When they stand up after a quest and speak for the entire party, saying that nobody will recieve gold because it was a good deed done, it borders on theft. You meet an NPC, he offers a reward to the group, the group does the deed with the reward in mind, then 2 out of 8 people vocally pronounce that the whole reward is null because it was a good deed is shennanigans. I tell them the same thing every time... feel free to donate YOUR share of the gold if you wish, but don't steal MY share of the gold for your own charity cases. That's like a lone dockworker stealing the entire payroll and giving it to an orphanage in his own name.Altruism and charity are fine. Just don't go trying to donate MY gold!
Haha. Your responses always make my sense of humor smile. In this case I might argue that the character who believes he is being selfless is failing because he cannot even recognize the needs of those he is working with. He can't see past his own drive to charity and so he is not acting with the mindset of helping others so much as he is blindly acting in the way he thinks is right.
Hang on, so this more about the character's motives as the character interprets them, not how others view their actions, or vice versa?
I think altruism for the RP character has be doing good deeds because of the characters inherent goodness and not because of any premeditation. The example here i give is ( oddly enough) one of how we judge murder in western society. If its thought about, or premeditated, then the murderer is punished strongly. If if not premediated then hes punished less. I think the other end of the spectrum ( he good end) works the same way. Premedidated good is acting good because you've evaluated the reward (I think there might possibly be a dark elf acting good at present but i'll find out later perhaps) and it serves your purpose. I would say the lawful good characters should be good instinctively whatever the result.
Is the more ethically sound man... ...Is it better to...
Also, as lonn was saying about donating everyone's gold, that may also be a conflict of interests. If some one who is rewarding you is barely scraping by, and they are giving you the last of what they have, it is reasonable for that LG character to say that they need it more than the adventurer's do, because they can't run off into teh Red Light Cavern's and loot the goblins of their coin... (harsh wording there, but that is what it basically is...)
Is this an open philosophical question, or is it constrained by the concept of alignment? If it's the latter, what do "ethically sound" and "better" mean?