an awful price – possibly an unacceptable price for some, particularly those who have a stronger background or vested interest in contemporary metaethics.*

Alright, I’m not burying the lede any further: the idea I’m considering is that alignment is simply a kind of natural force in Pathfinder, a causal part of the physical world which might be difficult to detect and measure at times, but is no less real. That is, a better analogy to alignment in Pathfinder than comparing it to real-world morality would be comparing it to gravity or electromagnetism.

This idea has quite a bit going for it, based on the rules of Pathfinder. Most obviously, as we saw in this early post, alignment (or at least something rather closely related to alignment) is a causally active force in Pathfinder. It pings evil for a paladin (or good for an antipaladin). Many spells (the magic circle spells are a perfect example) only affect creatures of certain alignments, or at least affect them more strongly, and they do so in an overtly physical way. I could list examples all day long: the point is that alignment (or something like it) interacts with the material world in a way more akin to physical laws than to moral codes.

It even works the other way around: actions which do not have an obvious moral dimension can affect alignment. Take spells with the “evil” descriptor, like infernal healing: not only can the target of such a healing spell “sense the evil of the magic” (making “evil” sound a lot more like “heat” or “magnetism” than it usually does), but repeated casting of this spell can actually cause the caster’s alignment to change and become more evil (or at least prevent further progress toward goodness). So even if you’re a Lawful Good wizard who only uses infernal healing to cure injured orphans and occasional paladins, doing so could only actually make you more evil over time, not less.

If you’re anything like me, these phenomena make alignment sound less like a familiar moral concept and more like the way that a magnetic field becomes stronger or weaker based on the alignment (see what I did there?) of its atoms’ polarity.

So fine, all well and good then, right? After all this work, we’ve figured it out: “This game assumes good and evil are definitive things.” More specifically, alignment is a type of physical (or at least metaphysical) force in the world, like gravity or electromagnetism. And much like those forces, we may not understand everything about it, but we can do science and learn more and get better at applying it over time.

Well, the problem is that this interpretation just strips alignment of the moral dimensions that make it interesting and genuinely relevant to our games. If alignment is literally nothing more than a part of the physical world, no more normative than heat or mass or quantum spin, then why should we care about our characters’ alignments or those of others? If you’ve been rubbing balloons all day and your hair got staticky, I’m not justified in somehow judging you (either good or bad) for having a stronger electromagnetic field than I do. But if “evil” is no different than “massive” or “electromagnetically charged,” then why should I feel disgust or disdain or fear or anything at all about someone having an evil alignment? And yet, this moral (or at least normative) dimension seems somehow key to what we’re actually trying to get at with alignment…

So, despite having found what looks like a rather workable interpretation of what alignment is in Pathfinder, we are left with a Pyrrhic victory, where it comes at the cost of something precious. Is there some way to resolve this issue, to keep the consistent and helpful “physical force” view of alignment, while also preserving that oh-so-important moral element?

Well…yes and no, if you ask me. I’ll offer my proposal in the next post, and we’ll see who (if anyone) ends up satisfied in the end.

Administrative Note: I’m taking next week off for a personal vacation from writing, so there won’t be a new Detect Alignment post until early September. If all goes as planned, though, it’ll be a real page-turner (down-scroller?), so your patience ought to pay off!

*Metaethics: the branch of moral philosophy concerned not with what ought to be done or how we ought to behave, but with the nature of moral concepts and the meaning of moral language. Example: “The first series on the Detect Alignment blog is about the metaethics of alignment.”