The Order of the Stick

Even fiends are still fully capable of choosing evil or good. It's just that in 3.5e they are literally made of Evil. So as far as the magic tied to alignment goes, they still count as Evil no matter what their actual personality is.

The only beings who truly don't have free will are the ones who just plain lack the intelligence to know any better. If a being has the capacity for reason, it has free will.

Edited by M84 on Apr 16th 2024 at 10:11:33 PM

It's astounding how complex and ambitious the writing became over time. The very beginning was so pointlessly silly.

I would be inclined to disagree, on both points.

In particular, I would argue that a Golem or other construct is likely not a person due not to a lack of free will, but due to having no "internal self"; to being, essentially, just a magical machine.

An animated skeleton (presuming that it's of the basic sort, and doesn't harbour a soul or some such) would be similar, I imagine, just of a different magical nature.

I agree! I just don't think that this argues for the demon to not be a person.

I'm reminded of the case of the Ringwraiths from The Lord of the Rings: To my read, they're still people—the spirits of old kings of Men. But they're explicitly stated to have no will of their own, knowing only the will of Sauron.

They can want—but only what Sauron wants.

I'm reminded here of the case of Planescape: Torment, which presented a Lawful Neutral (if I recall correctly) Succubus (and a chaste one, at that).

It also had an angel who fell, and he still qualifies as Lawful Good. But he's call "The Betrayer" for a reason.

The point is that Alignment, even when it was a thing in D&D, never meant that someone was or wasn't a person. It certainly doesn't in this comic. Roy in one of the prequel comics outright refused to slaughter a bunch of Orcs who were technically Evil since they weren't actually doing anything wrong.

Edited by M84 on Apr 17th 2024 at 5:23:25 PM

The leader of the party Roy's with says they can kill the orcs without alignment problems because orcs are listed as chaotic evil. The orcs themselves don't seem to be evil - they even leave money to pay for the snacks they take from the local town when the shopkeepers flee in terror.

In fact, the whole point of that comic (other than introducing Roy to Durkon) seems to be that the "good guys" are doing obviously evil things like trying to send an annoying party member on suicide missions to get rid of him and wanting to kill orcs just because they're orcs and it's less convenient to parlay with them. It's what convinces Roy that he has to form his own party.

I would say that "having an internal self", that is, desires and self-awareness, are at least almost the same thing as having free will. If you can desire for things to be different than they are then you basically have free will, even if you are bound to not change them.

Sure, Planescape basically said "fiends are just powerful, funny-looking people", but I find the Angry GM's take on demons and devils perhaps more interesting. In his game world fiends definitely aren't people - their only goal is to corrupt mortals (devils) or to bring pain and suffering into the mortal world (demons), and there is literally nothing else to them. They have intelligence and so can pursue their goals intelligently, and can therefore pretend to have free will if it will forward those goals, but they really are just "evil in physical form", and are not a person.

A devil who is not actively corrupting mortals basically sits and stares at a wall until it has an opportunity to corrupt mortals again. It doesn't get bored, though it might pretend that it was bored if it will help a mortal to sympathize with it - thereby giving it an opening to try to corrupt the mortal.

On the flip side, celestials are the same way - no real free will, but intelligence with the goal of improving mortals or improving and beautifying the world.

The Giant's take is obviously more Planescape "outsiders are just people"-style.

I would say that they're orthogonal.

It's like the difference between being a passenger on an aeroplane and being the pilot of the aeroplane: both are beings in a vessel, but only one has the means to steer the vessel; the other is "just along for the ride".

(Of course, it's an imperfect analogy—the passenger can still desire to steer—but hopefully the idea comes across that, I argue, a being with only an internal experience—only the ability to observe what is happening—with no ability to will change, is still a being.

But conversely, the lack of such desire or will doesn't imply, to my mind, non-personhood.

It's like the difference between a mug with a lid and one without: The mug with the lid can potentially prevent liquid within from spilling, and in doing so, proves that it's a container of liquid. But that doesn't mean that the other mug's inability to prevent spillage means that it's not a container for liquid.

Or, in formal logic terms, "A implies B" does not imply that "not A implies not B".

If that is to be taken literally, then it implies that they have no internal experience—that they're basically supernatural automata, or other-dimensional chatbots—then fair enough, by my definition.

