[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by WalkingDistance

Worldwalker, I feel like your argument of "Majority Rules" is in principle viable, but flawed.

That's probably because I have never, not now, not ever, argued such a principle.

So back to the LOTR fanfic, the author asked, "What if the forces of Mordor wasn't bad?

That's a good premise for fanfic. But it's still fanfic. The point being glossed over in a large part of this thread is that MR has a policy of not linking to fanfic, as it generally involves wholesale butchery of the canon author's rights.

What if that perception was a product of propoganda or the point of view of the story?"

What if Tolkien was lying? (pretending for a moment that LotR is real) That is, again, a valid premise for fanfic. It's been done, and done well. But that doesn't make it other than fanfic.

But if we assume that Tolkien was an unbiased observer and told the story as it happened, then evil cannot be turned into good no matter what the point of view. There is no POV in which killing an innocent baby just to watch him die can be defined as good. All things are not relative. Conquering Middle-Earth, enslaving its free people, and co-opting their work for yourself and your minions (for example, what was done in the Shire) is not a good act, and cannot be defined as a good act. You can say that it is evil done to prevent a greater evil (and the Warhammer universe, for one, even pulls that off to some degree) but you can't say it's good.

As you've probably guessed, I'm not a moral relativist. I don't think that everything is good if you just look at it the right way. I think there are things that are wrong, and have always been wrong, and will always be wrong, no matter how you look at them.

In order to make an educated decision of what's right and wrong, you need to consider different perspectives. To dismiss one side as illegitimate or stupid is just the narrowminded.

While you're accepting a flat Earth because it would be "narrowminded" to dismiss that idea, there are people who will say "hey, that's wrong" and move on. Personally, I suspect that they (going all the way back to Eratosthenes) probably know what they're talking about.