"Please answer the question, Priest Blai Artigas."

"No, I did not consider it; I only recently learned that praying does anything for anyone other than the person praying and what I then learned about that did not include effects on other people's souls and particularly did not include differential effects based on whether those souls were one's own victims in the past."

"Did you ask anyone you spoke to regularly about whether there was anything you could do to help your victims?"

"No."

"Did you ask the Iomedaen you exchanged letters with if there was anything you could do to help your victims?"

"No." Paladins are often condescending and act as though no one else has any common knowledge or common sense but he thought they didn't do that amongst themselves so he wasn't imitating it, and he thought that it would be obvious to Tezrić loosely what being an Asmodean priest implied and he could have ordered suggested it but maybe Blai was supposed to inquire proactively????

The devil will incline its head. Mission complete.

"As my colleague has just thoroughly demonstrated, the decedent was unaware of any feasible methods for making restitution and lacked the resources to become aware of same. We, with our superior information, can think of options the decedent did not, and doubtless others can think of options we did not, but until and unless Nethys comes before this court that is simply a fact of life."

"Turning to the question of responsibility: the legal definition of responsibility for the purposes of the Newton test is that the decedent must accept that they committed the evil acts in question, that the resulting harm was a consequence of their actions, and that they are morally at fault in the matter. I believe the decedent has already demonstrated via their thoughts that they meet this criterion, but I am entirely willing to go into the matter further if the court wishes. Are there in your view any further ambiguities, your honor, on that or other prongs?"

Sure. Let him into heaven because he's too stupid to be fully on top of handling the consequences for his actions. If it works it works. (It's not gonna though.)

"I'm inclined to agree that he satisfies the definition of having taken responsibility for his actions. But, while a lack of any feasible options for making restitution would be a sufficient explanation if he had in fact considered making restitution, attempted unsuccessfully to make restitution, researched ways to make restitution, or even consciously considered the question of whether attempting to make restitution would be reasonable considering his other priorities, it's not clear to me that he did anything of that nature. Do you dispute this as either a factual or a legal matter?"

"I dispute it as a legal matter. Do you consciously contemplate every step you take? Do you do a cost-benefit analysis every time you adjust your pencil? Do you consciously consider the possibility of ascending to godhood every week just to check if it's possible yet? It is possible to arrive at a reasonable belief without ever sitting down and saying 'now I will form a belief on this matter'. The decedent had a justified true belief in his lack of restitution options; I argue this should be considered sufficient."

Should he not be thinking about how that argument kind of doesn't work? It seems like it would maybe be in his best interest to not think about that but he's doing it anyway. Converting to a new religion should reasonably invite all kinds of reevaluations of one's conduct, and if he made a mistake in passing over this one while pursuing "reading the Acts cover to cover" and "implementing Lastwall discipline" and "running the fort instead of running to Crusader's for education" and and and - then he made a mistake.

"...Do you have any case law whatsoever that supports your proposed interpretation of this prong?"

"I do not. I saw an opportunity to set a new precedent in a grey area of legal epistemology. If you decline to do so I will not pursue the subquestion further." (Translation: yeah, alright, it doesn't work, but you miss all the shots you don't take.)

Well NOW he's anxious about various outsiders saying "in re Artigas" at each other whenever it's convenient for all eternity.

"In that case, I'm ruling that the Newton test is inapplicable, though of course you may continue to raise elements of the test as mitigating factors.

I believe we were also waiting on an argument from Hell about how defending the Worldwound is Evil?"

Were the Rovagug cultists right all along - no, probably not, they're Evil...

"You misunderstand me, Your Honor. Hell acknowledges that defending the Worldwound is, as a matter of well-established precedent which it has no desire to overthrow, Good in the majority of cases. But nonetheless this same study of existing precedent has lead it to the inevitable conclusion that it was not Good in the specific case of Blai Artigas.

