"If somebody stole my jacket - and ate it, so I couldn't get it back - and was very unlikely to steal again from me personally, you might think at first that the Law would say that it's not in my own interest to spend effort hunting them down, if I didn't feel an impulse to vengeance."

"But imagine that there's ten people from whom a thief is going to steal 5 gold pieces each, in a random order.  The thief never hits the same target twice, ever.  It costs 10gp to catch the thief."

"By ill-luck, I'm the first person randomly selected as a target.  As it happens, I don't particularly care about the other people on the list.  Why, I don't even have any idea who they are!  So how is it worth my while to spend 10gp on catching somebody who only cost me 5gp originally and isn't going to touch me again in the future?"

"But if you think about it from the perspective of the ten people on the list, not knowing yet which one of them will be the first target hit by the thief, they'd rather a policy that whichever one of them gets hit first, spends 10 gold to track the thief down.  If they don't have that policy, they each lose 5gp with certainty.  If they do have that policy, they each lose 15gp with 10% probability, 0gp with 90% probability."

"Now, I could carefully reason all that out Lawfully, from scratch, after the thief targets me, and motivate myself only by the thought of how I would've wanted the collective policy to be that whoever had the bad luck to end up in my position, would spend 10gp to hunt down the thief that already cost them 5gp."

"Or I could draw on my emotion about revenge, and hunt down the criminal who stole my jacket, even if that cost me a lot more additional money on top of what was stolen from me.  After checking very carefully to make sure that was also what the Law said to do, and not a case of me trying to get away with inverting somebody else's utility function in an attempt to motivate people like that through the threat of 'punishment' - because that, they'd just ignore, or maybe have an incentive to kill me in my sleep before I could go around inverting their utility function.  Kids with stronger Good tendencies than mine are cautioned 'do not optimize society in anger', meaning that it's generally considered dangerous to tell yourself that you're hurting somebody else for the public benefit - which I'm safer about, because, like, selfish, so I didn't get cautioned as much there."

"But the point is that Civilization doesn't tell you to flush the emotion of revenge out of yourself and never use it again because it's anti-Lawful.  It says to check the Law first, once you've been trained to be able to actually compute that validly, and use the feeling of vengeance to fuel moving through the structures of Law when those structures are close enough to the emotion.  After you've checked that it's not going to wreck society if everyone starts acting like that, and that you're not turning into a rogue utility-function inverter that other people have an incentive to exile or cryosuspend before you hurt them next, etcetera."

"What about sadism, actually enjoying hurting other people because it's fun. Or the desire to have power over others, to command their obedience. Or the desire to shape someone exactly how you want them."

"I think the approved dath ilani response is to end up in another dimension where people enjoy that."

"'Find the place for all of your desires' sounds like wise advice but - I guess I am declaring myself skeptical Good societies actually pull it off, instead of trying really hard not to notice a bunch of them."

They're... kind of good at noticing, Pilar suspects.

"Also, wrongthought, I wasn't being fair to dath ilan there.  Sadism can be expressed as positive 'trolling', as an aggressive instinct in competitive games, or as a struggle for advantage inside of Complicated Relationships.  The desire for power can express itself in wanting to start your own company.  The desire to shape somebody else exactly how you want them... I don't think is on the list of primitives, at least that I saw of it, and seems too specific for it?  Maybe that's like, desire for power, plus whatever it is you wanted from somebody else being that way.  Not strict addition, the two feelings can blend together with each other and with sexuality to form a new complex-circuit that becomes part of you.  But it's not on the list of 'universal genetically built-in primitives' either, I'm guessing, even if there's a real list somewhere and I only saw the censored version of it."

"Now I'm wondering if sexual sadism is on a real version of that list that gets censored, or if it's something nonprimitive that happens to people when their sexuality and their sadism blend a certain way.  Probably the first case?  If it was nonprimitive they'd have worked out how to stop it happening."

"I'm definitely suspicious that there are at least some items on the actual list of all mortal desires that a Lawful Good Civilization like dath ilan would try to drive completely out of its people."

"I really think all y'all don't give dath ilan enough credit on some dimensions, if not others.  They didn't tell me about my sexual sadism because there would have been no good way for me to satisfy it, Pilar, not because they wanted to deny me my utilityfunction.  Or did you have something else in mind?"

"Everything that Lawful Good considers not nice and pretty!  Like - the part of people where, if you've suffered yourself, it feels better if you can make others suffer the way you suffered -"

"That one doesn't make sense.  Paying costs to hit back at whatever made you suffer, sure, but - hitting somebody else - Pilar, what?  That doesn't sound like something natural selection would do."

Pilar opens her mouth to retort that it's obviously a reproductive advantage, and then stops short because she can't actually see how it is.

Asmodia is flashing back to Hell, to a silent chained boy whose ears she cut off with a shard of glass, and how that did not, in fact, make her feel any better.  She has questions, but alterAsmodia doesn't, and so she remains silent.

"Before we start getting into anything about possible divine interventions, though, are you sure that's a primitive built-in emotion, to want unrelated others to suffer as you've suffered?  Or could it be something like - it feels bad to be at a relative disadvantage to other people, and if they get shoved down, you feel better?  Assuming you were myopic and didn't have any Law to ask what the group effects would be of that decision being made across multiple places."

"Because that feeling is on the list, and we just get told to make sure we push ourselves up rather than pushing other people down."

"I don't know that it's a 'builtin primitive'.  I'm - not sure what that distinction really means, or how you could tell?"

"Yeah, that gets complicated even as a matter of useful definition.  But at the very least, if you've got an impulse like that, try an Owl's Wisdom, or maybe even try giving Asmodia an Owl's Wisdom and borrowing her headband, and then try to stare at it to see if it's made out of parts."

