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It gets very difficult when you try to apply real-modern-world morality to a fantasy setting.
Yes it can. There's no meaningful difference in morality between the real world and a fantasy world. The differences lie in circumstances, tool, and (in Pathfinder and D&D specifically )
When you have a world with sentient creatures that are literally evil by nature, killing them becomes an absolute good.
This is factually untrue. Any Alignments listed are the most common rather than for sure, and are pretty explicitly mostly nurture rather than nature, given the number of listed NPCs who violate the listed alignments (CN Goblins and Drow leap to mind, plus LN vampires, and so on and so forth).
In the modern world, the only known sentient creatures are human, and they don't have any innate "alignment" or natural predisposition towards evil.
Any such tendency is pretty limited on Golarion.
In our world, we expect that evil-doers can be rehabilitated, and we have a large social infrastructure dedicated to that goal (well, in theory, anyway).
That's not universally true in the real world at all. And in areas where it is, it has far more to do with the infrastructure of the area providing an ability to do so than anything else.
When you have a clan of goblins attacking a town of 200 people with no sheriff, judge, jail, or mental hospital, your options are a lot more limited.
They absolutely are. this is exactly the kind of infrastructure I'm talking about above and it makes a big difference. But it makes the same difference, morally speaking, in the game that it does in a real life town in a lawless region. Whether the attackers are goblins or humans, and whether they wield swords or AK-47s makes no meaningful moral difference.
As a GM, you can add the whole "nature vs. nurture" argument to your world (e.g., is it possible to raise a baby goblin to be a productive member of society?), but in the Golarion world as written, nature comes first.*
Actually...no. The books come down firmly on the side of nurture, for the most part.
In that world, you can try to negotiate with the goblins, but the odds are really, really high that they will stab you in the back the second they get the chance, or they'll just wait until you leave and start attacking the town again. Maybe they're just pure chaotic and pure evil, maybe they just have such a short attention span they forgot they agreed to a treaty, but sooner or later, people are going to start dying again.
This is more or less true, but more cultural than anything, and true (for slightly different reasons) of deals made with, again, say, bandits or militia groups in a war-torn area of Africa.
Is it "good" in this case to try to negotiate, knowing full well that you will never actually succeed? Or is it better to prevent people from suffering at the hands of an irredeemable enemy? ("Now kobolds, you can bargain with kobolds, but goblins, they's just plain mean.")
It's not about 'irredeemable' (which pretty clearly flat-out doesn't exist given the possibility of redeeming even demon lords), it's about untrustworthiness. If you can't rely on your enemy to keep their word, making deals with them becomes rather pointless.
*There have been some pretty interesting experiments with people raising wolf cubs as dogs or baby chimps with infant humans. In these experiments, the "wild" always takes over as the animal approaches maturity. In one "chimps and babies" example, the human toddler started acting more like a chimp. Fun stuff.
Eh. People keep pet wolves successfully. There's certainly some truth to 'going back to the wild', but it's not an absolute rule. And inevitably far less absolute among sapient creatures.
Pain, inconvenience and a hefty fine sounds like suitable punishment.It's bad if you're a thief, though. Magic is for rich people. But yes, cutting off someone's limb is less bad if there's ready access to healing magic. Now it's only bad for the value of pain you inflict+the temporary inconvenience imposed on the transgressor.I think the hand cutting thing might not be that bad. I seem to remember magic that can fix that (although I might be remembering some 3rd party stuff involving clockpunk prosthetics)You know, I've always found the idea of a paladin that kills evil creatures and then considers this an absolutely good action a tad disturbing. Much like cutting the hand off of a thief to show his crime, I think killing should be something to do for lack of a better alternative, not the stock response of someone who's described as a beacon of good and justice. I mean, what the hell?
Then again, it's very rare that I believe a campaign is suited to having a paladin pc in it.
Not to mention my brain just tried to transplant that view of evil to the minds of people in the real world. *shudders* Not pretty.
Aye, and it's probably the best thing to do in the circumstances, in order to have society keep running without prisons.
But as I'm not sold on the point that cutting off a thief's hand is a good act, so do I not see that killing creatures that plan to do evil is a good act.
It might be the best thing to do given the circumstances. But least evil=/=good.
The problem is seeing things as only Good or Evil.
In Pathfinder, we have a third option. NEUTRAL.
Killing in battle people who 'deserve' to be killed... is not good. It's neutral. With just the right twitch to the motivations, it could become Evil... but not 'all' killing is 'evil'.
And Paladins absolutely can perform Neutral acts. It's committing an Evil act that steals their powers.
So frankly there are a lot of situations where the Paladin would say "I'd rather not do this, But......"
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Yes it can. There's no meaningful difference in morality between the real world and a fantasy world. The differences lie in circumstances, tool, and (in Pathfinder and D&D specifically)
Whoops, meant to finish this bit with:
and (in Pathfinder and D&D specifically) the objective nature of it. But the core tenets don't change in any meaningful sense.
Pain, inconvenience and a hefty fine sounds like suitable punishment.It's bad if you're a thief, though. Magic is for rich people. But yes, cutting off someone's limb is less bad if there's ready access to healing magic. Now it's only bad for the value of pain you inflict+the temporary inconvenience imposed on the transgressor.I think the hand cutting thing might not be that bad. I seem to remember magic that can fix that (although I might be remembering some 3rd party stuff involving clockpunk prosthetics)You know, I've always found the idea of a paladin that kills evil creatures and then considers this an absolutely good action a tad disturbing. Much like cutting the hand off of a thief to show his crime, I think killing should be something to do for lack of a better alternative, not the stock response of someone who's described as a beacon of good and justice. I mean, what the hell?
Then again, it's very rare that I believe a campaign is suited to having a paladin pc in it.
Not to mention my brain just tried to transplant that view of evil to the minds of people in the real world. *shudders* Not pretty.
Aye, and it's probably the best thing to do in the circumstances, in order to have society keep running without prisons.
But as I'm not sold on the point that cutting off a thief's hand is a good act, so do I not see that killing creatures that plan to do evil is a good act.
It might be the best thing to do given the circumstances. But least evil=/=good.
The problem is seeing things as only Good or Evil.
In Pathfinder, we have a third option. NEUTRAL.
Killing in battle people who 'deserve' to be killed... is not good. It's neutral. With just the right twitch to the motivations, it could become Evil... but not 'all' killing is 'evil'.
And Paladins absolutely can perform Neutral acts. It's committing an Evil act...
Ahh. It seems I've put it badly. I'm not saying that killing is evil, full stop, I'm just saying that, if you take all the intent out of the question, killing something is worse than for it not to happen. Killing is, to my mind at least, basically never a good act. Whether it is neutral or evil depends entirely on motivation. I'd say undead and [evil] subtype outsiders are an excemption to this, as they're quite literally made of evil.
Anyway, the paladin'd need some other claim to paladinhood than "I kill evil for the lulz." Even if they kill A LOT of evil stuff.
Regardless, I'm aware that applying real-world ethics to a campaign isn't standard. Normally you kill the bandits/goblins/whatevs and move on, and that's fine. It's just that the paladin's I've seen played like that seemed hollow, and made me want to stay away from the class.