"Oh, that's a good point, I wouldn't want him to go free either! You could make it so that the victim gets to try to carry it out if they want to, but if they aren't able to then you bring in a normal executioner?"

"I am also against this right. I support the ban on torture and one cannot reconcile banning torture and having a man hacked to death by an unskilled executioner. Moreover, to kill a man for the sake of making him suffer is Evil," the Archduke says. "In the Good afterlives the blessed angels do not bring suffering to anyone; all the death they deal to the wicked is swift and clean. I have a summon spell that can summon a lantern archon, or can ask a more capable wizard friend of mine to call an Azata, a Chaotic Good outsider, tomorrow if you still require persuasion."

"... if there's nothing else the spell slot will be good for today I would like to meet a lantern archon."

"—I mean, I'll talk to an azata if you want to? As long as someone else" who isn't a nobleman "makes sure that it's really an azata and not... some kind of trick. I don't think I know as much about magic as you do so there are probably lots of tricks I don't know. But I don't see how it can be Evil to repay wrongs. If someone... forces himself on all the girls in his barony, and has his servants beaten for minor errors, and orders innocent people executed for making fun of him, and then a faerie cursed him so he couldn't do any of that anymore, but he could still go and live his life normally apart from that, that would be wrong. That's obvious to anyone that listens to their conscience." She learned about the concept of 'listening to your conscience' from a pamphlet. It's good to know there's a word for it.  

"...unless you just mean that sometimes you might be executing someone who never specifically tortured anyone? I'd need to think more about that. But even if you were executing people some way that didn't hurt them at all apart from killing them, I'd still think it would be good for the victim to have the right to release the blade if they want to. It's them that was wronged, not the executioner."

"I think the victim's involvement in determining the punishment will cause more crime. If the punishment depends on who you victimize, and not what you did, then everyone will think they can get away with murder, because sometimes you can. Better to prevent victimization in the first place than to avenge it." She's reasoning entirely from five year olds, here, but if she's learned anything today it's that the whole of Cheliax is much more like its five year olds than one might hope.

"—just to be clear, if the victim doesn't personally want to carry the punishment out themself, I still think the punishment should happen. I just think they should get priority if they want it."

"Allowing personal delivery of justice tends toward feuds. Ferrer kills Oriol in a bar fight, Oriol's widow or brother delivers the execution, Ferrer's brother takes offense and wants his own right to deliver punishment, and then another Oriol takes offense to that, and you have a cycle of violence. Rahadoum has problems with this, particularly in the desert. Having an uninvolved executioner is deliberate, because most states see personal violence as dangerous."

"It's not that I don't understand the impulse, I share it. But I think you're wrong, Miss Ferrer: that tends toward Evil, not just toward Chaos, and letting the man go if he's not a threat is mercy, which is classically Good."

To Theopho and Victoria: "Indeed. Sarenrae, Neutral Good goddess of mercy, holds as her primary belief that everyone is fundamentally good and kind and should have good things happen to them; Iomedae, Lawful Good goddess of opposing Evil, thinks that devoting resources to fighting people who are not actively trying to cause more evil is almost always a waste of resources that could be used to fight evil that is trying to make the world more evil. We must have justice - swift, sure, and efficient - so that the wicked fear opposing the righteous, but that justice must never be cruel or personal."

To Narcis: "The only other uses for it are self-defense and summoning another lantern archon later; I can cast the spell any time you wish."

She absolutely does not trust Theopho's explanation not to be some sort of complicated diabolist trick.

"I don't have a brother. But if I killed an innocent person for no reason, and their family took revenge on me for it, I don't think it would be right for my mother to hunt them down and kill them, because it would be Good to kill me if I did that, and you shouldn't take revenge on people for doing the right thing."

(To Xavier:)

"And I guess if I thought everyone was actually inherently good then maybe it would make sense to think no one should ever take revenge, because in that case if they hurt someone it was probably an accident? I'm on another committee with an Iomedaean priestess and she also thinks it's good to take vengeance on evildoers. If you had to pick between executing the guy who was cursed by a faerie and someone else who was just as bad but not cursed, I guess you should choose the second, but normally you could just... execute both of them..."

Enric isn’t sure about what Xavier is saying about heaven. It sounds good but he’s also heard stories of an angel of revenge. Theopho is right about the feuds between families, though.

Openly disagreeing with a calistria cleric is scary in an unnervingly similar way to disagreeing with an asmodeus cleric, in that if they’re irritated they will probably hurt you. So Enric tries to just be helpful and then ask a question.

