Present.

He's really just been staying out of the debates and voting with Inquisitor Shawil but his wife spoke to the Duke's wife about her diligent matchmaking efforts in Grazalema and apparently this committee is about that, but writ large, so here he is.

"I'm Ser Elorri Goés with the Reclamation. There is something of a shortage of paladins who already have families of our own but with the war over it's not precluded and I was told that having grown up in a family would be enough to render my input potentially useful."

Victòria kind of thought they were just adding a paladin and is sort of confused about what this random foreign-looking Abadaran is doing here.

"Yes, your grace. My name is Fazil. I am a fourth circle cleric of Abadar, and the count of Pedraza, near Corentyn. I do not know very much about the situation in the rest of Cheliax but in Pedraza a great many young people were unmarried, to enormous and predictable social ill, so we have been attempting to get them all married and I suppose can speak to how we have approached it."

Now she is even more confused!! 

For someone who also wants to gently coerce everyone into getting married she is really incredibly suspicious about that. Didn't say whether he was married, either. Maybe he has six.

"Like a number of my fellow nobles of Longmarch, Count Fazil is from Osirion originally and appointed by Archduke Shawil. If there aren't any questions, I'd like to start by voting to add Ser Goés to the committee."

"In favor of adding Delegate Goés. ...The pamphlets say that in Osirion a woman isn't ever allowed to leave her husband no matter what he does to her, is that true?"

"Osirion does not provide for people to dissolve their marriage vows, not for men to do that nor for women to do that. I think this protects women more than it protects men; if a man abandons his wife and children she will in the typical case be ruined and he in the typical case will be perfectly fine."

Wow, what the fuck. "If a woman's husband... keeps beating her senseless, say, or maims her, apparently that's a thing some people do, what's she supposed to do about that?"

"That does not seem like a defect in character that would usually show up in someone as a complete surprise after getting married, so mostly a man like that would have a great deal of trouble convincing any family to let their daughter marry him in the first place, but if we assume he somehow managed this, I would expect that the man's parents or brothers would be the ones to intervene and cut him off from drink or get him inspected for demonic possession or whatever might be causing that."

"...and do you think the law in Cheliax should be the same as the law in Osirion? Uh, in Cheliax people sometimes do things that are really bad even if they aren't possessed by demons, and their family probably wouldn't try to stop them—"

"I don't actually have much of a guess on what the law should be in Cheliax. It seems to me that making laws is a very complicated thing and I haven't had any training in it and don't really know which laws would be any good. I know what we've been doing in the town in my county where I live, but we haven't been doing it with the law, just with payments. If the committee's interested in it I can speak to it and if the committee's interested in how Osirion works I can speak to that but I don't expect I'll have a guess about whether most laws are a good idea or a bad idea, unless it's terribly obvious."

Well, that's still kind of suspicious, but it's probably not so suspicious that she wants to try to keep him off the committee, if he's not going to try to make Cheliax copy Osirion. ...also they're voting on the paladin right now anyway.

"Payments?" That does seem, uh, extremely optimistic about why a husband might beat his wife or whether anyone is likely to care, but at the moment she's more interested in how you attempt to solve this with payments.

"So if you ask the young men why they aren't getting married, the answer is that they don't see any need to, as they can find women to sleep with them anyway, and they don't have any sense that it would be the responsible step, that it is a mark of maturity, that their friends and community will respect them more once they are married. So the people who do hiring for my properties tried to change that by saying that you can only serve in the militia, be a supervisor on the docks, or take out credit at the bank if you're a married man, which indeed got the young men interested in getting married, but they still mostly weren't very suitable matches. A man's only a good choice for a husband if he doesn't drink too much and has steady work and not too much of a temper, and we found that a lot of local men drank too much, didn't work steadily, and got worked up easily. Now, in most places, a girl's parents are looking out for that kind of thing, but in Grazalema they didn't seem interested in that, and half of them weren't around themselves. 

A fellow at the church figured that being a good husband's a skill kind of like being an accountant, and at home the church offers classes in accounting, and then a test, and people pay to take the class and the test because if they pass the test they can get hired just off that, so he tried offering a class and a test in being a good husband, and then once men passed, a matchmaker'd meet with them to set them up with a good girl. And then their employer would pay for the wedding feast and build them a new house, to live in with their wife, so the whole town could see that this was a place where people were settling down and doing things properly. 

It has worked reasonably well in that there are enough men who'll be good husbands for my wife to be able to get all the girls on her staff married."

"What's in the class?"

"...does it work in that they're also staying with and not constantly tormenting their wives and children?" Can you test for that???

Yeah, that seems like it could easily make things worse.

"Examples of how you are supposed to solve problems and how you are not supposed to, some practice being provoked and calming down instead of smashing a cup on someone's head about it, discussion of what it means to be a good husband and father. It's mostly very obvious things it would be difficult to get to adulthood not knowing, in other places, but not here, apparently, and some people you'll explain a thing five ways and then ask them a sixth and they clearly won't have grasped it, or they'll say they'll stop drinking and then sneak off right after class, or they decide it's not worth all this bother, or they can't seem to keep their temper and talk a problem out even when it's for practice.

None of the men who have married have left their wives but it does bother me, that the law doesn't protect the girls if they do. We can't even put it in the agreements of marriage, not enforceably, because there aren't civil courts, and it's unaffordable for most people to ask the Church to enforce a lifelong agreement. I don't think they're tormenting their wives or their children but of course one presumes they wouldn't say so. The girls meet with my wife for tea every day so probably if they had a complaint they'd bring it."

