Delegate Saiville,

I spoke to another delegate this afternoon who thought that we might have had a misunderstanding during our discussion of self-defense and how people usually react to being attacked. She suggested that I write to you to clear it up, in case you were saying something different than I thought.

It sounded to me like you were saying that in the first moment after someone notices they've been attacked for no good reason, their soul's first instinct will be to tell you not to hurt them. (It also seemed to me that you were claiming lots of other things based on that assumption.) I believe that for most people, their soul's first instinct will be to make it stop, and that if you speak to people from countries other than Lastwall (especially people who've been attacked for no good reason) most of them would agree with me. I used to teach self-defense lessons to girls back home, and none of them were priestesses of Calistria, so I'm not just going based off of what Calistrians think here.

When I spoke with the other delegate, she pointed out that stopping someone from attacking you doesn't always mean hurting them. I agree with that — there are lots of situations where it won't help anything to try to fight, but you might be able to run away if you try. It hadn't occurred to me that anyone might take me as saying that the best way to defend yourself was always going to be to hurt the other person no matter what the circumstances were. I think different people's souls have different instincts about when to fight and when to run and when to do something else, but that no matter which idea their souls reach for, their first instinct, before they have time to think through any plans, will be that they want their attacker to stop. 

I think that even after the first moment, most people who are being attacked won't be trying to avoid hurting their attacker, or even thinking about how to avoid hurting them, no matter what their plan is, but I think there are probably more people who would care about not hurting their attacker once they have the chance to think through a plan than whose soul's first instinct would be to avoid hurting their attacker. (Even separate from wanting to hurt someone who attacked me for no good reason, I don't think it would be a good idea to try not to hurt someone who was attacking me, but it might be different for men.)

I think it's pretty likely that the Rights Committee will want to ask you more questions about Lastwall when we write our other laws, so it would be helpful to know if I misunderstood what you were actually saying. (If I understood you right the first time that would also be good to know.)

Sincerely,

Victòria Ferrer