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I blame Jack Bauer for a lot of this darkening of our pop-cultural hearts. Not all of it, not by a long shot, but damned if he wasn't a huge part of what went wrong with us somewhere along the way.
Torture is evil. Good gods are not down with torture. Inquisitors still answer to their gods. Of particular note, Iomedae comes down hard on those who do evil in the name of the "greater good". Especially if it's done in her name.
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Torture if part of interrogation if done professionally is unfortunatly quite good in extracting information.
You can get decent information from WW1, WW2, if you are lucky the cold war, and even more recent examples. To work with the informations, or if the poor soul does not have the informations you seek is another story, but....
And I mean professionally, like being done by people who are experts in Psychology, medicine and more.
This is simply factually untrue. Check out Hanns Scharff, for example. The very best interrogators of the Luftwaffe. Also, just about the nicest guy ever to the people he was interrogating...which would be why what he did worked and worked extremely well. Unlike many of the less pleasant interrogators.
And he and some of the prisoners he interrogated wound up friends after the war. So...yeah, even if you want to argue torture works (it doesn't, but for the sake of argument...) more humane methods work better.
Even Hera didn't support that level of disgraceful and dishonorable behavior.
Unless you slept with her husband. Or disapointed her by being born deformed. Or knew someone who slept with her husband. Or thought someone was prettier than her. Or thought YOU were prettier than her. Or helped someone sleep with her husband. Or killed someone in her temple. Or disagreed with her. Or worst of all were the child of her husband.
In those cases she would make with the torment, torture, maining, and baleful polymorphs all day long.
No torture is not always evil.
This is a game, so I don't feel at all badly about bringing other fictional examples in.
Anyone who has seen 24 will understand that Jack is nowhere near evil, and he tortures people. It's about context and intent.
Torture if part of interrogation if done professionally is unfortunatly quite good in extracting information.
You can get decent information from WW1, WW2, if you are lucky the cold war, and even more recent examples. To work with the informations, or if the poor soul does not have the informations you seek is another story, but....
And I mean professionally, like being done by people who are experts in Psychology, medicine and more.This is simply factually untrue. Check out Hanns Scharff, for example. The very best interrogators of the Luftwaffe. Also, just about the nicest guy ever to the people he was interrogating...which would be why what he did worked and worked extremely well. Unlike many of the less pleasant interrogators.
And he and some of the prisoners he interrogated wound up friends after the war. So...yeah, even if you want to argue torture works (it doesn't, but for the sake of argument...) more humane methods work better.
As long as you have the time.
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No torture is not always evil.
This is a game, so I don't feel at all badly about bringing other fictional examples in.Anyone who has seen 24 will understand that Jack is nowhere near evil, and he tortures people. It's about context and intent.
Torture is always an Evil act. In a world where it works, it's potentially one a non-Evil person might perform in a 'for the greater good' sort of way but that makes it a necessary Evil, not a non-Evil act.
And such a world has little similarity to the real world.
As long as you have the time.
Torture doesn't work, though. Especially if you don't have time. Even if you believe torture works, the first several things people tell you when you torture them are pretty much always gonna be lies. And that's after they start talking, which often takes a while. Torture takes days at a minimum, and more usually weeks or months, to break people to the point of saying things you want to hear.
No torture is not always evil.
This is a game, so I don't feel at all badly about bringing other fictional examples in.Anyone who has seen 24 will understand that Jack is nowhere near evil, and he tortures people. It's about context and intent.
Torture is always an Evil act. In a world where it works, it's potentially one a non-Evil person might perform in a 'for the greater good' sort of way but that makes it a necessary Evil, not a non-Evil act.
And such a world has little similarity to the real world.
As long as you have the time.Torture doesn't work, though. Especially if you don't have time. Even if you believe torture works, the first several things people tell you when you torture them are pretty much always gonna be lies. And that's after they start talking, which often takes a while. Torture takes days at a minimum, and more usually weeks or months, to break people to the point of saying things you want to hear.
