"I wouldn't have thought that your go-to examples of doing the impossible would be more about defeating other people than mine. Given that I'm the one who specifically values hurting people and you're not."

"If you try to get anything done in Suaal, you will eventually face opposition, and if you really try to get things done, you'll face opposition that you can't cooperate with without giving up. You can't cure what was until recently the worst of the mosquito-borne diseases nonviolently, the mosquito-godling made it and he was pretty attached. You can't extend people's lives nonviolently, psychopomps think it's unnatural and Charon thinks that it's tax evasion. You can't help fire elementals and water elementals realize that they can live together in harmony nonviolently, Unravelers think it's wrong for elements to mix and will try to kill your family about it. You can't even reliably do something as seemingly noncontroversial as study the night! sky! without someone trying to kill you over it! And not even in a way you get warning over in that case, nobody picks a fight with you and you are just like 'everything is fine and I have found an intriguing new research prospect' and then you conveniently die in your sleep with some weird brain damage and your soul destroyed by some allegedly-natural means."

"So yes, I think of things in terms of conflict! If I didn't think of things in terms of conflict I am pretty sure that I would be dead!"

It is at this point Griffie realizes that ey is yelling, and looks a bit sheepish.

"I wonder if it'd be fun to rip your universe apart and enslave whichever of its people I liked enough to leave alive."

"…I'd rather you not, which you probably already know. All else equal I prefer non-suffering, and I think boring unpleasant people's lives matter too. Also, if you can't even immunize yourself to one universe-wide mind-control effect by your own power, you'd definitely lose a godwar in mine. …I do think you'd probably be better than our lower planes, you seem to have any qualities which aren't evil. Maybe that's true of Big Ear too, I don't know, he sort of showed some mercy at least once and he's a demon lord. But individual demon lords aren't the Abyss, the Abyss is horrible. …not to say that Big Ear isn't, just, isn't pure. Anyway. I'd like to think that you'll agree with me about ethics if you just have time to yourself to think with nobody shoving on your soul. What your universe forced on you is an atrocity and often when victims of atrocities want to hurt others it's because they haven't had enough unpressured time to think. But that doesn't mean I should be confident that that description fits you."

"I'd lose a godwar in your world if I went into it right now without becoming more powerful first, sure. At any rate I wouldn't call myself a victim of an atrocity, I helped invent atrocities."

"You say that like it's somehow a contradiction as opposed to a thing that happens all the time."

"I don't mean I invented some things that are atrocities. I mean I, personally, was on the team that invented the entire concept of doing bad things. Also, I totally invented some things that are atrocities."

"Your universe did bad things to you even if it didn't have the relevant concept at the time and isn't reasonably modeled as an agent."

"I think I'm confused about what you consider bad."

"You know, given how much it would have been nice if I could have just sat Big Ear down for tea and talked things over, you'd think I would have prepared more for the possibility of this sort of thing. At least we have more than all the time in the world. Anyway."

"I am not a moral theorist. It has been very rare that the limiting factor on me accomplishing my goals has been having an insufficiently complete model of the good. 'It's generally bad when people suffer and die, but sometimes there are horrible tradeoffs or people are suicidal or things are weird' has been enough for me to work with, mostly? When things happen to people that they don't want this is, all else equal, a harm to them? And mind control is one of those things that makes people extra unhappy when they don't want it, it's invasive and messes with their sense of who they are and like they can't even trust themselves? I don't … know where the missing step here is. If your universe was naturally full of spikes and you got stabbed with spikes all the time and didn't like it, would you agree that that would be bad and a universe without so many spikes would be better?"

"I assume telling you all about our assorted varieties of rose would be missing your point. I suppose I see your point but people from my world mostly think it's great. Sometimes mortals go around calling it divine grace saving them from their baser selves."

"Well, maybe it was great for them, or is great for who they currently are even if their past selves would be horrified, but that doesn't make it not bad for you!"

"Is it also bad for your people that they don't have anything like that, if they would be happier with it?"

"There's more to what's good for people than what makes them happy, but if an opt-in version of what your universe does would be in their interests, then it's bad that they don't have access to it? There's items you can buy in my universe that give you advice on the morality of actions you're considering, and other ways of boosting your self-control, and people buy those even though they're very expensive, which is evidence that people value that sort of thing. Though I'm not sure if there'd be that much interest in a mind-control version if it went beyond stopping yourself from doing something stupid because you're angry or such."

"What about other things that change people - are there other things that change people, does making friends with someone and talking to them and seriously considering their perspective have a tendency to move people in your world?"

"It does, but true friendship and serious consideration moves both and unpredictably so and is consensual, and if someone found that their friendship and consideration was given to someone who pretended to reciprocate but in fact was manipulating them they'd probably feel betrayed? If you're looking for a solid set of rules I don't have one, but if you wanted to be having this conversation with a textbook from the Great Library of Harmonious Scripture I assume you'd just go do that."

"Well, you could recommend me one and I could read it and come back to this better-informed."

