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This doesn't require discussion of "the worth of a soul", though that would also do it. For example, the frame you've advanced is one that seems primarily about the stability of the polity, which doesn't need any discussion of the metaphysical elements you describe. I do agree that the parable is about the position of the king. That's neither what I said, nor what I meant. As I mentioned in another post, if your religion clearly says [X] is good, there is very limited space to debate that premise. You can wonder "why" as much as you like, and I think that the effort is good for a person to engage in, but an understanding of "why [X]" is not necessary when [X] is prescribed. Because while that's what Consequentialism is, Consequentialism is not the only philosophical tradition. Deontology famously rejects consequences of actions as factors in establishing morality, for example. As to the rest, I think that the point of the parable is more to help reveal, and explain, why the respondent feels that the philosophies they choose to apply are relevant, not to (in itself) establish one or another. The specific philosophic traditions you mention here are not ones that I espouse, particularly Relativism (which I broadly reject). Fair enough, though I'm not certain I agree. The direction still seems iffy to me (believing a non-traditional specific interpretation of a passage in a sacred document is often a heresy first), and if you open the door for novel interpretations it seems to me that you are proposing a new organization of the belief system, which is not unlike proposing a new organization of principles for a moral system. But this is a nonissue for the matters the thread was created to discuss. Appeals to a specific, ultimate moral authority are irrelevant to my reasoning. As I've touched on upthread, whether or not one exists doesn't necessarily impart to us any knowledge of its existence or its properties, and so even without a specific authority in mind (or even asserting that one exists) we have to proceed identically. We reason as best we can, and may be right, wrong, or entirely misguided. This does not As I've laid out before, the parable describes a situation in which the key elements are arbitrary state power, murder (however you want to establish its significance), total lack of information about responsibility for that murder, and a lack of context to soften any of the related issues. I argue that, regardless of the specific moral system you want to apply, to punish the innocent hogman is to knowingly apply the same punishment befitting a murderer to a person that does not individually "deserve" it (certainly not as the murderers do), in a situation in which the innocent cannot defend themselves in any way, and this would be done specifically because you don't have any reason to think that they (or any other specific person) is guilty. If the killing of the dead hogman was bad, which the parable assumes, it by extension is the case that the killing of the innocent is also bad. And without context (which the parable specifically omits), we have no particular basis for taking an unforced action which is bad. Arguments to the contrary have, in this thread, assumed other elements beyond the parable to justify them-- that is, they answer a different question than the parable proposes. I think that that is in large part what it's meant to do, to reveal what things matter to the respondent and what they would do as a result. But if the case turns on the extra details, then it's those extra details that we'd have to discuss. I'll contrast with your preferred solution. The case as you present it on page 4: Presumes that the killers will absolutely kill again (and murder, no less). This strikes me as a pretty strong presumption which is not evidenced by the parable. Based on the information the parable provides, it is as reasonable to assume that they had some reason to kill the dead hogman (such as, he was going to murder them) as that they are simply serial killers, or similarly inclined to kill indefinitely. Uses the above presumption to entirely and comprehensively justify the landlord's response no matter what it is: the landlord's intent to prevent future murders "judges him moral", regardless of the action he takes. Notably, the justification read into the scenario which absolves the landlord is specifically denied to the killers: they are definitely evil, and their assumed intent judges them as bad as they could be, and the landlord is definitely good. The innocent hogman is treated as morally inert-- they are wholly an object of the decisions of three guilty hogmen and the landlord. The comparison of punishments, with an aim to minimize the damage done to the innocent hogman, implicitly acknowledges that an injustice is being done to the innocent hogman. Doing the least severe thing (subject to other constraints, like ensuring that the three other hogmen are unable to act again) doesn't erase the injustice or make inflicting an undeserved punishment of the innocent better (or good), even if it's the best we can do. So my argument is essentially that based on the information we definitely have about the situation we get to choose between definitely harming a person that has done nothing wrong, in order to punish people that have, or not. Given those two choices, I advocate not knowingly inflicting harm appropriate to a murderer on someone who definitely is not. Justification for doing otherwise is not something that I see coming from the parable unless we add in other details which, while not necessarily outlandish, are added arbitrarily. On the contrary, it seems highly relevant from the position you've advanced. The argument you are making is not any different from any other moral system that might be proposed: declaring that there is no moral authority is every bit as strong a claim as that there is one, as is the claim that only with such an authority can any sort of morality exist. If you believe that there is no moral authority and that there cannot then be morality, then you can't you can't adjudicate between competing claims or make a statement like "let every man do what is right in his own eyes", because there is no right or wrong in that scenario. Things do not require an authority, as an entity, in order to exist. Maybe we're in different places on the word "authority". I've been interpreting it as you describing an entity, but perhaps not. It doesn't really matter to the thread, but the point that I'm making is that the problem you describe is not unique to either circumstance, of there being not such an authority or not. There are also arguments for things like weaker relativism, such as "we all live here and agree on this moral idea", and then people who choose to live there as well agree to that moral standard; it need not be cosmically absolute. But honestly, I'm not interested in discussing this further with you in this thread. If this is a big sticking point for you, feel free to assume that I believe that these discussions exist in a frame in which morality can exist.