I think we can safely assume that in a conversation about an Inquisitor using torture on magicians in a world where roasting someone with a ball of fire is not an Evil act yet causing someone who has already hit you with a two handed sword some pain (Retribution) is an Evil act, we are in a world very much NOT similar to the real world.
The reality is that you are in Pathfinder world, where torturing is a heal check that takes 1 hour. Yes it is also an evil act, but just like anything else, mitigated by context and circumstances.
I blame Jack Bauer for a lot of this darkening of our pop-cultural hearts. Not all of it, not by a long shot, but damned if he wasn't a huge part of what went wrong with us somewhere along the way.
I suspect that Jack Bauer was just a symptom, not a cause.
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If your Hera is mostly true to the mythological Hera, she's probably LN with a really mean vengeful streak and probably is OK with torture as long as it is targeted at someone who offends her. The inquisitor in question is probably of LE alignment, but that's allowed for a servant of a LN deity.
I have a hard time imagining a LG deity who would be OK with a servant of theirs performing torture.
Torture is not for information extraction, since it is unreliable when compared with spells.
It's for revenge, to inflict pain for it's own sake, or to perform an obedience to your god.
Exactly. Between spells and basic skills, torture is never the Inquisitor's best or only means to get information. Stern Gaze, Discern Lies, and if you're really fancy Detect Thoughts get the job done.
The reality is that you are in Pathfinder world, where torturing is a heal check that takes 1 hour. Yes it is also an evil act, but just like anything else, mitigated by context and circumstances.
And Intimidate is a check that takes 1 minute and that an Inquisitor gets a +1/2 class level bonus on.
Even if PF torture is quicker and more reliable than real-world torture, it's still not the quickest and most reliable way to get information.
Torture remains one of the absolute worst things a government can do or allow. It taints everyone involved. The ones who actually do it are subhuman monsters.
I agree with eveything else you've said, but while torture violates basic human rights and dignity, torturers are depressingly, frighteningly human.
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Jack Bauer was a very conscious decision about trying to whitewash the idea of torture in the hearts and minds of the American people. As such, he might be a symptom, depending on your definition. But it's not just the character. The entire setting is designed from the ground up to show that terrorists are evil people and the good people must use torture on them for society to survive (tm) and when the good guys do use torture, it works. It is... shameful.
And no, torturers are not like everyone else. They are people who accept doing such disgusting acts without objecting. Not everyone is like that. And while we spend our RPG time imagining monsters and how we kill them... the even sadder and more frightening truth is that every monster in the history of human imagination has been a mirror of something found in humans. A monster is at its heart an image of a human. THAT is why I call them subhuman and monsters.
Okay.
You two are ridiculous.
Gee thanks. I wasn't aware that thinking people bringing their RL issues into a PF advice thread was pro-rl-torture though.
I tend to see it as a problem to look at a fantasy setting that is not a modern scientific world with our contemporary morality.
For example today we know that beating children, even your own ones is a bad thing to do. But in the times that more closely resembled the golarion societies it was normal to do that.So in terms of morality I give PCs (those I gm for and those I play) more leeway than our modern world-view would allow.
The difference with the Middle Age is that deities who could strip you of your powers should you do questionable things were not a thing.
Real life inquisitors did things that most Good-aligned deities of Golarion would never permit, and the loss of divine power would have them automatically lose authority
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Gee thanks. I wasn't aware that thinking people bringing their RL issues into a PF advice thread was pro-rl-torture though.
I have no desire to play games in a world where there is objective morality that says things that are unforgivably awful in the real world are objectively not Evil.
Would you play in a game where the world rules literally say it's morally okay to murder children? Or commit rape? I wouldn't. And for the same reason, I see no need to play in a world where torture is less than pure Evil.
Likewise, I have no desire to play in a world where the way people think is so fundamentally different from the way real people think that torture's actually a viable tactic for information extraction.
It's like having a world where nobody experiences sexual attraction, or one where everyone both believes and doesn't believe things simultaneously, or one where nobody ever feels fear...it's so divergent from the way the vast majority of real people think that it distracts a great deal from any story not focusing on the psychological difference in question.
