"Well, like, if someone's fifteen, they're technically a child, but it'd be stupid to treat them like they were six, or even like they were twelve."

"That's... true... but doesn't clarify if you think a twelve year old is a little kid."

"I don't have, like, a specific number. Probably I'd usually call them a kid but not a little kid? ...I'm not saying a twelve-year-old should be executed for a magic accident, if that's what you're asking."

"...I think we're getting sidetracked. I think it is often possible and perhaps even ideal to bring up girls and maybe also boys but I'm less sure with very little violence - nothing that would ever cause bleeding, or still sting half an hour later, and judicious less-than-weekly applications of whatever that leaves. Chelish people are accustomed to a much higher level of violence than that. Right?"

"Right."

"And it would be better if Chelish people were accustomed to a lower level of violence, yes?"

"...Maybe? I think it depends, like, it's better not to have people getting ripped for bad grades, and it'd be better if fewer people attacked each other for no reason, and better if the riots hadn't happened, but it wouldn't be better if people stopped trying to fight back against people attacking them."

It would also not be better if people never rose up against their Evil Asmodean nobles but she's pretty confident Delegate Jornet is Lawful.

"Right, but, relevantly to the topic of whether a punishment is taking the offense seriously, an Asmodean background calibrates people dreadfully on that subject."

Victòria turns that around in her head for a couple moments. It sounds like Delegate Jornet is saying something along the lines of... the amount the Asmodeans were hurting everyone all the time makes it so that sometimes, even if you hurt someone as much as they deserve​, it still doesn't feel like enough? Which could be true, except the way the paladins talk about the punishments it feels like a lot of them are just obviously less than they deserve, so obviously that even the paladins can see it. ...But probably if there are crimes where people deserve to be whipped but don't deserve worse, it would feel like those people aren't getting what they deserved? 

"I think — so I can be sure we're not talking past each other — it would be helpful if you could say what you think the punishment should usually be in normal countries for some different crimes, and then the punishment you'd usually give out when you're being the courts in Cheliax. Assuming the circumstances are basically normal, like, the person who did it wasn't a six year old and didn't have a really good reason, but it's also not like you just punished them for the same thing the last time you can't through their village. Like... murdering innocent people who aren't babies, rape, big theft, small theft, being a priest of Asmodeus and trying to get everyone else to also worship Asmodeus..."

"- so, assizes are absolutely terrible for having a range of punishments available. We're only in each village for a few days. Taking the reports, determining what happened, and issuing the sentence all has to happen in that time frame, and paladins can't - for instance - sentence someone to labor if we don't have excellent grounds to trust whoever they will be laboring under, and there's a similar problem with fines and debt collectors, and - it's a dreadful set of conditions under which to work, I was cutting off people's fingers when I would far rather have given them eight months hard labor because I can do the first thing fast and had no systems I could trust to handle the second thing."

It really seems like they could have a bigger range of punishments if they stopped randomly deciding that all kinds of normal punishments are secretly torture and shouldn't be allowed!! ...Probably there's a way to say that that paladins are okay with but it's a bit of a side point, maybe she can bring it up later if she doesn't forget. It's kind of annoying to have to put all her regular words into words that don't upset paladins but it sure does seem to be helping.

"I think... if there's a punishment that most countries would handle by whipping or something, that the Asmodeans would have handled much more harshly, that's one thing. But sometimes when you talk about what sort of punishments you give you make it sound like you're giving out a much smaller punishment than what someone would get somewhere else, and I think — so, obviously it would be better if people didn't think of getting whipped as a little-kid punishment, because we weren't just giving it to little kids for doing badly in school. But if someone sees you give a mild punishment for an awful crime against them, when someone in another country would be punished much more heavily, then even if they don't know anything but what their own village used to do I don't think they're wrong to notice that you aren't really treating it like something awful."

(That last sentence feels like she's grasping for something she hasn't totally managed to reach, but she thinks there's something there.)

"I did execute people. In Lastwall that's the maximum you get for anything up to and including calling demons down on your neighbors. I didn't have the equipment for long-drop hanging so I was beheading them - at one point I requisitioned a wand of Sleep but couldn't make it work for me, I seem not to be the right kind of sorcerer or something, so I gave it to someone else and did without. I castrated people, when they lived far enough away from the nearest site routinely visited by Archmage Naima that I could expect it to stick for a long while - it's been shown in other places that that works shockingly well even on preventing even things you'd think weren't related, at least if the general tenor of the criminality is impulse and not - philosophical in nature, though mostly I assigned it for things that did seem related. But, yes, I also whipped and fined people, and possibly those they'd offended were not satisfied, and would have been satisfied if I'd - let's see, what did they tend to call for when they were moved to call for things - staked them out on an anthill for two days. Paladins can't do that.

"Do you know what makes paladins fall?"

"...Raising people as skeletons to make them work the mines? And probably other things but that's the one that's specifically come up."

