That seems like an abstract point, but maybe... "I had gotten the impression that Germania wasn't so secure as to be able to safely eschew conscription?  So Theologian Agnew's point is probably academic?"

"If public torture is needed to maintain public order because - what, the people would revolt without the threat? - that paints a very unflattering picture of Taldor! On Earth everyone would conclude that such a state is an oppressive tyranny ruling against the wishes and to the great detriment of the population, and expect it to stage a revolution at the first opportunity."

It might seem to make sense to sacrifice some of your human resources if that motivates the others sufficiently, if they work harder and are more loyal because they're afraid of being purged, but humans don't actually respond well to threats and uncertainty. The communists don't have constant internal revolts, but they also don't have productivity nearly as high as nations that place people in a system they are happy to be part of with positive reinforcement and incentives. 

"Germania does practice conscription, because unfortunately no matter how wealthy you are your army has to compete against equally wealthy nations and bigger armies tend to win, all else being equal. At least, until technology is so advanced that most people either can't be trained to use it or are genuinely unnecessary on the battlefield. In peacetime most men were conscripted for a brief duration to prepare them for later reserve service; in wartime conscription quickly became universal, or rather, the army decided who not to enlist because their civilian jobs were more important to the war economy, in a sense conscrpting them into those jobs."

"I wasn't setting conscription policy or rounding up recruits, obviously, but I was in command of mostly conscripted soldiers. Some might have volunteered otherwise, but I'm sure many of them did not start out wanting to be there," because Tanya expects better than that from her men; most of them became crazy battle maniacs during their service but that's just following incentives and the known psychological effects of wartime service in an elite unit.

"....I volunteered for service myself, because I would have been conscripted as a mage once I came of age and I saw no profit in waiting. It was still peacetime then." Tanya was still foolish enough to hope the peace would last, that everyone's rational incentives would win out against Being X's thumb on the scale and whatever it is that makes men wage ruinous war even in the absence of Beings.

"Taldor is indeed not the best managed state, and even at its height before Aroden's death its politics were fractious and counterproductive.  I think you've described reasonable conditions for conscription to exist under, so I'll move on."

He is starting to get more of a picture of Von Degurechaff.

"...you mentioned you were a man in your first life, were you married or did you otherwise have a romantic partner or partners?"

He'll skip a few if she was not.  She (he?) may have a life and a half of experience, but they still look like a young girl.

That one is at least straightforward: every human society has rape and every society must see it as a problem (and so Tanya has naturally not committed it). ...although Being X also thought not procreating was a sin, so maybe she shouldn't assume? This takes her back to her first life, with different cultural norms from Germania that she has no idea how the locals will judge, but she can still answer promptly.

"I was never married and didn't have serious romantic relationships, or children. I patronized sex workers several times, including in a work-adjacent context... ah, that is, with a group of coworkers in after-hours social events."

Well, so much for more prosperous societies being all around better.  Maybe they do get kind of decadent along some lines, that is the clearest objection to the Arodenite belief he knows of.  Although one particularly sort of decadency actually works favor of not being Evil.

"So one source of potential Evil and also Lawlessness, is, uh, leaving a woman with child and not supporting her.  Um... uh... were you doing the sorts of ahem, acts, that aren't at risk of causing pregnancy?  That would mitigate this concern."

This subject continues to be awkward to talk about with someone that looks like a young girl.

"We made use of contraceptives, which on that world are cheap, safe and very effective. There are also cheap, safe and legal abortifacients in case of need. I suppose it would be... technically possible for a woman to deliberately become pregnant and then not tell me about it, but I can't think of why anyone would do that" at all or with her in particular "and I was certainly not informed of any such case nor asked for child support." Legally she wouldn't have been obligated to provide child support anyway, because of the abovementioned birth control, but that's not really relevant.

(Tanya has waded through oceans of blood and mud. She has seen bodies dismembered by canonfire a hundred at a time, passed by allies fighting desperately for their lives when her mission parameters forbade diversions, administered far greater bodily harm to countless people than making them pregnant. No matter how strongly the social script insists that talking about sex should be awkward, and pace the nuns who raised her, some tasks are above her ability to convincingly act out.)

