If it helps, the demon got bored and stopped listening a couple of minutes in, and is currently constructing a series of origami figures of Asmodeus having variously undignified, violent, or otherwise undesirable acts perpetrated on him by Baphomet.

That does help, actually.

"I'm satisfied. I'm going to take it as read that among the many complicated mortal desires of the decedent was a genuine desire to prevent the world from being destroyed by demons, and that whatever his other motivations, this motivation was Good."

THANK you. 

The devil will, of course, contest all these points throughout! Blai wasn't trying to fight evil or defend innocents, he was trying to - obey his orders! Successfully accomplished his assigned mission! the effective defense of the barrier as he'd been ordered! Protect the reputation of Cheliax as a Lawful trading partner! Maintain discipline in his force! As he repeatedly said, everything he was doing he was doing because he'd been appointed to do it!

- Fine. 

"Hell acknowledges that Priest Blai Artigas, as well as the tremendous Evil he did by contributing to the triumph of the armies of Asmodeus through efficient use of their resources on the front by which he had been assigned, and the rehabilitation of their reputation for fair dealing and efficient work, did indeed have Good intentions and cause Good consequences." The forked tongue again flickers.

"Nonetheless, it is Hell's case that these deeds were not Good, in re Gettier. As established via the precedent in re Torran, individuals who set out to do Good with no realistic justification that their actions are Good, and who does not obtain one, are not ethically credited with the Good consequences of their deeds. In order for consequences from Good actions to be considered to the decedent's credit, the decedent must have had 'a realistic justification that these actions were good.' And Priest Blai Artigas did not.

"Indeed, a survey of worlds across the universe establishes unambiguously that humans who believe that they are going to fight beings of pure evil are right only 1/10^11th of the time. In re Straffer establishes that the belief that 'your enemies are motivated by a desire that you and people like you suffer' is 'not epistemically reasonable for a mortal to hold without the strongest justifications' and therefore 'no significant mitigating factor for the evil done by killing others.' The majority of individuals at the Worldwound have these justifications. Priest Blai Artigas lacked these for the vast majority of his career, and there was no significant change in his actions afterwards towards being more willing to kill demons when he gained this information."

"Why did he lack these justifications? Because Cheliax lied to him, and he knew Cheliax lied to him. He went to school in Cheliax. Every year, the state of Cheliax rewrote the history books assigned in class to claim that the majority of the previous year's contents were false. Priest Blai Artigas knows this, and therefore had sufficient evidence to make him believe that anything Cheliax wished to inform him of it did so not out of a desire that anything he believe be true, but merely to whatever served their interests, in re Sevar. If the demons had, instead of being inhabitants of the Abyss, been refugees from a devastated world seeking only to evacuate and find a new life (as occurs nine times more regularly than longstanding rifts to the Abyss) who Cheliax had wished to paint as demons, Priest Blai Artigas would have done taken the same actions in obedience to his commanders, and (in re Landen) had it judged only a mild mitigating factor in the otherwise Evil nature of his service.

"What evidence to the supernatural evilness of the demons did he have that would not instead have suggested them to be normally evil mortals, that was not deliberately filtered or controlled by Cheliax? None. He did not exchange uncensored letters with Iomedaeans. He did not travel to Mendev or Crusader's Fort at any point. When he encountered travelers from Crusader's Fort, he did not bother to check if they agreed with him that demons were entities from the Abyss, plane of ontological Chaos and Evil, certainly not with truth-detection spells or anything else sufficient to overcome them lying. He never met any Mendevians or Irrisenni until the final year of his service, and upon exchanging letters with an Iomedaean cleric, did not consider asking him if it was wrong to kill demons. He assumed his orders expressed true reality, even though nothing else Cheliax had ever told him implied that they would not lie, and indeed as though Cheliax does not regularly give equivalent lies to all soldiers fighting on every front about the Chaotic and Evil nature of their enemies.

"In other words, though Priest Blai Artigas may have desired to do Good, and though he may have achieved Good, he did not have a valid epistemic basis for believing that this was the case. He is therefore Lawful Evil."

