"Well, that should be illegal. ...is that also the case in Taldor, does anyone know?"

"...It is not standard practice in Taldor to require your servants to have sex with you as part of the contract. Some employers do coerce or threaten their servants into sex, but I don't think most of them would bother to write it down as a term of employment."

"The Duke of Gandia drunkenly seduced one of my servants at a dinner party last week and I'm irritated with him regardless but I'd be more irritated if he'd believed she had some employment obligation not to refuse him."

"I don't expect he did, but if it was standard in the part of Taldor where he grew up I might not have heard."

"I don't know much of his family, though I know it's his father who was chosen by the Queen as the Duke," and so there is every reason to believe he's just a perfectly average Taldane noble and no reason to believe he's withstood particular scrutiny. Her tone is lightly disdainful; of course the situation is slightly embarrassing for her but it's more embarrassing for the Duke of Gandisa, and they're trying to notice patterns and adopt better general rules, here.

"Fairly standard hospitality in much of infernal Cheliax, but even then, impolite without an offer. And that wouldn't particularly explain the Duke's behavior."

All the infernal nobles have been on best behavior with her staff. She is not going to say that, it wouldn't land as a compliment.

Did she believe she was obliged? Wouldn't be unlikely even in Kintargo, and they're a lot closer to Egorian here and Chelam.

Jilia weighs mentioning the question and decides that it's better to suggest it to Carlota privately later. 

Xavier frowns the frown of someone whose subordinates are behaving badly. "I am not acquainted with the current Duke of Gandisa. His father was a man of ability, but age caught up to him, and the son I have only met twice and both times briefly."

"Maybe he has more sense sober, but I have not seen him sober," says Carlota, which is as much as she's willing to insult the man. "In any event I speak with much less confidence when I speak to how men see these matters."

"Mmm," he says, because he really doesn't want to defend him but doesn't want to insult him either. "I do not think that most men see their mistresses as common prostitutes. I have heard that most women of similar social class to them console their envy at a great man's mistress by telling each other that she is equivalent to one, however."

"That I can understand. But that description sounds much less like a triumph of civilization that we should all encourage and participate in. I do not generally advise people to cultivate envy to console."

"I would defend envy as sometimes an engine of civilization but probably not when it takes that form. The thing that is the engine of civilization is the overall incentives, which have to be towards marriage."

"I think the women are already quite incentivized to marry, really, in the sense of finding someone who will agree not to leave them. It's just that extracting a promise from someone doesn't mean anything without very long experience, unless you mean to pay the devils to enforce it. I have known several women who had weddings and told people they had husbands, and then a year later they were alone again. If getting married did something, besides admitting that you had an expectation which you would be embarrassed to have proven wrong, then I might judge women for skipping it. If there is a simple standard contract that both does anything at all to prevent the parties from leaving, and doesn't reliably turn one or the other into a slave, then I am quite willing to insist that people sign it before having children with someone. But until then, I am too busy judging the men who convince women to rely on them, and then leave."

"That is very reasonable. I would support serious criminal penalties for abandonment, and I hope you are right that women will gladly choose marriage as soon as it is meaningfully offered to them."

"You have to make it not - contemptible, to trust a man. I don't think it's wise to tell people it's their duty to be stupid. But if you make it not stupid -"

"Penalties for abandonment. Penalties for bastards. A complete ban on all contracts that offer men the benefits of marriage with no corresponding commitment. Maybe we'll need more after that, but - maybe that'll be enough."

"Andoran still has problems, yes? Does Andoran do all of that?"

"I believe so but also Andoran has thrown out the concept of duty and obligation near-entirely as Asmodean. I'm not surprised that produces lots of abandoned children."

"I think we want to make the legal minimum contract as simple as possible. Something people won't have any good reason to balk at, unless they are in fact planning to abandon their children. Take the loyalty clause out entirely, and make it entirely about shared obligations towards children and not abandoning the other, at least not without mutual agreement or some list of poor behaviors from a spouse. Obviously tell people they're perfectly welcome to make other promises on top of that, and they're perfectly welcome to get custom contracts to enforce them, if they dare. But if it doesn't include a promise to care for the children, it's not a marriage, and there are penalties for the person who sired children without committing to take care of them. I think I'd want to write it without reference to the sex of the person who did so, too, if I can think how. I don't think there are a lot of female wizards going around impregnating people, but I don't see why they should get away with it if they do."

"Or if the Archmage Naima gives them a new form. I think you do want - not just shared obligations towards the children, something about trying to do right by each other, and I think you need the woman's commitment to fidelity so that her husband can expect future children to also be his obligation, but I can see why you might want to just leave it at that for the legal minimum. And then there should be a - Church marriage - that is the set of vows expected to actually be good for people."

"I think you're being somewhat unfair to Andoran. They certainly didn't try to convince anyone to reengage in a project of Civilization or Law, not even Codwin, and they started with Chelish people, who have little notion of duty or obligation that isn't done from fear of punishment, so of course they didn't consider that as a priority. We can, and given the results on the children we clearly should to some degree, but it will be difficult to do, for mostly the same reasons they didn't."

"I could go for 'try to do right by one another' if the civil courts were staffed by reasonable people, but it seems very vacuous. Admittedly, so is what counts as abandonment and failure to provide for children, so we'll need to handle that somehow anyway.

Requiring female fidelity would prevent people from making contracts that explicitly don't require it, which apparently some people have, and I thought people were leaning against that? And if we're allowing multiple wives, I don't want to legally ban multiple husbands, even if almost no one does that. Maybe some woman has heroically resurrected her dead first husband in the last year. They can always negotiate for more terms, but anything we put on the list is something we're saying people aren't allowed not to promise. Maybe we can do a legal minimum and then publish a list of more reasonable standard promises separately, or something."

"It seems ugly, to me, to suggest to women that they should agree to live as a man's wife off only his promise to support the children. I worry that women who might otherwise have held out for more won't. I do take your point that perhaps the default a couple is recommended if they come in to get married can be different from the legal minimum to not count as siring bastards."

"What size of fine are you discussing, for siring bastards? Something rich men can easily pay, I presume."