Maybe. It would have the normal nature to be evil, but maybe the nurture would make it good.
Pathfinder hasn't answered nature vs nurture yet.
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Depends on the GM/setting.
Modern basic assumption is that it comes down to nurture rather than nature and that infants can't be evil because they're innocent infants. There are also canonically non-evil orcs raising non-evil orc children in the Pathfinder setting now. It follows that it would apply to most of the "monstrous" humanoid types as well. Molthrune would be a good place to look for non-evil hobgoblins, while anywhere the desert meets Sarenites should produce some gnolls along the same lines. And friendly, non-evil goblins have been showing up in Pathfinder material for a while now.(that honorary sewer Hellknight is still the best)
The Bestiary itself points out that the alignments listed for creatures are rarely "locked in" except for beings like outsiders and such, and even there you can find exceptions such as fallen angels and risen fiends.
from the PRD:
The alignments listed for each monster in this book represent the norm for those monsters—they can vary as you require them to in order to serve the needs of your campaign. Only in the case of relatively unintelligent monsters (creatures with an Intelligence of 2 or lower are almost never anything other than neutral) and planar monsters (outsiders with alignments other than those listed are unusual and typically outcasts from their kind) is the listed alignment relatively unchangeable.
Humanoids from evil races are not themselves invariably evil, its just the norm for them. So their offspring raised in non-evil environments with non-evil cultures are definitely not invariably evil.
So I will say that yes, infants of "usually evil" races should be evil. Not because of who's raising them, but because babies are selfish manipulative @#%holes. Seriously, pretty sure all babies of every race would qualify as Evil under the alignment system (though we're generous and instead treat them like animals, too dumb to make moral judgements)..
Infants? No. Toddlers? Yes.
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In the real world the idea that every person is created equal and all people are more alike than different in terms of tendency and potential are deeply entrenched social values. It seems natural to project real world values onto the fantasy world to some extent, but in the fantasy world different races clearly have different abilities. Some are smarter, some are faster, some are stronger, so it doesn't seem strange to propose that maybe some have a greater inherent tendency to be Good or Evil.
I'd say that a goblin raised by humans could end up Neutral or Good but might have a tendency to end up Evil anyhow. Even if you're strictly against the idea that creatures could have inherent negative tendencies you might consider the prejudice and oppression which a goblin living in human society might encounter and the negative reaction that might create. Contrarily you could consider how that goblin's suffering might cause him or her to become a Paladin turning the other cheek to insults, championing the rights of oppressed people, and trying to redeem the goblin race - who would likely be violently disinterested in such salvation...
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So I will say that yes, infants of "usually evil" races should be evil. Not because of who's raising them, but because babies are selfish manipulative @#%holes. Seriously, pretty sure all babies of every race would qualify as Evil under the alignment system (though we're generous and instead treat them like animals, too dumb to make moral judgements).
As for after they're raised, why would they be any different than any other sentient free-willed creature? If they can't control what they do (not free-willed) then they should either be mindless or have int scores 2 or below. Since I can't think of any race that has that it's best to assume they're capable of the same decision making as any other race.
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All babies are evil.
Every last one.
Lazy bastards make everyone do all their work for them, clean their filth, feed them, and they REFUSE to get a job.
Slavers if I've ever seen one.
I can only speak in pictures.
What does a gif of a normal golfer have to do with anything?
But as Mikaze said it's up to your GM/setting but if you are following the default Pathfinder rules they could grow up to be Neutral, Good, or Evil just like any other sentient free-willed creature such as Humans, Dwarves, Halflings.
Also as babies/infants/toddlers they are not evil they are neutral as they(most likely) wouldn't have been able to do any evil at that time.
So I will say that yes, infants of "usually evil" races should be evil. Not because of who's raising them, but because babies are selfish manipulative @#%holes. Seriously, pretty sure all babies of every race would qualify as Evil under the alignment system (though we're generous and instead treat them like animals, too dumb to make moral judgements).
As for after they're raised, why would they be any different than any other sentient free-willed creature? If they can't control what they do (not free-willed) then they should either be mindless or have int scores 2 or below. Since I can't think of any race that has that it's best to assume they're capable of the same decision making as any other race.
The only thing that stops paladins from slaughtering all the babies is that they do not have enough hit dice to ping on detect evil.
In fact, I would argue that detect evil has that flaw for just this reason.
