"And it seems like - it'd be an injustice, if you weren't punished for that, and were forgiven for it, and could walk away and be a musician?"

He curls up very tightly.

"yes..."

"A thing I believe is that injustices - always have victims, they are always wrongs to someone in particular. Who is wronged, if you are forgiven?"

It's really unfair that she keeps asking him QUESTIONS with difficult answers that mean he has to actually think. 

"All the people who're - still stuck in the Empire?" he manages eventually. "Who - lost people, because of me. ...Everyone in Oris who - lost someone they cared about - because I made the decision to conquer them. I bet the rebel leader isn't just, fine, with me going off free to play music somewhere nice, when he still has to - fix his country -" 

"I doubt he would be fine with it. I think that's a little different than being wronged by it. 

A lot of people in the Empire are dead because of me, their families grieving because of me. Are they wronged, if we reach a peace in which I go about my Crusade and am never brought to justice?"

Well, obviously that's different, Iomedae isn't a terrible person! 

"You didn't ask to be stuck in our war," he says dully. "And you've - got bigger things to do - I don't feel like it'd help, to - punish you more, on top of already having murdered you." 

"That seems relevant to whether we should try to do something different, but it'd be a bit surprising to me if that were relevant to whether they were wronged? Something feels uncomfortable, to me, about the idea that whether they were wronged or not depends on the merits of a Crusade they may never hear about. We could say that they were wronged but we're going to permit that because we think other considerations are more important?"

"...That makes sense. I - guess I do feel like - our people who you killed were kind of wronged by you, even if it was my fault and Altarrin's fault as well." 

"That seems right to me. So - are they further wronged by my having been resurrected and restored to my work?"

"I - guess probably some people are upset about that. But - not as upset as the people in your world would be if your war went badly because you were dead ? And I - guess - I don't think the people in the Empire have - the right to say that the people in your world don't deserve help because you hurt them." 

"I'm not sure if you're saying that you'd argue they're not wronged, because I had sufficient reason to return to life, or that they're wronged but that shouldn't be an overriding consideration because Golarion not being conquered by Tar-Baphon is worth wronging them for, and I'm not sure how much the - different worlds - was doing, in your conception there -"

"I - think it maybe matters some?" Shrug. "I don't know. I just - it feels wrong to punish you for trying to help Oris, even if some people in the Empire died, I - we started it and that's - on me." 

"Hmmm. I think it matters who started it. But - people gave different accounts, of what the supposed provocation for the war had been, and I didn't ultimately end up thinking it mattered very much. It creates good incentives to punish people who start wars, so that people won't start wars, but - it's the rare institution that punishes the winners of wars, and being the loser of a war really seems adequately disincentivized. 

I guess there's a different line of argument here, which is something like, maybe there should be less punishment for people doing the best available thing, and more depending how dramatically their actions departed from the best available thing? But I'm not sure how closely that tracks the interests of any wronged parties, in a case like this."

That all sounds incredibly confusing to reason through and it's making his head hurt and it's - sort of missing the point, which is that the thought of walking away from all the horrors and being a minstrel somewhere better feels impossible, it's not a decision actually open to him, he can't just move on and be okay, and it would feel deeply wrong of him even if he could. Bastran is not exactly sure if this feeling is the kind that's amenable to being shifted by argument, though honestly Altarrin could probably manage it given long enough. He generally can.

"Which line of argument here do you actually believe?" he says, dully. 

"Oh. My own working conception of punishment is -

- what's the human impulse for justice fundamentally for? What is it doing for us, what kinds of worlds does it reach for? I think the answer is that you get less bad things, in the world, if it is a predictable feature of the world that if they happen they'll be punished; we execute murderers not because they have become bad and thereby begun to merit execution, but because there's less murder if that's how you handle it. In this conception, justice is Lawful - sorry - justice is ....contractualist? Justice is ....an agreement you would make before being born and ignorant of what soul you'd be born as?

...justice has its importance in the scheme of human values as an element of rules that societies agree to in order to be better societies. In the ideal, societies would make only those rules which, consistently enforced, make society better for everyone, and have those punishments which produce the best tradeoff between the rarity of rulebreaking and the harm done by punishment, and I would argue that also in the ideal world becoming subject to a justice system would be fundamentally voluntary, a condition of participation in society but an option people could meaningfully refuse if they did not agree with the tradeoffs their society was making. You can flee Axis for Elysium. 

