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I think everyone will agree that hurting innocents is always Evil in the setting.
While I do not think everybody will agree that hurting the guilty (ie those who did hurt innocents) is always Evil.
Hence my restriction, since we were asked about undoubtedly Evil acts.
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While we're at it, can can probably add unnecessary harm--a doctor likely causes necessary harm (or at least pain--I tend to think of harm and pain as separate depending on how lasting the damage is) to innocents in order to heal them. On the other hand, torturing a creature, no matter how evil, is itself an evil act. Even if we permit the fantasy that torture is necessary to extract useful information (spoilers, it isn't; it only gets you what the victim thinks you want to hear) it would still be an evil inflicted in the pursuit of another goal (theoretically good).
Therefore we could say causing suffering is evil, provided we distinguish it from mere pain inflicted (with consent) in the name of healing or restoration.
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I dislike extenuating circumstance because its one of those things that people can twist to avoid responsibility based on time scale or how convincing they are in relating their personal tragedies.
On the other hand, it really does make a lot of sense for some acts to not be Evil.
I guess what I mean is, I don't want to sympathize with Javert. But this ideological corner I've backed myself into compels it to a degree. I will justify this mentally in that the mortal justice system was not aligned properly with a cosmic D&D morality. As most mortal institutions are.
Psychopomps must have the best watercooler conversation.
I think extenuating circumstances are a requirement. An action alone without context can't really have true meaning IMO.
However, this is extenuating circumstances like "you killed someone, but it was self defense" and being judged in a cosmic impartial and consistent manner. Not in an individual manner. Not for justification purposes. It's not an idea of an individual changing morality. You shouldn't get different result for different people with the same circumstances. But rather the universe accounting for circumstances.
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I think extenuating circumstances are a requirement. An action alone without context can't really have true meaning IMO.
However, this is extenuating circumstances like "you killed someone, but it was self defense" and being judged in a cosmic impartial and consistent manner. Not in an individual manner. Not for justification purposes. It's not an idea of personality morality changing what happens such that the result could be different for different people with the same circumstances. But rather the universe accounting for circumstances.
That's true enough. How much context is needed? An entire life? The past hour? I suppose at a cosmic level that's irrelevant because time scales.
Here's an idea I like: The objective morality is based entirely on the subconscious of all aligned beings. Like, a person knows what they deserve, ultimately. Even if they're lying to themselves. A person knows when they put in less effort than their peers. They know when they took something that doesn't really belong to them. I dunno. Fun notion.
I mean, within the context of Golarion good and evil are tangible forces. And I believe Pharasma as arbiter of the universe has that impartial consistent judgement. Pharasma has her criteria, whatever they are.
Within the context of the real world...well...I'm not here to debate that.
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I 100% agree that a single evil act doesn't make a person evil.
However, I think killing as an individual act without consideration for circumstances isn't always an evil act. And I think the extenuating circumstances can make it evil, good, or neutral.
However, that isn't an argument to really win or lose. Simply a different basis of morality.
I dislike extenuating circumstance because its one of those things that people can twist to avoid responsibility based on time scale or how convincing they are in relating their personal tragedies.
On the other hand, it really does make a lot of sense for some acts to not be Evil.
I guess what I mean is, I don't want to sympathize with Javert. But this ideological corner I've backed myself into compels it to a degree. I will justify this mentally in that the mortal justice system was not aligned properly with a cosmic D&D morality. As most mortal institutions are.
Psychopomps must have the best watercooler conversation.
I find this perspective an interesting one and can see why it's appealing, but I don't think it's fully compatible with the alignment system as PF2 has built it. The clearest demonstration I have is that it's an important anathema for Good champions to never willingly commit an evil act. Murder is listed as an example, but I don't think it is the intention for a Champion to lose their powers for killing someone in an act of justified defence of innocent lives.
This feels very wishy washy. Context. Meh.
Can't really get my head around this. Context seems like the most important thing.
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If we were to remove all context from action to determine wether they are good/evil the result is that everything would be neutral.