Is that - he's Detected Evil on demons a lot of times, they read much more strongly than any normal person - would refugees act like that? Like, he'd probably have gone to the border and held it even if the things that came out of the Wound didn't act like demons, but he might have ever noticed that rumors of their interest in enchanting and devouring people were greatly exaggerated, if they were, over twenty years, except this devil appears to think it might be convincing to the judge to propose otherwise, so maybe he wouldn't have? He - would have expected different behavior from orcs and the Nidalese than from the demons, but he didn't actually compare - does anybody actually have a way to check - well, wizards do, Detect Thoughts'll probably distinguish a demon from a Nidalese from an orc actually - he admittedly cannot call to mind a time when any of the wizards the fort has had over the years identified a demon infiltrator with that spell specifically and then also happened to mention in Blai's hearing exactly what the demon was thinking in any more detail than "trying to pretend to be Abello" - but if they were in the habit of lying to him about what people were thinking that would reflect a broader issue than one of determining whether demons were evil. He supposes nothing guarantees he didn't have that broader issue! Maybe no one in his entire life has ever told him the truth about anything especially other people's thoughts! Maybe his own mind is perfectly pleasant to read, like a really lively bit of comic poetry, and that one wizard was just being snide for fun!

"First of all, if you got that to slide, Nirvana would be using it as an argument for the diminished moral responsibility of everyone who grew up in infernal Cheliax for the next several decades. But you won't, because it doesn't hold water."

"To begin with, consider the subjunctive objectivity of probability. You and I, with access to universal survey data, can say that our prior for a random war involving humans also involving beings of pure evil is 1 in 10^11, but Select Artigas formed his priors on Golarion, where the probability is 1 in 50 and, for wars involving extraplanar beings, 1 in 3. On Golarion, the existence of alignments and the Outer Planes is common knowledge; the existence of planar rifts only slightly less widely known. He need only have acquired enough evidence to overcome the prior he could rationally have formed, and this he quite thoroughly did."

"You say that the government of infernal Cheliax lied frequently. They did. They did not, however, lie randomly. In particular, they did not have a habit of concealing the Evil consequences of the acts they required people to perform. See any of the diminished-moral-responsibility cases that went Hell's way in the first generation after the conquest, but in the interest of brevity I'll pick in re Borman. Select Artigas reasonably believed that the government would tell him whatever it served their ends to tell him, which included evidence that his own actions were Evil when relevant. For a practical demonstration of this principle, they made no attempt to convince their armies that the rebels in Andoran and Galt were demons." 

"Add to this the evidence of Detect Evil and Detect Chaos, the inability of any demon to request and keep a truce even when it would have been in their interests to do so, the readiness of demons to betray each other. Add to this the presence of Iomedaens and Good adventurers at the Wound. Add to this the fact that even when Good individuals attempted to persuade Chelaxians to defect from Cheliax and/or Asmodeanism, they made no attempt to persuade them not to fight the demons. Add to this the behaviour of demon cultists apprehended at the Wound, who reliably Detected as Evil and made no attempt to persuade anyone that the demons were not beings of pure Evil and Chaos despite being those demons' allies."

"If the demons had not been beings of pure Evil and Chaos, concealing a fact of such magnitude from everyone at the Wound would have been utterly intractable. All truths are interconnected; information leaks from even the most tightly woven conspiracy. Instead, every observation Select Artigas made, including direct observations of the world unmediated by other humans, supported a coherent world-model in which the demons were Chaotic Evil, and it is not in any way a coincidence that this model was substantially correct."

"Objection! Heaven wishes to claim that the prior probability should be 1 in 3 for wars involving extraplanar beings. This was not a war involving extraplanar beings, in which killing every mortal who attempted to flee would be an act of Evil, but a war purely against extraplanar beings, and his sole known example of such a one was the Worldwound. He did not have the grounds to form this prior."

"Objection! Heaven wishes to claim that they made no attempt to convince their armies that the rebels in Andoran and Galt were demons. The correct question is not did they use the specific example 'demons', but whether or not they attempted to dehumanize them and to claim that they were purely evil and chaotic, which Hell did persistently throughout both conflicts."

"Fundamentally, Hell objects to the claims of Heaven on the grounds that Priest Artigas had no evidence that orcs would not have behaved the same way. Priest Artigas did not carry out any raids into demonic territory and so never had the option of learning if they had families, nor did he ask those travelers who did what their observations had been." Because nobody is crazy enough to go into the Sarkoris Scar. "Orcs are commonly Chaotic Evil. Demons did request truces, always deceptively, but 91% of truces carried out by Avistani orcs were broken by these same Avistani orcs. Good individuals and organizations fight Chaotic Evil orcs and approve of others doing so. Orcish allies most commonly believe they are Chaotic and Evil, particularly on Avistan. Not a one of Heaven's observations would not apply to a collection of Chaotic Evil orcish refugees fleeing the destruction of their homeworld, and yet killing Chaotic Evil orcish refugees when they attempt to escape a tightening trap was ruled Evil absent reason to believe those specific orcs had engaged in Evil deeds, in re Blackmoore."

