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Sympathy for the Devils: Free Will and Dungeons & Dragons
Greg Littmann
The fundamental conflict underlying the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons is that between good and evil. On one side are gods of good like Pelor and Bahamut, supported by their clerics and paladins and decent adventurers everywhere. On the other side are the cruel gods of evil, like the cadaverous Vecna and spidery Lolth, along with legions of demons and devils, grinning undead, and ugly, rampaging humanoids. Good-aligned adventurers know that demons and devils alike must be made to leave the prime material plane immediately and that the philosophical differences between the evil-aligned drow and the chaotic evil-aligned orcs are less significant in the great scheme of things than the shared evil nature that makes them both so dangerous.
Life is hard when you are born to be bad in D&D. The evil-aligned species of the monster manuals generally live in misery. Evil humanoids like orcs and goblins spend their lives being bullied by their peers, before eventually charging to a bloody death in melee. Intelligent undead are often left for centuries just staring into space, while evil people not lucky enough to become undead end up in the Abyss or the Nine Hells, where conditions are, to be blunt, hellish, as souls are tormented by chain devils or ripped apart by shrieking vrock. Even being promoted through the ranks of devils brings no respite ā your immediate superiors are always evil bastards, the more so the higher you go. If you think your boss is bad, try working for Asmodeus!
Not even the good guys show the bad guys any sympathy. A party of good characters will chop and char a tribe of orcs to so much smoking hamburger without the slightest hesitation or regret. Not even the cleric says a few words over the corpses ā sheās too busy looting them for small change. Likewise, good characters will carve their way through packs of rotting undead and gangs of howling demons and devils without giving a thought to how awful being carved up feels to the monsters, or where the poor blighters end up now and how much worse their next assignment might be.
Why is there so little sympathy for the forces of evil? Presumably, it is precisely because they are evil. It is considered justice for bad things to happen to evil people (using the word āpeopleā in its broadest sense, so as to include the various non-human intelligent individuals found in the worlds of D&D). Appeals to reciprocity might be made: the orcs we slaughter wouldnāt hesitate to slaughter us if they ever got the upper hand. The undead hate us just for being alive, while the things the devils would do to us if they had their way would make death in battle look like a merciful release.
How you treat your imaginary enemies doesnāt matter in itself. If it pleases you to imagine taking Asmodeusā ruby rod and ramming it up his nose, then you go ahead and imagine that all you like, for all the harm you are going to do anybody. But considering the justification of the moral attitudes of D&D characters is philosophically useful because attitudes shown towards combating evil in D&D mirror the attitudes that many people take towards combating evil in the real world. Whether your make-believe wizard is fulfilling his moral duty to a pretend vampire doesnāt matter in itself, but how we treat people we label as āevilā in this world does.
Philosophers test moral theories by subjecting them to āthought experiments,ā hypothetical situations set up and considered in an attempt to decide whether particular moral theories give the right answers in all possible circumstances. D&D games are nothing but thought experiments, hypothetical situations in which hypothetical people do hypothetical things. Of the various story-telling art forms that can serve as a source for thought experiments, D&D is particularly suitable because the D&D player is an active participant in the story, forced to make decisions based on the situations described by the Dungeon Master.
Pity the Pit Fiend
Why should we feel sympathy for the evil-aligned monsters of D&D? One factor that might move us is that so many of them seem to be evil by nature. That is, they are evil given the very type of being they are. While a corrupt human or malicious halfling might have taken a wrong turn in life, other humanoids like orcs, goblins and trolls, along with non-humanoids like red dragons, ropers, or grell are born to their alignment; a red dragon is an evil creature ā it says so right in the Monster Manual. Of course, the Monster Manual also states, āA monsterās alignment is not rigid, and exceptions can exist to the general rule,ā1 so beings labeled as āevilā in the manuals donāt necessarily have to be evil. Your PC could meet a red dragon looking to defect to the side of good, or a grell philosopher so tormented by the moral implications of her thought experiments that she can no longer eat people and is wasting away from hunger. But if the probability of a creature being anything other than evil is so slight that it is dealt with by a general disclaimer regarding monster alignment in the front of the Monster Manual, then there seems to be something unfair about holding it to blame for being an evil creature.
If the overwhelming majority of the members of a species behave a certain way, then either it is an astounding fluke, or something about being a member of that species explains that tendency; which is to say that something about being a creature of that type in that environment generally causes the associated behavior. Ropers spend their lives killing innocent adventurers to devour their flesh. Either it is an incredible coincidence that ropers are generally found murdering people for a living instead of tilling the soil or running an adventurerās supply shop, or there is something about being a roper that explains their murdering behavior; which is to say that something about being a roper causes ropers to kill.
Once we can see the external causes of a behavior, we tend to be less willing to blame someone for exhibiting that behavior. It is hard to blame the poor roper for its record of murder and stalactite fraud if it was being born as a roper that caused young Rocky to turn to a life of crime. After all, the roper didnāt choose to be a roper rather than a half-elf or a dryad; that it was a roper was entirely beyond its control. Likewise, when a glabrezu demon is spawned from the elemental chaos, waving its crab claws and swearing blasphemous and chaotic words, there can be no doubt that the poor bat-headed bastard never had a choice about being chaotic evil. As much as we might object to all the pincer violence and foul language, we canāt reasonably blame the demon for being born a demon.
In fact, nobody can rightly be held to blame for the way they act if they could not have acted any differently. If this principle is in doubt, it can be demonstrated by the following thought experiment. Imagine that you are playing a good-aligned cleric in a dungeoneering party. You are in a dark stone corridor, guarding the rear as the team advances into unknown territory. Out ahead, the rogue is scouting in stealth mode, searching for traps and watching for monsters. Suddenly, the dice hit the table the wrong way and the rogue fails a crucial Perception check. The fighter and paladin take another step forward and there is a loud āclickā as the corridor begins to tilt downwards, swiftly becoming a stone slide into a lower-level room filled with ferocious, slavering ghouls. The floor is dropping so fast that the rogue is the only one to make the roll to stay standing. Unfortunately for the rogue, the DM announces that you crash right into her, a cannonball in chainmail, as you slide helplessly toward the pit, and now you and the rogue slide together toward the bone-strewn nest of the ravenous dead.
Just when it looks like things canāt get any worse, the rogueās player gives you the stink-eye and says āAs I slide down, Iām going to take my rapier and stick it in the cleric. Iām using crimson edge to make sure the wound bleeds for the ghouls.ā And then the DM tells you āIām revoking all of your clerical powers! Thereās no way that pushing the rogue into a pit filled with ghouls isnāt a major violation of your good alignment. Donāt think that Pelor is going to help you turn those puppies down there. Pelor thinks you are ooze.ā It seems natural to object āBut my cleric couldnāt help it! Once the trap went off, I fell down and thatās when I hit the rogue. You canāt blame the cleric ā the cleric never had a choice.ā
Damnation Without a Saving Throw
What makes the evil monsters of D&D philosophically interesting is how obvious the connection often is between their evil behavior and factors entirely outside of their control. One second you are raw elemental chaos, the next, a spikey demon who exists to destroy. Like the falling cleric, the predicament of monsters born to be evil illustrates that when we can see the external causes of behavior, we deny that the subject is acting from free will and, if we are being consistent, we withhold...
