I have always had trouble understanding alignments and what they means so I was wondering if people could help me out.
Now good and evil seem pretty self-explanatory but then comes to the question what is more important in deciding good or evil intentions or affects. The obvious example of this is Ozymandias from the Watchman Graphic Novel his intentions are purely benevolent so you could at a stretch call him chaotic good but he destroys thousands of lives in the attempt to secure a future for the world.
In the real world, one of the biggest questions in the field of ethics boils down to what you are highlighting here. In consequentialistic ethics, only the outcome matters. If more good things will result from an action then bad things, you ought to do it. This is the ethics Ozymandias uses at the end of the film, and many will also recognize this as the moral philosophy proposed by John Stuart Mill.
The counter to this is deontological ethics; intentions and motivations are what make actions good or evil, even if the outcome ends up being terrible. This is the ethical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, an is also seen in a very skewed (read: insane) form in Watchman as the character Rorschach.
Some games do a very good job exploring in depth these kind of ethical questions, where grey areas are likely to crop up. D&D/Pathfinder are not one of those games. Instead the ethical code most befitting these games is divine command theory. Basically things are good or evil because some superbeing says so, or just as a result of the way the fundamental rules of the universe work. Lying for example is chaotic behavior; it doesn't matter to whom you are lying, or why, or what the outcome is, lying is simply chaotic as a matter of catagory. Some behavior has qualifiers, such as killing innocent people is always wrong, but killing evil people who want to harm innocent people is always good. The reason that these games take this path is simple, not everyone has a background in philosophy, and it's not fun for most people to spend the night fighting with their friends over largely unanswerable philosophical questions. By using divine command, the Game Master can simply step in and give a ruling, without needing to go to great lengths to justify his call. Consider the section of the rulebook that focuses on alignment as a set of guidelines when making your calls, and if a declared action might be fuzzy ethically, have the GM make his call before the action is set in stone.
Now another interesting question is the true lawful one if you have a police officer who follows the letter of the law in a democratic country he would be considered lawful neutral to good but the same officer obeying the laws of a totalitarian regime would he be classed as lawful evil?
No, the cultural and legal norms of a society have nothing to do with ethics as viewed univerally. Those norms only inform the members of that society how the society as a whole feels about actions, and uses the language of morality to express those judgements. For example, causing undue suffering on the unwilling will be declared evil in a good society, but may be normal in an evil one. No one in the evil society is likely to speak up and decry such behavior as immoral, they may not even consider it immoral, if they have internalized the societies norms. But in either society, it is evil. Members of the evil society may disagree, but in this case, they are wrong.
Now this is an interesting question what about a spy master who serves a state one who is loyal believes in what he does but will do anything to protect his country what alignment is he? He breaks laws all the time, he carries out evil action but he obeys his code and believes in the rightfulness of his actions.
Assuming the government he is working for is good, or at least neutral, I would probably say that he is lawful neutral. Yes, he breaks laws, but lawfulness as a function of ethics is not concerned with lawfulness as a function of governance. Ethical lawfulness is, as you put it, following a code, particularly a very narrow one which frequently constrains the characters action and informs both himself and others clearly as to what he will do. It is predictableness in pattern, both in action and belief. If the code is not narrow, and only occasionally shapes his decisions he may be true neutral, or if the code only exists as a justification for immediate whims and will be soon discarded, he may be CN.
Presumably he is also perfectly willing to do good actions to further the goals of his state, and as such is probably neutral. Whether an action is good or evil is irrelvent to him, therefore in his apathy he is neutral. If however his nation were evil in nature, as opposed to our assumption above, then he is probably LE. He would be engaging in evil actions, for an evil power, and would presumably only be performing good actions when it would be expedient. Granted the option, he would just as soon choose an evil solution.
I hope you find this response to be of use, and if there are more questions on this topic, I will be glad to give my 2 copper.
Nice write up Rats Archive!
Another angle to consider is that in Pathfinder good and evil are not subjective perceptions, they are magical forces that permeate existence. By your actions you align yourself with these magical forces. The system sort of implies that there is an alignment tabulation going on in the background, but it is abstracted to a judgment call by the GM to resolve any alignment shifts.