[D&D] Alignment

[Lunamancer]

Shouldn't there be some sort of non-arbitrary way to deduce alignments?

If you are willing to accept that Good and Evil are a part of the "physics" of the D&D universe, then the Good/Evil axis isn't arbitrary. If you want your campaign's Good and Evil to remain abstract concepts, then no.

And I get that. I played the game many years like that. Of course, you always get those cases where the "evil" God or "evil" magic just happen to do something that's massively beneficial to humanity as a whole. And I'm not talking about "Okay, this happens 1% of the time, but he's still 99% evil," but rather what I'm driving at is there is often a sizable gap between one's intent and the results of the actions.

It's harder for me ignore when it comes to the Law vs Chaos axis. For example, I've observed often enough that when a traffic light is not working, traffic flows more smoothly and orderly through the intersection. Even though the purpose of the traffic light is to bring order to the intersection, it seems to have the opposite effect. I could name countless examples of this. And that would absolutely include literal laws. Alcohol prohibition created a lot of chaos even though it sought to clamp down on chaos-inducing drunkenness.

Call it a blowback principle for lack of a better term. It's really a bit more sophisticated than that. But I think on the Law/Chaos axis, instances or the Chaos guy producing order, or the Law guy producing chaos are not just freak outliers but rather the general trend where sentient beings are involved.