"So it seems kind of like Lastwall is saying — look, people aren't all the same, and sometimes the way they are is surprising, you can't just assume that they work the way you'd expect them to work, you have to check really carefully. And then they're out here saying — look, you can make a cathedral out of sand — and when you say 'okay, show me the cathedral' they... I think maybe the cathedral metaphor doesn't exactly make sense for this point. They're saying you've got to check really carefully and not just assume obvious things like 'criminals are more scared of being flayed alive than of hanging' are true, but they... didn't actually check carefully, even if they're telling the truth about the numbers they don't have a way of knowing whether their amount of murders is because how you execute people doesn't matter for deterrence or because of some other reason."

And it's really frustrating when they act like people are Evil for not just blindly trusting that you can build a cathedral out of sand but she's really said a kind of pathetic amount about that already.

"The thing that they checked was - do they have more crime than other places, using Iomedae's justice system, which sharply limits punishments to require more mercy and gentleness than most places do. And they have much less crime than other places. You could still assume this was for other reasons, of course, but - it means it's worth checking in more places, to have a chance at achieving the Good we're looking for. This is also what the archduke of Menador was saying; he adopted Iomedaean recommendations in Menador and did not find that there were more crimes."

"...but that could also be for other reasons. Like maybe people do less crime if they aren't trying to be Asmodeans, or something."

"Is that about Lastwall or about Menador?"

"Menador. For Lastwall I'd just assume that obviously you get less crime if almost everyone's Lawful Good. ...I guess also I never specifically made sure of whether Lastwall just ensorcels everyone to listen to Iomedae but I'm pretty sure the pamphlet that said that was making things up."

"I am pretty sure that they do not do that. But on the topic of everyone being Lawful Good - the things Iomedae did and Lastwall refined are things that, you can tell because they checked, work to make most people Lawful Good. I suppose I don't know if you think that's a worthy thing to aim for."

"...well, I think it's good to aim for everyone to be Good. I don't think it's good to aim for everyone to be Lawful, if the law says you have to do something Evil you shouldn't follow it. ... Probably if you had a country where everyone is Good, even the government, plenty of people would end up Lawful Good by accident? But if I were setting up a country all by myself for some reason I wouldn't be trying to make everyone Lawful."

"I think it'd be pretty hard for a country to aim for everyone being Chaotic Good, possibly even Neutral Good, just because of how countries work, but I suppose if I really wanted to see how it would be done I'd talk to - elves, perhaps, they're mostly Chaotic Good -

"Anyway. Because hurting people is never good, if you're hoping to help everyone be Good, it's counterproductive to have there be any more hurting people than you absolutely need enshrined in law. And reasonable people can disagree about how much you absolutely need, but the Good goal is to hurt people as little as possible."

"...but the Lastwall punishment rules don't even do that." Even given that they're inexplicably trying not to hurt murderers and rapists and so on!!!

"It's possible some place could manage with even less hurting people. I would love to see it done and would rejoice if it worked. Lastwall is actually ill positioned to make such an experiment now when it's already long-established because that kind of thing can be hard on people's Law, and Lastwall is full of people who care very much about that; but Cheliax must and therefore can perform many experiments, and we are called upon to shape them."

"...it sounds to me like you're saying that Lastwall cares more about making sure people are Lawful than about making sure people are Good, is that right?"

"No. But they do care about Law, and it can be fragile, and they will take different kinds of risks for that reason."

A lot of the parts make sense individually, at least if she just takes it for granted that they really don't like hurting criminals for some reason, but when she tries to line up the reasoning there with the discussion in committee she the arguments on the floor it doesn't really feel like it all fits together quite right. ...Well, maybe it does, actually, if she assumes that Delegate Cansellarion and the people backing him were just saying whatever they thought would get people to vote down the punishments law, instead of thinking about whether it actually made sense. But there's really not a good way to just ask if they were doing that.

