this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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Nah. Evil is where the harm your actions do to other people doesn't stop you from doing it. Neutral is where you wouldn't put yourself especially at risk or especially out of your way to help others, but you wouldn't hurt them either, even if it benefited you. Obviously there's a spectrum there, most neutral people would do harm to others if they had a gun to their head. Enjoying the harm you do unto others is sadism, which is separate from alignment. A good or neutral person can be a sadist, but their morality will prevent them from hurting others even if they enjoy it. In short, sadism provides a motive (of which there are many others), alignment provides the restriction or lack thereof.
Tl;dr if order a village slaughtered to take all their stuff, I don't care how dispassionate or purely self-interested you are, you're evil. If you murder people because you're paid to, and don't much care about the details, you're evil.
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.
"Stupid Evil" is not a valid alignment anymore than "Lawful Stupid" Paladins. Decent players can role play a party with both Good and Evil characters in it without it constantly descending into bickering and threats of violence.
That all sounds reasonable, but you don't have to have Evil in your alignment for inter-party conflict. Some of the best story telling happens when different characters are trying to do the right thing, but disagree as to what that is.