”On the good gods committee, we have an outsider from heaven, a child archon they resurrected. We can ask him to come, see if he can recognize one of his own.”

”Is there a way to keep the victim safe, if we’re doing this? The family of someone who gets executed will wanted to get payback, even if it’s not right. Better they go for an executioner than an innocent?”

Wow, a resurrected archon that will be able to talk for more than thirty seconds is even better.

"What if you ever want to punish something with less than death? A flogging is a completely different punishment depending on who gives it, as all of us who went to public school no doubt remember. I'm going to stake out the position that this was a bad thing about them."

"—that's also fair. It might be there's no way to put this right in the Constitution without hurting people more than they deserve, or who don't deserve it at all."

"We can perhaps return to it if you have a different proposal, but I am also against it, I think the tendency to unjust vengeance is likely to be strong."

"I note several of these seem to be related: policies on the regulation of the family. Divorce, orphans, conscription of children, child abandonment, lordly intrusion. This isn't somewhere we can look to other countries for shining examples; Lastwall and Osirion limit the status of women more than I'm comfortable with, Andoran hasn't made any progress on its flood of street orphans, Galt has a little of both, and I've been advised that the norms in Infernal Cheliax around sex and childbirth were very much intended to damn us by treating our partners and our born and unborn children badly. This might be important and difficult enough to split out a dedicated Committee on Family Rights and Duties, and if not, we ought to look at them together."

”It’s important enough for its own committee, I think. But if there’s a separate family committee, we need someone good at politics on it, so people actually listen to them when they go back to the big room.”

It has to be a real committee, he means. Not one of those like diabolist-hunting and nonhumans where they’re planning to shove an issue into a side room and ignore it.

"It's worth the attention. I'd go to that room over this one, I think, if it added up to too many to do both."

"I would want to be on it, too, I - think the orphanage context may be useful. But I'm on too many already. I do think it's important and that many things touch on it, and if it was a particular project of hell, then fixing it should be a particular project of ours."

"The obvious thing to do is to make it illegal to sire bastards, but you'll never get that past the floor. Not that floor, anyway."

It would be a good law, though.

"I agree it is a real and meaningful priority," Xavier says, "and does deserve a committee devoted to it that can give it its full attention. But I don't know who would be the right choice to lead it." He isn't dreadful at politics, but he's not good at it, either.

Also, far more importantly, he's unmarried.

"We have some of the right people here - Calistria and Erastil should absolutely be included, and having an orphanage worker does sound relevant - but I think we'd likely want more faiths. Pharasma, at least, and Shelyn. Torag, if he's present, maybe? And some of us would want to sit out; I'd have nothing to contribute. Perhaps we could meet on alternate days, or something?"

"Rights has too much work to slow it to half the speed of the other committees. Although - if there are other subcommittees, we could split a few different ways tomorrow, pick up some other people, and then come back and discuss all the rights in a larger group? That's faster, not slower, although I expect that many of us are invested in multiple rights. But we could all discuss everything when the subcommittees come back together, and no one's left out then. - right?"

"Hmm. Splitting out other parts of our list isn't quite so easy. One around property and taxation, perhaps. Limits on criminal investigation and punishment, though those seem mostly uncontroversial. And I'd be reluctant to group everything else as the Subcommittee on 'Miscellaneous', since even I'm not quite sure what would be left there."

She could offer to chair the Committee on Family Rights and Duties, but since she was, until a year ago, expecting to be married to her city until her untimely death, she really is not at all qualified.

She scans the list again.

"...justice and punishment seems important, and I don't know that it's simple. Ferrer's idea of the the right to your own person seems enormously important, since if you don't have your own body, you don't have anything. At the same time, any punishment the state can mete out will violate it. But there should still be some things the state can't do to you, even as a punishment for a crime."

(Rape. Being maledicted. Maybe being made undead. Not listing it because she'd really like to limit the number of times she specifically brings up rape, here, she does not need to come off as obsessed.)

"Criminal rights have some controversy, and we need to figure out the specifics. There's religious rights too. Which gods people are allowed to worship, pilgrimages to temples, right to healing and help from clerics. Maybe we can work with the good gods committee there."

"Any of us on both of those?"

She drums her fingers on the table. "I don't think a right to healing from clerics is really something the government can promise. Aroden could, since his church overlapped with the state so much; Asmodeus, even; but we don't have a state church... I suppose I'm making your point for you, Mr. Porras, that we ought include that in the subcommittees."

"I believe only Delegate Porras is on both this committee and the Virtuous Churches committee. But we could invite someone else from their ranks onto that subcommittee. Anyone you would recommend, Enric?"