Which doesn't make you pro RL torture, but does make bringing those issues up a bit rather relevant.
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The reality is that you are in Pathfinder world, where torturing is a heal check that takes 1 hour. Yes it is also an evil act, but just like anything else, mitigated by context and circumstances.
This is a horrifyingly erroneous line of thinking. And dangerous at that.
No, healing magic does not make it all better. It does nothing to undo the trauma and violation felt by the victim. It does nothing to undo the spiritual harm torture does to both the victim and the torturer.
Healing one's tortured victim does not make the act any less evil than someone raising people they just murdered.
To bring this all the way to the original post -
Torture, like other issues, is a potential red button issue. Make SURE the other players and GM have no problem with it as purely a RP discussion type thing before actually bringing it to the table. Make sure that RP torture doesn't spoil the escapist fun the other players have.
I'm hopeful that since the original poster brought this up as an issue, that the original poster feels it is unacceptable in actuality.
If they are okay with torture as "what a character would do" and doesn't lead some PLAYER down some dark path, then we can worry about the deity. The OP says the deity is Hera - which has been defined in D&D (I believe she was true neutral), yet not in Pathfinder yet. If true neutral, torture wouldn't be an alignment shift if only used in extreme circumstance where lives were on the line. If done just for fun, or if used often to demand answers the inquisitor could care less about, it would cause alignment shifts. It also opens up another can of worms. In a magical world, is it worse to magically alter someone's free will than it is to harm their body?
Occam's alignment razor would say good people wouldn't torture unless they were pushed to some extreme limit. Neutral people wouldn't go out of their way to do it, nor would they avoid it if they see some benefit to it, maybe for revenge against someone that harmed that neutral person severely. Evil people enjoy torturing others, LE would just make sure it was all within the name of enforcing the code (law, religion, following orders, operating procedure, etc.).
Is the inquisitor in question under major emotional stress? Like, did the person about to be tortured kill a loved one or close party member?
Would a character torturing an evil being who just killed someone close to them, and is torturing mainly in a substantial emotional breakdown (mass sorrow and rage); would they shift in alignment?
Just curious really. I'd say if the inquisitor is in an emotional meltdown caused by the one being tortured, I'd probably let it slide... this once at least.
The reality is that you are in Pathfinder world, where torturing is a heal check that takes 1 hour. Yes it is also an evil act, but just like anything else, mitigated by context and circumstances.This is a horrifyingly erroneous line of thinking. And dangerous at that.
No, healing magic does not make it all better. It does nothing to undo the trauma and violation felt by the victim. It does nothing to undo the spiritual harm torture does to both the victim and the torturer.
Healing one's tortured victim does not make the act any less evil than someone raising people they just murdered.
What he was saying is that performing torture is a Heal check (as the Heal skill is about knowledge of anatomy also leads to how inflict pain efficiently), and by being a roll of d20 instead of a strong image it is perceived as less consequential by the players
This is why I hate alignment and tend to let my players have complete autonomy over alignment unless it in the absolute extremes. People have different political perspectives. It's not a fun game if I try to impose my moral compass on them. Also Pathfinder does not encompass an "objective" morality. That's nonsense. Everything comes down to abstract terms and words on which reasonable and even some unreasonable people may disagree about the application of to particular situations. Ugh, alignment.
While it's hard to determine some borderline cases of what is good or evil (not really, but let's assume that is subjective), it's not really hard what a deity, which is in the end a character of the setting, does or does not want you to do. And good-aligned deities are against torture by their beliefs and area of competence, so if you're a cleric or inquisitor and go explicitly against your deity's will (which is something not blurry in those cases), the "change of alignment" is more functional to the fact that your deity strips you of your powers in respons of your acts.
Even some neutral/good actions can make you lose your divine powers. If you try to prohibit alcohol because you feel that is dangerous to people (and so a well-intentioned act), rest assured that if you're a cleric of Cayden Cailean (CG) your god is not gonna be happy
I think the problem with "torture is always evil" as an approach is simply drawing the line between "torture" and any other sort harm brought to someone as a means to coerce them to do what you want.
