"...well, obviously you shouldn't kill innocent people. I was thinking something more like... uh, let me think... let's say I was trying to decide what to do after the convention tomorrow, and I could pick between... teaching a self-defense lesson, or walking around to different places casting Create Water, or, uh, fighting monsters, if there were monsters running around in Westcrown for some reason. I think... all of those things are Good? And it doesn't make sense to me to say someone should definitely pick one over the other two."

"Well, if there are a hundred other priests filling all the cisterns, then it doesn't add very much for you to create more water, and if they're all busy fighting monsters but you happen to be bad at fighting monsters by comparison, being the only one creating water for everyone would be very important. It depends on the situation, it depends on what you're spending to get it, it depends on what other people are doing, it depends on whether there are monsters in Westcrown."

"...I guess there could be a situation where it's really obvious that one is better than the other? But I don't think it's usually obvious, I think usually you just have... a bunch of different Good things you can do. And some people are going to care more about one and some people are going to care more about another, but if someone really wants to make sure all the inns have clean water I'm not going to tell them they're wrong to care about that."

"It's Good to make sure all the inns have clean water. It is just not necessarily the most efficient you could be."

"That makes sense to me if you're comparing putting the clean water at an inn to putting the clean water somewhere else but not for comparing making clean water to doing some other totally different Good thing."

"Well, you could compare putting clean water at inns all afternoon to... coordinating a schedule with a lot of other clerics, so you make sure everywhere with a cistern has clean water for weeks without anyone making the walk to an out-of-the-way place unnecessarily or missing a place. You could compare it to going adventuring in the hopes that one day you'll be a high enough circle to make a decanter of endless water, freeing up all the clerics in a whole city for other tasks like copying books and spiritual counseling, indefinitely."

"...I guess? That still sounds like a weird way to think about being Good but I guess if you want to think about it that way I'm not going to stop you."

"All right. What else is there that you'd like to know?"

"How does Lastwall decide which things count as torture?"

"I'm not from Lastwall and in fact have not actually been there, but I think they mostly think about how various treatment of a person affects them, and what kinds of motives lead people to want to do it to others - not just wanting to hurt them, necessarily, neglect and carelessness can also cause a lot of pain - and maybe they've confirmed some cases with Communes, though I'd expect most of the questions that urgent to have been figured out hundreds of years ago."

"So — this isn't exactly a question, but — during the floor debate today some people were saying torture was always Evil, no matter what? And — so, I guess there's a few things here, actually. One is that if I look at the things that I know Lastwall thinks are torture and the things I know it allows there's not really an obvious pattern, I don't know how anyone would figure out whether Lastwall counts any given thing counts as torture if they didn't already know. Another is that a lot of the things on the list... don't really seem like things that are wrong to do to anyone no matter what? Like, I do think there are some things that are always wrong, but I don't really see why Lastwall people would think of... a lot of those things... that way? Some of them have happened to me and I didn't think of them as... particularly bad compared to other things that Lastwall doesn't count as always torture? And—

—when we were talking about rights for people who'd been arrested, and Delegate Requena i Cortes said maybe we couldn't have a right for prisoners to be fed because it would cost too much, no one said 'no, not feeding prisoners is torture and torture is always wrong'? Even though it's one of the things that Lastwall counts as torture. And it feels like... on the one hand you're all out here saying that there's a bunch of things that no one can ever do no matter what and getting annoyed at people for disagreeing — I guess maybe not you specifically — and then on the other hand you're not really acting like you think it's always wrong? I don't know if I explained that well."

That sure isn't exactly a question. "Which day was it that he said that?" Angela asks, flipping through her bundle of transcripts. "If you make prisoners pay for food that amounts to a fine, which isn't torture but is undesirable for complicated structural reasons we needn't get into right now; if you just generally don't make sure that food makes it to your prisoners, then you're de facto sentencing them to death by starvation, if you keep them long enough, which is a terribly torturous death, so you need some standard of how often they must be fed and when you can dip below that standard for what reasons - well, you need this if you're a Lawful government, anyway..."

"Yesterday, the tenth. Feeding prisoners makes sense to me, I was the one who suggested it in the first place, except for people who had specifically been sentenced to a punishment that involved not eating — I was just thinking of that as a normal punishment, it never would've occurred to me that it might be torture. ...and I don't see what it has to do with being Lawful? Not starving all your prisoners to death seems like it's about being Good, or at least not being Evil, but I don't think the Asmodeans cared about it and they were plenty Lawful."

Flip flip flip. "Pardon me, I was imprecise. A Lawful government aimed at the welfare of prisoners. Someone else keeping prisoners might ad-hoc it and might do well or poorly at that; an organization needs a policy if it is going to achieve a goal, but with the Asmodeans, the welfare of prisoners was not one of the goals. It looks like he said... 'food is a cost'. He said this was a 'difficulty of implementation'. I took that at the time to mean that we might not be able to have prisons at scale, use imprisonment as a punishment routinely, because it would be too expensive. It's not common in most places for just that reason. 'The more we must track, the greater the cost to the Crown'. That's technically about the possible costs of making sure the right is correctly implemented rather than the costs of the food itself but it comes down to the same thing, enshrining and enforcing the right would make prison expensive perhaps to the point that it would see less use. It's possible I misunderstood him, but it's also possible you did."