"Abortion past a certain point sends the soul to Pharasma's boneyard, with all the problems for the child's soul I previously mentioned."

He thinks a moment...

"If you really had no reliable knowledge of afterlives or souls I think that is a strongly mitigating factor?  And preventing pregnancy in the first place should be fine, its probably the responsible and Good action to take if you aren't prepared to support a child."

She's really interested in the theological and ethical implications of safe, cheap, and effective contraceptives but she doesn't really have the time (or nerve, she's blushing at this conversation).

"For humans it is towards the end of six weeks a typical pregnancy is ensouled, but crossbreeding with other species, like orcs, can make it slightly sooner, and it is speculated even traces of nonhuman descent might make it sooner, so the recommended latest morally safe date is four and a half weeks, assuming accurate knowledge of when the impregnation occurred."

She wonders if Pharasma set it up that way on purpose, or at least could fix it if she cared to.  Pharasma really is quite obviously terrible in multiple ways once you consider things carefully.

He raises an eyebrow at Agnew.  You could just not have sex when you aren't planning on having children in the first place.

There is rape.  There is rape with Lamashtu monsters or cultist known to be involved!  You really don't want to let a pregnancy influenced by Lamashtu come to term, and you can avoid the entire moral dilemma if you can learn about it soon enough!

"There were many competing claims about the afterlives but no basis for a justified belief and accordingly few people believed, at least in the society I grew up in. ...I am not at all an expert and I'm not sure if women can tell they're pregnant within six weeks if they're not doing medical checks for it. If the contraceptives failed somehow the abortion would probably be done later than that. Which would be perceived only as an inconvenience, and birth control correctly used is really meant to be very reliable (*). 'Not prepared to support a child' isn't an appropriate gloss; the clear intention on both sides was not to have a child, one way or another."

What is Pharasma doing with six week old fetus souls is she sending them to be tortured not relevant.

At least the Christians think fetus souls probably go to Heaven also not relevant. She needs to stay focused.

(*) Tanya is tragically wrong about the latter.

"I think I've covered the major examples of Evils that people overlook.  Should we go on to discussing your time as a soldier?  Do you prefer telling your story from the beginning, or should I ask questions, or do you have another approach in mind?"

...right, that's only a list of what people overlook, otherwise he'd presumably talk about murder and theft and so on, but do people normally overlook torture, slavery and rape? Surely it's very obvious whether one has done these things, and all that's left is knowing what counts as Evil? And that's not a long or complicated list, so how could anyone not already know? They just explained it to a literal alien in half an hour! They can surely cover even an illiterate population with church services or, frankly, a well-written set of nursery rhymes!

Tanya isn't really trying to understand the local society, that's a long-term project for when she has a long term, but she does note that she (unsurprisingly) doesn't understand it.

"You can ask questions if you have them, or I can give an overview if you tell me what to focus on. A full review of my military career would take a long time but presumably most of it isn't relevant."

"I think you can start with an overview.  Maybe with an emphasis towards incidents that might be a problem for your alignment?  That would include times civilians or noncombatants were caught in the crossfire?  Or if there is anything you particularly feel troubled about or would second guess yourself about?"

He thinks 'guilt' won't exactly land for Von Degurechaff, but surely she must occasionally reconsider more fraught incidents? 

Asking someone what they think they did wrong is the oldest trick in the conversational book when the speaker isn't sure what, in fact, the other person did wrong. It won't work here for obvious reasons but it's probably a stock phrase without any thought behind it. Oh well, this is the non-specialist team that's not specced for aliens.

"I've second-guessed myself about many things, and regretted some decisions. The reason for that is that they didn't accomplish my goals or conform perfectly to the army's laws. Our goal here is to understand how I would have behaved if I had had different goals or had been operating under a different set of rules, namely those for not being evil-according-to-Pharasma. If I understand correctly, that means things I already regret aren't indicative of anything."

"I'm not sure what's relevant to the overview. As I said, I volunteered for service, and if war is generally or often evil then I might have used the years before age eighteen to find a legal way to avoid conscription. I could certainly have refused command positions and decision-making authority."