Subjugated a creature? Without context you could had gotten control of an evil creature to stop its rampage (good) or you could have gotten control of a weak creature (evil). Same thing happens with killing, without context you wouldn't know if the person who got killed deserved it or if the person who did it even had a choice.
Context is important
I like using the image of actions and activities. You can take an Evil action as part of a Good activity. But the action is still Evil.
Context is the activity.
Say you kill an innocent person to save many others. The whole context /activity sound rather Good (saving many innocent persons). But killing an innocent person is still Evil. Hence remorse actually.
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@The Raven Black
While the idea of "hurting innocent creature is evil" makes sense. A number of things makes it questionable:
* Animals are usually neutral even thou they hurt other animals. So are animals not innocent?
* Sports based around getting hurt or that could lead to accidents. Does that make the people involved evil, or are they not innocent?
* Would a doctor/healer be evil?
* Etc.We probably agree that torture is evil. So how about "instead of hurting innocent" its "hurting others for personal enjoyment without consent or justifiable reason"?
Animals are given the True Neutral alignment by default because, lacking sapience, they are considered as unable to make moral choices. That is one big weakness of the alignment system IMO.
I used hurt not in a meaning of physical pain, but rather mental anguish.
Though I am pretty sure that some people will argue against this. Not because the game's alignment system is bad, but because morality is an incredibly personal matter in real life.
And we tend to project our personal morality on the alignment system.
Any discrete action should be the same.
... Why though? Context is what defines those actions.
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... Why though? Context is what defines those actions.
Any discrete action should be the same.
It defines a character's reasons and motivations, but not the act itself. And I assume this is the dispute here. We can make statement that generally, perhaps universally, stealing is wrong and give plenty of reasons why it is so. Then we can state that if someone has stolen, objectively one has done wrong. Same logic can be put behind killing, cheating and such.
But context gives us reasons for a character to steal, which many may find acceptable. And context (as in reasons behind the action and the intend of the character) may make character evil, good or neutral. To focus on objective morality of act is point of view of a lawful person; where it puts the character on good and evil axis is another dispute.
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But this ideological corner I've backed myself into compels it to a degree. I will justify this mentally in that the mortal justice system was not aligned properly with a cosmic D&D morality. As most mortal institutions are.
Psychopomps must have the best watercooler conversation.
"The" mortal justice system? This is pretty temporally, geographically, and culturally contingent.
Even calling it a "justice" system is culturally contingent.
Here's an idea I like: The objective morality is based entirely on the subconscious of all aligned beings.
The fact that you like it is strong evidence that it's subjective and not objective! "This is the way it is, whether I or anyone else like it is irrelevant" is a way marker on the way to objective morality.
Pathfinder's Objective Morality does seem to have some kind of line somewhere that makes it okay to kill one person under certain circumstances, but not others.
A truly bizarre feature of all legal systems, which one would expect to be informed by some degree of local morality. If it's so widespread, perhaps we can call it universal rather than objective morality?
It is in fact "ok" to kill someone (meaning that the degree of punishment may vary along a spectrum with "nothing" at one end) to varying degrees depending on whether you are doing it for purposes of voluntary euthenasia, involuntary euthenasia, as the result of an accident, as the result of temporary passions, as the result of detailed planning, for fun, profit, for self defense, to save the lives of others, to save property (and depending on the nature of that property), the behavior of the killed person leading up the event, etc.
If it's never more ok to kill someone in some circumstances, then it's never ok to punish a killing differently from another. What is the universal sentence for homicide (we need not call it murder, for such a term implies lawful killings) in your "objective morality"?
Can't really get my head around this. Context seems like the most important thing.
This feels very wishy washy. Context. Meh.
Yes, this is rather like arguing interior decorating with someone who can't perceive color.
Animals are given the True Neutral alignment by default because, lacking sapience, they are considered as unable to make moral choices. That is one big weakness of the alignment system IMO.
Yes, it's a problem that the alignment system mistakenly attributes the ability to make moral choices, or any choices at all, to non-animals.