"In favor of this fellow and the paladin too."

"It sounds worth trying, and helpful for many men, but I don't think I'd trust my daughters to it until it's gone a few years with no bloody beatings or such found out. But in any case yes, I vote in favor of both as well."

"Oh, sorry, I didn't realize we were voting on Delegate Fazil too already, I'm in favor of him also."

Oh Josep likes this man, he seems like a sensible one with a good head on his shoulders. Probably has some foreign nonsense ideas, but well, you can't have everything. Josep is more worried about the paladin, paladins are supposedly the most impractical, naive sorts you ever meet, but he really can't say that out loud.

"In favor of both, yes."

"If both votes are all in agreement it can be both, but in case Ser Goés's vote for Count Fazil would matter I wanted to put him first."

"For both." He's trying something, anyway, and at least it sounds like they'll disagree productively.

"In favor of both." He's the one who asked for a paladin, and the other man seems sane enough.

"Alright, welcome to the committee, both of you. What old business did we have... the suggested basic form of marriage," which he has written and passes around especially to the new members, "considerations for what clauses in a marriage contract ought to be banned from new contracts and invalidated from leftover infernal ones, custody of children, the breaking of marriages for the safety of the children, possibility of permitting a husband to divorce freely as long as he pays to support the children... and questions about how meaningfully we can pass any of this without a civil court system to make clear how it will be enforced."

When a man and a woman marry, their oaths to each other shall be administered by a priest of a permitted church (empowered, or a lay priest of an organized church), and witnessed by two or more persons in good standing among their community. This being done, they shall then be held to these oaths: the man not to leave his wife and children, except in cases of adultery or other great provocation, and even then to provide for the children of the union until they have come of age; and the woman to be loyal to her husband, and to care for their children.

This shall be principally enforced by civil suit, the deserted husband or wife bringing a complaint against their spouse. The court may direct the straying spouse to return to their spouse and children, or require them to pay for their support, or declare the abandonment to have been permissible due to extraordinary circumstances (adultery, extreme cruel treatment, etc.).

"Unless I misread this it does not oblige a man to provide for his wife."

"Nor does it prohibit male adultery, or allow that any wife might be greatly provoked, even though it has come to my attention that the people of Cheliax include many diligent provocateurs."

"The vows we have been using in Pedraza, based on the ones I grew up with, are the husband's that he will honor his wife, protect and provide for her and for her children, and be good to her and greet her with love, and the wife's that she will be faithful to her husband, and take guidance from him, and obey him and use his money wisely and raise his children to honor him."

"Those seem like good vows, Count, except that they oblige the wife to obey him even if he commands her to evil or rank foolishness, which seems a much greater concern here than in other countries."

"For those who I haven't introduced her to, this is my wife Duchess Gisella, whose opinions I value very highly, but who is Andoren by birth and not herself a delegate."

"In Osirion it is often said that a man should obey his father, but if his father drunkenly tells him to burn his house down, he obeys his father by putting him to bed until he is sober, not by burning the house down.

 I acknowledge this is inadequate to the case where the father soberly says to burn the house down, which does not really happen in Osirion but which perhaps does, in places recently ruled by Hell.

I in any event agree that one should not obey when commanded in evil or destructive things, and that a person so commanding his wife would be remiss in his own vows to her."

"What's the point of having her promise to obey him in the first place?"

"It's possible we shouldn't encourage such promises in an environment where Law has historically been pitted so directly against Good, but in ideal conditions the point is that he needs to be able to trust her, and may need to be able to do that in times of crisis or intractable disagreement such that an hourlong discussion will not improve their consensus."

"I do not know if it is a bad idea here but it is how marriage works in every long-standing society and I suspect may be a necessary ingredient. Adventuring parties, too, always have it settled who gives orders in an emergency, or they don't last long."

Nod nod. "And some procedure if they've failed an important save, but - sometimes a call has to be made and you need to know in advance how it will be made."

"If it's just important for emergencies could you just put something about that in the oath? I think lots of women won't get married at all if they have to promise to obey their husband no matter what even if he's doing something Evil." 

"Women should not marry a man they do not trust far enough to agree to obey him, because marriage produces children, who will be utterly dependent on their parents, and if you do not think a man is trustworthy with that power then it is very important not to conceive a child by him."

Nod nod nod.

"....why does this argument not apply to men, if men are also obliged to support their children?"

"I would also emphatically advise a man not marry a woman who he did not trust."

"...I see what you're saying, about not marrying someone who might try to order you to do something Evil, but that kind of sounds to me like no one in Cheliax should ever get married. I can think of..." (pause) "...three men who I might trust that much. And one of them isn't even Chelish."

"Well, why don't you marry one of those?"

It had not even slightly occurred to her that that might be a thing she could do. "...Well, one of them's already married, and one of them only sleeps with men, and the last one's the one who's not Chelish. And also just because someone wouldn't try to order you to do something Evil doesn't mean he'd be a good husband apart from that. And I don't even know for sure they wouldn't order me to do anything Evil, it's just my best guess. And also most people wouldn't want to marry a Calistrian priestess anyway, and even if they did that doesn't mean they'd want to marry me specifically. And also I don't really have... any reason to get married."

"I agree you shouldn't marry someone you don't trust, but it doesn't seem like giving all decisionmaking power to one party improves the situation. I think most people are not trustworthy, or particularly likely to be acting well towards people in their power, so I don't think we should write laws that assume that anyone involved is behaving well at any point.

