The disturbing thing (from my
liberal,
British perspective) about the original
D&D alignment system is that there were only three alignments (
lawful,
neutral and
chaotic), and that Lawful alignment was understood to mean 'morally good' - or rather, that Lawful was defined the way you'd expect, and then
stated to be morally good. This rattled me. I'd never encountered the idea of Law and Chaos as major issues before, and seeing the definitions didn't exactly make me believe the assertion about the moral value of the two extreme alignments.
In his book
Role Playing Mastery,
Gary Gygax asserts that
AD&D's
Lawful Good are the very best. This view is not consistently expressed in
TSR or
WotC publications, thankfully. It may be that the 'law=good' idea comes from growing up in a country where swearing an
oath of allegiance to a flag is considered a good idea.