But onto actual philosophical discussion- why I do not think that any humanoid child (and a lot of monstrous humanoid children) are inherently evil... you are still going to have a rough time with some of them. Goblins and impulse control, for example. Dealing with this from the perspective of human psychology can be difficult, and since a lot of Golarion still practices the 'just smack the little blighter until he gets quite' style of parenting.... yeah, I can see them going bad during their rebellious phase.
It depends.
As has been said, this isn't exactly a rules thing, it's a GM thing.
That said, look at the extremes. Take a demon immediately after it is spawned and give it to a family of unicorns to raise. Is it evil? Yup. Is it still evil? Yup. What about now? Evil.
Right.
So it makes sense that there are inherently evil creatures. Sure, the lines become blurred when you get into monstrous humanoid land, but that's why you have a GM.
Do we really need to have this discussion yet again?
It depends.
As has been said, this isn't exactly a rules thing, it's a GM thing.
That said, look at the extremes. Take a demon immediately after it is spawned and give it to a family of unicorns to raise. Is it evil? Yup. Is it still evil? Yup. What about now? Evil.
Right.
So it makes sense that there are inherently evil creatures. Sure, the lines become blurred when you get into monstrous humanoid land, but that's why you have a GM.
Yeah, but demons are literally made from physical evil (since all outsiders are partially from their respective realm). There are degrees, sure (tieflings aren't affected enough to be inherently evil), but it is quite a different moral question from goblins and orcs.
Do we really need to have this discussion yet again?
Yes, Yes we do. Because we didn't get anywhere the first time, and who knows, the 58th time might be different.
The philosophers haven't settles this in eons. We aren't going to.
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Do we really need to have this discussion yet again?Yes, Yes we do. Because we didn't get anywhere the first time, and who knows, the 58th time might be different.
Here's Mikaze's dead serious post on raising bugbear babies.
Neat thread, actually.
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Do we really need to have this discussion yet again?
Does it somehow harm you that there exist people who haven't had the benefit of the past X times the conversation has been had?
You don't need to participate; those of us who are willing to dedicate our time to present material for the original poster to consider are the only people who have a meaningful investment.
And no, it doesn't harm me that you ask. Like the OP, I'll just take a moment to reasonably answer you.
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You know, if a Succubus can be redeemed and become a good guy, I have no reason to believe that anything is inherently evil in the setting.
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Do we really need to have this discussion yet again?Yes, Yes we do. Because we didn't get anywhere the first time, and who knows, the 58th time might be different.
Here's Mikaze's dead serious post on raising bugbear babies.
Neat thread, actually.
Thanks! And yeah, it's dead serious and earnest. Parody definitely wasn't what I had in mind and I don't go in for dead baby comedy; that thread was a reaction to a glut of "yay justified genocide" threads that were, if anything, far uglier than anything I've seen on the boards recently.
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Here's Mikaze's dead serious post on raising bugbear babies.
Neat thread, actually.
Yes, that thread is a great place to look if you're looking for complications that might crop up raising the usually-evil humanoids, including consideration for possibly innate thinking patterns that tend to lead to evil behavior (such as a bugbear's need to be feared).
You know, if a Succubus can be redeemed and become a good guy, I have no reason to believe that anything is inherently evil in the setting.
But that was initiated by a god messing with her head.
That is little different than asking 'are fiendish babies that were tainted by a evil god's power in the womb evil'? Because yes...they are at least partially made from evil made manifest.
The real question we should be asking here is this- can you redeem it using mortal means, and without relying on divine intervention or unique macguffins?
Goblins and bugbears need extensive counseling and psychiatric help to fit into most societies. Demons need their mind broken by a higher power, one that is interested enough to even both trying (instead of simply saying 'just stab the damned thing')
As for after they're raised, why would they be any different than any other sentient free-willed creature? If they can't control what they do (not free-willed) then they should either be mindless or have int scores 2 or below.
Free will is a concept that is universally assumed in our world, because it is convenient, but not actually strictly proven to be true...
Since I can't think of any race that has that it's best to assume they're capable of the same decision making as any other race.
...In fiction, though, concepts that explicitly or implicitly override free will while still allowing for complex decision-making and self-conttrol are introduced all the time. Even before we dip into explicitly mystical stuff, or things that make people into drones of a greater entity there are solutions like hardwired programming that makes certain core directives impossible to disobey, while giving the subject free reign on how to pursue them (look, at, like, every second story featuring AIs); or supercharging certain urges and drives, so, say, your need to hurt others is just as or almost as strong as your need to feed.