I do think this is a - suggested legal minimum, for something to count as a marriage, and for the state to enforce on all marriages, not a claim that people shouldn't make other promises to each other. We need a minimum because we're considering making siring bastards a crime, and need an official standard for what counts as doing that."

"I would also like there to be fewer bastards but I am not currently confident that we wouldn't just be herding people to the Abyss with such a law."

"I see the argument for not having obedience in a suggested legal minimum, in Cheliax in particular. I don't see the argument for not promising to support your wife. I can't think how it's even a marriage if you are not financially supporting your wife.

Siring bastards you could make a tort, if you had civil courts."

"We've not gotten that far in Judiciary but I can make a note to push it tomorrow."

What has judiciary even been doing???? Civil courts are extremely important!!!

"Thank you, I think that would be a good idea."

Well, it was re-formed abruptly after the first few days, and today they talked about getting the paladins off the fucking assizes,,,,,

"A full system of civil courts seems unlikely to be concluded quickly, so we may have to assess things as torts without full knowledge of what that will entail. I agree that supporting your wife as well as the children seems like an oversight more than a difference of opinion. Delegate Roig, I think you gave us that language, would you agree?"

"Certainly I meant that a man living with his wife and and children ought to be providing for them, but in the case where separation or divorce are justified, I would be hesitant to oblige him to support his former spouse. There are cases when it might be correct to so oblige him, I suppose. For one thing, when if she has his small children in her care, providing for her and providing for the children are not easy to separate."

"The whole project relies on having civil courts either way, because if we're requiring people to get married then we need civil courts to manage those marriages and any divorces.

The case for making it a crime is that it's in fact extremely costly for the state. You two weren't here, but - last committee we discussed the fact that Cheliax is currently spending nearly six million gold a year on the orphanages, more than half the cost of the entire army. That's after cutting costs by half, and shutting down daycare services that huge numbers of women used to rely on. The children are in many places quite literally starving. We need to fix child abandonment, first and foremost, and that goes back to women having been abandoned or never given support in the first place. I'm not an expert on legal systems, but - that's the goal, here. I think we were thinking the penalty would be a fine paid to the mother?"

"The mother who....also was promiscuous and carelessly conceived a child she couldn't care for? Or are we talking about cases where he forced her?"

"If someone who'd know told me that eighty percent of Chelish children were conceived by force I would not be particularly moved to protest the figure."

That doesn't sound right but he doesn't know enough about Avistan to dispute it.

Victòria doesn't really think it's that high either? She should've been killing way more men back home if it was really that high but that doesn't seem like it can be right, eight men in ten aren't rapists. But she doesn't actually have any idea what the number is.

"Surely not eighty percent. Certainly it is a problem, but I do not think that it is the source of our orphanage situation."

"Oh, I believe many children conceived by force are raised by their mothers, but it is certainly a feature of the landscape."

"As a general principle you get more of what you pay for so an expected consequence of paying women for having illegitimate children would be more women having illegitimate children. Of course if a woman is forced it is reasonable to confiscate much or all of the property of her attacker to compensate her and her family, and to oblige the attacker to marry her if she wants that. I think this holds regardless of how often the two things are happening."

"...if a man forces a woman you should hang him, you shouldn't let him marry her. Taking his stuff and giving it to her sounds fine."

"It might be that if you pay them for having illegitimate children the thing you buy is fewer of them smothering the illegitimate children."

"The question of force is... complicated. I would say instead that the previous legal definition of rape excludes many types of forcing someone to have sex, and is not very relevant to the situation on the ground.

But no, I don't mean to limit it to cases where force was used. Fundamentally, we target the father because the mother is already paying for it. I think Delegate Napaciza suggested that the fine be waived if the man proposes and the woman accepts, so we're only punishing cases where the man either refuses, or the woman judges that he is worse than nothing. Or - worse than an amount of gold that is probably less than what the child will cost her, in any case."

He is still pretty sure that if you pay someone a large sum of money for something, such as being promiscuous and having a child outside wedlock, you will get more of it, even if the sum of money is less than all of the costs of doing that, particularly if some people are already doing it anyway.

But he has already said this and if saying it the first time did not make an impression saying it the second time seems very unlikely to, so he does not say it again.

Nah, it's a point.

"We admittedly might need to additionally criminalize infanticide to prevent people from attempting to deliberately bear bastards for the fine money without paying the associated costs. But - every woman who is raising a child alone right now could have killed or abandoned it, and chose not to. More than half of the men in Egorian already did."

"Infanticide has already technically been criminalized but this appears to have been met with some incredulity, and this incredulity was anticipated in advance, so when I encountered people who'd done it I was meant to let them off with a warning." Has he mentioned he didn't enjoy assizes.

"...Why are you letting them off with a warning??" Aren't paladins supposed to be Good, or at least Neutral??

"....is it not, like, very ordinary behavior where you come from?"

"The sentencing options conscionably possible in an assizes context are extremely limited and the policy approach was not to prosecute infanticide specifically because we did not think anyone would believe, just from it having been decreed without any special wording specifying that infants were included, that it was really illegal. I imagine some people smother infants in Molthune but it is rarer and shameful."

" - no, I meant where Ferrer comes from."

"...no, I mean, it's normal, but that doesn't mean it's — if I murdered an innocent baby people shouldn't just treat it like that was fine! The baby didn't do anything to deserve it!" It's not upsetting to think about the way it's upsetting to think about people murdering someone a little older, but that doesn't mean — she doesn't think she'd want to kill someone over it, but maybe she should want to—

"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.