"I have served as an aerial mage, a commander of a regiment of such mages, a trainer in two different settings, and eventually a commander of a larger combined-arms unit including infantry and artillery with the attendant logistics, and I worked directly with staff officers as well as field commanders. I've fought in five different war theaters against four enemy nations, and led several highly specialized missions. I don't know what is relevant; I'll start by going over the most obvious situations when noncombatants are involved. ...I should clarify that, by our laws of warfare, noncombatants can be valid military targets, most obviously army supply trains and military manufacturing facilities but ultimately any installation that is materially aiding the enemy's war effort, even if it also or originally serves a valid civilian purpose and even if enemy civilians are harmed in the process."

"For example, we can destroy bridges and railyards in the enemy's rear and they can't stop us from doing it by keeping a civilian permanently on the bridge, because if that were allowed then everyone would put token civilians everywhere and - maybe that would be good, if it worked, but you can extend that principle to avoiding war altogether and yet here we are. More realistically, if we raid an enemy city and blow up an ammunition factory, some number of civilians working in it will die in the explosion and civilians on the surrounding streets and buildings might also die in the resulting fire. It's very hard to get good estimates of such civilian casualties since every country naturally wants to minimize the numbers it reports or to suppress the news altogether, both to limit enemy intelligence and for internal propaganda."

"Even in combat with enemy forces, there is no good way to verify that there aren't noncombatants involved. If you see who you're shooting at you can avoid people out of uniform and protected personnel like medics, but aerial mages and aircraft and artillery can all operate against ground targets miles away and often can't see much beyond that the target is an enemy camp or unit. Artillery in particular prefers to stay out of direct sight and use indirect fire, targeting coordinates relayed by coordinators who rely on aerial mage spotters which are typically from a completely different unit. The system only works because people are following the rules, not because they're capable of personally confirming their targets."

"Another, rather unique case concerned a Germanian city called Arene which was located close to the front lines and contained a central railway switching yard. ...that is, a place where trains - long distance freight transport technology used for army supply - are routed between the different tracks they run on. This area had been conquered some fifty years ago from the same nation we were now fighting and some of its population wished the enemy would reconquer them, or so it was later said. In any case, the enemy managed to sneak in a small elite aerial mage unit which took out the city's garrison and proclaimed the city to be in rebellion and that the population supported them."

"The military situation was already very precarious. If the railway junction couldn't be freed within ten days the front would collapse, with over a million men killed or captured and the nation presumably having to surrender shortly afterwards. My aerial mage battalion was part of the emergency response. We engaged the enemy unit inside the city but failed to completely eliminate it, since they dispersed and hid while recruiting disaffected locals as a militia. We rescued some people they were holding as prisoners, public figures who opposed their takeover, but that didn't really resolve anything... The Germanian army demanded they let civilians evacuate the city, and when some people tried to leave they shot them - we have recordings. We asked for parley to arrange to evacuate noncombatants, they refused and claimed the whole city was a militia united against the Empire. It was patently false, they were holding our own citizens as hostages against us with guns to their heads hoping we'd rather lose the war than fire on our own city."

"Command decided to call their bluff and instructed artillery to bombard most of the city outside the railyard. Several hundred thousands of people were killed, probably mostly civilians and not rebels who volunteered for the enemy's militia. The legal fig leaf of a justification was that we took them at their word and treated the city as a fortified enemy stronghold, but the reason was that the alternative would be to lose the war."

"My unit and I were there throughout. We didn't make any decisions that mattered to the city's destruction, we were following orders, and even to disobey those orders would have only delayed events by a few hours until another unit of aerial mages was sent in, or the army simply decided to proceed without aerial spotters. It was hard for some of my men, but - not in a way where a better alternative suggested itself to me. ...I was operating on the understanding that I would only be sparing my men the moral unpleasantness by burdening some other soldiers with them, and an army cannot function if all its officers adopt this policy. I did wish we didn't have to do this, but - only in the same way I have wished there didn't have to be a war."

It feels like she is trying to convince him, and not like she is trying to genuinely consider what she should repent about.  He gets some of that with the soldiers he usually counsels, but they usually at least understand the general point of atonement.  He can't just say that to her.  It was obviously a really hard situation she was in that put her Law and duty to her country against Goodness, and her Law won out easily.  Probably confessors that work in Taldor for high profile commanders and nobility get really good at diplomatically explaining 'yes it is clear you didn't feel like you had a choice, but also that still counts as Evil, and it would be helpful if you stopped trying to rationalize doing Evil'.