"I think maybe — with what you were saying earlier about how different people have had different lives, and so they notice different things more — people from Lastwall, or Molthune, or other countries where it's not common for people to just hurt innocent people because they can, sometimes don't notice all the ways that it can hurt people if you give someone a punishment that's a lot smaller than than what they did."

"Please tell me about that, it's genuinely possible we're missing something."

She hadn't actually been expecting that.

"Oh.

Uh, I don't have a list, so I might forget something. And I might not be able to explain all of them well. And I know a lot more about how things were back home, so some of this might not apply everywhere. And probably lots of these are things you're thinking about and it just hasn't come up yet.

I think — I assume this is one of the things you're thinking about when you're riding around to be the courts, but — when you're talking about reasons why you might hurt people you talk a lot more about deterrence and not so much about protecting all the people who might get hurt later, if you're scared you'll hurt someone who did something really awful too much. Even if there's someone who cares so much about murdering innocent people or forcing themself on people or torturing people in the name of Hell that they wouldn't have been deterred no matter what the punishment was, they still can't hurt people if they're dead. And if you let them live then maybe next time they'll be carefuller not to get caught, or even if they stop breaking the law there's lots of ways to hurt people that aren't illegal yet — and if they've got a guess about who told them, they might target that person specifically, which — I mean, it would suck a lot no matter what, but it seems like that would suck extra much.

And I assume you'd execute them if it was obvious they were going to keep hurting people, but — well, sometimes it seems like paladins are... really hopeful, that they can get people to stop people from doing bad things just by telling them not to. And I think it's a sort of being hopeful that's going to get other people hurt, people who didn't do anything wrong.

—Uh, that's not the only thing, lots of them are less obvious than that, but I think maybe it makes more sense to go one by one rather than asking you to remember them all at once."

"You're right, I haven't been talking about that much. I was - relatively reluctant to execute people on assizes, since practically every Chelish criminal who comes to my attention is going to an Evil afterlife, and also since if I were as strict as I would be in a healthier society I'd be orphaning virtually every child in many of the villages I passed through, children who also didn't do anything wrong and have no other prospects of support. That's a major reason why we were sent out with so many mitigating considerations to apply. But if there's no realistic prospect that someone dangerous will be stopped by any other means, a swift execution is sometimes the best we know how to do. Imprisonment would also work but it's - such a luxury, to be able to do it, and I don't know if it will be possible in many places. I did work very hard to keep it unguessable who came to me with information but that only means I didn't leak the information, not that the accusers themselves didn't do so.

"I appreciate going one at a time."

Every adult in a whole village?? Victòria doesn't think most of the people she knew growing up have done anything they deserve to die for, or most of the sortitions here. Maybe Delegate Jornet was visiting some especially bad villages? Maybe places that didn't use to be ruled by Asmodeus execute people for lots of things Victòria doesn't think people should die for?

"Before I move on — uh, you brought up 'no realistic prospect' of someone being stopped some other way, and maybe I misunderstood I think that's... a rule that's too strict? Probably lots of the time you're not going to be sure, and... if you think it's a coinflip whether someone keeps doing terrible things to people, it sounds really awful to decide that they should be the one who definitely doesn't get hurt, rather than their future victims."

...Feliu guessed that he could just explain to her why it was stupid to burn down the school and it'd work. And he was right, only she's not sure how he could have guessed except by being a hopeful-paladin sort of person, but — well, he was right. And also the thing she did was "burning down an Asmodean school" rather than "murdering an innocent person."

"And not saying where you heard only helps if it's a crime more than one person knew about, unless you don't tell someone what they're being punished for, which sounds like" some kind of awful Asmodean game "the sort of thing that'd be really bad for deterrence."