"Money's worth different amounts every week now, so I'm not sure there is a right amount. Thirty's not wildly wrong, I guess.

...what if he's already indentured?"

"It's a good suggestion... I have some reservations about the state of indentures and their conscionability in the present climate and I'm not sure how quickly that can be alleviated, but it might be unavoidable to solve the problems in parallel rather than in sequence."

Victòria is still pretty confused about what Delegate Fazil said but she's not really sure how to be less confused. "I think most people don't just have thirty gold lying around to spend, I think this would basically always be indenturing the father unless he's really rich. Which is fine if that's what we want, just, I know sometimes nobles don't know how much money is a lot of money."

"This is only if the mother of his child would rather not marry him, if I understand correctly. If he's poor but she'll have him no money has to change hands."

"What does the proposed law do if the woman," it having already been established that she is a reckless promiscuous idiot or no one would be in this situation, "cannot confidently name a single man. Does she get half from each of two men? Do the whores get some coin off a hundred, if they learned their real names?"

"Right, sorry, that's what I meant, it'd be basically always indenturing him unless she wants to marry him. ...Uh, also, what happens if a man gets two different women knocked up at the same time, like the opposite of what Delegate Fazil was thinking? You can't indenture him twice at once."

"That the fine is not easily payable is the intent, yes. We would like most people not to do this, and if they do it, to fix the mistake by marrying. An easily payable fine will not change behavior, not here.

I don't know what to do about multiple possible fathers, and I expect it will come up. If someone impregnates multiple women... indentured for twice the time is simple enough, I suppose. But on that note, I mention again that this whole strategy is uglier if the man is already married to someone else."

"I hesitate about indenturing a married man for betraying his vows. That further impoverishes his family, who are also the victims of his conduct."

"Exactly. But the damage is the same. Certainly if a married man can pay the fine without it, I think he should be made to, even if in some cases this does impoverish the rest of his family."

....are they planning to standardize on vows that promise male fidelity, that seems really optimistic. He's - well, actually not fine with it at all, now, but -

"Osirion lets men have two wives. I am not wholly enthusiastic about this. It has both benefits and very stark drawbacks. But it seems remiss not to even introduce for the case of a married man who has fathered a child outside his marriage."

"I'm not completely opposed to enshrining polygamy but it doesn't help in the least with the women who can't name a specific man so it is at best incomplete."

Now there's an idea.

"...I'm not sure if this makes sense, but... so, the idea here is that men shouldn't have kids they aren't going to care for, and whoever's taking care of the kids should be able to afford for them to eat and so on, right? Is there any reason we couldn't do Delegate Fazil's idea of half each, or some other fraction if it's more than two men? Which man is actually the father is basically going to be luck, it'd be better if you knew for sure which one should pay but it doesn't really seem like you're being unfair to any of them, if a man doesn't want to maybe have to pay the fine he can just sleep with other men. It doesn't work super well with the marriage part but at least it's something."

This will complicate the business of prostitution to an almost hilarious degree but Elorri does not actually have as a desideratum that the business of prostitution go on unimpeded even if he would have expected the Calistrian to.

The Abadaran does! Sort of! "I think it would amount to a fairly extraordinary tax on prostitution, which I don't have a principled objection to as it is a great evil but I notice Osirion and Lastwall both abhor prostitition, presumably checked if they could be rid of it, and allow it anyway, which is suggestive about whether we'll regret that."

"Have we got anybody about who'd know more about why they couldn't be rid of it?"

"Are you, uh — they don't speak Chelish in Osirion, right, are you using 'Evil' to mean something weird—" She is trying to find a way to make sense of what he said and coming up blank.

"...I don't know how Pharasma judges the act of paying a starving desperate woman to endanger herself and injure herself for a man's momentary pleasure, in those cases where it does not result in a child. We know it's Evil when it does. It seems Evil to me regardless."

"I actually think it's fine to make specifically forms of prostitution that can result in children more expensive, though I don't know if this specific proposal is manageable. We're not actually outlawing extramarital sex in general. And I expect that any solution that tries to carve out a complete exception for prostitutes will be useless. Half of women are prostitutes when the last child is starving.

Polygamy is probably worth considering, but - I would honestly kind of expect it to erode the sense that we're trying to nudge people to actually marry each other and not sign some arcane contract justifying their promiscuity, aside from my concerns about it eroding the status of women."

Half of - that's probably an exaggeration but the orphans were very much not an exaggeration - ugh, he misses his wife, maybe he should have brought her only then who would take care of things on the farm -

"It might do that. Awkwardly you do now have a lot of immigrants following the Inquisitor Shawil, some of whom just are married to two women, in a meaningful sense, and who I think it might be wronging to enshrine but one of those marriages in law, but that you could probably fix by recognizing marriages from countries with other customs, without allowing plural marriage in the Chelish system itself."

"It's occurring to me now that when I rode assizes and people presented themselves to me as married I did not... check... and did not encounter any situations where it seemed like it would have helped anything to have a way to check. On this one topic out of all of them I managed to get by on believing what people told me, more or less. I don't think anyone told me he had two wives but it would not have made much difference to most things I ran into."

(Victòria is still pretty confused, but less confused then when she thought he was saying prostitutes were Evil.)

"Saying marriages in other countries still count even if they wouldn't count here seems fine. ...Probably we'd need to be careful about how we write the law, it would be silly to, like, punish someone for breaking the promises we put in our law if that's not what's in the law where they came from."