"In general, with the rules of engagement between nations you describe, I think it would be difficult, but not impossible to be neutral on the Good-Evil axis and Lawful on the Law-Chaos axis.  The specific situation you describe with Arene almost did certainly push you to Evil if you did not already count as Evil.  You describe quite thoroughly a lack of any alternatives, or at least Lawful alternatives.  I can discuss it with you to try to be sure that you really did lack alternatives.  If that is really the case, then the choice to make differently would be to not be in that situation in the first place.  So, going back to your earlier decisions… did Germania have the concept of conscientious objectors or of genuinely committed pacifists, or of religious orders committed to nonviolence and exempt from conscription?"

He cringes internally at his very last idea as he remembers the fact that all of the religions of her world apparently lacked any guidance or input from actual Gods.  Also, it would be really terrible for the Worldwound and the world as a whole if Von Degurechaff comes out of her atonement as a committed pacifist, but his first duty as a confessor is to the person he is counseling, so it isn't even really a choice for him to provide the best advice he can to help her find her way to Good.

"I'm sorry I momentarily forgot what you said about all the religions lacking any Good Gods guiding them.  If we are to genuinely consider that alternative then I would need to discuss your planet's religions to make sure joining a pacifist religious order wouldn't somehow be Evil itself."

Rosin thinks to herself.  The idea of how the exact criteria for reading as an alignment might shift under different equilibriums of rules of war is genuinely fascinating!  Unfortunately for Von Degurechaff, the tendency in alignment of both common soldiers and military commanders (especially prior to Iomedae), suggests that 'it was the equilibrium standards of war' isn't actually enough to make standard Lawful actions non-Evil.

It would be bad for the Worldwound and the countries immediately around it, but actually if Tanya focuses on peaceful technological uplift it would probably be better for Golarion as a whole!

Tanya is eager to hear the Lastwall rules of engagement that are reliably non-evil even when fighting perfidious adversaries! (This is only partly cynical.)

"If you think I might have had alternatives after being deployed to Arene, I would appreciate hearing them. Would they need to be alternatives affecting the actual outcome for the city, or just ways for me to avoid personally dirtying my hands? If it's only the latter that matters then obviously I could have refused to carry out my orders and accepted whatever punishment the court martial handed out." And of course she would tried to avoid army service if she'd expected to have such a constraint.

"I'm not sure about the legal status of conscientious objectors, I never checked. It would likely be possible to get out of combat service. As a woman I was only subject to conscription because I am a mage so I could, at the very least, underplay my abilities in that regard... I could definitely refuse to have command authority. On the more extreme end, I could obviously injure myself in a way that would render me unfit for combat service. Yes, if my goal had been to avoid army service at any cost, I am sure I could have managed that." The 'any cost' had loomed quite large in Tanya's mind at the time, but consider: infinite torture afterlives!!!

"As for religious orders, the orphanage I was raised in was in fact run by nuns. Women sworn to celibacy and various religious strictures who live by the rules of a Church-sanctioned order. I could have pretended to believe in their god and asked to join them, and although I haven't checked I expect that's a legal way to avoid conscription, and in running an orphanage they provide a valuable service to society even if they spend the other half of their time on - religious duties."

"I - would have preferred any other option, though. It feels too close to what Being X said he wanted to achieve by placing me in that world. And their religion claims true belief is needed and no good deeds can be enough for salvation, and it would have been difficult for me to pretend all my life to believe in it."

The resentment at the quandary that her ‘Good’ options are merely avoiding ‘personally dirtying her hands’ actually does fit with his early model of Tanya as an Evil Arodenite.  He has some philosophical objections to Tanya’s framing but he has the sense that explaining them wouldn’t actually help this situation, and the human confessor is doing a decent enough job.

He doesn’t like that framing either and he also has a philosophical framework for rejecting it, but it might be too much of a diversion or distraction to discuss it.

“I had assumed you wanted to figure out a Lawful option, I had gotten the impression Law was important to you.  You could go for an atonement towards True Neutral, but Atonements are towards a God’s alignment or an alignment along the way to them, so you would need a cleric of a True Neutral, Neutral Good, or Chaotic Good God.  And my training, skills, and experience are not suited to counseling on unlawful alternatives.”

