"...Okay, but this is stupid. Fighting at the Worldwound is Good. You can argue that it is less Good when done in the service of Asmodeus, but it's still Good and not Evil. If Hell actually had a case then they would be claiming that other actions taken by the decedent were more impactful than his Worldwound service, not that the Worldwound service itself was evil, because that's a terrible argument that's not going to work." 

"Hell has further arguments, Your Honor, when the status of this one is resolved." In every trial Hell is obliged to argue that the things the decedent did were evil. This is how trials work. Is the dog new?

how long is this thing supposed to be?! can they just split the difference, let the axiomite have him, and get it over with

It's going to go until they all run out of ideas or the judge tells them to stop, because while it's primarily about Select Artigas it's not entirely about him. It's about attempts to set favorable precedents and the process of learning what works and what doesn't and how outsiders of other alignments think. Also this archon suspects the devil is aiming for a long trial to delay or avoid some unpleasant activity in Hell; it's happened plenty of times before.

"Is this court willing to reach an interim finding of fact that Select Artigas was among other complicated mortal desires deliberately intending to save innocent lives and prevent the destruction of civilization on Golarion and that he acted on this goal, or do I need to make a detailed factual proffer? In the latter case I would like to enter a standard request for extended speaking time under in re Jacksmith."

"Please make the factual proffer." Mortals manage to avoid thinking about some truly incredible things. "The request for extended speaking time is granted."

If everyone conjured a twenty-foot scroll and let it unroll across the questionably extant courtroom floor every time it would be funny in isolation, it would have become extremely tedious millenia ago, so the archon doesn't do it. They just start talking, a list of dates and actions and verbatim quotes of sentences Blai said years ago and didn't consciously remember having said . . . 

"I invite you to repeat that, Sergeant."

The sergeant wisely remains silent.

"Were you inadequately briefed?  Do you think that our job is to sit in this fort like it's our parlor, concerned with demons exclusively if they knock and bother us, in particular, out of all the people in the world?  Permit me to correct you: the fort is our base of operations and our operation is holding the border.  If a demon got past the wardstone line I don't care if it left you a fruit basket before flying off in another direction, you assess your force and you give chase if you can and call for reinforcements if you cannot.  You do not, hours later, return from your patrol and report that you saw a demon go looking for the nearest encampment of defenseless noncombatants whose only duty to the situation is to occasionally be hireable to help construct new forts when the ones we have fall under the mismanagement of idiots like yourself."

"Yes Chosen."

"Do you prefer to walk to the Commander under your own power or should you like to oblige me to drag you?"

He walks.

Blai doesn't see him again for a week.

"Grec, a Sending scroll.  - two."

"Sir?"

"Do your ears work, Grec?"

Grec runs, and comes back with the scroll.  "Should I -"

Blai is still holding the spyglass.  "Yes.  Our contact with the eastern border, priority is that an apparent balor's heading that way, fit what you can about its entourage, and then Crusader's Fort so they know to prep a strike team." Crusader's has all the good strike teams, every independent adventurer in the world would rather go through them than through Cheliax...

Grec casts the scroll.

Practically all the good clerics were already called to an incident near Kenabres.  They're scraping the bottom of the barrel when they need to control a demonplague outbreak in an unrelated location.  But you don't need positive channels to prepare Remove Disease and Create Water.  Blai's just hit third circle and when an outrider comes by #11 he climbs aboard the Phantom Steed and spends hours riding to a Mendevian outpost to cast Guidance on everybody constantly and heal one person of the sickness per day.  Nobody talks to him.  He supposes he can't think what they'd have to say.  But there's the treaty, so they know he's there to help, at least, and have to feed him -

The defenses near Kenabres are among the most important - sure, if something gets past #11, it has more or less free rein, but most demons still need to travel to get places and #11 is not near anything.  Kenabres is the throughpoint and fallback city for every Mendevian and several other forts' supplies and communications and recruitment, because only Cheliax supplies by teleport.  So if this briefing is right, and they're no longer sending any Chelish units through Kenabres even when they're destined for marchable positions and carrying relatively time-insensitive goods like soap and paper, they're leaving a catastrophic manpower gap and that's more of an emergency than anything that happens at #11 in a typical decade.  If there are not Chelish units marching through, staying in, spending at, being on the ground in emergencies for, Kenabres, then the demons are going to notice and so will the merchants.  If Kenabres is assailed and impoverished and can no longer supply their forts up to standard, they'll have desertions and starvation-related illnesses and they'll run out of arrows and then #11 will be fine because every demon with an ear to the rumor mill will go that way, nearly diametrically opposite, and it will be no credit to his management of his post that #11 will go indefinitely without a major incident if the reason they're doing that is Kenabres's infiltration and the consequent logistical nightmare - you can't take comfort in a barrel not leaking out of your corner if that's because it's busily spewing all its water out of the other side -

He gets busy on a return letter to his superiors; he goes through three drafts, trying to come up with an appropriately politic way to say I don't care if Queen Galfrey personally spat in your face in front of a thousand people, you can't stop routing people through Kenabres over it.  He writes to the insurance adjuster, Fiducia Boian, who is considerably likelier to see his argument.  He asks everybody who might know if there's someone he can write to in Kenabres asking if there is some statement from a random Asmodean priest on the opposite side of the Wound that would help but nobody has a name or even an office - the place has a count, but not a useful count - so he settles for making Grec also write similar missives of his own, to their superiors, whose pride and on-paper efficiency and deals with the clever teleport-logistics innovators will mean absolutely nothing if the Wound border bursts like an inflated pig's bladder and spills demons out across the entire world -

The archon goes on in the same vein for what feels like hours and might actually be hours, in chronological order covering twenty years, and finishes up with, "I hold that this evidence conclusively demonstrates prototypically Good ends, to wit, the preservation of innocent life, deliberately pursued and achieved across twenty years of myriad daily actions."

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaugh he thought people talking about their lives flashing before their eyes were being strictly metaphorical and not referring to an archon reading aloud every thought you've had in your entire life to, among others, a demon

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."