Half of women are actually only figuratively prostitutes. There are a lot of jobs you can't get if you won't sleep with people, and a lot of people who will give a girlfriend things other than money.

"Well I don't see how you could have checked, we don't - oh, right. Uh, I don't remember which committees I've told what, but Egorian has awkwardly kept the tradition of weddings without keeping the tradition that they can be relied on as a definite commitment. Lots of women have been married lots of times and never divorced anyone, because the marriages have no legal standing necessitating it. I understand that where Sower Soler comes from it's the opposite, people meaningfully marry but there's nothing to mark it but that they move in together.

For this reason I kind of think we should probably not count anyone's existing marriages under any new laws, and any punishments for having children outside of marriage should have a significant pause before they go into effect to give everyone a chance to actually make promises. It makes sense that if we do make laws about it we should probably be sure to acknowledge foreign weddings as legitimate, I can see how it's probably unfair to not."

Llei is quietly trying to work out whether the thing he has is a solution to all of his problems or a ridiculous insult.

"The rest of the case for allowing multiple wives, just for completeness's sake, is that rich men will - barring really very exceptional virtue and good luck of circumstances - not be faithful to their wives, and they will either take second wives or mistresses, and I think both of these typically involve wronging people but the mistresses more inevitably and irredressably so."

"What is it that gets into rich men specifically?" asks Soler incredulously.

Ow.

"I don't know. I don't think it is inevitable, people are perfectly capable of living lives to this standard of virtue and even to higher ones, but I think we're talking about - four rich men in five, who'll take a mistress or a second wife, not the worst third of them. In countries that are not Asmodean Cheliax."

"Which is why the penalty we're looking at is a pure fine," she observes, looking at Llei.

- oh, right, because he suggested that. "Yes. Compensation, I think, is doable. Anything that seems aimed at prevention, among the wealthy, will not pass the floor."

"On the topic of the correct size of fine, I think it is reasonable to be concerned nobility will overestimate the correct size of the fine. Ideally we would like something significant but not ruinous for a professional such as a skilled craftsman, say a cabinetmaker who has finished his journeying but not achieved a high rank in his town's guild. And which remains meaningful for those more wealthy than that but is not, as the Count-Regent says, preventative. Delegate Roig, Fiducia, does thirty gold seem approximately correct, say within a factor of three, for that goal?"

"Approximately, at least, though prices are very much in flux and who knows if it will still be at all reasonable a year from now, much less ten or more. I am still concerned, however, with the case when a man is both poor and already married to another woman."

Well, she still hates Delegate Napaciza and wishes he was dead, and she keeps getting distracted from the meeting imagining hurting him like he tried to hurt Valia, but if he got the amount of money right then he got the amount of money right.

"So I think that ties back to something I was saying on the first day we met, about how we were kind of solving two problems at once, punishing the father for hurting the mother and their child, and making sure the child is okay. And it seems like that's a situation where there's lots of ways to do the first thing that don't require indenturing them, but there's probably not a way to do the second thing just by fining or indenturing the father, if his family doesn't get enough to eat because he's been indentured to pay for a different kid you haven't really helped anything. But I don't know how to fix that, if he doesn't have enough money in the first place to pay for all the kids and he needs to work so his first family has enough to eat."

"So - I don't know whether this defeats the whole purpose, but I want to point out that a huge number of single women who are unemployed and starving with young children now were previously getting along even without men. Two years ago, a lot of them were relying on daycare services, from orphanages that were better-run and safer than they are now, and a huge number of them were gainfully employed. A lot of married women were, too. I worry that shutting down daycare services was part of what made everyone poorer, because, like, thirty percent of work in the cities stopped being done, or something. I don't know if there's a way to allow those who want to work to work again. But we should be thinking about it as an element of the equation, and not assuming that any woman who doesn't have a man in the picture or another woman to live with is necessarily going to end up homeless and starving. Maybe if most of the women are married, it's affordable to do limited daycares for women whose husbands have been sentenced to indenture or conscripted or something."

"Sounds like a problem for the reconvention in forty years, when they get to see how this works out."

" - well, maybe, but actually I think a major element of the current problem is that a lot of the women of today are used to earning their own bread, and right now they can't, so everything is in a state of crisis. I'm not just saying that daycares are nice and that it's nice for women to be able to work, though it is. I'm saying - things have been bad, but the reason they're collapsing right now is that they had a system, and we shut it down. And if we have something that will improve things in most circumstances and move us away from having so many abandoned children, but it and needs a small patch so that it doesn't ruin people who didn't do anything wrong, maybe we can just include a patch for it."

"It seems to me that it would be good to have a charity that supports widows and impoverished wives of criminals but I am not sure why that support should take the form of paying other people to watch their children instead of pensioning them so they can do it."

"I think adequately funded daycares are good because they let women who are suited to a profession pursue it, but maybe pensioning them is simpler? I guess if we pension them they can just pay for childcare, if there's something else they're much better served by doing. I'm slightly worried that if we directly compensate people then we're going to hear about some poor man deliberately indenturing himself so his wife gets support, but maybe there's a number where that doesn't happen."

"That does seem like it is likely to happen wherever various efforts to provide benefits happen but I think starting out there would probably not be enough funding for it to be decisive for many people."

