"I think whatever winds up making sense is almost certainly going to require a pile of money to get off the ground so I might focus on that for a bit."

"That sounds right." Belmarniss is such a good, sensible, achingly normal person. 

Is Select Oliva available? Tanya can wait (and reflect, and read) for however long it takes, if he's going to be available later today.

He's doing a channel but can see her after that.

"Select. Thank you for seeing me. There are three things I wanted to discuss with you, and I'm unsure what order is best so I'll outline them."

"First, I have a very complicated life story which I haven't alluded to yet, separately from being from Germania. I hadn't shared it before because it's fairly unbelievable and it didn't seem actionable, but I've realized I was wrong about that. I did intend to share it if we moved beyond receiving advice, before we attempted to make contact with Germania or to Commune with Iomedae. I could tell it now but it may take a long time and I worry it would - confuse the discussion, so to speak, so it might be best to deal with the other two first."

"The second thing is an idea I had. I'm unsure - and conflicted about - how urgently I need to decide what to do. It might be hours or days, or it might that I should study for a year first. Could we pray to Iomedae about it? If acting quickly means working with your church, and if she sees enough value from doing that soon or enough of a risk of me being prevented by other actors from doing it later, it might be worth it to her to send a sign even without a Commune. It would be a ceiling on the risk of waiting, at least. I don't know if you have a standard procedure for this, or if the ceiling is so high as to be useless in practice. I do trust Iomedae not to make me regret it, if the prayer is explicitly a question about how urgently I should start negotiating with her or the church. So from our perspective it would be worth a little time checking."

"The third one is a more complicated question. I want Good, generally, and Iomedae knows better than I do what would do the most Good. But I also want to help Germania, if I can afford to. I don't know how to balance the two. Is there a principled argument about - how selfish or parochial Good people should be, or can afford to be, and how to make such tradeoffs? I can say more about this, if you'd like, and the thoughts I've had already."

"I'm happy to pray with you and it's not unheard of for someone to get a vision or a feeling that's usable to steer by. Do you want to do that before or after we talk about parochialism?"

Oh good, her plan isn't worthless! "I think we should do that last, because our prayers will be influenced by all the rest of the discussion."

"On parochialism - first, I should tell you I've decided to interpret my oath as serving the good of Germania, as I best understand it, rather than following orders coming from people who don't understand or believe in the unprecedented situation I found myself in. It's not entirely contrary to its plain meaning, which is - conflicted in this case anyway - but it's not how many would interpret it or expect me to. I do think that my superiors would likely want me to do this. They also want what is best for Germania and likely don't care as much about me following the exact oath, because - they don't know about formalized alignments - I'm guessing here. I don't know if it counts as breaking the oath, in Pharasma's eyes. It's certainly reinterpreting it."

"I do know I need to answer the question in the most inconvenient possible case. If, hypothetically, we reestablish contact and I tell my commander everything I know and am satisfied he believes the same things I do about reality, and then he gives me an order which in my best judgement is Good for Germania but net Evil, such as transitioning to a Good or at least neutral standard of warfare but continuing to kill enemy soldiers many of who will go to Hell - I don't know yet what I would do. That's part of the question of parochialism. Or of selfishness, since it's my feelings that make me care about Germania. One could argue that I'd be preferencing Germania in order to feel better about myself, and that's not a Good reason at all."

"The other part of the question is - suppose for a moment helping Germania wasn't morally complicated, just very hard and expensive. Suppose I came to negotiate with your church, to share my knowledge and abilities for the cause of Good, but Iomedae determined it wasn't efficient to help Germania and all my resources were better spent here on Golarion. I could still ask, in trade for my help, that you spend the effort to help Germania, but how much of the - resource - ought to be spent on it? Doing the most Good is a simple rule. Bargaining to get the most I can is also simple, but then the minimum marginal Good would be done and of course I don't want that. What I I'm missing is - some principled way to pick a point in between, any point. Obviously we wouldn't want a rule that says the stronger I feel about it, the more I should ask for, because - there's no reason to incentivize being someone who feels emotions very strongly or gets attached easily... On Earth there are sometimes religious laws or customs, like tithing ten percent to the church or to charity and once you've done that you don't have a further obligation, but - the number ten percent isn't derived from some calculation. It's just a round number someone picked. Maybe history would have been much better if they had picked a different number."

"...I don't think the concept of incentivizing people to feel strongly about things in that way has featured in any of the theology I'm acquainted with," says Oliva. "I would in fact normally advise that if you feel very strongly about something you take particular care with it as a self-maintenance measure, and because, also, it is a harm to the cause of Good if serving it looks, to all onlookers, like a miserable sacrifice. It isn't that it can't be, but it needn't be, there are paths to it that require little to no suffering and privation and showcasing those is itself Good in terms of conversions of people whose altruism is limited."

"I've already been advised not to adopt any plan that might make me persistently miserable, or that I might not be able to follow through with for years and decades to come. I think I'm taking it seriously, and will consider it again before making any final decision. And your point about the secondary effect on onlookers is well taken. A week ago, I would have rejected a plan on exactly those grounds, that we cannot ask of everyone who wants to do Good to act against their self-interest, and any attempt is doomed to failure... Are you saying the rule is that I should do enough for Germania to not leave me miserable?" Incentivizing people to feel less strongly in order to be successfully Good, or feel more strongly in order not to be asked to bear a burden, feels wrong somehow but she could be wrong.

"It still feels like a hard rule to follow. I can't predict my emotions so precisely. And - I don't want to betray Good by asking for too much. Or to betray Germania by not asking for as much as I am entitled to, if there really is some policy to be followed."

Emotions are such a fickle tool to build policies out of. Right now Tanya's emotions are insisting it's wrong for Germania's fate to be decided based on how strongly she happens to feel about it. She keeps pointing out to herself that it's the only reason Germania is getting any special consideration at all but the emotions are still there. If there's a skill for having rational emotions about your emotions, Tanya doesn't have it.

"I don't have a very precise guide here nor can I think of a book that describes the problem; it's a rare one. Some questions I would have in mind in your position would be - would any given course make Germania worse off for having provided whatever benefits to you that you enjoyed? Would it be a policy you'd find defensible in a person like you who was born in another country, perhaps a hostile one?"