I mean, if you rough up a guy, punching him a few times, in order to get him to tell you what you want to know, is that torture? I mean, you're hurting him and the implication would be that you're going to keep doing so until you get what you want.
If you knock that guy unconscious, then tie him to a chair and leave him in a dark room all day, is that torture? I mean, that guy might get really bored and thirsty, and might miss some important appointments.
I think there are certainly means of coercing someone to do what you want, that involve actual or implied harm that are not "Evil Acts". So I think that what really needs to get nailed down here is "what, precisely constitutes torture. The Dictionary (and Dictionaries reflect use, they are not normative) defines torture as something like "the action or practice of inflicting severe pain on someone as a punishment or to force them to do or say something, or for the pleasure of the person inflicting the pain."
The imprecise word there is "severe" and given that in this game morality is generally adjudicated by divine entities, definitions of "severe" would probably vary from divine being to divine being (though the divinity in question should probably make it clear whatlines shouldn't be crossed.) So the rather than the GM specifying "torture is not okay with your deity" I would instead suggest outlining the basic principles of the worship of that deity, and permitting whatever actions fall within the spirit of said religion
So I don't think it's helpful to say "torture is always evil" without exploring down where the line between "permissible coercion" and "Act of Evil" does. Else you're basically just invoking a tautology saying "torture is what falls on the evil side of that line."
Instead of going with the "torture is always evil", it would be simpler to go with "torture is always non-good".
By this I mean that occasionally neutral characters will find it necessary to use torture *if* other interrogation methods fail. And if they do have to do it, they'll likely go with the "no long term physical damage" type like sleep deprivation, starvation, or whatever extreme measures "civilized" people use. Permanent psychological damage is a possible outcome.
Evil characters won't mind starting with torture, interrogation or not, and it will be the nasty kinds that dungeon torture rooms are famous for.
Good characters will *never* torture, nor even try to justify it. "Threatening" with torture may be acceptable (good cop/bad cop with diplomacy/intimidate skills), but different cultures and deities will have different tolerance levels (or no tolerance at all).
Now concerning Hera, she'd usually be against torture *unless* someone did something specifically against her or her church, then she's quite vengeful. If torture *is* done in her name, might as well have some "Hera inspired" techniques, a sort of "approved list" used by her followers.
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What he was saying is that performing torture is a Heal check (as the Heal skill is about knowledge of anatomy also leads to how inflict pain efficiently), and by being a roll of d20 instead of a strong image it is perceived as less consequential by the playersThe reality is that you are in Pathfinder world, where torturing is a heal check that takes 1 hour. Yes it is also an evil act, but just like anything else, mitigated by context and circumstances.This is a horrifyingly erroneous line of thinking. And dangerous at that.
No, healing magic does not make it all better. It does nothing to undo the trauma and violation felt by the victim. It does nothing to undo the spiritual harm torture does to both the victim and the torturer.
Healing one's tortured victim does not make the act any less evil than someone raising people they just murdered.
Yes, and it looks like those rules are from a 3rd-party supplement ("Villains: Rebirth" by Bastion Press) that ended up on the pfsrd. They're actually not as simplistic as iammercy's original comment made it out to be, since it specifically mentions that the target may lie regardless of the results of the roll, and includes tortures like sleep deprivation under the "erode willpower" application.
I'd agree with you though that it's hard to include torture in a game without either (1) glossing over the details in a way that trivializes the issue (2) making people uncomfortable by fully exploring those details.
And no, torturers are not like everyone else. They are people who accept doing such disgusting acts without objecting. Not everyone is like that. And while we spend our RPG time imagining monsters and how we kill them... the even sadder and more frightening truth is that every monster in the history of human imagination has been a mirror of something found in humans. A monster is at its heart an image of a human. THAT is why I call them subhuman and monsters.
Have you read about the Stanford Prison Experiment? Milgram Shock?