What is a prior probability. Was this covered in the Acts and he zoned out for it. Probably some demons have families in the sense that some of them used to be mortals and maybe the rumor that some of them split into twins if you cut them in half could be true even though he never saw it happen and demonic tieflings exist and perhaps there's even such a thing as demon weddings? Should he have been meditating on this truth whenever a demon beached itself across the wardstone barrier and he tripped over its invisible form on patrol? He doesn't actually think he ever heard anyone claim that the Andorani and Galtan rebels were not predominantly human. People said they were animals but that wasn't literal, or at least he didn't think it was literal? He heard Andorani referred to as 'elf-fuckers' but that was also not as he understood it literal, Felandriel Morgethai presumably has other things to do with her time, and at any rate nothing stops an individual who is one hundred percent human from fucking an elf if so inclined. Maybe Felandriel Morgethai isn't actually an elf and this was propaganda spread to diminish how impressed people would be with her for achieving an elflike lifespan without being undead. Is his trial going to hinge on Felandriel Morgethai's species. That would be stupid but there is no rule that something stupid can't happen. He's commanded half-orc soldiers and one three-quarter-orc soldier and they're basically normal soldiers, i.e. impulsive and dim and likely to be eaten by demons if they're not luckier than they are stupid, but better than nothing and capable of learning to follow orders and shoot things. He's probably commanded tieflings too but they usually don't advertise. Was Ortegas a tiefling all along, he NEVER took his hat off, maybe he had horns. Is his trial going to hinge on Ortegas's species. ...are there orcish homeworlds being destroyed such that the orcs flee to another plane and get killed there like the worldwound demons? What would that even look like - the border would be easier to hold, most random orcs aren't that formidable compared to a seasoned soldier, and prisoners would be worth taking because orcs make tolerably good slaves, so it would be different, but would it be importantly different - why did the devil specify Avistani orcs. Are Garundi orcs different in some way that matters. Does Garund even have orcs. Is his trial going to hinge on whether Garund has orcs.

This inevitable doesn't care at all about keeping people out of the Evil afterlives. What it does care about is people making bad-faith arguments. Right now it's at least mildly irritated with every other advocate in the room except for, somehow, Nirvana of all planes.

"Your Honor, these arguments are beginning to border on ridiculous. This court has found time and time again that the tendency of the government of Infernal Cheliax to conceal information from its subjects does not eliminate moral culpability for its subjects' actions in matters they were not substantively deceived about — in re Borman, as Heaven already brought up, in re Vidal, in re Alomar, among others — with the exception of cases where the decedent had a well-justified but mistaken belief they were being substantively deceived and acted accordingly, which is not applicable to the decedent's choice to kill demons at the Worldwound. Those cases have typically been used to establish culpability for people who committed Evil acts, while aware of the consequences of those acts and the fact that said acts were Evil, but they are not exclusively applicable to such situations.

Hell wishes to treat this case as comparable to in re Blackmoore, and to a broader hypothetical of orcish refugees fleeing their homeworld. This comparison is faulty for a number of reasons.

First, as a primarily epistemological point, there are nearly always visible differences between two substantially different worlds, even if those worlds share superficial similarities. It is nearly impossible to maintain an elaborate conspiracy of this magnitude so perfect that it appears literally identical to a world without the conspiracy, even to observers who have not made a concerted effort to disprove the conspiracy. Even in cases where Infernal Cheliax was genuinely attempting to hide relevant facts from its subjects, and even when it successfully did so, none of its conspiracies were that perfect.

Second, many of those differences were, in fact, observed by the decedent. It is true that Good organizations frequently support military action against orcs; it is not true that they approve of every possible military action against orcs, even orcs that they believe to threaten them, such as in the case of Iomedae's decision not to conquer Belkzen. —That is technically not precedential, if you want actual case law there you need in re Arnisant. Paladins do, sometimes, fall for killing orcs, in circumstances where doing so is Evil; the decedent periodically encountered paladins at the Worldwound, who engaged in extremely similar demon-killing behavior to the decedent and yet did not fall, a fact which he observed, even if he did not consider its full implications. Both orcs and demons typically mistreat their prisoners, on those occasions when they take prisoners, but the forms of said mistreatment are often different; orcs commonly enslave their prisoners, but almost never use prisoners as subjects for elaborate, torturous magical experiments intended to bolster Abyssal powers. Every demon the decedent ever examined with Detect Fiendish Presence either appeared to an Evil outsider, or was, detectably, using magic to mask its nature; this would not have been true of orcs, nor would orcs have universally appeared Evil to Detect Evil.