But that has nothing to do with whether or not they have free will—it's to do with the other stuff that they may or may not have. (I'm not familiar with the setting.)

I think we're on the same page here. A person who only has an internal or observational experience can still have free will, because the capacity to desire to change something is an exercise of free will, even if you lack the capacity to act. Likewise, I meant the capacity to desire to change something, not saying it was necessary for someone to actively desire to change something in order to have free will..'

Yep, other-dimensional chatbots that actively attempt to corrupt your soul.

We're on the same page regarding whether that constitutes free will—but I still hold that having free will is not essential to being a person.

Even a being that had only an internal experience—no will at all, not even the capacity to desire to change something—would still, I argue, be a person.

And for my part, as a materialist compatibilist, I don't see any particular reason to jump from being an automaton to lacking free will; nor any reason to jump from being an automaton to lacking interiority/will-at-all/etc. I think I'm a meat-automaton and I've definitely got interiority and will, and the latter sure seems free.

Oh, I see now why you suggested my examples, including the librarian, were writing characters with free will. Yeah, I would think the librarian had free will, still, or at least potentially; I think it's pretty hard to have will that's unfree short of like, mind control, where you want X but then something else hits a button and makes you not want X. The librarian seemed to just have a will of their own which was consistent with the wizard's, and so not necessarily constrained or overwritten at all. They were just set up to have the right will to begin with, the freedom was thus a feature, not a bug. Compatibilism!

I think a lot of people tend to assume that no free will and lack of interiority go hand in hand; I think often that assumption is incorrect, because they then go 'So no robot could ever have interiority because the magical freedom could never be represented in a programmed entity'. It's rarer to see people thinking anything with interiority has free will. I don't fully agree with that? It mainly involves an entity whose will is constantly altered by an outside entity in a way they can't recognize such that even though they have an internal conception that they've been acting according to their will, their past and future behavior weren't-and-won't-be chosen by the current them in any meaningful way, which is... rather an edge case!

The more interesting question is if an entity can have interiority but not will. I don't know? I can think of an entity which could have a perception of things, including themself, and an internal mental model of all that, with an ability to think and consider. I'd say that constitutes interiority. But the issue is that the ability to think imputes a will, because thinking is acting and thus is willful. A fully passive entity that doesn't willfully do anything, not even actively think, just passively observe and understand the world... Is that interiority? I mean, by some definitions, but it seems lacking in emotional states or the "I" concept as we tend to mean it, as an understanding of oneself as a doer.

That said, on the other hand, I can easily imagine an entity with only internal states and no conception of the outside world or (known) ability to act and influence that world, which nevertheless has a will? They can potentially still act on themself; thinking thoughts, for instance. They can have desires, even if not necessarily a way to act on them; maybe some experiences are good, and they want more, while some are bad, and they want less. Even without any ability to influence whether the next experience will be good or bad, having a preference speaks to desire, and desire speaks to will.

Many, many languages have a relationship between "want" and "will" in their grammar, because one of the early ways a "will" concept, one of future action, happens, is by analogy with future action. (The other big one, incidentally, IIRC is "go", analogizing travel in time by travel in space.) What we will isn't just tied to what we will do, but what we want. "Volition" derives from "volo", "I wish". Will falls out of having desires, which fall out of having preferences; just as much as will falls out of making choices, which falls out of taking conscious actions.

This sounds like epiphenomenalism, which includes the idea that consciousness is an incidental consequence of self-awareness. The body senses, decides, and acts all on its own, but because many of its senses are self-monitoring it produces the illusion that they are involved in actually making choices, not simply observing choices that were already made.

Technically, free will and conscious awareness are not the same thing, since it could be a sub-conscious part of the mind that is making the choices (and thus has free will), while the consciousness is merely observing this (and incorrectly perceiving itself as making the choices). But that raises the question why a natural organism would be selected by evolution for having consciousness awareness, since it seems to add nothing to the equation.

Regardless, if Calder is so constrained in his choices that leaving him free would almost certainly result in innocent people suffering, and killing him was too hard, then enslaving him might have been the least bad option.

I can't imagine a scenario in which capturing a dragon alive is less difficult than killing it, though.

When you're fighting it to kill it and it surrenders.

