There’s a trope of many fantasy settings, different kinds of magic have different moral valence, and your use of each kind influences your morality. Or alternatively, you moral character has effects which magics you can use.

In the starwars extended universe, there’s the light side and the dark side. It’s usually implied that the use of the powers of the dark side are seductive and corrupting.

‘Is the Dark Side stronger?’

‘No, no, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.’

It’s not (to my limited knowledge, at least), explained why or how using particular force powers is leads one to the poor moral behavior, but it is stated that accessing dark side powers requires tapping into “negative” emotions, like fear and anger. Presumably there’s some magical explanation for why using the dark side is so corrupting. But as a matter of simple psychology, using the dark side entails nurturing and cultivating emotions and emotional dispositions that are generally not good for your soul.

In my memory of the Knights of the Old Republic game, the causality went in the other direction: your alignment on the light side dark side axis was determined by the choices that you made in the game. High integrity and altruistic choices moved you towards the lightside and selfish, vengeful, or ruthless choices moved you towards the dark side.

And there’s a broader version of the trope, of the wizard who conducts dark rituals with demonic beings, and this being a slippery slope to evil as exposure to those powers (and the kinds of sacrifices they demand in exchange for power) warps his or her soul.

There’s a parallel of this dynamic in real life.

Some skills have a moral valence, because they disproportionately favor cooperation or exploitation. Which skills you choose to develop shapes your affordances, which shapes your moral habits and choices.

For instance, if you learn to lie skillfully, you build an affordance for lying. When faced with a problem a prominent tool in your toolbox will be to lie to get your way. This puts an incentive on you to use that tool when you can, and thereby leads you to less ethical behavior than you might otherwise have chosen.

Another example: various persuasion techniques that take exploit human biases to get others to agree to what you want generally lean evil. They’re more symmetrical than argument, and methods in that class have a disproportionately larger set of outcomes in which you get others to agree to something counter to their idealized or reflective interests.

It’s not that this couldn’t possibly be used for Good. It’s that honing this as a skill, builds affordances of ethically dubious action.

In contrast, Convergent Facilitation, an offshoot of NonViolent Communication, is a group decision making framework that involves hearing, holding, and solving for the disparate needs of everyone in a group, and thereby drawing out both the willingness to adapt and the creativity of the whole group. This is a technique that is structurally cooperative. Helping other people get what’s important to them is a functional part of the technique, not a side benefit that could in principle be stripped away, for better selfish efficiency.

A person who puts skill points into getting really good at Convergent Facilitation is building skill that supports cooperative behavior, as someone who puts skill points into psychological persuasion techniques is building skill that supports adversariality. Investing in one or the other shapes the affordances that are available to you in any given situation. If you’re good at persuading people, you’ll see those options, and if you’re good at CF, you’ll see opportunities to do CF-like moves to find mutually supportive solutions.

The better you are at lying, the more tempting it is to lie.

That difference in affordances corresponds to a difference in payoffs: If you’re good at persuasion, it’s a higher cost to forge that strategy when it would be unethical to use. The tools you’re skilled with exert a vacuum pull towards their ethical attractor.

In this way, the some skills have a moral valence. Which you choose to cultivate exert pressures on the condition of your soul.