"Yes, it mostly only helped with the kinds of crimes where everyone knew. I... didn't have a strict probability I was aiming for, when deciding how strict to be, because there were usually a lot of other factors, like whether they had children or anyone else they were supporting, and whether we were close enough to a town that I could bring them with me to that town and follow up there instead of having to do everything on the spot - but if you're envisioning me leaving people alive when I thought they were a coinflip away from committing more murder you're mistaken, most of the murderers I tried were doing infanticide and they were among the likeliest to also have children they were looking after, a lot of people don't murder all their babies and infanticide in particular was in large part people not being aware that babies count."

"...Well, I'm not sure if" how does she explain this without saying 'deserve' "people should be executed for it, if it's babies specifically. But that actually reminds me of one of the next things I was going to say — it's kind of a side point but it's relevant to some of the other things I was thinking—

—It seems like a lot of the time you guys don't know how normal people will see any given punishment? On Family Delegate Goés was saying he was just giving out warnings for infanticide, like he expected that to work, only — so, before I came to Westcrown, I don't think anyone ever gave me a warning about something I'd already done without also hurting me at least a little, even if it was just something like my mom hitting me where it's really not a big deal. No one'd take a warning seriously, if you're not also hurting them. And even if you don't want to kill them, there's lots of things that hurt someone more than a warning but less than killing them.

Or also—" She flips through the Rights Committee transcript. "...Okay, it's hard to find a good quote because the transcript doesn't say anything about how people were acting, so I guess maybe I was misunderstanding, but people seemed surprised when I talked about how we used to get whipped for getting bad grades in school. That's an everywhere thing, I'm pretty sure, except I overheard someone say that where she was from they hit people with sticks instead. And so people don't really think of whipping someone with a regular horsewhip as all that serious, and if you're thinking you could just whip someone like you'd do in Lastwall or Molthune for the same crime, it'd be... kind of like if you punished someone in Molthune by hitting them once? I don't know if that metaphor made sense."

"The warnings for infanticide are because... it's unfair to punish someone if they were not adequately warned, and it turned out that for this population at this time, a declaration that murder was illegal did not constitute adequate warning. People were surprised. I could have accompanied the warnings with some kind of other punishment, but it did seem to me that people were taking the warnings alone seriously enough, and I usually had enough time to have an extended conversation like this one with the people who I needed to investigate and try, to figure out how they could proceed without doing it again. It's possible that all those people just fooled me, and that they weren't really surprised, and laughed all the way home planning to kill another baby, but that would not be my guess."

"...probably some of them listened, and some of them fooled you, and some of them were planning to listen when they left but ended up changing their minds? But I also think—

—there's a lot of people who think it's their right to hurt people less powerful than them, who'd never dream of the law going after them, who'd be really shocked if someone told them the law was going after them even though they're a noble, or a powerful wizard, or an Asmodean priest — or, I mean, probably the Asmodean priests figured it out when their country got taken over, but apart from that. And it seems really awful to me to say that someone shouldn't be punished for breaking the law, if they didn't realize they were breaking it, when — a lot of times what that means is just letting people get away with hurting people weaker than them. And — people murdering their babies isn't the exact same thing, I don't even really think it's close to as bad, but — I do think there's something to the comparison?

And — there was the delegate who went out and murdered a bunch of slips, I don't know if you remember but he got mentioned during the punishment debate, and — that's one of the things I was looking into over the break, when I was trying to figure out what was going to happen to Valia, and it sounded like he really thought murder was legal if you're doing it to slips? And they executed him for it, and I think that was the right thing to do. And — well, I guess I'm not sure whether you'd say that's somehow different from not knowing murdering babies is illegal, or whether you think the magistrate should've just told him 'no, the murder law applies to slips too' and let him off with a warning."

