"Good to meet you! You're a delegate, right?"

"Yes, I'm Delegate Jaume Agramunt. They wanted native-born Abadarans for the religious seats and I think I am the only one who is both longstanding and not returned from abroad since the war... Do you prefer Cicerone or Conde?"

"Conde, when we're speaking Chelish."

Nod. "I booked this appointment because - I channel negative and have not been able to shift it, and have historically considered this a nearly inevitable product of my environment because it also eventually happened to every foreign Abadaran who rotated in to staff the bank in Corentyn during my time there, but my understanding is that you have a Good reading despite a Neutral prevailing ethos in Osirion, and so the analogous achievement must not be impossible."

"I believe I'm Lawful Good, yes. I do not know myself to be doing anything wildly different than everybody else - my adventuring party was mostly Neutral, despite doing most of the same things - but am happy to answer questions about my outlook and what I do with my resources and so on. I suppose I always thought of the fact that everyone who went to work in Cheliax came out Evil even without doing any particular Evil as an obvious product of - they were enabling a lot of Evil, and if they hadn't been the Asmodeans wouldn't have let them into the country, for all the reasons they barred almost every other priesthood. If you go do the accounts for an overseas slave-trading business I expect you'll end up Evil even if you're just doing the accounts, because the accounts matter to the success and downstream of that the scale of the business, or they wouldn't be hiring an Abadaran to do them."

"I manumitted my last slave the other day. It did not obviously help, though that wasn't why I was doing it.

"They wanted me for the Asmodean church and I would count myself adequately compensated merely to have avoided that but I would certainly still prefer not to go to Hell."

"I think most people would. I am sure you have encountered already the recommendation you could donate lots of money to Good causes. Unappealing, or just unaffordable?"

"I have considered it and will probably do it in the absence of less expensive options but my understanding - perhaps it is incorrect - is that this works less well and therefore at a worse exchange rate if done mechanically rather than out of some sincere Good intent, which I am unsure how to come by."

"I don't actually particularly think of myself as giving to charity at all. I think of it as spending on things I want, some of which are things like 'Pedraza being a good place for my children to grow up', and some of which are things like 'a rich peaceful world where it's worth investing in all your children as none of them are going to die young'. Those are Good things, but I don't want them particularly differently from how I want other things, and I don't buy them differently either."

"Do you think that's what produced your alignment?"

"Most likely? I have not noticed any obvious other places where I spend my resources very differently from my friends or from others in the Church."

"Do you think it likely that slavery in particular is a major source of Chelish Evil? I am on the committee about it and have been operating under the assumption that it is a grave risk to the economy to expropriate slaves when it's already delicate with the slow collapse of paper currency and the damage from the war - and then the port closure - and I did not succeed at pushing a policy of slowing the emancipation to something safer but I did attempt it -"

"I find all policy questions extremely difficult to think about and have been abstaining on most of them. For the most part I would really expect people working for themselves to produce much more value - though not necessarily more taxable value - than people whose work is chosen by others. I do think having a constitutional convention increases investment uncertainty a great deal and that's a bad thing. I don't know what to do about it. It's the uncertainty that's really fatal, though. If we knew what the law would be in five years we could just account for it, and even if it's a stupid law commerce finds ways to route around stupid laws.

What were you imagining would happen that would be good if emancipation were slower?"

"The policy I was trying to offer as a compromise was banning the sale of slaves to buyers other than manumission-inclined interests, with the idea that any business which was shuttering anyway would rid itself of slaves in that manner, any new business starting up would be unable to source slaves and would begin by relying on free labor, and meanwhile shipsful of steeply discounted halflings would stop departing for Katapesh. This would have been slow to exactly the extent that interests inclined to purchase and manumit slaves would take time to come up with the money to match that interest. Money is tight almost everywhere in Cheliax right now, and half of the money is Evil and many people are very confused about what to do about that, and I believe that it should be prioritized toward emancipation to the extent that someone voluntarily buys that with money of their own.

"I expect that with halfling slavery ended so abruptly instead, some concerns which were not financially or prognostically able to shift their employment practices in anticipation were ruined; and more generally anyone who imagined that the new regime would be disinclined to steal their possessions is now disabused of that trust and may well not expect the theft to stop with slaves - reasonably enough, since it might not - and therefore be disinclined to investment that relies on continued ownership of anything."

"The interests inclined to manumit slaves have no way to purchase it no matter how highly they value it because they are ...slaves. If you had a country with that policy where ninety percent of people were enslaved and despised their slavery but none of the free people cared much I think slavery would endure forever, with some loan arrangement springing right up to evade the sale prohibitions, not because there was no mass of value that people were voluntarily willing to dedicate to abolition but because that value was being ongoingly expropriated."

"There are manumitted slaves - I had no objection to it becoming legal to manumit halflings - and churches and Andorens and damned people casting about for Good to do. Your point about the loan arrangement is well taken, thoguh."

"I agree that in fact the interest that free people have in paying for abolition isn't zero, but I would not want to adopt a policy that would result in slavery forever except insofar as free people happened to altruistically want to end it, that amounts to presuming it's entirely fine to steal from people so long as you steal everything and they are left without any currency with which to register their preference to not be stolen from."

"There was a pamphlet put about that claimed to be a letter from the Archbanker of Molthune, did you see it -"

"I have been avoiding the pamphlets but I've met the Archbanker and think highly of her."

"It had some interesting arguments principally about hereditary slavery, which I should perhaps reflect on more... What I wound up doing with my slave is allowing him to earn money on the side toward his freedom but I wound up waiving almost all of it after a very short time. Something obliging owners to make this possible would have been less injurious to the premise that people own things they buy and which are not recent stolen goods but have been property for generations."

Have you met Chelish people? he wants to ask but firstly it would be rude and secondly Jaume is a Chelish person. 

"An important difference between buying people and buying things that are not people is that the people will frequently run away and engage in activities that would be self-defense if they were free including where they rise to killing. The present state has not in fact been paid any money at all for lifelong enforcement of this contract. The present state does not have immediate prospects of being paid for such enforcement. The church would charge an enormous amount if asked to provide lifelong enforcement of this contract in some place where the law did not provide for it as a default.

It seems to me that 'the new state of Cheliax inherits from the Asmodean state the obligation of lifelong enforcement of this specific contract' is on weaker grounds than the new state inheriting most of the old state's debts, and in fact I don't think it paid any of the old state's debts that weren't related to the Worldwound. The new state does not really have anything to gain by lifelong enforcement of this contract. The new state never represented that it would provide such enforcement. Conquest, in general, is injurious to the premise that people own things, but where ownership of a thing requires someone promising to track down and kill the thing for you if it runs away, if the someone who promised that is gone, I am not sure why you're entitled to a free replacement."

"Hhm.

"But of course people still own - goats, which are prone to escape, and their ownership of those goats is not premised on there being an arm of the state which recaptures goats, nor even on the operation of the still-dormant civil courts, but on the - hm.

"Thank you."

"I think that in Katapesh this specific line of argument would be on weak ground because the organizations that recapture slaves like the neighbors that recapture goats are indeed all private, and take bids. That is not how Asmodean Cheliax did things because it would in fact naturally bring about the end of slavery if it got too expensive to enforce, and I think Asmodean Cheliax wanted slavery independent of the costs of enforcement."

"I suppose it did."

"Also most of the ways to make enforcement cheaper are things like 'if you catch someone trying to leave, torture their whole family to death', which are definitely very Evil, and if you ban those enforcement costs get even higher."