"So, we have to be Lawful Good. But the Good part is much stricter than the Law part. Law is in a lot of ways a fragile alignment, but a little lawlessness that didn't happen to directly touch on any formal vows I've taken wouldn't make the Goddess renounce me right away if I remained able to read Lawful throughout. And many, many Good people occasionally do something Evil. Not very evil, I'm not saying most Good people have a rape or a murder in their history, but at all Evil.

"Paladins can't.

"Not once.

"Which is even more difficult than it sounds, because if you're hewing to that standard, and getting information that instantaneous about what is and isn't Evil, it turns out that a lot of things can be Evil or non-Evil depending on how you are thinking about them when you do them. I can't be angry at someone when I behead him. I can't be thinking about how repellent somebody is when I'm castrating him. It might pass muster the first twenty times, if I were careless about it and let bits of those feelings feature in my motives at the moment the sword falls, but eventually, if I'm not perfect about it, I will accidentally hurt someone in an Evil way, and fall, and need to call off my rounds and go do a lot of prayer and reflection and Atonement - if having me back in the ranks is justified as an expense at all. That's why we had to take so many breaks from assizes, it's a lot better to do it and re-commit ourselves to our paths before you need the spell with the expensive incense."

That is a very confusing group of sentences!! It kind of sounds like she's saying that... Pharasma counts people as Evil for doing the right thing if they're angry?... except that can't be right, that's just saying that Good and Evil don't mean anything. It matters how you're thinking about it, sure, but in the sense that it'd be Evil for someone to kill Delegate Ibarra because they're mad that he doesn't like Asmodeus enough, not in the sense that it's Evil to be angry at people for doing awful things. Which is... not exactly Good, being angry doesn't do anything by itself, but correct. People should be angry at people for doing awful things.

Maybe she's saying that Iomedae doesn't want people to be angry? Except she picked Valia, not as a paladin but as a regular priest, she could just pick only regular priests instead of weird priests with extra rules.

If Delegate Saiville isn't allowed to be angry at people who actually deserve it maybe that's why he kept getting annoyed with her for disagreeing with him, he needed somewhere for the anger to go and — that's a stupid and pathetic thing to care about, and not even relevant.

Maybe she's saying that if you're really angry you might end up hurting people more than they deserve, and that counts as a little Evil, and then you get kicked out of being a paladin? That would make sense, except it doesn't quite line up with the words she said, but maybe she just explained it badly? (Victòria thinks this sounds like kind of a dumb problem to have, but maybe paladins have a harder time than her with not accidentally hurting people too much or something.)

"...and so if you aren't sure how much is the right amount to hurt someone, you try to go for the smaller amount, because it's a lot harder to Fall by hurting someone less than you should have?"

"That is... basically true but in a way where I think you missed my point."

"I have more than one guess for your point but most of them don't make sense."

"Well, maybe one of them is close in a way I can clear up."

"That Pharasma randomly counts people as Evil for doing the right thing if they feel angry while they're doing it, except that's just saying that Good and Evil don't really mean anything. That Iomedae really doesn't want people to be angry, for some reason, except she picked Valia as a normal priest and Valia's angry sometimes. That people who are angry might be more likely to hurt other people more than the right amount."

"Pharasma... does that but it's not random. It's... related to how you said that if someone hurt a guilty person, but it was at random, like if a bandit accosted them because they were convenient and it had nothing to do with their crimes, then that wouldn't be satisfactory. That's an extreme example of the same thing. Iomedae does not specifically discourage anger and it is not forbidden to experience it and there are many contexts in which it's quite safe; assizes are bad for paladins in part because dispensing justice isn't one of those safe contexts. People who are angry are more likely to hurt other people more than they ought to, but if I've already decided to behead someone that's not really a fashion in which I'd expect to have a problem so it's not related to the train of thought I was describing."

"That's not the same thing!! It's Evil to be a bandit, it's not Evil to feel angry at someone. Or if it is then that's also saying Good and Evil don't mean anything."

"It's not Evil to feel angry. It's often Evil to hurt people because you are angry."

"...I think usually people do things for multiple reasons. I guess if someone were hurting someone... only because they were angry... and not for any other reasons... that would probably be bad?" As opposed to, for instance, because they're avenging actual wrongs that person did.

"Only because they were angry and not for any other reasons is definitely an Evil act, and I don't know the exact mixes that do and do not count. It's just something I have to be careful of because I can't afford even one Evil act so I need to make sure that whatever plan I'm using won't let one slip over hundreds or thousands of repetitions."

...Victòria is going to go ahead and assume that there's something more complicated than just "occasionally Pharasma randomly decides people are Evil for being angry when they hurt someone" that Delegate Jornet just doesn't know about. 

"...I'm assuming this isn't why you said that but I think I understand now why you want to stop using paladins as judges. And it seems like a good idea now when it didn't really before."