Not by RAW. By RAW, all killing is evil.
I've a strong feeling you're trying to poke holes in the system itself because you don't agree with it, and aren't being genuine. So I'm taking the gloves off. There is no point where RAW says all killing is evil. You're ripping parts of RAW out of context to serve your dirty agenda. I've given you a chance to stop that, but I'm done playing nice.
"Evil" implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others.
This is what you quoted. I don't see anywhere it says that all killing is evil. I will not tolerate being lied to. What I do see, is that killing is implicit in the evil alignment, meaning, not that all killing is evil, but to be evil aligned, there needs to be either the desire/willingness, to kill for, or the actual act of killing for, wait for it, "She sheds no tears for those she kills, whether for profit, sport, or convenience." When it says, "implies" it does not mean, if you do these things, you're evil, that conditional "implies" means that these traits are required for evil. That is called reading in context. I wonder if you actually have somewhere in RAW where it says that all killing is evil. Because that is not what that says, despite your incredibly feeble attempt at misconstruction. Laughable that you think that just because the words killing and evil are mentioned in the same entry that means all killing must be evil. Hilarious.
It says so under evil and nowhere else does it mention killing. You can try to justify your position by looking at "opposing evil" and such as allowing you to kill evil, but that is only weak justification and not RAW.
Actually, it is RAW. Good implies opposing evil. So one of the traits of good, is that it opposes evil. Since it doesn't specify, anything that falls under opposing evil is fair game, so long as it doesn't leak into killing for sport, profit, or convenience. It's not justification, it's called reading.
If you're going to look at RAW narrowly, you have to look at every piece of RAW narrowly. You don't get to pick and choose what parts you are going to give lots of latitude to.
You're the one ripping RAW out of context, while I'm the one using it in context. You can't just misuse one bit of RAW and then ignore all the rest. I would say good try, but I've seen better.
This is wrong. It does not say under RAW that only the action is measured.
Since it doesn't mention intent in that passage, anything you bring into it about intent isn't supported. It only mentions the action there and doesn't give any treatment to intent at all. So anything you bring into it about intention, is speculation. It doesn't have to say that, because that is what it does there. You don't get to make an appeal to ignorance and go, "prove that isn't the case! Ha!"
Just because it mentions an action that cannot exist without intent,
Intent isn't mentioned there at all. You're bringing your own, unproven subjective value judgments into this.
does not make that action all that is measured or intent secondary. The action being measured cannot exist without intent, so intent is required.
People might be motivated to do the same things for different reasons. No, intent is not a requirement for action. What you're talking about is a decision, or a choice to exercise agency, which is trivially true. But your intentions do not have to be good for an act to be good. You can oppose evil, and so long as it isn't for sport, profit, or convenience, it's good. Even if you're just protecting your own hide.
So what. This sentence is meaningless. If you try to act in order to protect someone and fail, you haven't done a good act, either.
But intent was still there. The only difference, is that action didn't accompany it. Since RAW gives treatment first and foremost to action, the intent wouldn't get you anything there.
Again with the big so what. Failure is failure. That's it. You cannot actually cast the evil spell successfully without intending to do so.
If you lose the spell, no action. No action, no value. If that spell was going to kill some innocent, and you lost the spell, you still had intent to cast and intent to kill, but all of the alignment descriptions in RAW give treatment to act first, with intent being subordinate.
Hardly a day goes by without the PCs killing something.
I was addressing your faulty point of one act causing an alignment change. As for the argument about killing, see what I have said above.
The bold is not RAW. There are no conditionals. The rest of the paragraph does not consist of conditionals. Only a few examples.
Neutral Evil, "Malefactor"
A neutral evil villain does whatever she can get away with. She is out for herself, pure and simple. She sheds no tears for those she kills, whether for profit, sport, or convenience. She has no love of order and holds no illusion that following laws, traditions, or codes would make her any better or more noble. On the other hand, she doesn’t have the restless nature or love of conflict that a chaotic evil villain has.
Look at that, conditionals. See, your continually engaging in the fallacy of appeal to ignorance. You're assuming, without evidence, that killing for reasons other than the bolded, is a neutral evil act. I am saying, that any killing, not done for the bolded, is not a neutral evil act. My statement is a reliance on what we do know, on information we do have. Your statement is base speculation based on a misconstruction of one line in the RAW that you pulled out of context. Not even a line, but two words in the same sentence without regard to the contextual words in that sentence.
No. That's not RAW. I quoted the only part of RAW that mentions killing, and it completely lists all killing as evil.
As I proved, that is a blatant misconstruction. Personally, I think it's an intentional misconstruction on your part, for what reason you're doing that I can't possibly fathom, other than trying to desperately hang on to your point about RAW needing some interpretation otherwise it's unusable, or whatever it was that your original point was.
