"It's complicated. But it is not impossible to figure out. Iomedae did a lot of research into the question in life and Lastwall has refined the approach since then. If you'll pardon another metaphor, building a cathedral is complicated, someone trying to do it from first principles and maybe having seen a cathedral once will fail at it, and also architects know full well how to do it and it can be done whenever the will and the materials are gathered together. Reasonable people can disagree about punishments, and some of them are right, and this doesn't actually make the ones who are wrong necessarily unreasonable, just - wrong, and since some of them have political power in need of political opposition."

That is still pretty confusing but she doesn't know what to ask to get less confused. Basically every punishment is going to do something besides just hurt someone? Maybe if you hurt someone in a way that didn't leave a mark, and then used magic to make them forget, and never told anyone else, it would only hurt someone, but no one was even suggesting doing that. 

"...Can I see the Rights transcript from yesterday? And if you have a copy of the speeches people gave during the punishments fight that would also be helpful, but I don't know if there were copies of that."

Angela finds them and hands them over. "If you want blank paper to scriven them onto we'll have to go inside for it. The important thing, and this I believe every single Good church agrees on, is that you must hurt people as little as you can while achieving your other aims, and that not all other aims are important enough to justify any amount of hurting anyone."

That seems like a really confusing rule to have and Victòria is trying to figure out any way at all that it makes sense. Maybe it just means you should try to avoid doing anything that hurts innocent people, except then it doesn't really make sense as a rule for considering punishments. Maybe it just means you shouldn't hurt people for dumb reasons, that makes sense with the part about some aims not being important enough, except that also doesn't seem like a rule that makes sense for punishments. Maybe it means that if one of your goals is to hurt them you should try as hard as possible not to hurt them more than they deserve, and that they think it's better to hurt someone less than they deserve than to hurt them more — that sort of makes sense, actually, with the confusing things people have been saying about Hell—

"...I think I'm confused about what you mean by that, a lot of the obvious things it could mean don't really seem relevant. But, uh, what I was going to say was—" she flips through the transcripts "—when I was listing punishments that weren't on the Lastwall list and I thought probably should be, and I brought up branding and he said Lastwall doesn't allow it but it's probably not torture, and then I brought up cutting someone's crime into their skin, and Delegate Saiville said, 'I struggle to imagine a method of... carving a crime into the skin... which would not also be torture. Especially relative to branding which achieves the same result.' 

And — I know it's a mistake to assume that people who aren't Chelish are — feeling the same way a Chelish person would, if the Chelish person was acting like they were? But — it's hard to tell from just the transcripts, obviously, but — I'm not sure exactly how to explain this, but — it really didn't seem like he was... treating it like a complicated question that reasonable people might disagree about? Even in — a way where one person is right, and if they explain why the other person can see it too. Rather than as — something where he'd decided it was obviously bad without even thinking about why, where he was going to get upset at anyone who disagreed.

If he'd been... treating it like a complicated question that reasonable people might disagree about... I could've explained that the reason for cutting someone's crime into their skin — or, well, there's lots of reasons, but the not-Asmodean reason — is that if it's — a crime that's not bad enough they deserve to die for it, but that people should still be on the lookout for, it gives everyone else a warning so they can stay safe from them. Like... uhh, let me think... selling someone a spell but lying about what spell it is, or something like that. It doesn't really have anything to do with hurting them, I don't actually know whether it hurts more or less than branding. And you can kind of do that sort of thing with branding, but if it's someone who's allowed to leave the area then everyone in the whole country needs to know what the brands mean, or else it won't work, and you'd need a ton of different brands for all the crimes where you might want to do this. Whereas if you can just carve their crime into their skin, and you're, uh, competent at it, then someone only needs to be able to read to know what they did. —It might not work in Lastwall, if it's true that other countries only teach rich nobles to read.

...I know that probably sounds like a tangent, but — if the thing you guys were trying to say was 'this is a complicated question, we think there's a lot of different considerations that can go either way, here's our best guess at the one that gets us the most metaphorical potatoes,' that's really not what it sounded like, the thing you were saying sounded more like — 'here's a bunch of things that don't really have anything to do with each other that we've decided are always Evil even if we can't explain why, or if our reasons don't make sense, everyone should just trust that we're right and listen to us and if you don't it's because you're Evil.' And I don't think it's just that I'm confused about a lot of things, I think if you asked a bunch of other people at the convention they'd agree with me." It can't be that every Iomedaean is like that, Valia and Feliu weren't like that, but maybe every Iomedaean who's still at the convention is like that.

"I think you and Ser Saiville have an exceptionally hard time communicating and you should probably preferentially talk to any other paladin instead of him where what you're seeking is a generic paladin opinion and not his own personal opinion, and I can't think when you would ever need his own personal opinion." He has already spent Goddess knows how long writing you a multipage letter he probably shouldn't actually send. Please never talk to him again. "You're saying 'deserve' and you also keep specifying 'innocent' people, am I correct in thinking that you believe that guilty people deserve to be harmed, perhaps even that it would be wrong to omit to do so even if there were no other consequences at all?"

"...yes?" Obviously? "...Maybe not if they've completely stopped being Evil, that's one of the things I was talking about with the azata, it thought you should only take vengeance on people who are still being Evil. I... can't really think of a situation where someone is still being Evil and also you could just not hurt them without there being any other consequences..."