I'd like to see more meaningful interactions between major characters generally, and I really want more with Shallan and others. So much time has been spent on Shallan's inward-looking relationships, like with Veil, Radiant, and Formless, and more broadly with her own memories and feelings, that I feel like her interactions with others have been a bit lacking. We've got a lot about how Shallan and Veil interacted, for example, and how Veil and Kaladin interacted, but we haven't gotten a ton of Shallan proper interacting with others since WoR. Especially given how dramatically Shallan is changing as she progresses through her Lightweaver oaths I think that those external interactions will be interesting to see. I see potential in more interactions with Jasnah since they have many similarities and contrasts, but like others have posted think that it will be hard for them to have on-screen interactions with much depth. I think that their positions are really unequal and that their differences will lead to conflicts more than anything else, which will require them to stay apart more than they are together.

We could go back and forth on whether or not a person should have a right to bodily safety and autonomy, or any degree of agency, and what moral framework we are satisfying with that premise, and why that framework is the one to use. There are many moral systems which lay those out, thousands of pages' worth of argument and analysis, positive rights, negative rights, extensions of premises, discussion of why proposed values are right and good. There are others which argue your position, that morality as a concept is non-existent and irrelevant. Not all premises need be given equal weight: one that is more encompassing, has fewer exceptions, and is better argued has a good case for being preferred over one that some person arbitrarily prefers. But as discussed above this thread isn't a great place to go through all of it. If you want to assert that no moral frame exists or is applicable, you certainly can. That will tend to reduce the ground for discussion pretty severely, and will also tend to prevent you from offering a position that isn't irreducible subjective moral relativism. If that's really your position, then fine, but moral discussions would then seem like an odd thing for you to want to participate in (I'm not judging, if that's the case, it just strikes me as an activity that would have little to offer you). And while I appreciate that you probably chose an example to be shocking (rather than to represent your true views), if you want to declare that a rapist has an identical moral claim to commit rape as their victim has to not be raped, then have at it. Invoking a supreme authority doesn't answer this issue either, just for the record. It sidesteps it by asserting the authority's existence, primacy, and relevance, and then proceeding as though knowledge of that authority is perfect and irrefutable. If, for example, there is a supreme authority but we don't know about it or have any information on its views, we're still stuck trying to reason our way through morality as if the authority didn't exist. To bring this back around to the hogmen question, as I asked another poster in the thread before, is your assessment of the situation that it is amoral, and moral judgments do not apply? Is there no right thing, conditionally or absolutely, to do in the situation? If you you have an action that you believe is the right one, do you have an argument for it outside of your whim alone?

We should reel this back in to the topic of the thread anywyas, as Duxredux has encouraged, but I'll throw one out there. A person shouldn't impose violence on another, against that person's will, strictly to satisfy their own personal pleasure. Are you really taking a pro-rape position in this thread, or at least saying an anti-rape position is always unjustified? It's the extension of another poster saying that moral positions can't be debated outside of religions. At least, that's why I've posted on that topic. But I'll concede that it's gone far afield from the hogman question! I'll rein it back in for future posts. I'd been hoping to get more insight on why people are choosing the outcomes that they are. No. Again, I'll do better. Thanks, Dux.