In other words, "but if this bugbear can think up complex plans of killing me, he necessarily can think that killing me is wrong" is a fallacious argument.
In the real world the question of nature vs. nurture is fairly controversial, and clearly there is a blending of the two, so it is unreasonable to expect that the answer in a fantasy world would be obvious.
In my opinion, most children of evil races would be more likely to be good if raised in a good family than they would if raised in their more typical environments, however they would be more likely to end up evil than a non-evil race raised in a good environment would be.
Basically they have impulses, aggressions, and possibly connections to supernatural divine entities that the more typical demi-human races don't have. These don't make it impossible to be good, but they probably make it less likely and a more difficult thing to obtain.
This doesn't mean they don't have free will, but it does mean that they have different choices and challenges to exercise their will against.
So yes, free will absolutely exists if the GM says it does. The only creatures excluded are too dumb to know any better (who are therefore neutral) and literally made of evil/good/law/chaos (outsiders with alignment subtypes).
As for the hardcoded AI... well, I would argue that's not free will. Limited free will maybe,
Exactly. You can have complex decision processes and even culture without free will. As is the case with outsiders. And actually there are non-outsider races working on the same logic - shall I remind, that Golarion drow is literally what happens when elves go insane and evil to the core, with a spontaneous tranformation, no less?
The only one of your examples that matters here is the AI one, because we (as a species) fight hardwired biological drives all the time. It's not necessarily easy and some people have a much harder time than others but it's always possible.
I'm sure hearing that would be a great relief to people living near that underground daemonic-conctructed race with unpronounceable name for which killing every sapient creature other than themselves is an imperative as strong as procreation.
Wait, no it wouldn't be. The attitude towards vampires is "kill 'em all, no sorting needed", and vampires don't even strictly speaking have an urge to kill, merely an urge to feed in a way that often results in death.
And going to the main point of the thread, the key problem spawning all these goblin babies conundrums is the indisputable fact that yes, certain races exist in the game world solely to give PCs targets for guilt-free killing. You might note that as soon as orcs and other traditional candidates for this role become humanized to the point that PCs might feel uncomfortable massacring them, game settings invariably introduce "eviler than you" fantasy races to serve the same role. And yes, it is certainly possible to imagine creatures that have sapience but not free will, as you have agreed right above. And so the concept of free will does not give bad GMs a free excuse to pretend that the "goblin baby" issue is, in fact, an issue in their settings, even though that situation implicitly assumes that every able-bodied goblin acted like not a free-willed creature but an organic killbot that might have programming elaborate enough to make tools and create complex plans but cannot deny its core directive of aggression.
Depends upon whether you believe alignment in inherent or learned.
Smite baby?
Smite baby?Ladies and gentlemen, the new archetype power for the Divine Devestator Paladin Archetype from the Murder Hobo Tactics Toolbox!
It only works on baby goblins, and it gives you 10x for it (it also somehow makes them drop 10k in loot)
It's a GM thing.
However, in real life, trying to deny a creatures nature doesn't change the nature.
If you treat a Tiger domestically, will it be domesticated? Perhaps Siegfried and Roy could answer that (their beloved tiger attacked them).
If you treat a Python as domesticated, is it really domesticated, or will it eat your little children if it's hungry and get the chance?
If you treat a Rat as domesticated, will it no longer gnaw holes in your house if you let it go free?
It takes generations to domesticate animals (and by that, it could mean thousands of years of generations to get a dog out of a wolf, or other animals), much of that because of their nature vs. nurture.
I imagine if Evil is part of the natural nature of the babe, it will turn out evil no matter what you do. Sure, it might be able to act good, but eventually, it's nature will show.
Now if you did the same thing for a thousand years and managed not only to not die from old age, but not get killed by them...maybe it would be different.
However, this is a magical creature from a fantasy world we are talking about in RPGs typically, and hence might not have any basis in reality at all.
Which means...
It's up to your GM.
Toddlers are inherently evil, and their alignment shifts (or doesn't as the case may be) as they mature.
It's a GM thing.
However, in real life, trying to deny a creatures nature doesn't change the nature.
If you treat a Tiger domestically, will it be domesticated? Perhaps Siegfried and Roy could answer that (their beloved tiger attacked them).
The answer to the Tiger question. A major difference in the evolution of Felis Domesticus involves the lowering of the Fight/Flight fear threshold. Which is why your cat will tolerate you picking it up and put up with many of the things children do if it's raised with children from it's kitten days.
