This is a supplement to the sixth part (no, it’s not quite the seventh 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. To immediately read the previous post (because this is a direct supplement to that one, after all), click here.

Before really wrapping this series up (yes, actually, for real…next time?), I’d like to have a brief discussion with a little more detail about the source of the incoherence of alignment in Pathfinder. My general point in the last post was that there is a necessary conceptual connection between morality in Pathfinder and real-world morality, and that this necessary connection is the main reason why alignment as presented in Pathfinder is incoherent. But my reasons for this position are actually rather more complex than usual, so I’ll ask you to indulge me a moment and allow me to say a bit more about how and why this incoherence comes about.

Recall my suggestion that this is all because Pathfinder is not just a static fictional world but a roleplaying game, with actual human beings animating its PCs and NPCs. Because of that, there can’t help but be a connection between the players’ moral concepts (i.e., those of the real world) and the moral concepts at work in the game. Put another way, it doesn’t matter if the alignment system would theoretically work in a totally internally consistent way if Golarion were a real place; because the game cannot be totally divorced from the conceptual capacities of the people playing it, any conceptual incoherence the alignment system would have in the real world constitutes a conceptual incoherence in that system.

With that out of the way, we can focus on the real point of this post: what exactly is that incoherence? Briefly put, it comes down to one of the greatest problems in moral theory, and a central issue of metaethics in particular: the is-ought gap, often called “Hume’s Guillotine”…but which I will playfully be calling “Hume’s Falchion,” in honour of anti-naturalist orc ethicists everywhere.*

For Hume (and countless ethicists influenced by him), you can talk about the way things are (“is-statements”) and you can talk about the way things ought to be (“ought-statements”), but you can’t derive one from another – you can’t use is-statements to argue for or against ought-statements, or vice versa. This division is the is-ought gap, between the two realms Hume hath cloven with his mighty logical falchion. And while countless philosophers have argued in countless ways about whether, how, and why this division is a problem, suffice it to say that a real way to fully solve Hume’s Falchion would arguably constitute the most significant advancement of moral philosophy in…a century? Maybe more? Maybe ever?

And yet, at first glance, even the most straightforward applications of alignment in actual games of Pathfinder happily skip back and forth across the is-ought gap all the time, seemingly interchanging is-statements and ought-statements from moment to moment.

On the “physical force” side of alignment, for instance, a magic circle against good spell has literal, physical, definitive effects on creatures with a Good alignment, whatever we might want those effects to be – it’s clearly on the “is” side of the gap.

Conversely, my cavalier having a Lawful Good alignment actual does nothing physical to stop said cavalier from running down and killing innocent children in the street – rather, it’s an expression of how that character feels (among other things) about what sorts of things should and shouldn’t happen, including the unjustified random killing of children in the street. His LG alignment is most definitely a type of “ought” statement here. [my thanks for spurring this example go to claymade, whose comment on the previous post led to quite a bit of rethinking on my part as I crafted this supplement]

I could go on, but the main upshot here is that alignment in Pathfinder ignores the is-ought gap, thoroughly dodging Hume’s Falchion at every turn. This makes it incoherent with regard to our existing moral concepts, while the necessary connection between characters and players imports this incoherence from our world to Pathfinder.

So, the remaining question concerns what we are to make of this incoherence. Should we abandon alignment entirely as hopelessly incoherent? Should we just accept its incoherence and try to make the best of it? Or is there some way to interpret this notion that preserves the interesting moral and gameplay elements of alignment while also salvaging it conceptually? In my next post, you’ll see that my answers are (respectively) “no,” “not quite,” and “yes, probably.” Tune in next time for the details!

*It’s actually named after David Hume, arguably the greatest English-language philosopher of the Enlightenment era…and some would say the most important philosopher of the last thousand years, period. His An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and A Treatise of Human Nature are particularly significant, engaging, and influential.