Morality is just a memetic infohazard used to control and manipulate your rivals and enemies via symbolic rather than physical means. (The motivations of Peter Watts' Blindsight aliens is adjacent to this, although in that case it's all expressions of conscious activity, including metaphor, lying, and telling stories, that are attacks on species that lack the illusion of consciousness by trying to drain cognitive resources dealing with this nonsense.)
Try to rise above the illusion of morality and not fall for it.
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It defines a character's reasons and motivations, but not the act itself.
I mean... you say that, but I just simply completely disagree. The act itself is almost meaningless without context. You need that information to ascribe a value judgement of good or evil. Otherwise it's just a thing that happened.
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I mean... you say that, but I just simply completely disagree. The act itself is almost meaningless without context. You need that information to ascribe a value judgement of good or evil. Otherwise it's just a thing that happened.
It defines a character's reasons and motivations, but not the act itself.
Casting an Evil spell is always Evil. Regardless of context. So an act having an innate alignment is definitely a thing in the setting.
And you can do Evil acts in support of a Good cause. It will not change the acts' alignment though.
A Good personne can even unwillingly commit an Evil act, thinking they are doing Good in their understanding of the context.
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I find it extremely interesting that there is nothing in the game AFAIK that can tell the alignment of a given act (except for those with an alignment trait). You can only detect the alignment of creatures, thanks to their alignment aura.
This combined with the fact that alignment is pretty nebulous for most mortals (who do not have access to Detect alignment and the like) and that mortal understanding is infinitely narrower and imperfect compared to that of the universe, means it's likely that mortals in the setting are as lost and bickering about alignment, especially the alignment of acts, as we do.
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But in the context of the setting, where there is no GM, but some cosmic force that ascribes perfect application of alignment to creatures with perfect knowledge of intent and context.How does it know? Especially since prophecy broke. (I know its probably not related to prophecy, but perfect, omniscient knowledge of all actions being taken sounds like prophecy). Of course, this presumes that there is a will or force behind it when its probably just a background script of the universe.
Tapping into that should be some villain's scheme.
I think alignment is merely the result of an action compared to 2 axes. You need a zero point (that is Pharasma), 2 axes and that's it.
No perfect complete knowledge is required.
And, in a way, the cosmos encompassing all, it has perfect "knowledge" of everything just because they are part of it. Not necessarily because the cosmos has a kind of consciousness.
It's just that everything has coordinates on the axes.
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I mean... you say that, but I just simply completely disagree. The act itself is almost meaningless without context. You need that information to ascribe a value judgement of good or evil. Otherwise it's just a thing that happened.
It defines a character's reasons and motivations, but not the act itself.Casting an Evil spell is always Evil. Regardless of context. So an act having an innate alignment is definitely a thing in the setting.
And you can do Evil acts in support of a Good cause. It will not change the acts' alignment though.
A Good personne can even unwillingly commit an Evil act, thinking they are doing Good in their understanding of the context.
Some acts certainly have an innate alignment in the setting - but if you look at a lot of the examples of innately aligned actions, they require context to determine whether or not a choice is that action. In the Good Champion anathema I referenced earlier, it's explicitly mentioned that murder is an evil act. How could one possibly define murder without the context involved in the death of the creature? Differentiating between legitimate self-defence and murder requires the context of the death. Differentiating between the also-innately-evil torture and inflicting an injury during a battle requires that context. The game has an objective morality system - murder is always evil, regardless of your reasons for the murder - but that doesn't necessarily mean context can't be applied to determining the alignment of an action. I think my perspective here is basically in agreement with The Raven Black - Good people can do Evil things for a Good cause in the alignment system of Pathfinder (the Good rogue murdering someone because it prevents greater deaths, for example), and no amount of context around that evil act will make it stop being evil. My perspective is just that the determination of if an act is evil or not (typically) requires context - there are some spells that are innately evil without any context required, but barring channeling evil magic, most acts require some context to determine if they're evil or not - figuring out of it's murder or self-defence, to use my previous example.
It took a little bit to get there, but we have arrived at a compelling question. How does the universe (and/or whatever relevant forces within it) know how to judge aligned actions and the complexities of context that surround such?