Yeah, because no one has ever had a long dispute over what a god wants or a religion demands... I'm not talking about "religious morality" versus any other type. I'm saying that claiming that morality follows directly from what an arbitrary deity wants is not decisive (deities vary pretty widely in what they proclaim to be right and good, so saying "a deity thinks it" is not sufficient to establish any particular claim unless you are also claiming primacy and precise knowledge of that deity). We don't have to talk about the worth of a soul to think that cold-blooded murder might be a bad thing, and there does not need to be a framework of spiritual (and related) beliefs in order to arrive at such a claim. That might do it too, but isn't necessary. Even if you disagree with me on that point, asserting that a given religion's dictates on those topics doesn't elide those debates; it only presents an asserted conclusion. Uhh... no, that doesn't seem right. You don't shop around and determine what truth underlies the universe by what beliefs are most congenial to you. I mean, you could do that if you wanted, but the nature of reality is not dictated by what you happen to already prefer. "I used to think that the ancient Greek cults correctly portrayed the nature of the world, but on balance they seem anti-pomegranate. And since I really like pomegranates, I'm going to switch to Hinduism. That's what's true now." Moral philosophy is infinitely more amenable to your own beliefs changing because you can examine them and be persuaded by one or another as the way to assess what right actions are. Whether or not that transfers over to a discussion of law and punishment is a separate issue-- law and punishment may or may not be moral. If you adhere to a pragmatic moral system you may see more overlap, but if you're more into value ethics then it's a different beast. I certainly wouldn't say (or agree) that pragmatism as a moral framework is free from the taint of individualism you claim affects other systems, especially when what's practical is undefined. That's just nakedly asserting that your preferred system is correct. I'm not sure it is, and certainly less so than suggesting that religion is a consumerist choice. It's been your position that "religious morality" flows directly from the religion itself, so I'm not sure what you find insulting about someone else pulling that comment forward; if your fundamental position is that X is good because God said X, there isn't a ton of room for inquiry around X. I disagree with your framing of religion as being about determining "why", and don't really understand where your drawing that from. And the idea about non-religiously based philosophy being focused only on results of actions being about how the affect others is flatly wrong. That's an OK summary of consequentialism, but a very poor summary of philosophy more broadly. It's also a fundamental element of moral inquiry to inquire; there is no question more important than "why" when evaluating a moral framework. There are many. But saying "there is a proof" is not the same as saying "there is proof indicating that this position is completely accurate." That is exactly why moral philosophy tends to produce such long, intricate, technical arguments. The entire undertaking is to explain why the moral system being proposed is true, deal with counterarguments and flaws, and determine what should be done and under what circumstances. It's not just someone saying "This is the way to do it, just because"-- that's the opposite of moral reasoning. There are tons of reasons why rape is generally considered a bad thing to do, and if a rapist wants to argue that it's acceptable they can make the effort, though they'll probably find the weight of argument decidedly against them. The fact that one person believes X is OK or not does not by itself establish an unimpeachable set of ethics that everyone has to accept as exactly as valid as any other.

Nope. This is the argument I've presented to indicate why "religion" is not a good word to use to describe all moral frames, nor the beliefs of a deity a necessary element of establishing one. I wanted something a bit more "real world" than pointing out that Odium's views on morality might be very different from Honor's; Odium believing that he did a good thing doesn't translate directly into that necessarily being true just because he's divine. Whether or not there is an objective morality, or if we could know one if it did exist, does not preclude discussions of morality. It's what you espouse here, however you find it. Saying you find it unsatisfactory but better than alternatives is irrelevant to whether or not it's what you bring to back up your positions, which it is. When you say you advocate a show trial of the hogmen, pinning everything on one of them arbitrarily and then executing all four regardless, and that the justification is that the country will collapse otherwise and so it's worth both the sham and the innocent's death because everyone will feel safe and content, you're making a pretty strongly affirmative case under the pragmatist approach. "Other systems are hard to tie down" is not a supporting argument, and arguing about the framework is exactly what the hogmen parable is meant to provoke. What do you value as "right", and what is it worth? If a person's answer to that is that they value stability in their polity and that it's worth any amount of arbitrary punishment of known innocents at the hands of the government, then that's their answer. You said that about judging between them: That's pretty bold to say; it doesn't seem to me that you do understand my argument, though perhaps I'm wrong. Theology tends to examine dictates of a religion (gross oversimplification), which morality can certainly be a part of but morality is largely an effect of the rest. You, as an adherent to a religion, don't need to know why, you only need to know that. Working to construct a philosophy so as to better understand morality works in the opposite direction and invites free-form, direct inquiry about what is right, and why, and how it might be best achieved. Without they why, there is no that. Consequentialists and deontologists have a common ground in which they can argue, which is not so much the case with people whose sense of morality entirely derive from separate and mutually exclusive theistic beliefs. I've laid out my position and some of the reasoning behind it previously in the thread. If you'd like further discussion, providing more information on the elements you've claimed to support your position would be useful (such as, how we know the country will collapse without a show trial and public executions, etc.). Or you can address some of the arguments I've already laid out (not a small task, since I'm longwinded and often unclear!).

