"The formal system is stupid in lots of ways but I manage to ping Good while thinking that, so it might still get somewhere. What makes people jerks?"

"Playing games with people." Like everyone here keeps doing. "Expecting not just that people will do what they're told but that they'll - entertain you with how they'll do it. Putting people in a position where they'll obviously do something pathetic, because you think it's funny. Betraying people when you don't even get anything out of it."

"Games like -"

Like saying that to keep you in a box making magic items they have to marry you and you have to try to filter for people for whom the powerlessness isn't actively the entire point by acting like you might want this. Like requiring you to convert but not telling you so. Like having lots of rules about who you can complain to, because it's so important to treat you well, while planning to deny you an afterlife. 

"I dunno. Sometimes punishing people for being too standoffish and sometimes for being too chipper. Setting them tasks they can't succeed at so you can punish them for failing."

"Okay. But not, like, torturing people, that's not being a jerk?"

"Torturing someone because you want information they might have is just common sense, it's not being a jerk to try to accomplish your goals. Torturing someone as a punishment for breaking a rule they knew about or should've known about is not being a jerk. Torturing someone to teach them a skill or lesson that for some reason they can only learn by being tortured is not being a jerk. Torturing someone because you need to practice your torture skills for one of the above uses is not being a jerk. Torturing someone for no reason at all is being a jerk, I guess, but in real life it's almost always one of the above cases."

"Huh. What the goals are isn't an input? Setting a policy that torture is a consequence for rulebreaking isn't?"

"N..no? Most peoples' goals are not my goals and my goals are not their goals but I wouldn't say that this makes them a jerk, having their own priorities. Why would I expect them to have my priorities. You need some consequence for rulebreaking and torture's nicer than - imprisonment, or maiming, or execution..."

"People have different priorities all the time but in different ways. If somebody wants to build a very tall tower of their own drinking glasses I can think that's stupid but not be remotely invested in stopping them. If I am playing sports with some people they will have the goal of winning and I will have the goal of them losing so I can win instead, but that isn't the same category of opposition as if someone wants to torture me."

"Why is it not the same category, it seems like the same category to me."

"Well, the point of wanting to win at sports is so the sport can take place at all and the point of not wanting to be tortured is that should that occur it will be bad for me."

"I guess I don't think of not liking being tortured and not liking losing games as different in kind. I guess you like games enough to choose to play them even knowing you might lose them? But mostly people get tortured because they, I dunno, decided to be a spy, or decided to worship another god, so you can say they liked those enough to chance losing. Maybe that's why it feels like more of a jerk move to torture someone for no reason."

"What about people who go to Axis, if Asmodeus scoops 'em all up and starts torturing them when they were not particularly inviting this with risk-taking?"

"It feels a little silly to apply judgments like 'a jerk' to gods in the same spirit as it feels silly to apply them to hurricanes but if I think of a human-scale equivalent of that I'd think it was - sort of tragic. I'd hope we'll go after Heaven and the Abyss, which keep attacking us, and then Abaddon where they eat people, and just work out some kind of terms with Axis."

"Hurricanes don't make moral choices." She looks at her notes, shakes her head. "How do they get people like you, what in the world do you learn in school - I went to a heck of a lot of school myself and they did some creepy shit but -"

"I think Chaotic Evil is a lot harder to make the case for because it's, uh, terrible. No offense."

"I'm not offended. We're generally told that no matter what we do, Pharasma is racist because Rovagug got some kind of spiritual ick on us so we're going to the Abyss no matter what and ought to be in good with the management, and then it's hard to be lawful around chaos because there's nobody to cooperate with and if they get as far as neutral they get their choice of doors and probably pick the one where maybe their buddies are waiting, but that's not really a case for the philosophy per se."

"I guess I can see why, given that, you'd just try to be valuable enough to have some cover. 

If it were untrue that - Hell mostly makes use of people, or that Good is in significant part about fighting Hell, or that Asmodeus was a powerful god - or that Cheliax was a good country to live in - those feel like things that'd make me feel like I was wrong..."

Niss writes all those down. "Well, what counts as making use of you. If the paladins turn you into a statue and you decorate the garden and they hang a clothesline off you are you useful?"

"I don't - really exist. Someone eating your corpse after you have died on Ibyabek and not gotten an afterlife doesn't make you useful because there isn't a you."

"What needs to be true about something, for it to be you?"

"...I feel like that is very obvious so maybe I'm missing the point of the question. I need to be...having some kind of experiences."

"What needs to be true about the 'I' that is having some kind of experiences? If you get turned into a statue experiences will continue to happen, just not to you; if you get turned into a devil..."

"It started as me and then got to the person it is by having experiences."

"You pretty sure that's all that's going on?"