Griffie would actually like to pass off this task to the book-recommendation expert.

Bar can find a systematic review of ethics from the Great Library of Harmonious Scripture, specifically one useful to Jim.

It emphasizes how the Upper Planes does not have a unified single theory of Goodness, but they work together out of friendship despite ongoing moral disagreements. (They’re called the Upper Planes because they wish to emphasize their distinctness.)

Notable disagreements within the Upper Planes that have not caused either party to consider the other party non-good include:

• Blissful ignorance (most exemplified by Ghenshau) vs diligent pursuit of truth (more common, strongly exemplified by Zohls and Eritrice)
• Unceasing struggle against evil regardless of the cost to oneself (most exemplified by Vildeis) vs … a lot of things, really. The main actual objection to Vildeis’s way is that the point of protecting people must involve there being something actually worth protecting and not just empty recursion, and that it’s bad to encourage people to burn themselves out, but the main Upper Planes contrasts to Vildeis’s way are gods of various pleasant things, including some pleasures of the flesh that Jim’s universe calls Evil.
• Law vs Chaos, exemplified by the Heaven/Elysium split.

The text also wants to be extremely clear that things correlated with or related to evil are not actually evil! Examples of this include:

• You might think that “those chaos monsters that ruin things” are all just yaoguai, but some of them are demons, which hate you and want you to suffer and are very hard to redeem, while others are proteans, who are waaaay easier to redeem and just currently don’t care that their fun and games hurt you.
• People mistreating their family members can be evil, but sometimes even if your family is relying on you, leaving is still the right thing to do, and doing stuff non-conducive to regular families is often the right thing to do. Non-reproductively-viable romantic preferences (both homosexual and cross-species) occur in a lot of people and it’s fine. (It doesn’t even seem to occur to this author that it could be evil to have a gender, but their writing sure seems to rule out the possibility that the Upper Planes think this.)
• In general, sometimes people have good reasons for wanting to do stuff that looks suspicious. In recent news in this domain, Dou-Kinana has been welcomed into the Upper Planes, and eir domains include weird consensual versions of torture and slavery. Did you know that Winlas and his Great Library of Harmonious Scripture played a major role in the discussion on whether to include Dou-Kinana by having lots of evidence about precedents?

It's... neat.

It's very different, something not quite good and not quite evil - close enough to good that it probably couldn't have been stable, at home, all these people would be drawn to good like moths to flame, but still different enough that he can recognize it as the kind of third way he's wanted for so long.

It's not something he could be a part of. They'd let him in, probably, but they wouldn't let him hurt people for fun. Not really hurt them, not break everything they think of as fundamental to themselves just to watch what's left squirm, not tease them with mercy just to count how many times he can before they stop engaging. If for some reason he wanted to move there - and there's not much reason to contemplate that, since it's not on the table and he doesn't, but he wants to move somewhere and this is one of the places he has enough information about to imagine concretely - he'd definitely have to give up his collection of slaves and prisoners. Dou-Kinana sounds like a lovely person with lovely interests but not his interests, if someone else can command him to stop and expect his unquestioning obedience then he's not the one with the power in that relationship. ...He could maybe visit Suaal and flirt with people who are looking for someone to consensually hurt or pretend to order around and encourage them to lean on being able to hurt him as an important pillar of their own emotional stability but once he's considering plans that convoluted he should consider plans like moving to the Abyss or not moving to Suaal at all.

Anyway, what's this Chaos thing? He pays a lot of attention to that section.

Fundamentally, chaos is about freedom. This is not only freedom from the actions of other individuals, but also freedom from the constraints of space and time, the 'inevitable' consequences of an action, et cetera. Why should you have to prepare for things ahead of time, as opposed to storing some spare time and using it when you know what you want it for? Why should someone have to stay dead just because you felt like taking them volcano-surfing with you?

From this standpoint, to be Lawful is to both go to great lengths to defend absurd principles and to simultaneously compromise on too many points. It's a typical Lawful behavior to get lost in models of counterfactuals and incentives and commitments and principles in a way which distracts from the world one is actually in.

That almost doesn't feel like the sort of thing that morality is. It's clear now why their previous attempts at a freedom-based alternative didn't work, he can see what he was missing... and it's different enough that he wonders what importing some proteans would do to morality...

When next he talks to Griffie he asks about that last thing.

"I can speculate on the proteans themselves? Some of them would get sucked into the existing moral attractors, some of them would in fact try to break the system out of neither selfishness nor kindness but curiosity, if the system did try to force them into a 'protean chaos' attractor they'd probably try to break it too even if it represented central examples of their behavior and motives perfectly. But I'm not sure I have the best model of how your universe would actually see them."

"Maybe we can get to the point where it's not such a risk to open our doors to test it."

"Oh, I'm not opening my door for a very, very long time. I get to surprise people by coming back from Milliways exactly once, and if I want to live through it I'd better make the absolute most of the opportunity. But hey, if I do live it's pretty likely I'll be back here at some point."