I'll answer it anyways: the rejection of all possible frames of analysis as "religions", which no one can judge between, is equivalent to saying that no possible assessment is possible. We can't judge between "religions", which are the only possible modes for assessing morality and ethics, which means we can't establish a frame of analysis, which means that we cannot assess morality or ethics. That may or may not be the actual position that you hold (I suspect it is not, as you seem to favor Pragmatism and Consequentialism), but I believe it's a fair reading of what you wrote as you wrote it. There is no reason that a deity (or equivalent) need exist for "objective morality", nor that a deity would know (or assert) ultimate right and wrong: if there is some objective moral standard (a position I'm not taking), then you or I would be able to judge against it as well as anyone else, including a deity (though a deity may well have better knowledge or wisdom). The common demand for a supreme being as a necessary component for objective morality is that they assert that morality. I contend that the word "religion", though it's clear you like it, fits poorly in the manner you've deployed it. It carries implications which would not fit something better defined as an "ideology", or "a system of moral beliefs", for example. We probably can't discuss whether Rama is more or less real or relevant than Ishtar or Huitzilopochtli, and so can't determine which moral positions associated with each should be used. We absolutely can talk about whether or not a consequentialist frame is more appropriate than a deontological one, or if an individual's wellbeing is more or less valuable than a crowd's. Lumping them together dismissively as "religion" is a disservice to both, and muddies arguments. I 100% agree that we can, and should, work to establish frames of discussion in an effort to discern what the right thing to do is, and to define "right thing" as well. "The best thing for society" is woefully underdefined (here in the forum, which is not the ideal environment to do it, and in the world broadly). It's formless, and only means that "with some criteria a best decision may exist", which is not much help to us. If that's the philosophical stance you prefer, then the "moral" thing to do is whatever is best for society, and that's the way that you would evaluate. That's the frame you're asserting, which is the opposite of saying that morality doesn't apply-- it's saying that your preferred moral system is the right one. We don't need uniform beliefs to talk about that.

I have no such desire, as I feel it irrelevant (not unlike you, though for different reasons). But the concept that ethics and morality can only exist if they come down on high from a deity (a claim which, itself, is far from airtight), or exist in the framework of a "religion" (quotes to underscore that you define that loosely here) is one that I totally reject. It may be hard to establish what the terms of discussion are, but that just means that the discussions are difficult, not impossible. The perspective you present here is a variety of nihilism, which I both reject in its own right and view as a degenerate philosophy (particularly as it's deployed by most everyday people who espouse it). If that's the basis of your interpretation of the dilemmas presented here then that's implicitly rejecting that any action can be moral or immoral; the concept simply does not and cannot apply. There's no room for discussion of the thread's topic to be had, as the amoral frame preempts any other elements.

Well, I certainly disagree with those (particularly that discussion of morality is impossible). But I'm not looking to get into it, just asking your view.

Do you consider there to be any difference, even a potential difference, between something being morally right and something being practical or useful? Or, put another way, is this a moral deliberation or an amoral deliberation?

