"You can't build a cathedral that way. If you'll pardon the return to metaphor. There needs to be a step where you check how the world works, not just think about it."

"It seems to me like the thinking is pretty important! If someone told me they checked what happens if you build a cathedral out of sand and it actually works really well I wouldn't believe them, even if they said they did a really good job with the checking."

"I mean, I'd be skeptical, but if they could show me the sand cathedral that would be pretty convincing."

"...I guess maybe if you could be really really sure it wasn't an illusion or something? But I'd probably still assume it was some kind of trick I hadn't thought of, sand doesn't work like that."

"It doesn't work like that by itself, but a stone cathedral needs mortar too, it's not just rocks. There could be some trick to it that would make sense once I saw it. Anyway, with people it can be tempting to think - okay, I'm not a rock or a grain of sand, maybe I need to check how those work, but I'm a person, so I know how people work already. But people are very different from each other."

"Sure, maybe there's some things you need to check."

"So, when I say that I think Conde Cerdanya was making a factual mistake, I think he was - looking at what Lastwall has built, and deciding that the level of mercy that has worked well there is not suitable for here, and I think this is an error of his but a factual one; I think he is probably trying to achieve the Good goal of deterring as many selfish smart would-be criminals as possible while doing no additional harm that doesn't contribute to that. Does that make sense?"

Saying that people are just as scared about dying quickly as about being tortured to death really seems like saying you can build a cathedral out of sand!!!

"...The way people were talking about it during the debate it didn't sound like Lastwall tried executions both ways and compared, did I misunderstand what Lastwall" is claiming that they "did?"

"Lastwall specifically, no, you have to compare to other countries, which is one of the reasons it's so easy for reasonable people to disagree about whether it would work to do the same again elsewhere."

"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."