Or if you're in a stone hall with a great weight on a chain suspended above it and you can shout the dragon into landing and approaching you on foot

Edited by blkwhtrbbt on Apr 23rd 2024 at 3:58:02 AM

Fine, if it has to be said, capturing it is harder than killing it when it’s resisting you. We already went over the ethics of attempting to keep a dragon prisoner, in depth.

The decision to accept Calder's initial surrender was due to Soon. He was a Paladin, and a Paladin just doesn't kill a surrendering opponent in cold blood.

It's probably more accurate to say that Soon wouldn't allow a surrendering opponent to be killed in cold blood. We've seen many Stickworld paladins get away with worse things without a fall from paladinhood.

Such as? And don't bring up Redcloak's backstory. That's already been discussed ad nauseum.

Remember the bit when Team Peregrine killed a surrendering hobgoblin willing to turn cloak? There's a reason one of the Azurite freedom fighters said they shouldn't tell their paladin leader what happened.

Generally, paladins don't kill people who are no longer active threats in cold blood.

Edited by M84 on Apr 24th 2024 at 10:00:05 PM

Even avoiding the obvious example of the massacre of Redcloak's village, there's plenty of examples of paladin misbehavior in the comic.

The unnamed paladin leader of Roy's party in On the Origin of PCs routinely sent Durkon on what he intended to be suicide missions just because he found Durkon annoying. He also wanted to kill the orcs waiting for the concert because he felt that would have been easier and quicker than talking to them and coming to a peaceful arrangement.

Sir Francois abandoned his squire Elan with no money or gear in a city full of thieves in the same book. Probably not quite the level of "refusing a surrender", but certainly a questionable act.

A whole group of Sapphire Guard paladins in How the Paladin Got His Scar were perfectly willing, until O-Chul interfered, to massacre everyone in a hobgoblin settlement that hadn't really been bothering anyone. I very much doubt Gin-Jun would have allowed any hobgoblins to be taken prisoner.

I think it's pretty certain that Miko would not accept a red dragon surrender. She was ready to accuse the Order of doing wrong when they killed a juvenile dragon, but as soon as Roy told her its scales weren't shinny she immediately changed her tune to "then its destruction was just and necessary."

So yes, Soon, Hinjo, O-Chul, or Lien would certainly not kill a surrendering enemy, but in Stickworld it seems there are paladins and then there are paladins, if you know what I mean.

Edited by Bense on Apr 24th 2024 at 9:57:10 AM

The fact that many Paladins in the Sapphire Guard were willing to do what we would regard as pretty bad things in the pursuit of Good is pretyy indisputable. Some fell, but others didn't; evidently enough didn't to keep doing stuff like in How The Paladin Got His Scar and, yes, Redcloak's village, without a major fall-epidemic-induced organizational reassessment.

It's quite possible there are circumstances where killing a surrendering person wouldn't cause a Paladin to fall, in the 'verse of the story. Maybe they reject the surrender; maybe they deem themselves judge, jury, and executioner; maybe they believe the elimination of Evil is always Good, regardless of circumstance, and the relevant god(s) agree in that given circumstance. The fact that there are Paladins who wouldn't do such things doesn't mean there are no Paladins who would.

I'd sure balk at a Paladin murdering a surrendering person, but OotS world's morality sure isn't mine.

Oh, beaten to it, quite thoroughly.

Edited by RaichuKFM on Apr 24th 2024 at 11:12:09 AM

In all fairness, that's pre-character development Elan. He was asking for it.

And if you think about it, you can't be safer in a city of thieves than if you have nothing to steal from at all.

Edited by Resileafs on Apr 24th 2024 at 12:21:58 PM

Too bad thieves don't always check to see if someone has anything worth stealing before mugging or killing them.

On the plus side, Roy met Elan three weeks later and Elan was just fine, so if Sir Francois was counting on Elan being able to take care of himself until he was able to glom on to someone else he turned out to be correct.

The thing about accepting surrender is that you have to believe it's in good faith, no? Miko would likely not accept a surrender because she wouldn't believe it.

Miko accepted the order's surrender in their first battle.

And she avoided killing them in their second battle.

Humans, elves and dwarves are notably not chromatic dragons. She attacked in the first place because she saw a positive reaction to Detect Evil and accepted a surrender because iirc Durkon, clearly a reasonable person, defused the situation and explained what was going on.