True points are more important than convenient ones, and I don't know anything about the provenance of the number. Besides, my broader point about the reliability of "some people think..." is the more important one to establish here. And I'm aware that the murder solve rate isn't anywhere near as high as we'd like, but that's tangential to what we're talking about. It would be more consistent with your position so far to start convicting people of those unsolved murders without any evidence just for the sake of saying the solve rate is higher (though not totally consistent with your stated goals-- I'm aware this isn't what you're advocating, but it follows from much of what you've presented and isn't easy to exclude). Again, no need to apologize. I get it, and have similar hurdles When my posts start to get noticeably long I tend to feel it's a bad sign (and I'm aware that this post looks long ). In any event, I'm still firm in my conclusion. To knowingly punish someone innocent of murder with a punishment thought to be suitable for a murderer, specifically because there is no evidence to point to the actual murderer, is a bad thing. Whether or not it might be necessary in some specific case is a separate matter. The reluctance to push the full punishment on the innocent party suggests that you believe this too, as does your statement that you would not accept the situation as just if you were the innocent hogman punished, as does a change of heart when the ratios are shifted (it's OK to execute one innocent and three guilty, but not two innocent and two guilty). Even if you (the collective "you", not @Rg2045 specifically) have some feeling that there there is some threshold ratio of innocent:guilty punishment that is morally right on one side and wrong on the other, the burden of that argument is to articulate what that ratio is and why. It is not reasonable to just assert that you can claim the benefits of being on the right side of it. When the argument is that there are benefits to punishing the innocent, as above, which are to be balanced against the harms of that punishment, then relevant argumentation needs to express what those benefits are, how they will be achieved, and why they're worth the harm. This kind of thing is almost always hard, and a gut feeling like "there will be fewer murders" or "society will be safer" doesn't cut it, especially when these arguments are asserted to explain why we are or are not on the acceptable side of the innocent:guilty punishment ratio. So in summary the argument that it's right to definitely execute the one innocent hogman in order to definitely execute the three guilty ones is definitely one that a person can make. But making that argument sets up some specific claims that need to be evaluated If it reduces future murders, how many might be so prevented? If it inspires confidence in the government from its citizens, by how much and how necessary is that compared with any fear they might have that the government will execute them wrongly? If those are our goals, would it not be similarly moral to grab random people and convict them of difficult-to-solve crimes in show trials? With or without the above bullet, a person taking the position that the innocent must be executed also has to contend with extensions of that argument. If it's right to execute at a 1:3 innocent:guilty ratio, how about 2:2? 3:1? 5:1? With the arguments presented, if a murder occurs and the killer is seen by a witness but only well enough to say that the killer has brown hair and there is no other evidence of any kind, should all of the brown-haired people in the area be rounded up and punished? If your answer is no, why not, when the hogmen case is such an obvious yes for you? The circumstances regarding guilt, innocence, and evidence are identical. At what point does the "right" punishment of the innocent become the "wrong" punishment of the innocent, and why is the dividing line where it is? These are not easy questions to address but that doesn't mean that we can just skip them or assume that whatever immediate feelings we have will put us in the right. That's why my position is what it is: when the government is exercising arbitrary authority and power to punish citizens, it should make efforts to establish that the objects of that power deserves it. When the government can't do that, then at minimum it needs to be very clear about what it's getting in return for that injustice to even have a chance at claiming it's doing the "right thing". Appeals to fuzzy claims are not enough to prevent error.

Talk to a defense attorney, especially a public defender, and I think you might come away with a different impression of how "innocent until proven guilty" works in the U.S. I don't know anything about the murder rate without convictions in Miami, or anywhere else. That people (which people?) believe that 0.5% of people in prison are innocent strikes me as about as meaningful as the percentage of people that believe in leprechauns-- it doesn't matter what people vaguely assume is probably true. That's kind of the point that I'm making-- observation of a vaguely defined belief that something is one way isn't an argument that that thing is that way, and to use it as evidence that that thing is that way is tautological. For the record, Japan also has a presumption of innocence for criminal defendants. There are obviously a lot of differences between the U.S. and Japan, and I don't think that it's reasonable to assert that an absurdly high conviction rate in Japan is the cause of of its relative safety compared to the U.S. Consider, for example, that in 2016 0.04% of the population in Japan was in prison, while 0.66% of the U.S. population was in prison in that same year. The U.S. version of the presumption of innocence didn't prevent a much larger slice of the population from ending up in prison. And even then, the U.S. was then (and is now) vastly more dangerous than Japan. There has been a substantial amount of research over the last several decades on the U.S. justice system. There is not a great correlation between intensity of prosecution, conviction rates, incarceration rates, etc. and changes in crime rate. For whatever reason or reasons, the U.S. is simply more dangerous than most of its peer countries, including those with similar strong protections for those accused of crimes. I do disagree with your conclusion on the hogman problem, but my bigger issue is with the reasoning which has been presented to support it. We can only evaluate an answer to a problem like this by considering the reasoning that justifies it. Even if I were to accept (which I don't) the purely pragmatic case you're presenting if you're offer an argument like "doing [A], we get good thing [X], which outweighs the harms due to injustices which we all agree inherently follow [A]", then a major part of your burden is to demonstrate that we do indeed get good thing [X]. What I've seen so far are bland assertions that we do get [X] (however vaguely and variably defined), followed by further assumptions that this obviously justifies an unspecified amount of guaranteed injustice. That's pretty shaky, especially since the fact that the injustices will be inflicted on the innocent is not in dispute. Efforts to reduce the intensity of punishment of the innocent underscore this: if we definitely get [X], and [X] so worth it, and [A] is the only way to get it, why the unease and reluctance to commit? I'm not suggesting that this is all that there is to your position, or even a good summary of it. I appreciate that an internet forum is not an ideal place to make such lengthy, intricate arguments. I know I'm rarely, if ever, as clear as I'd like to be online (or anywhere!). But the argumentation that has been presented to me I find unpersuasive at best. I love Old Enough as much as anyone, if not more (はじめてのおつかい何時までもよ！). But it's a reality TV show, with a lot of adults constantly around the children at all times. It would be very unnatural to see a 4 year old in Japan doing an errand on their own, completely unsupervised. But your point stands that Japan is vastly safer than the U.S. You just have to be really, really precise (and correct) in how you're defining and evaluating utility. Otherwise it can justify literally anything.