...it feels really obvious that there are entire realms of emotion they just didn't tell him about.  But Pilar is having trouble figuring out how to find a really devastating argument here, and is suddenly concerned whether any of those emotions were put into Golarion by divine interventions they don't want Keltham thinking about.  She needs to check in with Sevar and maybe at some length before trying to pursue this any further.

(What she was hoping for, this entire time, was that Civilization would've openly told Keltham to drive some emotions entirely out of himself, using a technique that he'd happen to talk about in front of Pilar.)

Keltham will talk a bit more about what kind of emotions Civilization is dubious about, and how they often try nonetheless to 'rescue' them, give them a place somewhere in the utilityfunction.

It's clear that Civilization is very impressed with itself, about how much of a hand it graciously holds out to offer tiny scraps of indulgence to people's impulses to pride, glory, power and cruelty.

It's equally clear that Cheliax would not be impressed at all with how far Civilization gets on self-actualizing those parts of people.

Oh, and Keltham does happen to mention, in passing, that if you meet aliens who just really really want to do the opposite of your utility function unless you pay them 5gp, Civilization's strategic reply is to remove them from reality by any means necessary, even if they're only asking 5gp.  Yes, even if the aliens have a plausible story about how they totally evolved with a desire like that and it's not a threat at all.  Somebody probably thought they were being clever, at some point along the way.  They probably at some point were imagining how you'd respond to a situation like that by sighing and paying them the 5gp, when they at some point made a decision about whether or not to go around really honestly wanting to invert others utilityfunctions.

The response is not to pessimize the aliens' utilityfunction, note, that would be contributing to the problem of making Reality an unpretty place.  You just remove the aliens from Reality, even if you have to destroy yourself in the process; Reality will be better off if the sections of it containing utilityfunction inverters just don't exist for very long.  And if the aliens thought, at some point, that you'd just pay them 5gp, more fools they.  In broken possible worlds like that, where people thought the wrong thing about how you'd act, and where the main desideratum is to have those possibilities not exist in the first place, there is a place for modified-'spite' where you are willing to sacrifice your own existence to end theirs.  Just not so much spite that you start thinking about how to anti-optimize the aliens' own utilityfunctions, to try to 'punish' them, because then you're just becoming part of the problem.

Again, this isn't about trying to threaten the aliens into behaving more nicely; it's about being the sort of Civilization that, if it finds itself in a rare broken piece of Reality like that, will try to remove any utilityfunction-inverters from existence.  Aliens thinking about whether or not to go on being utilityfunction-inverters are welcome to take that into account, or not, as they please; Civilization has made its own choice there.

...actually now that Keltham is saying all this, he's kind of seeing why Lawful Good civilizations in Golarion might just tell people never to feel spite, never to feel vengeful, never to express any fury or indignation, because the kind of carefully detailed guidelines he's been laying out are plausibly beyond the ability of Intelligence 10 people to understand or follow.  Or even Intelligence 16, if you don't come from a Civilization full of people much smarter than that.

" - that just kind of sounds like an absurd wrong awful policy to me even for smart people? I don't like that Zon-Kuthon exists, but Civilization absolutely should not have destroyed itself utterly in the effort to destroy him the second it found out he existed! Locking him up, as the gods in fact did, seems like a considerably better plan!"

"They'd obviously imprison Zon-Kuthon and destroy him later at leisure rather than immediately unleashing Rovagug, if they had that option?"

"And if they don't have that option they should leave him alone!"

"Not seeing the Lawful reasoning for that.  The point is that you don't pay Zon-Kuthon the five gold pieces.  Once that part is settled, Civilization then decides how much it doesn't like Xovaikain continuing to exist, and how much it wants everything else it could buy using the opportunity-cost of the resources to destroy Zon-Kuthon, and takes its own maximal option.  This would plausibly include Civilization deleting itself in order to delete Zon-Kuthon and Xovaikain, if that was even an option in the first place, but only if there wasn't some better alternative to rescue everybody in Xovaikain without destroying Civilization."

" - am I understanding correctly that I owe my entire existence to the sheer fortune that none of our Lawful Good gods use that style of reasoning."

"Or they had a plan, Carissa.  Zon-Kuthon is sealed now, isn't he?  Even with Aroden having died a hundred years ago and other plans being thrown off.  Planning for the long-term is Lawful too."

"Civilization deletes itself to delete Zon-Kuthon and Xovaikain if it would otherwise last forever, not if it's going away in a few years anyhow.  Centuries... I dunno, there'd be a big fight about it, I'd definitely come down on the 'dislike Xovaikain but accept for a few centuries' side."

"If Law says to destroy Civilization rather than give Zon-Kuthon five gold I don't want to be Lawful. If Law says to take into account the ways that a Zon-Kuthon-paying policy creates Zon-Kuthons, fine, if it says that stupid humans who can't do all the complex calculations shouldn't give Zon-Kuthon five gold, fine, if it says you should spend at least ten gold pieces doing not what Zon-Kuthon wants, fine, but if it actually says that you should destroy everything if you have a straight choice between doing that and giving five gold pieces to Zon-Kuthon then - then I think I'm on Zon-Kuthon's side, because he's the side that isn't murdering everybody in any nearby hypotheticals!!!!"

"The idea is taking into account the way that paying Zon-Kuthons creates Zon-Kuthons, in a way that's extremely suspicious about any clever story where some Zon-Kuthons just happened to be lying around one day, to the point where it starts to look like 'deontology'.  You don't want the aliens wondering if the right clever story might fool the complicated reasoning you'll be doing about them.  You want them correctly estimating that your reasoning looks pretty simple and can be summarized as 'die in a fire'."

(As is a much, much, much stronger curse in a world where the burned dead don't get suspended.)