Self-interest is not evil. Self-interest is a core trait to surviving. Egocentrism is abrasive but also isn't in itself, evil. An egotistical hero is still a hero even if they save people only for the sake of getting credit for it.
To be Neutral is to be able to do not only good things, bad things, but to also abstain from both. Neutral is 'boring' because it doesn't lock your character into an alignment. You aren't forced to help people, you aren't forced to harm people, your character does what would make sense for your character to do, even if it means doing nothing.
Then there's no difference between apathy and evil according to you guys. Not caring if someone dies from your actions is the same as gleefully killing them. Makes total sense.
Yeah you just don't get it. Characters can do different things regardless of their alignment, you just think they'd do something different so you disregard what I'm saying.
I feel like the actions matter less than the intent for matters of morality. If your character wants to save a village overrun by monsters, but the monsters were actually people who had an illusion spell cast on them, your character isn't evil for slaughtering a village because their desire was purely noble. Neutral is having both good and evil desires, usually for personal reasons that make sense for the character. A rogue is going to steal from a town guard as readily as they'll steal from a goblin, they want the gold, they don't care about the morality behind it. Evil is wanting to slaughter the village just to see what adjacent towns would say, it's doing something bad for the sake of it.
Okay then what's the difference between someone who's apathetic and someone who actively likes hurting people? Nothing? Those are the same alignment? I don't get why this is so hard to understand.
Well, even if all of them went off the reservation, there's only 1500 of them. They'll never disobey a direct order from the Commander in Chief but if they did, they wouldn't pose too big of a threat.
It's a tool like anything else. It'll be used for everything like anything else. It cannot be stopped. All we can hope for are tools to mitigate the damage and applications to outweigh what bad it's capable of. Trying to slow it down is like trying to stop a flood with buckets. Build a boat, it will only keep rising.
Well I think you're assessing good and evil based on your own moral compass rather than how RPGs base them on. Someone who is apathetic is neutral because they could go either way, it makes no difference. It's the definition of neutral. Evil is going out of your way to cause harm, Good is going out of your way to help. Why would a neutral person kill a village of people? They'd need a reason. Soldiers have slaughtered towns and villages on orders but each soldier didn't have an active desire to be part of that. They aren't inherently evil, maybe they think their cause is just. They were told to and had no resistance to it. You can do evil acts without being evil.
Neutral is the absence of compulsion either direction. It's killing a guy because they had it coming one day and feeding orphaned children the next. It's a mix of good and evil to where you are conflicted to call them either a hero or a villain. Something from Fallout: New Vegas does a good job of explaining it.
Self-interest is not evil. Self-interest is a core trait to surviving. Egocentrism is abrasive but also isn't in itself, evil. An egotistical hero is still a hero even if they save people only for the sake of getting credit for it.