No need to apologize, we simply disagree. My mind is not bent on "saving the individual", and the reasoning I laid out allows for innocents to be harmed. My primary concern, however, is to not harm innocents with the arbitrary power of the state where it can be avoided, and that this is the primary concern we should maximize. It has nothing to do with a life being priceless, and applies equally if we're talking about a theft or some other crime. You said previously that you would not find the imprisonment of an innocent right if you yourself were the innocent punished. That's something to think about: the rightness of the outcome should not depend on your identity in the scenario. I reject all of this. It's not necessarily an invalid approach, but working this way requires a huge amount of work to justify the values you are picking, and that the issues at play can be reduced to numeric values at all. That's not something I will demand here, nor is a forum a great place for such a discussion. But I do not accept the values or operations you present here. I think we're getting closer to agreement on the terms (I suspect we aren't going to agree on the conclusion). We seem to agree that inflicting a punishment on the innocent is morally wrong, regardless of whether or not it can be avoided. We also have limited ability to avoid it. We can "move the dial", as you put it, until we get a result we feel comfortable with. I say that your personal comfort is not a relevant factor in something being right or wrong-- becoming comfortable with inflicting injustice does not make you just or moral; it makes you amoral, no longer concerned with how right or wrong your actions are. We move the dial to do the best we can do, given the limitations we are faced with. The best we can do is not necessarily good, however. A ruler who declines to imprison three guilty and one innocent is not "unable to inflict any punishment"; they are a ruler who declines to punish without evidence indicating guilt. It's not a free-for-all, Purge-style environment they are creating. It's a non-police state. As I said above in my (admittedly very long) post, I do not believe that maximizing punishment of the guilty is so compelling a value as to justify any cost to achieve it. Nor is pursuing a different value a straight line to anarchy. You haven't presented an argument (that I've been able to draw out, at any rate) for why it is so compelling, or why society is destroyed when an innocent person is executed/imprisoned/banished/punished arbitrarily specifically because of a lack of evidence. A bad king is a bad king, strong or weak. A king who imprisons his innocent subjects arbitrarily is not protecting those subjects.

My broader issue is that the nature of the punishment is not much of a factor for the moral character of punishing at all. The problem with banishment is similar to the problem with execution-- the innocent doesn't deserve any punishment at all, and has no way to defend themselves. Whether or not banishment is a suitable punishment for the guilty is a totally separate matter, though it has been only lightly explored so far in this thread. We can talk about whether or not it's acceptable to deem someone too dangerous to live near us, but shunt them off towards other people with no warning (or maybe a Shash glyph?). Banishment is probably less severe than execution, and depending on the context can be more or less substantial-- does it condemn them to living in the wilderness, can they move to another town and live there, are they likely to become bandits, etc. But in any case it's way too severe to justify imposing on someone who didn't do anything wrong at all; any punishment is unjust. Any punishment which we view as suitable for the crime of murder is going to be too severe to apply to a totally innocent person. Any punishment we feel is light enough to be OK with assigning to an innocent is probably going to be too lenient to promote society or serve justice when inflicted on a murderer. This is the most substantial issue with an approach in which the value we want to uphold is maximum punishment of the guilty. We can bargain over how much punishment we're going to live with, and therefore exactly what the maximum degree of punishment is, but it's never going to be easy to justify imposing it on an innocent person who gets swept up in our effort to make sure no guilty avoid consequences. We will almost certainly never have the ability to perfectly discriminate between the guilty and the innocent, but the nature of society and collective power mean that our authorities will arbitrarily exercise the power to harm people even though our knowledge is imperfect. Efforts to make sure that every guilty person is punished will tend to increase the number of innocent people who are punished as well. An innocent person really can't do much to protect themselves from, or in any way avoid, this arbitrary exercise of power, as is exemplified in the circumstances of the hogmen parable. So my view is that the operative problem is the arbitrary exercise of power against those who have no ability to resist or protect themselves in any way-- not that people will sometimes commit crimes and will leave varying amounts of evidence behind. We seem to agree so far (you and I, and Taravangian and Dalinar too) that a core function of government is to protect its people. The government cannot "fix" murder by imprisoning, banishing, or executing people, guilty or not. A totally innocent person who is not safe from arbitrary harm at the hands of their government is, by definition, a person that that government is not protecting well. I think that the only ethical approach to this is that the government needs to restrain itself from using its power to harm its innocent people, and in this context that means that we cannot try to uphold the value of maximum punishment of the guilty. Trying to do so leaves us with the harms done to the innocent by murderers as well as the harm done to the innocent by the government, and self-satisfying efforts to explain why the harms we've done are really acceptable after all. And in writing off harms to the innocent inherent to casting the broadest possible net to catch the guilty, we leave ourselves unable to clearly forbid things that can do a lot of harm to the innocent in service of some pretty abstract benefits. The better value is minimum harm to the innocent, working specifically to keep the number of innocent people directly damaged by the government's arbitrary power as low as we can manage (and, like above, what we can manage is going to be based on the other things the government needs to do). It is unsatisfying and distasteful to think of people we know to be guilty going unpunished. I know that I don't like it. But the alternative isn't obviously better to me (again, we don't solve crime by maximizing punishment, we only create victims of government power in addition to victims of individual criminals). So my position is that we can't work from a position of harming the guilty as much as we can, while also being comfortable in inflicting that same harm on someone we know to be innocent, which is at the heart of choosing banishment over other punishments. When we are in the rare case of having no information on guilt or innocence, justice is best served by focusing on doing as little harm to the innocent as possible, which in this case means not immediately punishing anyone.

