"...unless he's a zombie or something, sir, yes."

"He is for now a human man, twenty years old, offering no provocation at all. But perhaps instead of the Empire I live somewhere uncivilized where this is entirely legal, is it less wrong now?"

"It's...... less stupid? I don't think it has bearing on - are you tracking the time, sir, your sermon was soon -"

"Huh! I would have said that some of the ill is the ill of lawbreaking, and the betrayal of a trust, and so there is a little less of it in this case. Unknown to me or to him, the man was about to die right around the next bend of a bear, does this make the deed less evil?"

"Less... consequentially so, I suppose... the book does say that you tend to think of Good and Law as facets of the same thing but that's neither otherwise conventional nor intuitive to me."

"What if I did know that the man was about to die of a bear around the bend, and chose to kill him only because he was already doomed?"

"...I guess that might be slightly less evil if you were specifically on a mission to deprive the bears of food to the Good end of reduced bear activity in the area? Possibly much less evil if you somehow knew the man to be bound for Paradise and to prefer swords over bears as a way to get there."

"What if I don't kill the man at all, but I know there's a bear around the corner and could shout a warning to him and don't bother? Am I as guilty as if I had killed him myself?"

"...I don't think so?"

"Hmmm, why not?"

your sermon, sir she ignored the question and he's not going to re-ask if she's watching the time. "You haven't described any out of the ordinary responsibility for his safety, not even to the point of answering a question he might ask about the road; warning him about a bear would not be very time consuming but it does not occur by default whether you meet him or not, whether there is a bear or not, whether he can handle the bear or not, and merely not murdering him yourself does."

"Ah, is it about whether I am the cause of his death? So if I tell him to go to the left, and this is where I know the bear is, then am I as guilty as if I had killed him myself?"

"........maybe? Unless there's a dragon the other way, or something."

"And if I believe I'm sending him to his death, but actually he can easily fight bears, am I relieved of responsibility?"

"I don't think so, sir."

"Why not?"

"...for the same reason that it might be less evil to behead him to spare the bear if you knew he'd prefer this way to Paradise but not if that were the case by coincidence. The same reason they printed on all the paper money that it was backed by the souls of the damned and told everyone about it in school, so they would ignore it for their personal convenience rather than because they were never told."

"And what reason is that?"

"We are judged for what we are trying to do."

"Hmmmm. I think that I would phrase it as - the good or evil of a deed must be a matter of how good or evil most deeds are that are the same as far as the doer can know; we can neither be redeemed nor damned by features of a situation that we were not able to distinguish before the doing, though we certainly can be by our decision not to go looking for such distinguishing features. But trying to do good and doing Evil is still often Evil, if you went about it in a way that usually is Evil, even if you were right this time." She stands. "That is the exercise, anyway. Aroden keep you."

"Thank you sir."

(It's not really customary, if someone invokes Asmodeus at you either positively or negatively, to wish it reciprocally.)

Then she'll depart to give her sermon.

He sets up his chess set and tries to see which side wins if white's out bishops and black's missing knights while he mulls all that over.