"I don't think he wants to almost never use prisons, he included prison sentences as part of the publishing law. ...I don't think you're going to have a transcript for that committee meeting, it happened before the archmage put his scribes everywhere."

"Alas." She smooths the pages back onto her lap. "It's not impossible for something to be - bad enough, enough of the time, to enough people, and for little enough benefit to anyone, that it should be banned; and also to not have affected you in particular very deeply at the time it happened to you. People can choose to accept, or happen to weather well, events that would be devastating to another. And the opposite also."

"Sure, but — I guess, first of all, I don't think I'm that unusual? And second of all that still doesn't... tell me anything about how Lastwall's deciding what they think counts as torture, or why they think those things are never okay."

"Do you want to pick an example variety of torture to talk about more specifically?"

"...The one I was thinking of as — it's happened to me but it's not anywhere near the worst thing that's happened to me — was not letting someone eat? Which, I mean, it sucks a lot, I'm not saying it doesn't, but any punishment that actually does anything is going to suck. ...Or, like, I see why it might be torture if you didn't let someone eat for so long they starved to death, but they didn't do it for that long back home. It doesn't really make sense to me to talk about it as... the same sort of thing as flaying someone alive? Which is the worst thing I've ever seen happen to someone else."

"So, in most places they don't use imprisonment as a punishment at all; they use it as a stopgap while someone is waiting for their trial, or their execution, or their spiritual counselor. Within those limited periods of time I think it's still ideal for the imprisoning authority to cover food but - better to dispense with that so you can afford to have a trial, can afford to let them have time to talk with a priest, rather than be in a rush. I wouldn't accuse a place which was genuinely making budgetary tradeoffs between important things, and chose not to cover prisoner food for short stays which were all they ever had in the first place, of 'torture'. But I'd want them to be very much aware of those tradeoffs, and doing what was in their power to make the waits shorter, and being alert to any cases where they held someone longer than usual and had to feed them so they could get through their trial or their counseling usefully. If the people in power in this hypothetical place seemed to instead be - glad that this policy freed up money for other things that are less important, like... new guard uniforms, or things that are actively a problem, like bribes, then I might push much harder on trying to get them to feed their prisoners instead. Resource constraints are a constant, but when they're at their most dangerous is when they interfere with people's consciences, that view into the ideal world where the prisoner would not be hungry.

"Using hunger as a punishment, so potentially over longer periods of time but not necessarily, has a very smooth gradient of how bad it is for the prisoner. On the one end you have sending a child to bed without supper for making an ungrateful face at the fish sauce but giving them their breakfast in the morning, and on the other you've got starving people to death. Are we in agreement that at one of these ends is torture and at the other is not?"

"I wasn't actually sure whether Iomedaeans would say that the first thing isn't torture but I agree that it's not, and that the second thing probably is. ...Is the reason for saying it's alright if the prisoner isn't there for very long that you think it's not torture if it's only for a couple days, or that you do think it's torture but you don't actually believe it's never okay to torture someone?"

"'Torture' is a - bit of a strange word. In most contexts it seems perfectly clear to me but in this one I find myself tempted to pretend there is no word for it at all, so that I can be sure we're talking about a thing and not a word. There are many situations where it is permissible to do things that happen to inflict pain or discomfort. Happen to is an important word there. It happens to inflict pain if I stab a demon with my sword, but that is not the point. The point is that then the demon can't use that arm, or is a little closer to never being a threat to anyone again, or is distracted for a moment while someone else comes in with an axe. If I were in a position to cause a demon pain that had no other point at all, if there were not a tactical objective I were achieving by stabbing it, I must not."

That doesn't really make sense? Either in terms of right and wrong — well, the azata might say — no, she should focus on this conversation right now. Either in terms of right and wrong, or in terms of making sense with what the paladins were saying today and yesterday. Also she doesn't get why anyone would care about not hurting demons, they're demons. 

"I think people nearly always have multiple reasons for doing things? So I'm confused about what the paladins were saying about the punishment rules if it's just, if you want to hurt someone you need to be doing something else too. It... sounded like you guys were saying there were specific punishments that shouldn't ever be allowed... but I guess I might have misunderstood what you meant."

"Punishment is more complicated. Neither hurting someone for no other reason at all, nor fighting a battle, are quite like it. And because it's complicated there is a lot of room for reasonable people sincerely seeking the Good to disagree about what is Good and what is necessary and what is effective. The Conde Cerdanya who proposed that list of punishments is returned from Heaven, if I've heard correctly, and I have no reason to think either that this was a fluke or that returning to life has dreadfully worsened him - I think he's made some factual mistakes and is failing to be corrected in them and that this will lead him to do grievous and unnecessary harm."

Victòria totally thinks it was a fluke, but not because of this. 

"...if the thing you and the other paladins meant to say in committee and on the floor was that figuring out what punishments were Good in any given case is hard and complicated, and that you liked the Lastwall list but don't think it's Evil to want to use other punishments in addition, then that's not a confusing thing for you to think, but it really didn't come across like you guys were saying that."

...Or, actually, maybe some of them were just lying to try to convince people to vote for the laws they wanted? That would explain a lot of what was happening but there's not really a good way to ask about it.