Of course they can, though there are a lot of scenarios that make that more or less likely. But this is a legal distinction, not a moral one. Regardless, the whole point of the parable is to think about how the ruler's actions are moral or immoral, and what they achieve. Is it better for the people to imprison one innocent and three guilty, even though the innocent is oppressed and the people know innocence is no protection from punishment, or is it better to let three guilty go to avoid persecuting an innocent and let the people know that the state will only act against people with a minimum amount of certainty? The ancillary effects are the ones at issue; no one would complain about only the three murderers being punished. The intent to better the whole is both not assumed in the problem and not necessarily relevant. Even if it were, "I want to do the right thing" isn't the standard for judging whether or not that person did the right thing. The question here is more on the order of "what can the person do that will most benefit the whole?", or possibly "is it right to arbitrarily sacrifice one for many in this way?". They are hard questions for sure. But they're unavoidable if you're trying to determine what the morally right action is, and the reasoning behind an answer is how we would evaluate whether or not it's right (or at least acceptable). It's usually much easier to assert that a given conclusion is right than it is to lay out why it's right.

It seems like people are still talking past each other. Some are saying "punishing an innocent is wrong", and therefore it's never right to do it. Others are saying "letting the guilty go free is wrong", and therefore it's never right to do it. Some are asserting specific future outcomes to justify their position, like "the killers will definitely kill again" or "the killers will definitely not kill again" or "criminals will suddenly learn that hiding their crimes is practical". Still others are inserting other details which directly contradict the point of the parable, like "maybe we'll get more information someday so we can make a right choice" or "the people will revolt unless all four are punished" or "a supernatural force will unerringly make the decision for me". Re-endorsing the conclusions we already like doesn't usually make for a good discussion. There isn't going to be a perfect apportionment of good or bad with any decision that's made here, a situation which the parable is written specifically to create. I mean, we don't even know that the victim was murdered, really-- I'd bet we could contrive a scenario in which the three killers did the right thing, as long as we shoehorn the right details into the situation. Certainly we're not supposed to feel content with any solution we think of. But without expanding on why the principles we're championing are the right ones, or override the others, it's hard to discuss. It seems to me that there are three major camps here so far: 1. It is morally wrong to knowingly punish an innocent person, it is never acceptable to do 2. It is an invalid use of social or civic power to knowingly punish an innocent person; in either case, it is never acceptable to do 3. The interests of the town require that the guilty not go unpunished, and no combination of moral claims from the innocent person can override that. In such a case, the innocent must always be punished It's also the case that: there can be a difference between what a person thinks is the right thing to do in a situation and what they think they would do in that situation, and even if a decision is the "best" one available, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's good. So in the spirit of moving discussion along (and obviously people are free to ignore me and this post ), I propose this question: Given the details which were provided to us, three of the hogmen are murderers because they knowingly killed an innocent man. Presumably they had some reason to do so (it wasn't a random killing conspiracy), but we don't have any cause to think that reason is a justification. In executing all four hogmen, the landlord has also knowingly killed an innocent person, and while the landlord has a reason it's not been established that that reason is a justification. By the same standard as the three guilty hogmen, the landlord is then also a murderer. And because they acted alone and in the open, there is no question of misplaced responsibility. Would it, therefore, be the tidiest and most ethical solution for the landlord to be executed for the death of the innocent hogman and replaced by a landlord untainted by the hogman case? This has always struck me as a cheat. Saying it "needs to be done" seems like an overriding moral claim of its own. We need a guiding moral framework to determine what is right in the first place so that we can evaluate competing claims. In my experience, anything less in discussion is just a patchwork tyranny of whomever your talking to-- "I think I'd do this, therefore this is probably somehow the right thing to do".