My first instinct is that Pharasma and the courts of the Boneyard do represent an in-universe will that subjectively decides (and debates!) the morality of every soul that passes their way. On the other hand, their judgment obviously comes far too late to influence the outcomes of objective morality spells like detect alignment and divine lance.
This leads me to imagine the possibility that the psychopomps might be called upon to render judgement over a mortal soul which has acquired an attunement toward metaphysical evil, but died a few years after repenting and dedicating themselves to good. The balance of their soul says one thing, while the intent and trajectory of their life had they continued another decade says another. The same for a soul whose misguided ideals led to suffering in the name of the 'greater good'. We know that the ushers themselves disagree about how much to weigh intent vs consequence of a soul's actions, so the objective alignment of a soul when it arrives in the Boneyard may only be one factor.
Of course, it does appear to be one of the most significant factors--the lore does mention that the majority of souls pass through the courts relatively quickly (relatively; this is a bureaucracy we're talking about) based on their alignment gain from actions in their life. At least for souls that didn't worship a deity, who are first judged whether they lived up to that deity's teachings enough to be accepted (presumably judged in close partnership with that deity's servitors) and then failing that by whatever alignment aura they've acquired while failing their deity, which i suppose could get them sent to the same plane.
This has led me to believe that alignment is an even messier and complex question in universe than I already suspected and we have arrived no closer at the question of how the universe decides which actions attract which metaphysical alignment. We do have an insight that the process of graduating from this mortal coil doesn't solely depend on your soul's aura and that there are creatures in-universe whose job it is to decide when your soul's moral flavour seems inconsistent with your intent/consequences.
(As for the actual process of assigning alignment, I seem to recall that your actions over time attract the quintessence consistent with your behaviour, but that is a vague and possibly inaccurate memory at best, and of course does nothing to illustrate how good quintessence knows to show up when helping others but not when helping others to further your selfish goals.)
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And, in a way, the cosmos encompassing all, it has perfect "knowledge" of everything just because they are part of it. Not necessarily because the cosmos has a kind of consciousness.No consciousness? The Monad would like you to have a word with yourself, and thereby enable it to have a word with you.
Aeons propaganda is not necessarily truth ;-)
Aeons propaganda is not necessarily truth ;-)And, in a way, the cosmos encompassing all, it has perfect "knowledge" of everything just because they are part of it. Not necessarily because the cosmos has a kind of consciousness.No consciousness? The Monad would like you to have a word with yourself, and thereby enable it to have a word with you.Honestly the Monad is weird as far PF2e lore is concerned. It went from the creator/main body of aeons to being something affecting all monitors.
So yeah I would not trust anything the Aeons say. They went from N to LN meaning that they are no longer looking at just balancing the universe.
I think the lore is attempting (success may vary by personal taste) to reflect the opposite circumstances. The rigorous concern with preserving the balance of alignments is more appropriately a lawful behaviour (esp. as denoted by James Jacobs, perhaps someone has a link), and the aeons have merely reverted to their original status as the orderly agents of cosmic balance and preserving dualities. Same job, but no longer undercover. Mind you, even the aeons are conflicted on this move, so not all of them have returned to the grand axiomite master plan; some remain neutral.
Still, the Monad is weird, no disagreements there. Does anybody remember if there was a relationship between the Monad and the undersoul of the positive energy plane which the manasaputras meditate upon?
It took a little bit to get there, but we have arrived at a compelling question. How does the universe (and/or whatever relevant forces within it) know how to judge aligned actions and the complexities of context that surround such?
.....
(As for the actual process of assigning alignment, I seem to recall that your actions over time attract the quintessence consistent with your behaviour, but that is a vague and possibly inaccurate memory at best, and of course does nothing to illustrate how good quintessence knows to show up when helping others but not when helping others to further your selfish goals.)
Description in Planar Adventures does mention, that "sentience, experience, and outside influences might realign a soul’s innate neutrality toward extremes of law, chaos, good, or evil." Quintessence by my understanding of the text comes to a factor when soul is judged and sent to the final plane. Soul and quintessence merge, forming an outsider (petitioner). I wonder if the quintessence itself is "mallable" and reacts to the alignment of the soul, or if there exists multiple types of it respective to alignment, which then is attracted to suitable types of alignment that the soul represents. Or something else entirely. But this doesn't still give deeper understanding on how the soul itself gains alignment.