"It has long been established that a decedent who kills others must have intended good by it for the action to be judged good. See Leurdorfell, 2096, for the most famous case. Other trials have established that Good consequences resulting from an action are not sufficient if there were no good intentions; Setach, 2013 will do as an example, establishing as it does that a serial killer who specifically chose wicked criminals as victims because she believed this would result in no investigation for their deaths still committed Evil by so killing them. Torran, -4961 establishes there is no fundamental distinction in this between demons and wicked mortals in this matter. Therefore for it to be Good for Priest Blai Artigas to defend the Worldwound, he must have done it for Good reasons. And yet at no point in his life did he ever express any Good reasons for defending the Worldwound. He did not express a desire to kill demons to save their victims, did not attempt any alternate methods of achieving Good goals other than killing his enemies, and, when asked, said only that he was here to do his job. And do his job he did, exactly as he would have against any other enemy and for exactly the same reasons, and that the enemy happened to be a demon is luck. He did not even seek out any evidence outside the Asmodean command chain to confirm it was correct to fight the demons, that they actually were beings of pure chaos and evil that threatened the world! Blai Artigas was indifferent to whether or not his enemies were Evil, Marthasagor -3088. And as we all know, Leurdorfell establishes that this indifference is more than enough to make the killing Evil, and Hegenbach establishes that a man who just follows orders to do evil is still responsible for the evil done by these orders."

"No doubt the delegates from Heaven and Nirvana will say that he bears responsibility for the choice to enlist in the army and then to request a combat posting. Hell wishes to remind them that this is a presumptively Evil act, in re Taizu, in re Pete, Susumu v. Gorum, and that therefore the burden of proof rests on Heaven to demonstrate some specific Good goal that Blai believed himself to be pursuing, and to inform them that Blai Artigas did not, during his service express such a goal."

"Therefore Blai Artigas is, himself, Evil."

And the devil inclines its head and waits for the response.

"This is ridiculous. Of course he didn't have to express such a sentiment; everyone in his extended culture-sphere knows that hold the Worldwound means prevent the planet from being overrun by demons. It's unnecessary for a decedent to explicitly express or even verbalize to themself intentions and context that is that baked into their model of the world! In re Vorloupulous, in re Parren, in re Tabris--do I need to keep naming cites or is that enough to go on." 

"In re Vorloupulous, the individual confessed to forming an illegal army. In re Tabris the decedent was asked why she was organizing a defense, and said, quote, 'otherwise everyone on the continent will die.' This is not a high standard, Nirvana, and if Blai Artigas cannot meet it that is a flaw with your defendant, not with the law.

"As for your point regarding his shared cultural knowledge, I quote in re Archimedes, 'there is no level of obliviousness regarding obvious facts for which a genuinely incapable individual can be culpable.' In re Vorbis a theocratic ruler managed to conquer a large part of a continent and die without ever realizing his god didn't want him to. In re Casey establishes that this applies for ignorance of Good as well as ignorance of Evil. The historical precedent is quite clear that detail-focused, socially unaware mortals are capable of acting without ever seriously considering facts which 'everyone in their extended culture-sphere knows' to be relevant."

"While I can hardly claim not to enjoy epistemological tangents, this one isn't dispositive. Select Artigas demonstrated repeatedly in thoughts and actions that he intended to prevent the demonic invasion of Golarion. He chose his personnel deployments, his patrol schedules, his item expenditures and spell preparations and tactics, with the aim of preventing demons from overrunning or bypassing his fort, with minimal expenditure of costly resources that could otherwise be used for the same purpose elsewhere. A man indifferent to the Good he could achieve in this work would not have been so diligent at it, or so skilled."

"Also, he volunteered for a Worldwound posting specifically."

Vicar Rey returns from her meeting in an icy mood.  "They want more clerics for the army.  If the army had half the Law of an imperial retriever puppy they wouldn't get themselves bloodied so much and they'd still have the ones we sent them last time!"

"I'll go," says Blai, half on impulse, half wishing for a life that closes around him so rigidly that he cannot possibly make a mistake.  And Vicar Rey is usually - safe to make things easier for.  Not safe in general, but it won't specifically draw extra attention, in a bad way, if you offer to fetch her tea or run her letters to their recipients; he's been filling his time with a lot of that in the quiet moments, while he and the rest of his Crucible cohort are shadowing her to learn the in-practice ropes of the clergy.

"Huh," she says, after a pause.  "Yes, I suppose I can see it.  I'll send you and demand one each off Oliver and Sala and two from the New Cathedral and that's all they're entitled to for the year, they can take better care of their things if they want the things to accumulate instead of going through them like firewood..."

If Blai thought there were a lot of obscure clerical titles people could have there are again as many in the military, but that's just memorization.  He can do that, he can count pips, he can march and wear armor and swing a mace, he can do pushups and run laps.  He follows orders.  He does not complain about army food, not when the rations are short or when the biscuits have bugs in them or when he's blinked too many times at the drill sergeant in a bad mood and had a scoop of fireplace ash dumped in his trencher on top of the porridge.  It's not Hell.  It's not even the Crucible.