"I do not have a transcript of your conversation with the azata so I'm reluctant to speculate on what it meant.

"Hurting people is not Good. It can be a side effect of doing things that are Good, like any time you do yourself some damage pushing harder to heal more people or get a message where it must be. It can be a way to prevent Evil, like defeating Evil enemies in a fight or delivering the gentlest possible justice which still achieves deterrence. The hurting people, in and of itself, by itself, is not and can never be Good. This is the universal consensus of all Good gods and powers. Good mortals have a lot of tradeoffs to make and that's one of them but hurting people per se is not ever Good."

"... Obviously whether it's right to hurt someone depends on why you're doing it?" she says, this being her best guess at a non-insane version of what Delegate Jornet was saying.

"That is true, but it is not the thing I said. Do you understand the thing I said, which is that hurting people is never Good?"

"I think there are a few different things you could mean by that." Many of which are — insane? Evil? Completely inconsistent with the actual Good people she knows?

"I could... give some examples of times when I think it would be right to hurt someone, and times when it wouldn't be, and you could say if you disagree?" And depending on what Delegate Jornet says, it could help her figure out whether she means something stupid and Evil or whether she's just doing a bad job at explaining.

"No, I don't think I want to get into when it is or isn't acceptable to hurt people. I want to get across this single specific thing which I think is very important. It is never Good to hurt people. I can try saying it a few more ways if that one is confusing somehow."

"...so, when I say something is Good, I mean something like — it's the right thing to do? I think people should do it? I would think someone who did it is a better person than someone who didn't? And I don't really see how it makes sense to talk about hurting people as... acceptable but not Good? That's just... two different ways of saying the same thing... or, like, I guess it would make sense to say it's acceptable to, I don't know, eat a cheese pastry, but it's not Good and not Evil, it's just Neutral, but I don't think hurting people is going to be like eating a cheese pastry basically ever."

"If - I know, full well and thoroughly, that this virtually never comes up, but if, somehow, there are two options, and the only difference between them is that in one of them someone is hurt and in the other option they are not hurt, the second option is always better. This might sound like it is not very important because it doesn't happen. It is however important as a matter of mindset and as a matter of thinking about what, if anything, you are getting out of hurting people. If you do not understand and remain aware of the fact that the hurt itself is not a Good and desirable feature of anything you are doing, you will - out of cruelty or carelessness or both - hurt people more than you must. At which point we are beyond 'not Good, like eating a cheese pastry' and into 'not Good, like it's actually Evil instead'."

"...Obviously you shouldn't hurt someone for no reason?"

As far as Victòria is concerned she's never hurt someone for no reason! Sometimes the reason is to give them what they deserve and sometimes the reason is to protect the people they'll hurt next and sometimes the reason is so that any other Evil nobles like Delegate Ventura know they can't just kill innocent people and get away with it and sometimes it's because the world feels a little more correct with someone dead and sometimes it's multiple reasons at once — usually, she thinks, it's not like she's ever hurt people in a way that didn't protect people — well, no, she whipped people in school, but she knows that was wrong.

"My statements continue to apply when the person who is or is not hurt is not innocent."

"I didn't say — if someone... randomly went and hurt an Evildoer for no reason I wouldn't call that Good?" If someone went and randomly tortured Delegate Ibarra to death just for fun, not because of anything he did or was going to do, she'd be glad he was dead but she wouldn't call the person who did it Good, they could just as easily have picked someone else.

...Angela takes a deep breath with her eyes closed. Twice.

"Okay. Is the 'randomly' part important to you?"

"...Well, we're talking about hurting people for no reason, right? It seems pretty hard to... not have a reason... if it's not... like, if you know someone is going around murdering innocent people, and you put a stop to them, then it's not for no reason..."

"Okay. I apologize if I'm - going over the wrong things at the wrong intensity. I am having a more difficult time communicating with you than I do with most people and I am trying to compensate for it. How about we try your idea after all, one example at a time."

"Okay. Uh, starting with an example that seems relatively obvious to me... today at lunch I met a woman who told me that — uh, I'm skipping some details, but — she told me that she invited one of the nobleman delegates into her house during the rain last week, and then while he was there he murdered her husband for no good reason. I sent the Queen a petition to tell her about this and ask her to have him executed, the way she would for a regular person who murdered someone for no good reason. 

Executing him will hurt him, obviously. I think executing him is... the right thing to do? And the way I use words, it means the same thing to say 'executing him is the right thing to do' and 'executing him is Good.'"

"Okay. I think that's right, especially because you went through a petition to the Queen instead of doing something yourself."

"...I think petitioning the Queen is more Lawful but I don't think it's more Good." 

"Yes, I mostly prefer it for Law reasons, but I think it's also protective against making a mistake."

Sure, that's reasonable now that the Queen is Good, she can make sure of what happened under Abadar's Truthtelling. She nods.

"And... if we imagine that instead a thief who didn't know about any of that killed him to steal his stuff — I know it'd be hard, since he's a noble, but imagining — I think that'd be wrong, or Evil, or something they shouldn't do — those all mean pretty much the same thing to me. Because even though it's right to kill him, they're not doing it for any of the right reasons, they just wanted to steal from him."

"That sounds right too."