She may not realize what he is referring to.

“So that rules out my helping you consider some options, like lying about your beliefs to join the nuns, or refusing a lawful (but evil) order, if you were sure the orders you received were in fact lawful.  But it sounds like there might have been some options to avoid combat service?”

He thinks… her magic is pretty different.

“Does your type of magic do healing?  One option pacifists with the right kind of healing on this planet sometimes have is to serve in a healing order committed not to fight.  Did anything like that exist in Germania?”

"I did say I would have preferred any other option! I would have considered joining religious orders - in this counterfactual - only if it was a choice between that and predictably being sent to a torture afterlife because of my army service!" Is this man really criticizing her for saying that lying is better than getting yourself tortured?! It's not as if anyone else would be affected by Tanya lying about her own beliefs! Really, it's Tanya herself who'd be harmed in this scenario!

"...I really don't think it would have come to that, though. We can postulate that I could have avoided combat service by simply refusing to do it; the exact outcome or cost of that decision doesn't seem to be relevant, especially if it would not be problematic for me to serve the army or the broader military effort in some other way. After all, every tax-paying citizen contributes to the war effort. I'm... no longer sure what this line of argument was in service of. I thought I was to learn Lastwall's laws of warfare and commit to following them pro tem. If I had somehow known to follow them at the time, obviously I could not have enlisted in any army following different laws, but if the law demanded my conscription - if there were not, in fact, the convenient ways out that I think there were - then I don't see how I could avoid breaking one law or the other. Except by dying, I suppose."

"My magic does do healing, although I am not personally skilled with it. Mages are too valuable for the army to formally track them as career medics, although skilled healers can be very valuable in the field. They're still combatants and they do see fighting. ...military medical personnel and associated infrastructure like hospitals are protected by the laws of war and so are civilian medical organizations, some of which volunteer to work on or close to the battlefield. But that's not a path that was open to me. If I wasn't an A-rank mage I wouldn't have been conscripted, I was conscripted specifically as an aerial mage, and if I refused that then offering to serve as a mage medic instead would not have been - something the army would have seen as a valid alternative." Weird nonstandard not-quite-illegal postings might exist for distinguished veterans with a friendly ear in Personnel but they definitely don't exist for no-name fresh recruits.

"And yes, I am certain the orders I received in Arene - and throughout my service - were legal by the laws of the Germanian Empire. I happened to encounter a theoretical case similar to Arene in military academy; we were set it as a theoretical exercise and I proposed the answer that, if the enemy claims the city contains mostly combatants, it is in fact possible to take them at their word if one wishes to obey only the letter of the law and is willing to accept the civilian casualties that come with urban fighting. And that answer was accepted. This was a program for distinguished junior officers selected for fast promotion and I'm sure the judges had the appropriate legal knowledge. I still don't know what else we should have done, but I suppose if Pharasma's rules prohibit certain actions regardless of the outcome, that can't be helped."

"A Lawful alignment doesn't actually require following the laws of a nation, though it helps.  It is more about being predictable and consistent in a particular way, and predictably following your nation's laws is the most straightforward and simple way of meeting that.  Strong personal codes featuring honesty, forthrightness, and keeping your agreements can also meet the criteria for lawfulness.  So in this counterfactual, you could stay Lawful with a consistent code you made clear to people.  Admittedly, it probably doesn't end well for you if Germania insisted on conscripting you despite you being clear that you were committed to following rules that might lead to you disobeying or ignoring particular orders.  But if you can plausibly make that sort of commitment, as judged by Iomedae looking into your mind during the Atonement spell, then an atonement to Lawful Neutral should go through successfully."

He pauses to consider.

"I've gotten a clear sense that you have a strong personal code, Tanya.  It is completely reasonable to prioritize avoiding eternal torture over keeping your personal code, but it would be ideal if you could avoid giving up your code (as opposed to adding to it with a few extra rules to follow) and avoid eternal torture."

"I've gotten enough sense of your time as a soldier and commander to start with at least.  Do you want to move on to discussing Lastwall's rules of war?"