"All right, so maybe if the man is already married we make him face the same penalties as someone else, and we separately have some kind of program to support women whose husbands are indentured for crimes, to take the sting out. That - is, technically, an incentive to marry, I guess. And if he impregnates six women and the term is twelve years or something, maybe we make some amount of indenture or criminal action grounds for divorce, if she wants that."

"I suspect funding care for children would be both cheaper and more reliable at seeing the children taken care of, given the general state of the people of Cheliax. Not to say that the orphanages are presently good care, as Delegate Tallandria made very clear last week, but if they can be staffed adequately and supervised by Good churches, I think we could achieve a good standard of care, and I worry many Chelish mothers do not love their children well enough to achieve that if supplied with money intended for that purpose. Perhaps there is an Abadaran means of assessing the benefit for the mother and the child separately?"

"Mothers love their children and are almost always the best person to care for them, certainly much better than even extraordinarily well-run orphanages."

"The orphanages are hellholes. I don't know what they'd be like if you opened a portal to the elemental plane of gold and quintupled their budgets but they would not be families."

Victòria looks incredibly confused about something Fazil said but hasn't managed to turn that into a question yet.

"Most mothers love their children. If they didn't, they wouldn't keep them, and most of them do, even after the father leaves. They may not love them well, but neither do I, not even at my well-rested best.

I do think that there's is a very big difference between leaving a child at an orphanage forever and leaving him there for a few hours. Most children who used daytime daycare two years ago had mothers, and many had fathers, too. They would drop them off in the morning, and pick them up in the evening, like for school. Sometimes an older sibling would pick them up in the afternoon when school let out. Following the fall of Egorian, daycare services were suspended, and the rebuilt orphanages now serve only children who have been utterly abandoned, with a quarter as much use and a tenth as much staffing. I'm not going to tell you they used to be nice, because they weren't, but in many cases daycare services were what allowed a mother to keep a child."

"Oh, if you just meant children should be raised by mothers who care about them enough to keep them that makes sense, I was thinking — I don't know how I'd tell, and it doesn't really seem like it would've helped anything that happened to me growing up if she felt different — but she didn't smother me even though it would've made things a lot easier for her, and I agree that that's better than if she had. 

...Uh, anyways, I didn't grow up in the cities, but the daycares sound kind of like... when a bunch of women with really little kids take turns about watching them so they can all get their work done, which we did have back home. And I don't really see why that would be a problem even if it meant most people weren't usually being watched by their mother? But I'm still not sure I understood you right."

"It's very normal for children to be watched by siblings, or cousins, or neighbors, and doing that for pay isn't a problem. I just am bothered by the idea that the hope is to get the children away from their mothers to a state or church-run institution. That seems like a tragic last resort, to me, and not in the children's interests even if their mothers are products of Asmodean Cheliax."

"....is there some way to, like, encourage people to pool together and watch each other's kids even if the state isn't doing it directly? I don't know how much it would help the unemployment situation, but - a lot of people don't trust each other, see, and if you leave the baby at the government daycare all day you at least get a baby back at the end of it."

"I surely could not trust any of my cousins or nieces to watch my children, not that I personally need to. I doubt most of my duchy's families could either, though my ancestral county is better. Church orphanages could be made more reliable."

It's not really about trust, it's about how you've got to do something with them or you won't be able to get all your work done. Her lord didn't force his servants to kill their babies the way some lords did, she's pretty sure that's part of how her mother wound up there, but that didn't mean he'd let anyone get away with not doing their job. If you're out in the middle of nowhere with no daycares the question is whether you trust other people to be better than not having anyone watching them at all — though actually, he's a nobleman, probably his family is worse than normal people.

"...For what you just said about most of your duchy's families, do you mean all the families or just the noble families? I don't know how it is in the cities but most people back home wouldn't... murder your kid... if you were going in on watching each other's kids. ...If there are a lot of people in the cities murdering each other's kids that seems like something we should be doing something about right away!"

He looks incredulous at the question and blinks in confusion

"...All the families I know of, yes. Murder is almost entirely irrelevant and beside the point; even the most unpleasant would expect to be killed for it and refrain. Negligence can kill, and cause much other harm."

"I don't think I can possibly be understanding you right. It sounds like you mean to tell us that if you left a toddler with your cousin for a day, you'd expect them to neglect it to death. Are your cousins all... six years old, or... presently in active war zones, or..."

"Well, you can just say you'll watch it and then ignore it all day." Not that she would know anything about that.

"I'm also confused but I'm not sure if... I don't know how to explain this... I'm not sure if I'm confused because of people being less Evil to their families where I lived for some reason, or because of — something like whipping people for doing badly in school, bad things that I thought were just normal everywhere. Could you maybe... say what you'd be scared of, if someone asked their neighbor to watch their kids, or was trying to watch their own kids, that you think wouldn't happen if there were Good priests watching the daycares?"

(Her mother didn't leave her with the servants' kids, actually, at least not that she can remember, but it's not like she remembers being a really little kid. And her mother was a wizard, anyways, little kids aren't going to make that much harder if they can sleep through the night... she's not actually sure what her mother did when she was a baby, now that she thinks about it, but it must've been something.)

"A child gets into the kitchen unwatched and gets cut with a large knife, and there is no cleric to keep the wound from festering. Same but with an unguarded fire. A fall in a well. A kick to the head from a goat or horse. Tries to swim in a river and can't handle the current. Or the sea and the tide. Can handle the tide, or a lake, but gets exhausted and no one notices them starting to drown. A hunting dog who's calm in company it knows but not with strangers, who gets riled up and bites."

