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I'm hoping that I can get some input on a topic that is baffling both myself and my DM.

I'm playing a paladin of Shelyn who is helping to eradicate an evil temple. The problem we're facing is that there are evil works of art of evil deities. So far for the valuable unholy symbols she has been going by the part of the code that says you may destroy art if more art arises from it by having the symbols melted down to be used by an artist.

But they encountered a large statue to a very evil deity in an evil temple. We're both stumped on what she should do she's been praying for advice and we're hoping for some insight.

Can paladins of Sheylyn destroy evil art when it's not to be used for more art? There is another paladin in the group she's been talking this over with and the topic has come up that if they leave the statue it may be a source of more inspiration for other evil worshippers. It's too large to carry out all of the stone to use for other artists to make different statues. It also does have a large emerald she's thinking could be used, but that does nothing about the statue itself.

I babbled on, but we've hit a philosophical problem. Could I please get some input that may help?

In a group that is focused more on the character and roleplaying then rules tweaks, playing a paladin can be a very rich experience.

Usually it's just my husband and myself doing our own games, and we love, love, love RPing paladins. We're more on the RP/lax side of things, but still enforce that a paladin is being lawful and good. Sometimes this takes a moment of thought before doing something (ie. trying to rescue somebody who was taken by the law... but in a corrupt, tyrannical town where they just abused their power and made up some false claim to torture the man)... my paladin had to do that brief self-affirmation before breaking in the door to the guard station to rescue this person. She stopped to think that this would actually be breaking the law, a false law that was set up more so that bullies could make up whatever rules they wanted to terrorize the people. She thought of how this innocent and good man would be tortured to death if she didn't intervene, and that goodness, and doing what was right trumped trying to play within a corrupt and evil law. So she broke the door down and rescued the man, even if it was literally breaking the law, but still a very good action, and one that in a non-evil town wouldn't have been necessary anyhow.

We very rarely have paladins break their codes, and there are some traps that are frustrating.

The topic of 'what is good' and 'what makes a good action' are frequently things that we wind up philosophizing in and out of character. (We have a Dragonstar/plane-hopping/dimension-skipping RPG going where the captain of the ship is a cowboy, marshal paladin.) The paladin leader of the ship (more like huge adventuring company) has things like 'philosophy club' where people get together to discuss these things.

We finally came to an epiphany during one hard choice in a game that included all good characters to what we believed made an action 'good' (at least for our games and philosophies)

Basically it came down to a game where the characters were killing evil, evil giants who were kidnapping people, eating people from the nearby town who they kept in prisons for their chopping blocks, etc. It wasn't just a group of adult giants though, they were a whole tribe, with families, children.. and a nursery.

So with the evil, horrible, baby eating adult giants killed, the characters stood around not sure what to do about the giant children. Killing them felt, well, rather evil. They were innocents. But would letting them live on with nobody to take care of them and letting them slowly die be better then a merciful death? What if they were left and grew up to start another tribe of baby eating giants, with their leanings to become evil?

Would it be a good action for the good characters to kill the evil infants of the evil child eating giants so that you stopped the menace from occuring again? Would it be a good act to leave them alone? Would they need to find a way to take care of the orphaned giant infants? The characters weren't set up for the option to take them in, and who knows what the locals would do to the children of the monsters who killed their loved ones.

What we finally came to, for our conclusion, is that some varying characters may argue that another one wasn't being 'good' for not taking on their side of what should be done... but that all of the options were basically still in the way of goodness. The BIG difference between if it was an evil action or not was that the characters themselves were actually bothered by this, trying to think of a solution, and it wasn't just a callous/cold killing without thought, empathy or care for the situation.

We decided that what made their final decision good was that they were actually troubled over it, fretting over what the 'good' way to do things was for quite a bit of time (both in game time and out of game time), and actually tried to make the best out of the situation for the infants. (They had decided to kill the infants in a mercy killing rather then let them slowly die, they didn't have the means to take care of them and handing them over to the locals would mean death anyhow.)

It was decided with our roleplays that a big part of goodness (and good intent) is not doing things to be selfish, or to be cruel, but actually trying to do what is right, for that time, and situation, with the knowledge that you have at hand. If it was the wrong decision, but you did spend time fretting over it, and really trying to do what was best and right, it's usually going to be a good action.

Mind you this is just more on the side of 'good' actions, but not 'lawful' actions which is another pitfall for the paladin.