They get their assignments after they've been through their paces, and the girl Sala sent, Diana Toset, looks like she's going to commit insubordination about it.  "The Wound?  I'll never have my own city church like that," she mutters to herself, or more likely to Asmodeus, pacing back and forth in the training yard.  "Circles, sure, as many circles as I can swallow the demons to earn, but my Lord, there is more to power than circles!  Raise me high and I will build You a cathedral and crucify a man before it in Your name every day!  My lord, not the Wound!"

Blai didn't get the Wound; he got the Ash Regiment.  He doesn't really get what's wrong with the Wound.  Unless you happen to really want to head up a big church in a big city, apparently.  Still.  Someone's got to man the Wound.

"I'd trade you," he offers - because if she notices on her own, before he says anything, that he's heard her prayers, she'll have every reason to go out of her way to destroy him; because she'll owe him a favor, and he doesn't know what he'd do with one but it's generally the kind of thing you're supposed to accumulate; because if he somehow wound up with a big city church he certainly wouldn't know what to do with it, and he's heard you can just stay in the army forever, at the Wound, until you lose a limb or your life, instead of the expectation being a few tours and settling down in a village to terrorize them.

"Would you really," Toset says, rounding on him, snide -

"Write up the request and I'll sign it.  I can't change matters if you've got a black mark from Personnel but if they're only making up the numbers... you'll owe me a favor," Blai adds, you have to be clear about that or they'll pretend that they never realized you weren't just taking leave of your senses long enough to give them a gift.

"Only if they swap us.  If they won't I don't owe you shit."

"Fine."

She writes something in her lovely loopy handwriting and he scribbles his name under hers and she marches off.

He goes to the Worldwound.

"An argument that proves too much," Hell says. "Your fellows in Heaven tried to claim that competence at an assigned task where failure would be punished - both by the man's superiors and by nature - was inherently Lawful Good at in re Climent, Genis and Guim in the last two years alone, and every one of then was ruled Lawful Evil at trial. 'Diligence and ambition are not traits fundamentally belonging to any alignment, and the task to which they are assigned determines their moral valence." Asmodeus v Aroden.

"Priest Blai Artigas joined the army because he wished to submit himself to a more disciplined, regimented life in greater obedience to authority than would be possible with an independent assignment, a Lawful and perfectly Asmodean desire. As for his decision to volunteer for the Worldwound,, requesting a postion with a good opportunity for bloody violence is not usually a good sign as to the moral character of the person doing it, but his chief considered motives when volunteering for this task  were to obtain favors from his allies and to further submit himself to discipline, order and obedience, also Lawful, also perfectly Asmodean. Neither of these is a Good motive."

"You are missing the point. I do not claim that his diligence and ambition were inherently Good, but that they demonstrate that Select Artigas' motive was to hold back the demons. Had his motive been solely to avoid personal danger from the demons or his own hierarchy, he would have acted differently. The task to which his diligence was applied was protecting the planet from demons, and he knew it."

"Now, to the question of the Select's reasons  for volunteering in the first place. As you say, the bloody violence doesn't enter into it," says the archon with a dismissive spin of an inner sphere. "As for what did, one must look not only at what a decedent seeks out but at what they seek to avoid." Perhaps especially in this case. "What Select Artigas feared, worse than the prospect of maiming or death, was being given a church in a village or a city where he would be expected to tyrannize civilians. Of the tightly constrained set of options available to him, he sought out the one with the least pressure to do Evil, which is Good under in re Poitiers. And he was, in fact, coerced into fewer Evil acts at the Worldwound than he likely would have been at a different posting. He went for one Good reason, worked hard for another Good reason, and obtained significant Good as a result."

"Had his motive been to obey his hierarchy, as it was, he would have done precisely what he did. Obedience to your superiors' will and to their commands is Lawful and amoral; if these superiors are Lawful Evil, it becomes serving Evil, which is Lawful and Evil." 

"What Priest Blai Artigas feared, worse than the prospect of maiming or death, was independence. Autonomy. The necessity of making his own decisions. Priest Blai Artigas desired slavery and feared freedom, and so enlisted in the army to be enslaved and was sent to the Worldwound to avoid an independent posting. He sought out the assignment with the most discipline, which is Lawful and neutral, in re Diaz. He went for a Lawful and Neutral reason, worked hard for a Lawful and Evil reason, and good achieved but not intended is irrelevant to a trial, in re Leurdorfell."