So, you should be able to walk up to any creature you deem to be evil and then kill them? Even if they are not attacking you? What if the creature in question wasn't evil, and had lived a life of helping people but because of your racism you just kill them. Should that break your oath?
Personally I wouldn’t call it “stupid” that we break our oaths for killing goblins in BG3, as I agree it’s not straightforward, but I do think it’s wrong that killing goblins not attacking our paladin automatically breaks the oath and I do think that seen a certain way it could indeed be required by our oaths, specifically the tenet “Compassion. Aid others, protect the weak, and punish those who threaten them.” Paladins seem to have a quasi law-enforcement role in Faerun, and it seems expected that they might need to act as judge, jury and executioner. I’d agree that killing every goblin they met wouldn’t be seem very paladin-y to me, but the specific goblins we meet in BG3 have just carried out a raid on a nearby inn and clearly are preying on passing travellers as well as threatening the druid grove. It feels reasonable that a paladin might decide the best way they can protect the weak and punish those who threaten them is to kill those goblins, and that merely killing their leaders and scattering them would just lead to more innocent deaths elsewhere so would be an abdication of responsibility. My kind of paladin would probably wish they had had another option and regret that the killing, but they’d feel that they had both the authority and duty to do that as the lesser of available evils.
