Originally Posted by
Ring_of_Gyges
Back to the original question, 'Can a lawful good character be a vigilante who punishes evildoers outside of a legal system?' I'd say sure. Personally I think treating a Lawful alignment as having anything to do with prevailing cultural rules is a mistake.
Take Dan the Dwarf. Dan lives in a dwarven hold with legal rules, written down, impartially applied, and basically fair. Everyone is connected to everyone else by family and feudal ties into a well organized society. The community as a whole can respond as a cohesive unit to outside threats and has courts to handle internal disputes. Dan loves this, he thinks this is how people should behave, and is capital L Lawful.
Take Oscar the Orc. Oscar lives in an orc tribe where there are no property rules beyond "what you can hold onto is yours, what can be taken from you isn't". Disputes between orcs aren't governed by any sort of rules, the aggrieved party just tries to murder the other orc. Leadership of the tribe isn't based on any sort of constitution or theory of rulership, there is just an orc who is bigger and scarier than the others so people mostly do what he says. Oscar *hates* this. He wishes his people would stop wasting their talents on infighting and private vendettas. He wishes they could get organized, work out a chain of command, and get some order in place so everyone wasn't spending half their time trying not to get stabbed by another orc who is pissed off about something. Oscar sounds pretty lawful to me, but compare him to the PHB definition. He doesn't "respect authority", he thinks the authorities in his tribe are idiots, he doesn't "honor tradition" he thinks his traditions are dooming his species. I'd stat him up as Lawful, even though he is totally opposed to the cultural values of his people.
More importantly I think it is important that people with identical views have the same alignment. If Dan is lawful, Oscar needs to be too because they think the same thing about how to organize society. The best way to accomplish that (IMO) is to have lawful/chaotic be about adherence to ideals rather than cultures (which may or may not have lawful ideas).