Third, and most importantly, the decedent was not, in fact, slaughtering orcish refugees. The consequences of one's actions are not the only relevant factor in determining the decedent's alignment, but they are a determining factor. If the decedent had killed orcish refugees while under the mistaken belief that those refugees were demons, this case would be much more complicated, but in fact he wasn't."

It's really good when the inevitable talks. Blai wants to play chess with an inevitable. That would be the best thing that could ever possibly happen to him.

"Hell, do you wish to respond?"

"Actually," the Abyss interjects, "I think that Hell is right and we should just rule that fighting at the Worldwound is evil." 

".............On what basis do you make this claim."

"Well, that's the claim Hell's making, and you didn't immediately throw it out on the grounds that it's stupid, and it'd be really convenient for me personally." 

"Do you have... an argument, or a relevant precedent, or anything."

"I think that most of the arguments that Hell has been making are stupid lawyerly weasel words designed to obscure the fact that they are proposing that fighting at the Worldwound is evil, and I'm being more respectful of the court's time by just saying it in normal words that take a normal amount of time. I'd offer you sex about it but not only do I not think you're stupid enough to fuck a succubus I think that's also separately just not allowed." 

The fact that the succubus spends any amount of time at all under any circumstances being more reasonable than Hell is really kind of a referendum on Hell if you think about it. These have to be the most evenly matched circumstances in the universe and obviously the inevitable is the best one unless he is supposed to think the archon is the best one but if the demon is not in dead last place that just kind of destroys every flimsy theological point for Lawful Evil that he's ever heard.

"Objection! Hell is not proposing fighting at the Worldwound is evil in all cases. Hell is proposing it is Evil in the case of Priest Blai Artigas, and others who, raised to expect conspiracy all around them in a society bent on damning them, never devoted resources to checking if its orders to them to commit dozens or hundreds of killings might possibly fall into that category."

The succubus raises an eyebrow. "Aaaand given the average alignment of leaders at the relevant tech level, this makes him special...how?"

"No states in Avistan except Cheliax and Nidal are engaged in an elaborate, carefully-constructed quest to control the information-environment of every one of their subjects to damn as many of them as possible, Your Honor." They lack the ability! And also the motive, but mostly the ability!

She waves a hand. "A matter of scale. The fact that the ignorance of your average Golarian is natural rather than artificial doesn't improve their epistemics that much."

"...At this time I am not inclined to rule that fighting at the Worldwound is generically Evil in all cases. Does Hell — or anyone else — wish to rebut the arguments of Axis and Heaven that it is not Evil in this case?"

Cheerful shrug. 

"Indeed. Hell would be overjoyed to do this, as Axis is mistaken on multiple points. First, a conspiracy does not need to be perfect to be successful; that Priest Blai Artigas was convinced by the evidence for it is hardly evidence that he noticed it. Tremendous evidence is leaked in the vast majority of cases in which Hell's lies damn souls by convincing them to evil; it would hardly entertain Hell otherwise. The vast majority of good soldiers such as Priest Blai Artigas ignore this evidence and obey their orders, and Axis and Heaven have presented no evidence that the decedent did the requisite information to investigate.

"Second, Axis underestimates the unreliability of the basic knowledge about his person, his environment and his tools a typical Chelish person possesses, since they are systemically mislead about all these things in the vast majority of cases, a deceit that Select Artigas made no particular attempt to mend. He did not check if Detect Evil falsely detected paladins as evil, did not even check if Detect Evil as well as Detect Fiendish Presence detected all demons as evil, and, most damningly, trusted his superiors about the limits of Zone of Truth rather than investigate them himself. He at no point observed a paladin falling, did not interrogate any paladins to determine what would make them fall, did not even seek out books written outside of Cheliax for more information on demons or on paladins. He trusted the information given to him from his superiors. Detect Fiendish Presence is a spell invented by Asmodeus, as he would have known if he had bothered to learn, which should have made him doubt its effectiveness as a source of moral guidance and fiends. He never considered it."

"Third, orcs regularly torture prisoners to death, often using magic to do so, often for purposes of rituals. The majority of orcish prisoners are enslaved, but a large portion of demonic prisoners are also enslaved. The difference is smaller than Axis presents it as."