Alignment: another view

Not long ago another member of our role playing group and contributor/co-founder of stupidranger.com, Vanir, submitted an article about alignment (you can read it here). Vanir's article is well reasoned and entertainingly written, but I simply disagree. As a player and as a DM I find the alignment system in D&D to be helpful and enjoyably complex.
As a game system, D&D allows for many types and levels of play. Some of the most basic levels focus on broad and sweeping categories, campaign plots are simple, easily discerned (though perhaps challenging to carry out), and require little in the way of difficult choices. This is where many of us began as players and DMs. As we age, and in theory mature, we see that the world is not nearly as simple as we once thought. I call this the DC-Marvel shift, but that's the subject of another article. If this new understanding of the world doesn't send us into escapism, we are likely to include this more nuanced side of life in our role playing and in our characters.
Nuanced Characters rely more on shades of meaning than on broad categories. Some would say that the alignment system prevents nuanced characters. I say the way some people play alignments didn't mature with the rest of them. It's not the system (remember the system allows for many levels of play), it's the people. Consider this: in our real life world, many people rely solely on the good-evil spectrum when identifying someone's personality. In the D&D universe one would never consider having only one alignment.
There are many many ways to be Lawful, Ethically Neutral, Chaotic, Evil, Morally Neutral, and Good. When building a back-story I would urge players to discern carefully the alignment position, to determine what about this character's philosophy of life leads them to this or that alignment. A player might play six Neutral Good characters in a row and they might all have slightly different moral priorities. A character's alignment is a tool to be used for better role-playing; it is a precision instrument, not a sledgehammer. Thinking critically about a character's alignment before the game even begins can go a long way towards warding off metagaming and broad performances.
For my part, I hope that alignment sticks around for a long long time, and I also hope that the core rule books remain sufficiently vague on their behalf.

Also Check Out: Hero Builder's Guidebook. This work contains helpful chapters about adding nuance to the character creation process and demonstrates beautifully the "there are many ways to play each alignment thing" I was trying to describe above.