Adam Smith is one of those people who changed the world, or at least our perception of it, significantly.  He is almost always listed among the most influential people in the past millennium, for making an entire field of study respectable and establishing some of its most basic theories.  He said that every person would always act in his own best interest, and that this would always create competition between individuals, causing whatever is most desired by most people to have the greatest value in society.  His theory is called capitalism, and he stands as one of the icons of economics.

  It is interesting that capitalism postulates without judgment that everyone will always work toward his own best interest.  This in itself has become a value in our world.  Look out for number one, we say, Take care of yourself.  We recognize the value of putting your own concerns first, of focusing your best efforts on making your own life better.  This self interest is a value we promote in our culture, and one which we respect in others, perhaps even revere.

  Interestingly, the Dungeons & Dragons™ alignment system also gives this value an honored place in its hierarchy.  It calls this Evil.

  One of the beauties of this definition of evil is that in the minds of many people there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.  We tell each other in all sincerity that the most important thing you can do is take care of yourself, because no one else is going to put your interests first.  It is perfectly defensible in our world to be the sort of person who always gives first thought to how something will benefit him, what it will cost and whether the return is worth the investment, how to protect himself while taking full advantage of opportunities which present themselves.  Few of us would say that this is evil; we’d say it’s good common sense, practical thinking, pragmatic, even perhaps wise.  Putting your own interests first, putting yourself in the center of your own world, is in the minds of many the best, perhaps the only practical, way to live.

  Yet the consequence is the same.  If beneficence is the definition of good, if putting the welfare of others as the top priority in all that you do is that which characterizes goodness (as we showed a few weeks back in Beneficence), then it follows logically that putting your own interests first is the central concept of evil.  Where the good character will say, I matter to the degree that I can benefit others, the evil character says, Others matter to the degree that they can benefit me.

  The rest flows quite naturally from that.  If the only benefit you hold for me is that someone else will pay me to kill you, then your purpose in this world, from my perspective, is to die so that I can collect my paycheck.  That’s an extreme example, and certainly (particularly given modern detection and jurisprudence) there may be reasons why killing you would not be in my best interest, unless the paycheck was particularly high.  Yet there is this direct correlation between every evil act and someone’s decision to put their own interests above those of the rest of the world.

  There is another interesting facet of this belief which is often overlooked.  Those who hold it, as Adam Smith suggested, also believe that everyone else holds the same belief.  Of course the Blessed Mother Theresa did so much to help the poor; she believed that she would be greatly rewarded in an afterlife, and so was working diligently to earn those rewards.  Karol Jozef Cardinal Wojtyla dedicated so much time and effort to his religious work, and we can see how it paid off when he became Pope John Paul the Second.  These people who claim they’re doing things to make the lives of others better have a profit motive all the same.  They’re hoping and believing that someone, be it God or the king or the Nobel Prize Committee, will notice their good works and reward them.  Everyone, Smith tells us, puts his own interests first.  Anyone who appears to be doing otherwise either has a different notion of that which is in his own best interest, or is trying to con you.  Thus the person who adheres thoroughly to this credo of evil is quite certain not only that his is the best, most rational, value system around, but that everyone else who pretends to value something else really can be shown to agree with him, as they will all ultimately act as if their own individual interests, as they understand them, were most important regardless of anything they might say to suggest otherwise.

  There are problems to being evil, in this sense, though, quite apart from the fact that you really don’t understand anyone who is good (since you think they are thinking exactly what you’re thinking, and they aren’t).  Good people don’t trust you.  That’s hardly a surprise; after all, you’re evil.  However, what is surprising to players who play evil characters is that evil characters don’t trust you, either.  Even saying it, I get a vision of Kevin Kline’s Otto in A Fish Called Wanda staring at the empty safe from which he was about to remove the diamonds he and his cohorts had stolen, yelling, “What do you have to do to get people to trust you?”  The fact is, good characters don’t trust you because they think you’re only out for your own interests; evil characters know this to be true.

  In fact, you don’t trust anyone else, either, because you know that whatever they say, they’re ultimately after their own interests.  They may say they’re good, but when the rubber meets the road they’ll put themselves first every time.  After all, that’s what you’d do, right?  What makes you think they’re different, other than that they think it’s to their advantage to try to make you believe they’re different?

  Further, there’s no reason why anyone should trust the evil character.  When Han Solo tells Princess Leia that he’s not in it for her or her rebellion or anything else but the money, he’s expressing what is at the core of the beliefs of the evil character:  if there’s no advantage to me, there’s no reason to take the risk.  (Han eventually proves that he actually is one of the good guys; whether this is a change of heart when faced with the example of people who actually are doing all they can to make the world a better place for other people or because all that evil talk was always just so much bluster behind which he was hiding is another question.)

  In evaluating whether evil characters in my D&D games are abiding by their alignments, I consider all these points.  To those who say it is easier to play an evil character than a good one, I invite them to try it.  They’ll find that it’s not so easy to be consistently selfish and not raise the ire of everyone from party members to local citizens to exalted rulers.  It’s not impossible to play this way; sometimes it is in your best interest to get along with others and help them.  Just don’t be caught doing this when it clearly isn’t.  Those who say that there is honor among thieves are generally thieves who know that it’s to their advantage for you to trust them.  Experienced thieves know better.  Truly evil characters know that you don’t trust them and they don’t trust you, and once that’s established we can get down to the business of negotiating our relationship so that each of us gets what he wants along with guarantees against the inevitable doublecross.

  It all comes down to whether you believe that everyone always acts in his own best interest, and you choose to do the same.  Thus, the great Adam Smith is the patron saint of all that is evil, at least in game terms.

  Next week, something different.

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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc.  His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.