"My options were executions, maimings, lashes, and fines but only if the accused could produce the amount in full immediately, so I used them sparingly to avoid the admittedly correct impression that under these conditions I had to address the impoverished differently from their better-off neighbors. The Reclamation did not judge that any of these options were appropriate for people who committed infanticide under the conditions immediately following the decree, though I expect enforcement to tighten as it becomes more generally known that it's forbidden."

"It just seems like you won't have any people left, if you treat it as murder, and not having any people is also notably bad for babies."

You'd have Korva, but only having Korva isn't very good for babies either.

"Anyway. Uh... even if you meaningfully ban infanticide, that doesn't do anything to stop women from dropping the children off at the orphanage, so in fact it might make the original problem worse. I guess you could make it a crime and not pay the fine to the mother, but then she has no reason to report it unless she wants the father to marry her, which means the worst cases probably aren't affected, and you're not doing anything to support the resulting children in cases where one or the other won't agree to marry."

Well, if giving everyone what they deserve means you don't have people anymore, then maybe you shouldn't have people! Victòria's — not sure — what people deserve for killing babies, it makes sense for it to be death but it feels wrong to treat normal things like killing babies as murder, but it's not nothing.

"Paladins operating as a justice system usually have far less discretion and fewer mitigating considerations to apply and the main reason we had so much of both on assizes was so that we could arrange to not run out of people, yes."

"...well, it depends what the mitigating conditions are? If someone's done something that's against the law, but they had a really good reason so they don't actually deserve to die, obviously you shouldn't kill them. But if someone deserves to die you shouldn't not kill them just because there'd be fewer people."

"...that's not really the frame behind how we make policy."

Is she imagining that the purpose of government is determining who deserves to die, as if this is some fact judged by Pharasma like alignment is, and then executing everyone Pharasma has so designated? He can't ask that. It would not be diplomatic.

"Avenger Ferrer has very strong intuitions about the proper extent of vengeance and whether we should leave open opportunities for redemption, which have distracted our deliberations a few times now." There is a place for Calistria here but it does not seem to be a place for her. "I do not think this is likely to be a more productive line of discussion this time than before, so I am cutting it off, please and thank you."

"To return to Fiducia Fazil's point, I think if we have slightly more than the already very large number of abandoned children, but they are much more reliably provided for, that is not ideal but seems like a reasonable state from which to build for the next generation. If we can avoid Augustana's hordes of orphans and the infernal rate of infanticide damning us, well, in forty years we'll have a healthier generation of the Chelish people and they can decide if the family is strong enough to change the rules."

"Perhaps the fine should be paid to whoever is in fact engaged in the support of the child, whether that is the mother or a grandparent or other relative, so it is less directly paying for the bearing of that child and more paying for their upbringing. And perhaps it should be paid by the mother in the case where she abandons the child but another person is caring for them."

It really seems like no matter what you think the right amount of vengeance is the appropriate response to killing innocent people is not literally nothing.

"I think that'd have the same problem as one of the ideas we were talking about yesterday, with having a fee to leave your baby at an orphanage, you don't want the mother to decide to just kill the baby instead of paying someone else to take care of it. But making it so the father is paying whoever takes care of it rather than just the money makes sense to me."

Josep is so obscurely satisfied by Ferrer jumping on the Abadaran count when he suggests the obvious thing as quickly as she jumped on Josep for suggesting the same thing.

"I do like the idea of paying the fine to the person who's raising the child, though it requires the courts to determine who that is. Maybe we can make explaining the circumstances of conception a required step for dropping a child off at the orphanage, and the orphanage can pursue the payment if the circumstances were illegal, or something. I do think we want to be careful not to encourage women to hide their pregnancies and dispose of children quietly."

Elorri nods fervently at Korva's last sentence.

"So the described desiderata are - no costs imposed on any person who had the option of trivially killing the child, lest even small costs induce Chelish people to do this; costs imposed on participants in promiscuous conception of children, inasmuch as permitted by the first constraint; payments to caretakers of children, inasmuch as this incentivizes them to report participants in promiscuous conception and to be caretakers of children.

Is there a reason to do this by taking the fine from the father and giving it to the mother, instead of taking a fine from the father of whatever size is ideal for discouraging men from promiscuity and giving the woman a smaller payment not contingent on the father's ability to pay?"

"If someone were on the fence about marrying the father of the child instead of seeking redress, the money being tied to his existing financial situation means she's not more inclined against if he's poor. I'm not positive she shouldn't be, in borderline situations, but many poor people manage well enough..."

"It seems more difficult, and expensive, to administer, if we must pay when the father cannot. And I have no idea what size the fine should be, or how we would determine it."

In civilized places 'what size should fines be' is the work of a well-funded government department, not selected somewhat at random by a group of unqualified random people. He is not going to say that. It would not help.

"Yes, I would expect an uncoupled payment like that to impose a far greater burden on the treasury. And the burden on the treasury is, after all, one of the major problems with the current situation. ...I do believe that we should accept imposing some costs that will inevitably cause some to murder their children. Not too many, and we should attempt to mitigate those costs, but if we impose no such costs at all, everything else that we try will be of no use whatsoever."

"...I don't think we should do things that'll get children murdered? I think I'm confused about, uh — why do you think we need to do things like that or else nothing we do will work?"

"Compared to a policy of giving all people who have given birth to a child and registered them with the government a lot of money, on an ongoing basis as long as the child lives, all policies get children murdered."

What.

Well, they didn't decide to have random people write the laws either.

"My thought is that you want something the wealthy can pay with little inconvenience, but that most commoners cannot. Thirty gold, maybe. A poor but decent man will marry to escape it, and a reasonable woman will have him, as he's worth more than the fine in the long run. If he can't pay, and the woman won't have him, sell him as an indenture for some short term - two or three years, maybe, and specifically to agricultural work, so the fine is not a death sentence in disguise. If he has a child he cannot feed, let him work to feed him, and pay the woman whatever two years of his labor are worth. Teeth, but only baby ones, as sentences go."

She blinks at Delegate Fazil. "...I'm not saying we have to do everything we possibly can to get people not to murder children? Just that we shouldn't do things that will mean that people go murder children if they wouldn't have otherwise. But I'm not sure I understood that right."

"The concern," he says to Delegate Ferrer, "is that many policies touch what people will do, in many ways, and can be compared to every possible way to spend the same resources, which makes it difficult to use rules that presume there is some neutral state where your policies weren't touching anything. 

I have not much intuition about what would make for a reasonable fine and will defer to those present who know more about the population we're targeting and the behavior we are trying to disincentivize."

Abadarans have such a fascinatingly odd perspective on the world. Useful, but so odd.