A remarkably large percentage of ordinary people will torture other ordinary people if pushed in the right way. This does not mean that torture is not a truly monstrous act, one of the most horrible, heinous things that one human can do to another. Nor does it mean that someone who performs torture doesn't bear psychological scars after the fact. It does mean that if we continue to believe that torture is something done by sadists and monsters, we will ignore aspects of our society that allow or even encourage ordinary people to torture and lesser evils.
We can't eliminate torture and other atrocity by those in power by screening for "bad apples" if the problem is a bad barrel.
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I mean, if you rough up a guy, punching him a few times, in order to get him to tell you what you want to know, is that torture? I mean, you're hurting him and the implication would be that you're going to keep doing so until you get what you want.
Yes.
If you knock that guy unconscious, then tie him to a chair and leave him in a dark room all day, is that torture? I mean, that guy might get really bored and thirsty, and might miss some important appointments.
Yes.
How much have you actually read about Milgram's Study
I mean, if you rough up a guy, punching him a few times, in order to get him to tell you what you want to know, is that torture? I mean, you're hurting him and the implication would be that you're going to keep doing so until you get what you want.Yes.
If you knock that guy unconscious, then tie him to a chair and leave him in a dark room all day, is that torture? I mean, that guy might get really bored and thirsty, and might miss some important appointments.Yes.
I just think "good cop/bad cop" and "tie a guy to a chair and leave him somewhere for a while" are things that a neutral character should be able to get away with.
I mean, I've had good parties abduct people and leave them locked in rooms, or tied to furniture for periods of time to prevent them from malfeasance because it was a humane alternative to "killing them."
Well, every society has its myths. Some of those basically say "we're all shit". That doesn't mean those myths are actually true. It is very interesting that in a serious analysis of the Kitty Genovese murder, two facts showed up: Given the circumstances, including a badly lit street late at night, it was unlikely that someone would see what happened. The police DID receive calls about the situation, people who heard something that worried them. The myth states that lots of people saw it and did nothing, and the police didn't get any calls about it. But the story was printed in the newspaper, and it was the kind of myth people wanted to hear, so even today people believe it. They even justify other beliefs with it. "If you're assaulted, nobody will protect you. See what happened to Kitty Genovese. I need a gun to protect myself!"
The Milgram experiment is not what I would call a serious experiment. I have no doubts that finding a number of people that WOULD administer a lethal shock is quite possible. But: Not everyone is like that.
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I mean, if you rough up a guy, punching him a few times, in order to get him to tell you what you want to know, is that torture? I mean, you're hurting him and the implication would be that you're going to keep doing so until you get what you want.Yes.
If you knock that guy unconscious, then tie him to a chair and leave him in a dark room all day, is that torture? I mean, that guy might get really bored and thirsty, and might miss some important appointments.Yes.I just think "good cop/bad cop" and "tie a guy to a chair and leave him somewhere for a while" are things that a neutral character should be able to get away with.
I mean, I've had good parties abduct people and leave them locked in rooms, or tied to furniture for periods of time to prevent them from malfeasance because it was a humane alternative to "killing them."
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that good people can torture bad people with effective results. That still doesn't make torture good. You can argue the greater good (and you would still be wrong), but torture is always evil.
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I think the problem with "torture is always evil" as an approach is simply drawing the line between "torture" and any other sort harm brought to someone as a means to coerce them to do what you want.
I mean, if you rough up a guy, punching him a few times, in order to get him to tell you what you want to know, is that torture? I mean, you're hurting him and the implication would be that you're going to keep doing so until you get what you want.
If you knock that guy unconscious, then tie him to a chair and leave him in a dark room all day, is that torture? I mean, that guy might get really bored and thirsty, and might miss some important appointments.
I'd argue that if you're physically hurting someone who is already a captive in a way that isn't actively necessary to keeping them captive, you're torturing them.
Punching them is certainly less Evil than ripping out their fingernails, but if a Paladin beats a prisoner, I'd say he falls (and The Worldwound Gambit actually has some supporting evidence for this perspective), and that's a solid barometer for Evil. Heck, anyone here read or seen Neverwhere? There's an excellent scene in that demonstrating why beating a helpless target is very much torture, if not the worst form possible.