"I think I might've lost track of your argument here but — when Korva told us about the orphanages it sounded like that sort of thing happened a lot there, even more often than it would've back home?" She's not sure how often it happened back home. Kids die for all sorts of reasons and she mostly wasn't keeping track. "And you're saying... if there are Good clerics, they'll be able to heal the kids up so they don't die of it, and it's... in the cities, at least... easier to have a Good cleric in every daycare than a Good cleric in every group of people that are watching multiple kids, because there's fewer daycares?"

"We at least don't want to participate in anything the orphanages are doing besides to clear them out. I guess we could stop by and channel there every day but I'd go mad if I had to spend much time there and keep going back over and over."

"The Church of Abadar runs orphanages in Osirion and these are regarded as a great success as they produced the great Inquisitor Shawil. But they are much less expensive in Osirion because the circumstances that produce abandoned children are much rarer."

"How are those funded, at whatever level of expense they do require?"

"The state pays for them on the theory that if the children of prostitutes and vagrants are well-raised they will turn out assets to the state and not criminals and liabilities, and I suppose also now the theory that perhaps you get the very best Abadarans that way."

This committee is so confusing. Victòria is pretty sure it was not this confusing yesterday.

"That doesn't really sound like an argument that they're bad for the children."

"Yes, the Osirian government doesn't believe that they're bad for the sort of child who gets abandoned to them or they would not run them."

"How's Osirion avoid the sort of problems Korva was talking about on the first day — uh, I guess you weren't here—" She looks at Korva.

"Sorry, which problem? Just the thing where they're horrible? I'd expect if very few children are abandoned then it isn't very hard to take good care of the ones that are, since it's way less work."

"I think that's the key, yes."

"Yeah, that's the one I meant, sorry if I asked that badly."

"If we can have orphanages run by Good churches, we can trust that they will take good care of them; or if they cannot because there are too many and their resources too few, to say so and let us know of the problem. We cannot have that trust with the general public, not today, and not for years to come; if mothers and aunts and neighbors are being neglectful because they do not care about the children enough to ensure their welfare, and I think we must assume that in great numbers they will be, we will never hear of it. The children will suffer from that negligence, those being paid will pocket profits as if they were taking good care, and it will continue out of sight. That is why I am more optimistic about paying for better orphanages than about giving stipends for mothers."

"The resources are too few. I am letting you know about that problem right now. And the thing I do about it is I guilt people into adopting the orphans. Even a chance at something like a family is better than those places."

"The ones we have now are terrible. No one here disputes that, after what we heard from Delegate Tallandria last week - I have scribed copies if our new members want to read it, but I will warn you that it is long and very unpleasant reading. But so are all too many of our families. And the alternative is not, usually, a family. If a family wants to adopt children, that would still be encouraged. It is a mother without a husband, and without close family she can trust, because few women have that even before they have a child out of wedlock. Without neighbors she can trust, because few Chelish people can trust their neighbors at all. I do not think money can fix any of that; time can, I hope, but not money. I am optimistic that money can produce good orphanages that can take good care of children, while their mothers work or otherwise; in Osirion it appears it can. It is not the solution to all our problems, and we will still need to work on encouraging there to be fewer children abandoned this way and more marriages and families. But for the problem of what to do for the children without a father once they exist, I think trying to fix the orphanages to provide good childcare is better for them than a pension for their mothers."

Headshake headshake.

"I don't know. I think we should work on improving the orphanages too, obviously. But right now, a child with just a mother is still usually better off than an orphan. I like the idea of giving compensation to whoever is actually raising the child, whether that's the mother or the orphanage or someone else. ....though, now that I think of it, it probably will result in some people adopting kids and then neglecting them for the sake of a one time payment, but - ugh. I'm not actually sure that's worse than what we do now."

"I'd say most likely it isn't, but it's still worse than what we'd be doing if we gave the orphanages the money and supervision to care for orphans and day-stay children well. I have faith."

"Do you also have money."

"If we can bring down the number of children who need it, we have it already. And the alternative needs just as much money."

"So, I don't know what the orphanages in Osirion and Andoran are like, maybe they're way better than Korva's orphanage, I've never been. 

But my mother didn't have a husband, and we weren't living anywhere near any of her family, and as far as I know the other people around weren't unusually trustworthy — I could be wrong about that, I don't really know how trustworthy people in most places are. And there's definitely some things she did wrong, but I don't remember ever almost dying because of something she did, and she was definitely way way better than the orphanages we have now.

And maybe I'm just not imagining well enough, maybe there's things Good people do when they're caring for children that I haven't thought of, but at least where I come from, people mostly didn't leave their kids in dangerous situations by accident? Like, I don't know the right words to explain it, but even if someone's an Asmodean, that doesn't make them stupid, they can still... do things that they want? And so if they want their kid alive — which they do, if they didn't care about their kid being alive they'd've smothered them, or maybe left them at an orphanage if it's in the cities — they can still watch their kid, even if they're Evil. Even if someone's really really Evil they can still figure out that it's a bad idea to let their kid crawl into a fire.

And I do think it's harder to find someone who'll definitely do a good job of watching them, but — back home the way it worked out was, if someone had done a really bad job of watching the kids and other people found out, then they'd kick her out of the group of women who were watching each other's kids, and then she'd have no one to watch her kid while she was doing her work and she'd get fired. I don't know if bringing back the daycares would be better or worse than that, if you had Good priests running them, but I think — maybe I'm wrong, maybe people where you're from are a lot worse than people where I'm from — I think even if a woman grew up under Asmodeus she can probably make sure children she's watching don't literally die, if she's trying to.

