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There are two different aspects to being good in the Pathfinder games:
1) showing mercy
2) forgiveness
3) divine wrath (although in something like Star Wars this is a path leading one to becoming evil)
Even Iomedae's herald says that the only way to truly defeat evil is to convert people away from worshiping evil gods/demons/devils.
Also the fact that someone threatens you with violence is not that same thing as someone committing violence against you. Someone on the pathway to ideological change will often cling to their previous ideology more strongly before truly changing.
The situation is a lot more nuanced than you are trying to make it be. You don't seem to think that people can change, and then when you see someone who might be on the pathway to change you don't understand what is involved on that journey of change.
Additionally, the attitude that someone is too stupid to "let live" isn't good, that's evil. Goodness doesn't require other creatures to "earn" their right to live, or you'll murder them.
Goodness prefers creatures go down the good path, but killing those that don't meet your standards is definitely evil behavior (lawful evil, most likely). Goodness has optimism towards the superiority of their alignment and that others will eventually turn to goodness, since it's the best. Being good and succeeding in good acts, should turn others to good.
By contrast, doing evil (such as murdering the helpless), promotes more evil. You can't "snuff out" evil by mass murdering everyone who is evil - just adds more evil to the world. Sure, you'd kill those particular evil people, but in doing so, you are spreading evil and further proving the inferiority of goodness.
I think the idea is it would be dishonorable to finish him off or something. I will never take the gold dragon path cause everyone rips on it as being underwhelming and Hal's an idiot, for reasons Daeran gives quite clearly.
I defend myself against these "friendly" "patients". The doctor shows up and asks I spare the last one standing. AFTER a third party (the doctor) asks for mercy, the sole surviving ass-wipe proves his status as an ass-wipe (and that he is not particularly intelligent) saying he'll kill me the next time he sees me if I let him go (or words very close to that, I don't recall his exact words at this point).
The choice in front of me:
A.) Kill the proven threat here and now, not only saving myself from having to fight him later when he's at full strength, but preventing him from doing more harm between now and then.
B.) Let him go. He attacks me later. I may or may not survive the fight. Even if I do survive the fight, I now have to apologize to the families of everyone he harmed or killed in interim for not finishing him off when I had the chance.
And yes, "Too stupid to live" is a real thing. The cultist in question was too stupid to even pretend he was reformed, or at least just keep his mouth shut.
Is the doctor going to go and treat all the people the cultist harmed because I let the cultist go then? Will he apologize to the surviving family members? Could that harm have been prevented if the cultist hadn't survived the day?
Some of you are saying he might change. I might win the lottery tomorrow. Yes, anything is possible, but you have to practical in the face of here and now, using what you know is, rather than what might be, and everything I know up to the here and now says the guy is unrepentant, not to mention an enemy combatant in a war.
Yes, real world doctors treat everybody, a practice I don't 100% agree with, but as far as I'm aware, doctors still call the police when they know they have a criminal on hand. The police secure the criminal so he can't flee (handcuffed to the hospital bed, for example) and do what they can to reduce the criminal's ability to get up to trouble. Once treated, he is turned over to the police, not just turned loose to create more trouble.
The dragon in the game just let's them walk away to create more victims. Maybe that's not the dragon's intent, but circling back to the my original post's subject line, if the dragon can't come to this realization on his own, then yes he's too stupid to live because he is actively enabling more evil too occur.
Were they actually threatening you? Like, I don't mean if they were "trying" to hurt you or claiming they would harm you, but did they actually have the capacity to endanger you? A bunch of patients in hospital gowns with nothing more than improvised weapons isn't a threat to a fully armed party of adventurers.
Further, did you enter the "field hospital" with the intention of finding combat, or were you innocently going there and just happened to find hostile people?
Also, did you bring weapons into the field hospital? Were you, perhaps, dripping with the blood of their allies that you fought prior to entering the field hospital?
Real world, you show up at the hospital with guns and a big sword on your back, chances are pretty high someone tries to stop you. And if you fight back, you're still the agressor here.
And again, too stupid too live vs having faith that goodness will prevail...if you abandon your faith and just kill everyone who probably won't repent, that's definitely the path of evil. Doesn't make them good guys, but you might all just be evil together.
At this point, perhaps want to start debating the "circles" of hell, that your character
might be in the "better" circle than those enemy cultists - since it's all shades of evil that you are debating.
So you have ten ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ all claiming they will repent. You have no idea who is sincere and who isn't. One of them does, the other nine go on to comment more atrocities in the name of their god or what have you. Does the one who repented out weigh the evil of the nine who didn't? Do the victims agree with that math? Evil is gambling on a 1% chance that good will happen and a 99% chance evil will happen rather than taking the sure fire option that prevents the evil.
I remind you in your own words:
Even if you disagree with the Gold Dragon's attempts at trying to reform evil characters that certainly is NOT cause to execute the Gold Dragon for anything even remotely "good" from an alignment perspective.
There is an argument for it being "LAWFUL" but certainly not "GOOD." At "best" that is Lawful Neutral but more likely Lawful Evil.
It doesn't prevent evil, it ensures it. You just add more evil in addition to their evil. A daemon would be quite satisfied with you, as one evil (that cultist) leads another (yourself) to do evil, a win for evil.
What you are preventing is the possibility that your enemy could turn to good in the future.
Even a mostly evil enemy might save a child from a burning building or some other good act, sometime in the future. You don't know. They might never repent, but they might do good, even once. You've denied that good that which could have happened.
If you are thinking that deliberately doing evil somehow balances the scales if you then do enough good, once again, you have fallen to evil ways of thinking. There's not an "okay" amount of evil that you can do, from a good perspective. You can't murder a bunch of people and then somehow resolve yourself by also helping orphans at the orphanage. That's not a good alignment.
And, yes, nobody is perfect. Even the most evil, are not pure evil, just like the most good are not pure good. But the attitude that accepts doing evil as necessary is not considered a good alignment.
Next time you have a chance to stop evil in real life but don't because he of the THEORETICAL good that might happen later, make sure you go and explain yourself to the victims of everybody hurt because you ignored the very ACTUAL evil of right now.
I'm not talking about knowingly offing sincerely repent individuals. I'm talking about excising proven societal cancer before it has a chance to spread and do (more) irreversible harm. Also, anybody who is truly repent probably only caused the harm by a legitimate accident, never wanted to cause the harm, and therefore isn't a person who needs to die, though reparations might still be appropriate depending on the nature and scale of the harm caused.