Now, many people who commit Evil acts aren't Evil themselves, and it actually takes an ongoing pattern of Evil behavior to actually wind up Evil (though a much lower amount can slide a Good person to Neutral)...but that doesn't change the nature of the acts.
And when we talk about torture being unacceptable to the Good Gods there's certainly matters of degree there, too. A beating, as mentioned, is a bit less Evil than a lot of examples of torture, and a deity might even forgive an Inquisitor (or other follower) an instance or two, especially if they were provoked, but an ongoing pattern is gonna lose them their deity's patronage pretty quickly.
Now, psychological torture is also certainly a thing, and a nasty one, but a bit harder to define. Personally, I'd reserve the term for pretty egregious stuff like extended sleep deprivation or methodical efforts to drive someone crazy. Basically, if you're trying to hurt and/or permanently traumatize them psychologically, not just scare them a bit or make them uncomfortable, you're probably engaging in psychological torture.
That seems a pretty thorough and workable definition to me.
The Milgram experiment is not what I would call a serious experiment. I have no doubts that finding a number of people that WOULD administer a lethal shock is quite possible. But: Not everyone is like that.
You're right about Kitty Genovese, and about quite a few other examples in the area of 'people want to believe the worst'...the Stanford Prison Project was basically rigged to be much more awful than a real prison, for example.
But the simple fact is that the Milgram experiment provided some real data on several things, and a large percentage of people would, in fact, torture or kill someone if put in a vulnerable position and ordered to by someone in authority. Period.
Also, many people wouldn't. Probably even under duress. So...not as bleak a picture of humanity as some make it out to be.
First you can't use the actions of children as a basis for moralality. While many children grasp morality the vast majority under any sort of emotional stress will act on an instinctual level.
Secondly pathfinder is written with good and evil being absolute tangible things. There are no real grey areas actions either are in the scope of something or they are not.
This doesn't mean every means of interrogation is torture. You can probably say "alright I'm going to disorient this guy for 2 days feed him at the wrong times and use lighting to confuse his day/night schedual while I as him questions.
Within a controlled framework that ends at the appointed time it is not torture. However it can easily become torture repeated with no new questions and no breaks or no supervision.
But here is the kicker... none of it is remotely necessary because spells will quickly determine the truth in the gash majority of cases.
Lastly I'm going to move away from do a moment and address a few final things.
A)with the pt/golarion framework inquisitors receive no leeway for alignment. People are using class fluff to assign the ability to ignore alignment infractions. The rules don't care who the inquisitors God is when determining if something is good or evil nor does the God.
B)in this case the dm appears to have made the decision to use the Greek gods and probably shift the moral basis away from the of one. I agree Hera leaves a lot of room for a sense of moral justification for things that pt/golarion consider evil.
Ultimately if played with the of/golarion framework people need to step away from the inquisitor fluff and focus on the fact that they need a class feature to let them ignore alignment which they do not posess
Capturing opponents, and subsequently interrogating and subjecting them to endless sense motive checks is completely normal behavior in this game that most of us agree would be acceptable for all 9 alignments. In real life people kill themselves to avoid this situation, even when they hold religious beliefs that forbid suicide.
I think that gratuitous torture beyond simply getting the information through skills and/or magic is ridiculous. When you do that you are engaging in a kick the dog moment that serves the purpose of pointing out your villainy. Why do people try to get away with kicking the dog while being the hero? I can only assume it is some kind of dominance game. I haven't heard any other explanations for this behavior. It drives me crazy when people try to push the "Evil is Cool therefore Good is Lame" fallacy and then use the Rule of Cool to justify why they should still be considered a hero.
If your game relies on pushing the "Good is Dumb" trope on your players, expect the above logic to be used by at least some of the players.
Tell that torture does not work to my grandfather who was tortured by the stasi. He tells a complete diffrent story.
And check CIA records where they are public. Same thing.
