I never post on these forums as while I browse them, usually, I feel someone adequately represents my position. In the paladin argument I feel most people fall short, as I find paladins to be more an avatar of their diety. I think a CG paladin makes plenty of sense, but I think there is an underlying point missed in the discussion over it. This is a not of an odd topic so I'll try to cover it with as much brevity and clarity as I can via a cellphone.
Positive and negative rights. These marker the key difference between the lawful and chaotic axis when it's applied to the good end of the good and evil axis. Es la Champions the protection of the people as a community and us to protect a positive rights are enforced. Walla chaotic individual Advocates personal freedom and liberty thus enforcing negative rights. The chaotic individual tends to hate positive rights as they tend to fall against personal freedom. this is not strictly true but for brevity sake I'll simply explain the basis of negative from positive rights. And negative rights, is a right that exist regardless of interactions with others. freedom Liberty pursuit of happiness these aren't buzzwords these are terms referring to things that you have as long as no one attempts to take them from you. Positive rights are rights granted by others to an individual but can be at the expense of another individual. I won't go into any kind of modern semantics, but for example the government giving tax money provided from working individuals to non-working individuals would be a positive right to ensure quality of life. I e the right to a healthy lifestyle, the rights to fair treatment and Equitable treatment, or the right to accommodation based on weakness. A chaotic good individual would not inherently be against the facilitation of such things, however they would be against the enforcement of these accommodations when they take away from another person's natural rights. A lawful person is more likely to focus on fairness over individual liberty to ensure Equitable and even treatment in the society in the implication of law. Meanwhile if you do try to advocate for a neutral good State on these rules you would be focused on equivalent balance between these two concepts.
The reason I wanted such a long-winded approach to understanding this distinction is that many people Miss represent chaotic to mean Lawless or rulis or without pattern. This is a false statement as individuals with no Direction like that would not be able to operate within a society. What chaotic represents in this access is to be unrestricted within the relative bounds such that laws are meant to defend individual liberty and freedom of action and expression. If a law would not promote those things and instead infringes upon them a chaotic good individual would act out against that or ignored entirely.
A code or edict for chaotic characters is not an affirmative that much as long as that edict is what they and their gods believe is right as someone noted above actually. The real disconnect between law and chaos is what leads to the greater good. More specifically what the greater good entails, mainly for all or for to each his own. Both would find slavery anathema, but a lawful individual might accept its existence if it's something that brings more good to a larger number of people. As a Counterpoint both would find unfairness in exclusivity to be anathema, but a chaotic individual might accept it because it is a person's right to choose to the interact with where is the lawful individual would consider that entirely against supporting everyone's quality of life.
It's arguable which one of these would be great and which one would you be terrible, as that's going to fall into a personal taste in ethics. However, this distinction does not preclude chaotic individuals having a soulful edict, it actually promotes their existence as that edict would be the coalescence of their beliefs in individual Freedom's and the greater good.
As a side note, I've always found it interesting that people consider chaotic individuals to be flighty or whimsical almost without thought. That's no more true than all lawful individuals are staunch no-nonsense characters who follow every rule. Even the universal aspect of Chaos in Pathfinder does not create Amorphis creatures that don't even exist simply because that would require rules for existence. It simply means that the rules that Encompass their existence even on the plane of Chaos are amorphous and subject to change but substance is still a solid law. The organizations of internal organs that's debatable, but that they exist and acting the universe means that chaos is still subject to rules. Seriously, it confuses me because even entropy is subject to order it is just a different order focused on even distribution rather than collected distribution but I digress. I rambled on and people have said most of the other points I would make but if anyone has a question or if this bloody message comes out hilariously bad due to dictation by a phone, I'll correct it and organize it through edits if I can.