...probably that would stop applying if we started paying people to adopt random kids, I do think Korva's right about that. Maybe if you were giving them the things that they needed to take care of a kid, rather than just money."

"I expect that most arrangements like that only have someone kicked out when they cause permanent harm, because most Chelish mothers are not very attentive to anything less out of their sight, and that significant but impermanent harm happens quite a lot, because most Chelish women being asked to do it do not care enough to attend and prevent it. I think everywhere I've seen in my duchy except my ancestral county and one of its neighbors on the shore, I would not trust my toddlers to anything like that, if I had to choose. Death from negligence is just the most obvious harm that is impossible to ignore."

But he does note a point in favor of 'Ferrer isn't useless' in his mental book.

Nod. She's not really sure of all the ways people could hurt kids, accidentally or on purpose, but that explanation seems a lot more plausible than people just accidentally letting kids crawl into fires for no reason just because they're Evil.

She looks at Korva. "...How many Good priests would we actually need to have enough of them for all the orphanages and daycares? If we assume it's just the ones that were already around before the war, and then also if we assume we're adding a bunch more daycares outside the cities."

"I couldn't guess how many orphanages in the country. It would have to be in the thousands, maybe tens of thousands. I know the money is about six million, and that's with skeleton crews and no daycare."

"...the paladin assizes are supposed to have downtime one month in four. This is an extraordinary amount. Because otherwise we fall at elevated rates; it's morally injurious work. Sower, are you concerned that it would be like that for clerics trying to run orphanages?"

"If, what, you made me work at one? Deadeye's empty quiver, I don't know, but you'd have to make me."

"Uh, Korva, just to be clear, did you mean thousands of orphanages or thousands of priests? And if you meant the first thing how many priests would each orphanage need to stop having the problems you were talking about?"

"Lay priests of Sarenrae run them in Andoran, for the most part, one per orphanage for smaller ones; some other churches and some empowered priests supervising, intermittently except at the biggest ones. I can't possibly beg for them to import enough for this, but they would have less problem with caring for children during the day than keeping them, if anything, and that's what we expect to increase this way. I don't really understand the Sower's objection to day care, but I wouldn't expect it to extend to any Good church but Erastil."

"I walk into one of those places and the only thing in my head is to get every one of those kids out of there."

"A number of different churches run orphanages in Osirion but I share the sentiment that -  inasmuch as they're not a horror it is only because it is exceptionally rare for anyone to need resort to them. I would not be excited about any program to have them play a significant role in the rearing of a nation's children."

"I meant orphanages. I figure one priest per orphanage is probably enough? You'd need to hire other staff, definitely, but I don't see how you could possibly hire entirely clerics. I don't think you could even hire enough for every orphanage to have one, but certainly not more than that. The current cost is with lots of the labor coming from young women who don't have any other skills, besides maybe domestic service ones. When we offered daycare a lot of the workers were women who themselves had children and kept them in the daycare while they worked. That's what I did. Then you'd have a housekeeper and some nursemaids who lived there full time, and have the older children help at night.

- Conde, do you have the same concerns about daycare if all the women working there themselves have children at the daycare? It wasn't required, but it was common, before we fired most of them."

"That seems much more reasonable to me and perhaps the best that can be done in places where no one has their family to fall back on."

Victòria really doesn't like Sarenrae. As far as she can tell Sarenrae thinks you should never treat anyone differently for trying to hurt people, no matter how badly they did it, even if they don't regret it at all and are still going around trying to hurt people, to the point that she doesn't even think you should be angry at people for trying to kill your best friend even if they did it yesterday.

...Now she's angry again, and not even at Delegate Napaciza, who unambiguously deserves it.

It hurts to think around the anger but probably she should try anyway, this seems like — not the sort of situation where being angry is useful for figuring out what to do—

If you somehow had a Good person who just — didn't understand how terrible some people were, or something — and agreed with Sarenrae, and they were working at an orphanage... probably that would be okay? A little kid's not going to do something really Evil, them hurting someone isn't really the same thing as an adult that should know better, you could just have the normal orphanage workers punish the kids for actual misbehavior. They'd probably teach the kids to think a bunch of stupid things, but her mom taught her to worship Asmodeus and that didn't stick.

And it does sound like the orphanages are really bad right now, and could definitely use more people, even if those people follow a really stupid goddess. On the other hand, it sounds like the orphanages are really bad right now, which is going to make it pretty hard for one person to fix them no matter who that person is.

"I think... given how Korva described them on the first day, one priest per orphanage — especially if they don't even have magic, like Delegate Noguera i Mata was saying — wouldn't really be enough to make them not terrible, even if the priest was a really good person. Like, I think it would help, but that still sounds a lot worse for the kids than basically anything besides being murdered. But she's the one who's actually worked at one, so if she thinks that's wrong I'd trust her guess more than mine."

"I think we're over time. Is there anything to be taken home from here besides that the Judiciary committee needs to prioritize getting civil courts up?"

"I'll see if any of the Sarenrite immigrants at the Burning Blades have any direct experience and can come by, but I don't expect to succeed and can't think of anything else."

"I can't think of anything else either." Maybe she can try to talk to Raimon about how this would work with whores but she's pretty sure she still doesn't understand what Delegate Fazil's been saying there.

"Alright, then that seems good for today. May tomorrow morning be even less exciting and may the sun shine on us all."