Enhanced interrogation techniques check that out
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There are two arguments for torture: a) Otherwise the disaster happens, and b) people do bad things all the time, these things are worse than a little piddling torture...
A) is, much like other fantasies, a convenient way for primitive people to justify their right to torture. In essence, it skips to the non-existent/extremely rare cases that gets anyone's blood boiling, ignores any argument why it might not be necessary - because the arguer WANTS to define the world as one in which torture works and doesn't bring horrible side effects.
B) is immature to the point of being laughable, or would be if it wasn't so terrible. Siblings fight. People hit one another. People get angry with people they love. People say hurtful things, sometimes in front of others. Simple, right? All these things make us equally monstrous, so let's torture away!!!1 No. None of this holds a candle to the sickening, stomach-turning horror that is knowingly torturing another. Keeping them helpless, in your power (this is what people like about torturing), and subjecting them to degradation, pain, mutilation and situations where they fear for their lives for days or weeks on end.
There will always be primitive people who like torturing. In their fantasy, they can do the things nobody else can stomach, hurting only thoroughly evil people to Protect (tm) Society (tm), Justice (tm) and Freedom (tm). It has about as much to do with reality as Rambo IV or Megashark vs Giant Octopus, or He-man and the Masters of the Universe.
By the same token, there will always be those who oppose it, and tell the Milgram-du-jour to go f$~# himself.
The greek gods were a pretty awful bunch. Hera did all the things described above. Zeus boned any girl he was passing by. Demeter transformed people into deers and hunted them for sport. Athena blinded a man for seeing her naked when she was bathing in the forest - and to compensate, gave him the gift of precognition which allowed him to see his own death and thereby poisoning his entire life. And so on... Calling any of them Good is truly stretching the definition of that word. And yes, an inquisitor of Hera would be able to employ torture to his heart's content. He would just be evil while doing so.
Not to make fun of this... But how many of us bullied our siblings when we were younger?
Not me, she was 6 years older than me, and always a lot bigger. By the time I caught up size-wise, we both knew better. And we don't judge children by the same standards as adults.
Edit: IS 6 years older than me, still :) That hasn't changed.
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Not to make fun of this... But how many of us bullied our siblings when we were younger? How many of us still tell the embarrassing stories of our siblings when they bring over their date? Congrats, I just showed that probably 80% or more of the people in the world have torrured their own family at some point for no reason than their own gratification.
First...while I lacked siblings, I never bullied anyone. I got bullied, but that's a different story (and I only got physically bullied that once).
Second, that's not torture. Not as we're discussing it anyway. Part of the horror of torture as it's being discussed here is the inherent power imbalance and utter helplessness of the prisoner. That's simply not the case for a sibling being beat up or teased. They may be overmatched, certainly, or even feel helpless...but not the utter helplessness someone tied to a chair in enemy hands feels. It's more like combat than torture, really, given the ability to respond in various ways, and while unprovoked assault is certainly an Evil act, it's not torture per se.
Parental or spousal abuse is basically torture, but that has to do with the complete perceived inability to go to any authority figure to get it stopped. Sibling abuse could fall under that category if the victim was either too frightened to go to their parents or the parents wouldn't step in no matter what...but that's drifting pretty far away from '80% of the people in the world'. Being teased at school, ditto, since in most schools there are certain categories of 'teasing' that the authorities are very unlikely to put up with. Again, there are certainly exceptions to this...but they're hardly as ubiquitous as you're painting them.
This may be very trivial when compared to beating someone in a physical sense but such psychological tortures have on RARE occasions caused mass school shootings and other terrible things. This is BASIC every day stuff. Is the entire human race evil?!! While my own views says yes, for the purposes of pathfinder I say cut the players some slack.
Again, Evil Actions =/= Being Evil. Not inherently. They do if they're bad enough or if they outweigh Good actions, but that's not inherent to committing an isolated Evil act. And most people are Neutral...which means an occasional Evil act is to be expected from them.
Tell that torture does not work to my grandfather who was tortured by the stasi. He tells a complete diffrent story.