Now, justice like other parts of Law and Good is built into the human spirit, and the way it's built isn't precise like that, nothing's precise like that in the human spirit. The way it often feels to want justice is to want a bad thing to happen to a bad person, so that they'll suffer, which will be good because they are bad. It also often feels like justice to hurt people who've done no wrong, but have offended local sensibilities, or to hurt outsiders more severely for the same crimes. Human spirits - reach for the Good - but aren't perfect in finding it. And my intuition is that the desire to bring about justice, in the absence of a system to which the relevant parties were knowingly subject, is a sort of misfire, it is the impulse being imperfect at identifying the situations in which it can usefully be activated.

Because in the absence of a system to which the relevant parties were knowingly subject, it's hard to imagine how justice brings about Good. It can't prevent things that no one involved could have anticipated they'd be punished for. It can only with some distortions and some paroxysms establish a precedent that may prevent similar conduct in the future, among the people who believe already in the workings of that system. 

There is something tremendously emotionally appealing about saying, 'if we hang a common murderer, how many more times should we hang an Emperor who with his words and his seal murdered hundreds of thousands? As many as it takes him to run out of diamonds.' It is a grasp for - a real thing, a true thing, the fact that most of the final violence of your world and mine is done under orders, and not by petty powerless criminals, and that most of the responsibility for it is yours and mine. But it will bring none of that violence to a halt to try to turn justice into something that it cannot be and is damaged by trying to be. 

In matters where there is no preexisting system of predictable punishment which the involved parties knew of, or could have known of, my answer is that justice is not, actually, one of the tools we have to hand, and we'll have to make do with other ones. In many real cases, it will be deeply unclear which systems count and what it would've meant to know of them, and sometimes something looks sufficiently like justice that it's better to treat it as an actual justice proceeding, but - in many cases, if we find ourselves struggling to fit these intuitions to these situations, we should consider that this may be because we are trying to make justice do work it cannot. 

I do think that people would ideally have a fundamental entitlement to the truth of what was done to them being known, and to decide for themselves whether to forgive it, and I think they would ideally have a fundamental entitlement to live in a place with justice processes, and for those justice processes to operate impartially with respect to wrongs done to them. But if you don't have the latter two - you should execute Emperors precisely when you expect it to make the world better, and not bother bringing justice into it."

This is way too much philosophy for Bastran's current level of intense misery. 

He rubs his eyes. "- You would have a fascinating conversation with Altarrin about that, if you brought it up with him. I– it sounds like you think that it - wouldn't help, including with, er, second-order effects in the future, for your people to punish me, and my people's legal system won't, and - that there's nothing else there that matters?" He makes a face. "I think Altarrin would agree, and - I don't actually think it'd - do the world any good - for Altarrin to be punished. Because he's going to go do better things now, and - he would've done better things all along if he saw how." 

He wants Iomedae to know that. It feels very important, somehow, that Iomedae knows that Altarrin is - on her side, and someone who would want to help Aroden in His work, and someone who will do more of that if granted more trust and power and wealth. 

Bastran isn't. Bastran is just a useless coward. 

"That's - true of nearly all people, really, though they vary in just how much it takes for them to see how."

Except for Bastran, who is only capable of doing any useful things if mind-controlled to serve an Empire, and otherwise will be completely useless and mope and never actually accomplish anything important that is pooooossibly not a trustworthy thought. 

He shrugs. "I - maybe someday I'll - want to do better things. Or maybe I just - broke that. I don't know. Right now I just want to...not have it matter what I do or don't do, or - whether I'm any good at doing things - and, and not be letting anyone down..." 

"Sure, makes sense. We don't in fact need anything from you. If you want to apologize to Kiritan I'll have her come through in a few interworld Gates."

"I...don't want to drag her through a few interworld Gates unless it would help for her to - hear it from me -?" Bastran says uncertainly. 

"I appreciate that. I think it would be good for her. She talked to Arbas and thought that was good for her, and that was with him saying he wasn't sorry and was glad he'd done it."

"He said that?" Bastran is just going to quietly die of mortification over here! "I...don't know if I can say - the right things - but I'm not going to say that." 

"I don't think there's a right thing, from you. She wants to do things in the world, it's good if she can understand peoples' real thought patterns and motivations whatever they are."

It’s a startling thing for her to say, for some reason. He’s not sure what to do about it. “Oh. All right.”

Just a slight bit of pride. "She's one of my paladins. She knows what she's about. - the reason she went to talk to Arbas was to make sure Alfirin hadn't hurt him."