All of that sounds plausible enough to me, though being magical could always interfere Sanderson generally tries to keep effects consistent with the real world. The key effect is that Division breaks bonds, a process which would likely give off some energy, but not necessarily as directly as in an oxidation/reduction reaction; I'm not chemist enough to think through the energy states of spontaneously breaking molecular bonds and then spontaneously re-binding atoms opportunistically, particularly with magic as the force driving the separations. Clearly they can, as the one example of it we see produces a smoky smell. We don't even really know that atoms aren't splitting off in their lowest-energy states or not. But when we see Malata use it on a wooden table we don't get much fire, and it seems like she has a lot of conscious control over the effect: So depending on how skilled the Surgebinder is, I'll agree with you that some pretty dramatic effects are possible. I wonder how the Surge varies between Releasers and Skybreakers.

Really? I'll have to re-read. My recollection is that most of the religion (not the existence of the Returned themselves, but the social organization under a God King and the attendant gods, rituals, and beliefs) was devised by Vasher to safeguard a hoard of Breath (the Treasure of Peacegiver), maintained in the succession of tongueless God Kings. I could swear Vasher said something to that effect, but it'll take me ages to confirm or deny that. I agree that the Returned gaining a vision of a future issue and coming "back to life" via Endowment predates Vasher, since he's one of those himself. But the religion in Hallandren itself seems entirely different.

Division definitely can be used on humans: It's not 100% clear what the exact effect would look like (at least, not with what I know), but we do have a description of how it works: So maybe something like the body melting/sublimating away?

Is it established anywhere that this is literally the purpose that Returned return to fulfill? As I remember it that was just a feature of the religion that Vasher devised on Nalthis, even though Lightsong returned to do just that. That doesn't mean he won't do it, but Vasher can help out in lots of ways without dying to heal (healing is cheap on Roshar, for the most part). Unless I've missed something that says Returned do come back for that, which I easily could have.

Not the only frame to consider things, or even the best one, but if you were the innocent hogman would you be as firm that it's right to be permanently imprisoned to make sure three guilty are imprisoned too? It's easy to call the price cheap when it's only others that pay it, especially since it could be argued that the main purpose of the approach quoted above would also be to assuage your conscience about letting people go unpunished, or maybe dealing with a possible future crime. I'm not making a strong comment on your conclusion, just fishing for more information on your position. When people have different values they're trying to achieve it's not surprising that their conclusions differ. I've always felt that the most wrong ethical conclusion a person can hold is an unexamined one.

I've always felt that it's hard to beat Study in Scarlet. I enjoyed Valley of Fear quite a bit, but I don't classify that one as quite a Sherlock story since he's not really in it. I generally favor the earlier stories over the later ones.

I personally would probably let all four go free, perhaps with extra surveillance or a mark against them in any future crime they are suspected of having been involved in. That last bit is a pretty petty cover though. The parable is overly tidy, as Taravangian notes, and so we're both deprived of any useful context while also possessing unarguably correct (but incomplete) information about what happened. So it's really a question of what injustice you will tolerate, and not what justice you can achieve. Without any particular reason to believe that the three hogmen will murder again the upside of any punishment is a lot more abstract. The issue strikes me more as the application of arbitrary power than it does punishing criminals. It's not just that an innocent will necessarily be swept up in punishing the three guilty ones, but instead that the landlord will mete out punishment because it seems like a few people probably deserve it, specifically because relevant evidence isn't available. A halfway punishment, like a term in prison, doesn't seem to me like it really addresses the dilemma. It's tricky to talk about meaningfully without establishing a broader moral framework. For example, Taravangian's definition of ethics and duties demands that all four be hanged, with (arguably) little room to dissent unless you refute how he defines those. Dalinar's concept of ethics is different and forbids Taravangian's solution, but doesn't precisely suggest a different one. The two of them certainly talk past each other in their discussion.

Wax had kind of a rough time of it...

Destroying things isn't really her jam. She's all about making sure they grow, possibly in a specific way or towards a specific end. It might be nearly as difficult for her to destroy something as for Preservation.