Ok, so I've decided a thread for this might be useful
When I think of alignment, I think of D&D's LG-CE usually. Partially because the alignment system I remember from Palladium didn't even have a clear naming system that helps me remember what anything means. Which is partially why I don't like that system.
Also, in fantasy role playing especially, "good" and "evil" are incredibly vague and not useful. Is a fertility cult evil if they practice only sexually oriented rites (no sacrifices, even of animals?) Is that the same answer the Christian religion (or some religion with similar views) would give? If not, is that Christian religion evil?
Is disobeying the law evil? Not necessarily in D&D's system, where that's governed by the law-chaos side of alignment. What if your religion says it is? And what about oppressive laws? If you're lawful good do you have to follow those laws?
What about nonviolent bigotry? Selfishness? Ritual Combat? Drug/alcohol abuse? If you have multiple religions, they may answer every single one of these questions from the next faith. What makes a bad guy bad?
This is also why a simple 1-20 scale doesn't work, in my mind, Slant. I couldn't use that systme anymore. Sure, the guy's a saint, but how does he feel about my politics? Is drinking ok in his religion? How about letting women speak in public? It seems to me the best way to represent morality as a stat (which is almost absurd in any context) is to have it be a series of scales. One end of each scale is an arbitrary "evil." One for domestic violence, crime violence, and war violence. One for drug abuse, one for lying, stealing, sexual relations (which would also have a set of scales: adultry, fornication, homosexuality, etc). As you can see, to make it useful, it becomes mind numbingly burdensome (that is, if you care at all for having two different "good" religions that have different stances on different morals).
The other way to handle it is to take ONE aspect of morality and say "this is the good to evil." For example, good v. evil is based on generosity. People who share their wealth with others are good, (even if they commit violent crimes to get that wealth). People who hoard are evil. It's a little too simplistic. Better to just say "he's good" and leave it at that without meaning anything. But then, it doesn't matter how a priest act, because he's "good" and can't fall out of grace by any rule system.
The best use of alignment I've seen is actulally in Hackmaster, even though it's still to burdensome to use. They have alignment audits, alignment tracking charts, and honor (at least in a small way) affected by adherance to your alignment. It adds too many rules for me to want to bother with it, but at least it has a use and a monitoring system for how the rules are followed.
Now, if you ditch alignment altogether, you lose all those good "protection from {alignment}" spells in D&D. And the Paladin's protection from/detect evil abilities. And adherance to a clerical devotion becomes moot again. So do we really want that? I think the idea of "protection from evil" is pretty cool.
So how to do it?
I once saw an editorial in Dragon Magazine (oh those many decades ago when I spent money on that) where the guy based "good" and "evil" from a subjective perspective. If you were loyal to the king, than anyone else loyal was "good" and any enemies were "evil" (and Switzerland was neutral). Good and evil became political. Now, of course, to the Orcs who hated the king, hatred of the king was "good" and loyalty to the king was "evil." This is more fuzzy, but is a little bit easier to use in a game. It also gives you the ability to use Orc Paladins fighting Human Paladins of diametrically opposed values. Which is pretty cool.
Then in AORP I based it on religion. Law-Chaos reflected how believing and obedient you were to your Christian or Pagan faith (or your agnostism or atheism). Then "Protection from Evil" is really "Protection from Pagans." But that has it's own problems, some of which I can't talk about because soem people here post to that board, and I'd be giving things away if I talked about why that was a problem. This COULD work, if you could work out how "protection from atheists" would work on someone who did a good show of acting like a good Catholic but was really just trying to get ahead in a mostly Christian court. So far, no one's tried to use the spells, so I haven't had to deal with it.
So, more thoughts on the matter?