Can evil have friends?

Evil can be nice as well

Since my other computer is being fixed, which has my reviews, I’m going to go into a brief Alignment article.Basically, while lurking on the OOTs forum, I ran across this

“And Tourniquets. Evil creatures or persons cannot have REAL friends. I don't believe in that. Friendship can only happen if you are a good person. Being evil forbids you to sacrifice yourself for sake of a friend, for example.
I'm not saying that evil persons cannot have relationships with good or other evil persons. What I'm saying is that they cannot befriend any other person. A relationship between evil persons, at best, will never be anything more than a degenerated kind of friendship, because evil persons do not have enough "goodness" in themselves to be able to look forward the good of any other person. Sometimes, not even of themselves.
That happens because evil is nothing else than the absence of the good. That means the evil person is someone who lacks practical knowledge, and sometimes theoretical too, of what is good. If you lack that knowledge, in practical ways, that means you cannot mean to do good to anyone. I acknowledge that evil persons may have pleasure in the company of some other person, good or evil, but having pleasure in the company of someone does not equal true friendship, but a degenerated or partial form of it.”

I figured I’d address two issues in terms of D&D evil. Can evil have friends, and can evil be effective PC players. The first is simply a response to the above statement. The idea that evil can’t have feelings of love or comradely is a fallacy. Evil, unlike good, isn’t a moral code. It’s the lack of a moral code. Good people are obligated to commit certain deeds, protect the innocent, not resort to torture, and uphold the standards of good ect. The details vary on Law/Chaos but in general good has some sort of centralized code. Evil in contrast isn’t a sort of code; you don’t fail to be evil because you have friend or pet kittens. A serial killer who lives in a hole and comes out only to kill and eat passer bys isn’t “more evil” than a brave and honorable fighter who wants to protect his family, loves his wife, sends presents to his family, and also systematically wipes out families of natives for the land he wishes to settle (Andrew Jackson anyone). Ok the former is a far worst person and is certainly more evil in terms of the damage he does and how many negative traits he possess, but in terms of being evil, both of them are clearly of the Evil Alignment, through the latter is a far more decent human being, genocide notwithstanding. To be evil, you don’t need to constantly kick puppies and laugh at old ladies to stay evil, unlike good there is no set quota for evil deeds you need to do to stay evil, you just need to have committed enough to slide you into evil (which varies depending on your beginning alignment and the deeds in question, but ten is pushing it I think). A man who murdered his elder brother because he felt he was more qualified to rule (regardless of weather or not that was true) is still evil, even if he spends the rest of his rule doing nothing at all bad, as long as he has not admitted that his prior action was wrong or repented for it, he is still evil. Committing good acts, like giving to charity and healing the sick, don’t turn an evil person good, other wise he could function on some sort of weird scale, where he could slaughter dozens of innocents one day, and then pet half a million puppies and suddenly be good. Unless you’re in Fable of course, but again, I’m trying to talk about an alignment system that actually makes sense (say what you will about 3E, it makes sense with the exception of a few loop holes, through it is understandable if you don’t like it).

So, onto the actual quote, that isn’t describing an evil person. That is describing a sociopath. Now, I’d be one to argue that almost all sociopaths are evil (mental illness and alignment are a different issue I’ll tackle later), but not everybody who is evil is a sociopath. Considering how sociopaths are a tiny percent of the world’s population that would make ethical issues a lot simpler, a lot more black and white, and a lot more juvenile. I mean, if evil can’t have friends, then a lot of really horrible people in history are going to seem funny.

Breaking Godwin’s Law (look it up if you haven’t heard of it), lets talk about the S.S., IE the elite Nazi troops who were the ones who actually ran the death camps during WWII. For example, the Einsatzgruppen was a unite charged with rounding up Jews, Poles, Gypsies and other “unpure” peoples, gathering them up and slaughtering them near ditches, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Now, clearly, both within D&D context and without, evil men, but they were not all sociopaths. Yes, they were cruel mass murderers, and I in no way intent to justify there crimes, but if you read there diaries, letters, or even watch the interviews with those who are still alive, they were people who had families, friends, loved ones and…moral values, horrible and twisted as those ethics may be. While it is easier for people to assume the SS were simply sociopath monsters who had no friends nor loved ones, in fact from all accounts, there was a sense of comradely among the lower level Nazi troops (while the upper ranks were full of infighting and inefficiency). They did horrible things, and their actions still stand as some of the greatest atrocities of world history, but they weren’t simply a bunch of soulless serial killers who drank the blood of children from birth. They had friends, families, loved ones, but were also evil murdering bastards. Hell, Himmler was by all accounts, a really friendly guy in person and a family man, as well as being one of the most evil people in human history. Mao was apparently a pretty nice guy in person, and very loyal to his comrades, but also takes the cake as the greatest mass murderer in human history. In fact, if you look to history, most of the worlds cruel conquerors were pretty nice people to there friends. The Khan, killed millions of people over his long career, modern estimates put his list of victims at 15 million (through that is almost certainly exaggerated greatly) and contemporary ones put it at even higher (again, more absurd). But he was far more democratic than most states around him, running dictatorship based more upon merit than birth, integrating massive amounts of people, and promoting religious tolerance and the preservation of learning, leading to on of the most advanced, if somewhat short lived, empires in the world. Julies Caesar committed Genocide, mass slavery, and unjust conquest in Gaul alone, and yet was an honorable man, who loved his first wife greatly (through it didn’t stop him from cheating on her) and famously, was very loyal to his friends…which turned out to be his great failing. Hell, almost all of the great Roman, Greek, and Middle Age Heroes would be evil by D&D standards, even many of American’s historical figures, especially in the early days would be evil, Polk was a warmonger, Grant was corrupt, and Jackson was both (through more competent than the latter two), and we aren’t even getting into the Confederacy. Basically the point I’m trying laboriously to get to (kudos to anybody who can catch who I stole that line from) is that being evil in D&D doesn’t keep you from making friends. Evil people can have friends, loved ones, and beliefs they hold strongly. They just also have to have committed evil actions without repenting. And in order to make this more accessible to non D&D people, I think in any moral system, you should never ever assume that people who are evil have to be sociopaths; it’s just demonizing people you don’t like, and building up a Black and White morality. Things aren’t that simple, everybody thinks they are good or justified, and even the Nazi’s believed in what they did.

Next, either Evil PCs or can good people be jerks, if I don’t get my computer back with my reviews.

From

EE