And check CIA records where they are public. Same thing.
Enhanced interrogation techniques check that out
Yeah...here's the thing. Nobody's arguing torture doesn't exist or doesn't mess people up.
What it doesn't do is reliably extract useful or actionable intelligence. Will it sometimes get a fact out? Sure, even the worst methods of doing most things occasionally work. But the actual information is going to be mixed with lies (far more so than many other interrogation methodologies), which require extensive work sorting truth from fiction. And most other interrogation methods just flat-out work better, over any timetable you care to name.
Not to make fun of this... But how many of us bullied our siblings when we were younger?
Well, as Saint Augustine observed, infants are evil-aligned and it takes time to grow out of it. ;)
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The Milgram experiment is not what I would call a serious experiment. I have no doubts that finding a number of people that WOULD administer a lethal shock is quite possible. But: Not everyone is like that.
No, not everyone is like that. But not everyone that is like that is an unredeemable monster with no human empathy or compassion. Some of them are. But some of them are at least a little brainwashed. This does not make it OK. It does mean that stopping torture requires making sure that our government does not brainwash people into the torturing mentality, and that our citizens are given the moral tools they need to resist such brainwashing.
Ultimately if played with the of Golarion framework people need to step away from the inquisitor fluff and focus on the fact that they need a class feature to let them ignore alignment which they do not posess
In fact, the Ex-inquisitors section makes it pretty clear that alignment is still an issue for an inquisitor:
"An inquisitor who slips into corruption or changes to a prohibited alignment loses all spells and the judgment ability. She cannot thereafter gain levels as an inquisitor until she atones (see the atonement spell description)."
The bit about "corruption" is a little vague but I'm guessing it refers to doing things for your own benefit rather than to advance the goals of your deity.
Demeter transformed people into deers and hunted them for sport.
That was Artemis. Demeter is the one who caused a famine because Zeus gave Hades permission to kidnap Demeter's daughter.
Duh. Of course it was Artemis. Brain fart.
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The greek gods were a pretty awful bunch. Hera did all the things described above. Zeus boned any girl he was passing by. Demeter transformed people into deers and hunted them for sport. Athena blinded a man for seeing her naked when she was bathing in the forest - and to compensate, gave him the gift of precognition which allowed him to see his own death and thereby poisoning his entire life. And so on... Calling any of them Good is truly stretching the definition of that word. And yes, an inquisitor of Hera would be able to employ torture to his heart's content. He would just be evil while doing so.
Pedantic Mythology Buff Note: As Weirdo notes...that first one's Artemis, not Demeter. And she didn't actually do it regularly, just once when she got spotted naked while bathing.
And the Athena myth you cite is by far the less common version of that story (the more common one involves Hera, Zeus, gender swapping, and whether men or women enjoy sex more...Tiresias is an interesting mythological figure).
That said, you're generally correct. A couple of the Greek Gods are somewhat nicer, depending on which myths you go with (as many are somewhat contradictory), but on the whole they're pretty much complete dicks.
Demeter is the one who caused a famine because Zeus gave Hades permission to kidnap Demeter's daughter.
In defense of Demeter, per the myth, her daughter was kidnapped, raped, and being held captive by her rapist and nobody was willing to do a damn thing about it. Flipping out in an 'I will f&@$ everything all to hell if you don't rescue my daughter' way is pretty understandable.
EDIT: Semi-ninja'd. Ah, well.
Yeah, the Eleusis myth is not... Incomprehensible.
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Demeter is the one who caused a famine because Zeus gave Hades permission to kidnap Demeter's daughter.In defense of Demeter, per the myth, her daughter was kidnapped, raped, and being held captive by her rapist and nobody was willing to do a damn thing about it. Flipping out in an 'I will f**! everything all to hell if you don't rescue my daughter' way is pretty understandable.
Absolutely understandable, and most of the blame lies on Zeus and Hades for creating the entire situation.
But it does illustrate the fact that even the best of the Greek gods don't care that much about mortal suffering.