Tigers, and other wild cats however, always remain on that razor's edge. And trainers who forget that will pay a heavy price. Even those who remember, may not always be aware that the trigger may be closer to the surface than usual on any given moment. They are genetically incapable of being domesticated in the way cats and dogs are. Same thing with wild rabbits. you may catch one, feed it and keep it for a couple of weeks, only to find it unexpectedly dead of fright one morning, because of that high fear threshold. (Actually saw this happen at camp.)
Pretty much. in order to get it out of them, you have to breed it out of them. With careful selected breeding, it could take just a few dozen generations.
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Wait, no it wouldn't be. The attitude towards vampires is "kill 'em all, no sorting needed", and vampires don't even strictly speaking have an urge to kill, merely an urge to feed in a way that often results in death.I'm sure the corpses they leave behind appreciate the distinction.
Vampires generally have an urge to drink their victims dry. And it's an urge that's followed much more often than not, hence their status as monsters that treat mortals as a food source.
Agreed, actually. I've often noted that the villains in my games are villains not because of what they are but who they are.
The evil vampire is not evil because he's a vampire. He's a threat because he's a vampire. He's evil because he's evil. He might be better at being evil because now he has power and a will to use it, but he kills people for his own pleasure even when he knows he doesn't have to.
Even if you were to un-vamp him, he'd still be an evil bastard.
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Of course, vampires are overdone and the rules for them vary, but the concept applies - Mind flayers, maybe?
Yeah, funny thing about that. I hadn't used vampires at all in my games for like half a decade or more, but one of my current playgroup has this supreme fascination with all things vampires so I ended up making them a pretty major part of my current campaign and some additional campaigns (there's a campaign I want to run in the future that basically revolves around all the PCs being vampires or being associated with vampires, which will revolve around various noble houses and such).
She's kind of renewed my interest in them and has allowed me to explore some fun stuff concerning vampires that I hadn't before. However, I've found vampires to be surprisingly "living friendly" compared to most monsters who feed on the living. They're more like overdressed mosquitoes since it's surprisingly easy for vampires to feed without killing people.
This has actually become a bit of a plot point in my recent campaign. Some of the Paladin's order have had their world turned upside down because they've met some non-evil vampires (the order frequently hunts and slays undead on principle) and found out that there are more vampires than they thought (even found there were some in the city where their HQ is located). Just they hadn't discovered them because they weren't causing a problem so they went unnoticed.
It also draws more attention to the primary vampire antagonist (who is currently deceased, yay PCs) because he was indeed the killing sort, because he only cared about himself and didn't mind draining his prey dry for his own pleasure. He was a jerk and the party was glad to smite him.
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Pretty much. in order to get it out of them, you have to breed it out of them. With careful selected breeding, it could take just a few dozen generations.It's a GM thing.
However, in real life, trying to deny a creatures nature doesn't change the nature.
If you treat a Tiger domestically, will it be domesticated? Perhaps Siegfried and Roy could answer that (their beloved tiger attacked them).
The answer to the Tiger question. A major difference in the evolution of Felis Domesticus involves the lowering of the Fight/Flight fear threshold. Which is why your cat will tolerate you picking it up and put up with many of the things children do if it's raised with children from it's kitten days.
Tigers, and other wild cats however, always remain on that razor's edge. And trainers who forget that will pay a heavy price. Even those who remember, may not always be aware that the trigger may be closer to the surface than usual on any given moment. They are genetically incapable of being domesticated in the way cats and dogs are. Same thing with wild rabbits. you may catch one, feed it and keep it for a couple of weeks, only to find it unexpectedly dead of fright one morning, because of that high fear threshold. (Actually saw this happen at camp.)
Interesting experiments go on in that field. Russian researcher attempted to create a 'domesticated silver fox' (use that as your search term) in order to improve the fur industry.
They worked from the idea of how dogs were domesticated from wolves. The general idea was to selectively breed based on the same criteria ancient man might have originally used- which cubs seemed the most docile (or the 'which of these little..... ers bit me, because he is going into the stew' principle).
The interesting result was this- he succeeded in making foxes that were fairly dog like in their tameness...and it resulted in their going dog like as well. Instead of the beatiful silver fur they were looking for, they got the kind of patching fur appropriate for a pet named 'spot', or something similar to a husky. They also acquired a few other dog like behaviors.
Basically, dogs today are pretty much a direct result of how we treated them early on. Whether you would get quite the same reaction from noncanines is questionable... but yeah, you could literally make predictions based off of house cats given this kind of trend.