"So - it's possible that he was in fact not adequately warned, somehow, but there are other ways in which it's different - I didn't encounter anyone who specifically took advantage of other violence and chaos in which to kill their baby and that timing is suggestive that he knew he wasn't up to something fully aboveboard. It has in fact been conspicuously illegal to kill slips that don't belong to you in Cheliax for many years, and they didn't belong to him; he was perhaps doing wildly foolish novel legal reasoning but he wasn't just continuing a practice that had been going on without negative comment from any authority for decades. And - I'm not actually sure I'd say that killing a baby isn't as bad, for the victim, though that will depend on the afterlife destination of the slip; but there is a sense in which it's more sympathetic, many of those babies were conceived by rape and the conscience may genuinely cry out for the better world in which no such responsibility has been forced onto oneself, whereas there is not a better world in which a bunch of slips are dead that his conscience might reasonably have been telling him about. Also, babies and slips have very different abilities to keep up with the news, which isn't a huge factor but does come to mind."

Now she's thinking about the little girl Raimon told her about when they were burning down the school. She killed her unborn baby, and it didn't really even register at the time in between everything else that was awful about what happened to her, and — it's hard to say that she's a murderer, or that Raimon's mom is a murderer. But it's also hard to say her baby deserved to die — maybe she can just say it was really the Asmodean priest's fault? That feels reasonable, she thinks, and it's not like the priest didn't deserve to die a hundred times over for everything she'd done.

Victòria wouldn't have — well, she's not sure, her conscience was only just starting to speak — she wouldn't now.

"I think the parts about conscience are more important to me than the parts about whether people technically knew exactly what the law was. But those aren't going to apply to anyone, there's plenty of people who kill their babies just because they're inconvenient. 

I think maybe a way that — like you were saying earlier, a way that my conscience notices different things, because my life's been different — is that a lot of people in my mom's situation would've just killed me. She wasn't forced or anything, but it would've made her life a lot easier, lots of people thought it was stupid she didn't, sometimes she said she wished she had. And I know that doesn't matter for the laws but — I think sometimes people... think about how the people who murdered their babies are people, but not about how the babies are also people? If that makes sense? 

...also I don't really get why it matters that slips can learn the news easier than babies, it's not like the slips or the babies are the ones deciding to kill people. Or, I mean, I assume sometimes slips kill people, but not this case specifically."

"Oh, the news matters - not very much, but at all - because the future children of a reformed infanticide will not be afraid of her and the halfling neighbors of a reformed slip-killer would be."

Nod. "Sort of related to that—"

How is she supposed to explain the next part without sounding incredibly pathetic and without talking about how some people deserve to suffer. Probably the not sounding pathetic part is a lost cause and she should focus on picking the right words?

"When something really awful happens to someone, but not so awful that it kills them, I think it can add on extra hurt to force them to act like actually they actually weren't hurt at all. I know that sounds kind of pathetic, but — I don't think that means it's not common, or even that it means it doesn't really count as hurting. I think it's easy for people who've never had something like that happen to them to imagine it as a smaller way of hurting people than it really is. If it helps, you could try thinking of it as something like — their conscience is crying out that in an ideal world this should never have happened to them, and the world is telling them to crush that voice.

I think there's a few different ways that letting people who've done really awful crimes off easy can turn into that sort of thing, or something like it. If you assign a little-kid punishment, it's easy to come across like you're saying that what happened wasn't actually that bad, or it didn't actually matter, or the victim should just — stop being pathetic. And you can maybe try telling people 'no, this was actually very bad,' but — that doesn't mean it'll work." Also Victòria is pretty skeptical that Delegate Jornet would bother, she won't even say that what Delegate Artigas did was terrible. "And maybe you get a village where most people don't care about what you think, so it doesn't end up mattering, or maybe you get a village where everyone's the sort of person who thinks you should listen to Iomedae just because she's Iomedae, and they decide that actually the victim's doing something wrong if they're still upset about it.

And I think there's lots of other ways it can hurt people that are kind of related — the one that what you said reminded me of is, if the victim has to see whoever it was that did the awful thing every day, and everyone expects them to just treat them the same as everyone else, and they can never really feel safe, they've always got to be on guard that it'll happen again."