This is the fourth 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.

Special acknowledgment goes to /u/AnguirelCM on Reddit, for first bringing my attention to today’s topic and provoking some very helpful discussion about it. That user, in turn, directed me to an article on this idea in The Escapist, from which I will be citing.

So, we now have good reason to think that alignment is neither just a type of label for how characters generally behave, nor synonymous with the will of the gods of Pathfinder. Perhaps instead, then, alignment is an expression of something more nuanced than either of these possibilities: perhaps it is an expression of allegiance, of what side a character takes in the many conflicts, large and small, constantly occurring across Golarion and other gaming worlds.

On this view, “a character’s personal virtues and vices matter don’t matter, only his [sic] allegiance to the cause.” If your wizard helps old ladies cross the street and volunteers with starving orphans, but also works for the cult of Lamashtu, she’s Chaotic Evil; conversely, if you play a selfish rogue who lies, cheats, steals, and murders indiscriminately with not a twinge of guilt, but does it all to help Iomedae and her paladins, then boom, you’re Lawful Good.

The first problem with this proposal, the one that’s likely to strike you first and hardest, is that it runs pretty directly against the grain of the strongly normative elements that seem built into Pathfinder’s alignment system, both semantically and intuitively. That is to say: why are we calling one of these characters “Chaotic Evil” when she is neither chaotic nor evil (in the non-alignment sense), and the other “Lawful Good” when she is neither lawful nor good? And isn’t there something wrong with saying that your sweet, gentle, loving wizard is in fact Chaotic Evil, no matter how much of Lamashtu’s accounting she does? In the same vein, isn’t that rogue actually not Lawful Good, based on, you know, her behaviour and beliefs, even though her wanton slaughter appears to be directed solely against the enemies of Iomedae?

That being said, despite our counterintuitive reaction against this “alignment as allegiance” view, the characterization above strikes me as strange and unwieldy, but not necessarily incoherent or inconsistent in itself. Instead, I think there are two other, more subtly pernicious problems with this view:

It’s explicit in the alignment rules of Pathfinder that “ [a]ll creatures have an alignment .” This extends not only to humanoids and demons and the undead, but also to magically animated objects, animals, plants, and so on. Can a plant really be said to have an “allegiance,” though? And I’m not talking about sapient plants like treants, but just regular, literally garden-variety plants. Sure, they may be looked over by Gozreh and his/her priests…but is a plain old Neutral climbing vine really allied to Gozreh in the same way that a trident-wielding Neutral inquisitor of Gozreh is? If alignment is nothing but allegiance to a certain faction, completely divorced from the moral concerns that its language would seem to invoke, then the codes and directives given by gods to their followers are remarkably unhelpful. Consider this: Iomedae gives her Lawful Good paladins a code to follow, with a bunch of specific rules included. But what about all the many, many cases where the options available to her paladins just aren’t specifically called out in the paladin’s code? Are paladins allowed to just act anarchically willy-nilly, so long as they obey the strict letter of Iomedae’s code? It seems like there’s more to being a paladin than that…but if alignment is nothing but allegiance, then it’s not clear what that “more” might be. And we also can’t just fill in what counts as Lawful Good for these paladins by “what Iomedae wills” (see the link to Part III of this series above, about the Euthyphro problem). In the end, it makes this paladin code (and other alignment-based rules of conduct) seem rather listless and shallow, more like a simple, non-normative transaction between contractors than a guide to living. On this view, we seem to lose something important about what alignment is supposed to be.

I think that’s good enough to conclude that we can’t just look to allegiance as a synonym for alignment. In the next post, I’ll be looking at a radically different proposed characterization of alignment, so we’ll see if that fares any better…