PossibleCabbage wrote:
I'm just against the idea that any person (whether it's a green person, or a pointy-eared person, or a person with a weird thing above their eyebrows a la Star Trek) would have their morality encoded in their DNA.
Anybody who can choose, can choose to be evil, but can also choose to be good. The reasons why they choose to be evil are much more interesting than just insisting that their wickedness is somehow intrinsic.
How would a mouse judge the behavior of a cat? What would a cow think of the behavior of a human? What do humans think of vampires?
You can find any number of examples for which the physiologic needs of one species place them absolutely at odds with the survival of another species. If the preyed-upon species were sentient I don't think its a stretch for them to view their predator as irredeemably evil.
Taking this into fictional terms consider the behavior of the Xenomorphs from Alien. Their lifecycle demands that they inflict a horrible death onto sentient beings in order to reproduce. Why shouldn't such sentient beings look at them as something to destroy?
Or in D&D terms consider the mindflayers: intelligent, communal and absolutely opposed to other sentient life. Depending on the lore you use their reproduction too requires the torturous death of other sentient species. Were it not for their behavior and their psionic abilities they could easily be classified as humanoids. They can be said to have free will because they have a capacity for intelligent, rational and morally-based decision making but the evil behavior of these creatures is truly 'encoded into their DNA' because their physiology demands it.
Turning to goblins it gets a bit tricky. This is in part because goblins have taken on many forms and we need to be clear about what sort of goblins we're talking about and in another part because goblins have in the past been a channel for expressing harmful stereotypes about real world human beings.
If goblins are compelled by some instinct of their biology to eat human babies, burn villages and kill for sport I think it's wholly reasonable for a human, dwarf, elf or otherwise to view them as absolutely evil and to kill them on sight. In this expression killing a goblin child is no different destroying any other deadly predator before it can grow to harm innocents.
If these behaviors are instead cultural in character, not dictates of biology but learned behaviors that goblins may be predisposed to develop but which with education and guidance can be steered away from them it's a wholly different matter.
One of the troubles we face is that goblins have been both of these in different times of the hobby's existence. In some settings goblins need to feed on human babies and sacrifice to dark gods is literally hardwired into their brains and is part of their reproductive cycle. In others they are wild, goofy and fire-loving but capable of a peaceful coexistence with other species.
Maybe for game purposes these latter traits are a necessary element to separate personhood from monsters. Neither one is inherently more interesting. I think there's room for creatures of more nuanced morality and for creatures that can only be described as monsters. For the purposes of D&D settings in general I think we've slowly moved from a time where goblins were monsters to one where they're people. Given the tangled history of goblinoid features being tied to antisemitic tropes this is probably a good thing and for the purposes of Golarion an irreversible one but I don't believe it's impossible to view 'evil' behavior as being hardwired into a species.