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We probably agree that torture is evil
Generally, yes. Universally, no. At least that's true if you believe in the adage the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. Meaning that if the subject of your torturous efforts is aware of an impending evil, but refuses to prevent it, the question of using torture to forcibly extract that information becomes much less certain. Does an "evil" cease to be so if it benefits society? Kind of like killing is generally evil, but there are circumstances when it is arguably not evil (war, capital punishment, self-defense, etc). Course torture can become increasingly unreliable so its use is complicated. By the time you know if the extracted information is reliable, it might be too late to act on and then the torture becomes less justified. Like most things, there is enough nuance to have a blanket morality applied to it.
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Torture is always evil because anybody who pays attention to torture is that it does not get people to tell the truth, it gets people to tell them anything they think their torturer wants to hear.
The whole "we will torture the bad guy to get the location of the bomb in time to defuse it" is just a myth that people use to justify torture.
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I find it extremely interesting that there is nothing in the game AFAIK that can tell the alignment of a given act (except for those with an alignment trait). You can only detect the alignment of creatures, thanks to their alignment aura.
Agreed, and I thinks its a flaw (albeit minor) in the current system. In older editions there was the idea of 'intentions' such that even if a neutral/good character was about to, in the midst of, or perhaps even just did commit an evil act, they would radiate evil, even if that evil wasn't a strong enough action to force an alignment change. Course, this places a lot of responsibility on the GM, but it does feel more "real" and would eliminate the silly situation where a creature's statblock listed it as CN, even though it was actively participating in a greater evil and thus made it immune to a paladin's smite or a divine character's judgement-like abilities.
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The whole "we will torture the bad guy to get the location of the bomb in time to defuse it" is just a myth that people use to justify torture.
Except that historically there are uncounted times when it did work. If it never worked, it would be much less frequent. Course if it always worked, it would be even more frequent. Like most things, it is not absolute.
Torturing an innocent is probably always evil since there is nothing good that can come from it. However, if there is a bomb and only the subject of the torture knows how to resolve it and you get that information through torture which results in countless innocents being saved, I cannot classify that as evil. YMMV
The reason why it is generally detestable is that no matter how many times it does work, the one time you torture an actual innocent, you have lost your moral position. At least that is how it is generally judged. Similar to how capital punishment is evaluated. Even most people who are against the death penalty are not so because of the act itself. It is because we cannot guarantee that a mistake won't be made and an innocent is inadvertently killed due to human error, faulty science, etc. If we could guarantee only the "right" people were executed, chances are it would be used everywhere and only the most absolutely radical would oppose it on some other grounds (religious beliefs, etc).
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The whole "we will torture the bad guy to get the location of the bomb in time to defuse it" is just a myth that people use to justify torture.Except that historically there are uncounted times when it did work. If it never worked, it would be much less frequent. Course if it always worked, it would be even more frequent. Like most things, it is not absolute.
Torturing an innocent is probably always evil since there is nothing good that can come from it. However, if there is a bomb and only the subject of the torture knows how to resolve it and you get that information through torture which results in countless innocents being saved, I cannot classify that as evil. YMMV
The reason why it is generally detestable is that no matter how many times it does work, the one time you torture an actual innocent, you have lost your moral position. At least that is how it is generally judged. Similar to how capital punishment is evaluated. Even most people who are against the death penalty are not so because of the act itself. It is because we cannot guarantee that a mistake won't be made and an innocent is inadvertently killed due to human error, faulty science, etc. If we could guarantee only the "right" people were executed, chances are it would be used everywhere and only the most absolutely radical would oppose it on some other grounds (religious beliefs, etc).
Of course the person being tortured might also believe that, if the bomb does not explode and kill some innocent people, even more innocent people will suffer and die ;-)
So, both are acting for what they believe to be the greater good.
Note also that, even if they are doing Evil acts for the greater good, the acts themselves are still Evil. And the person might be too.
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The whole "we will torture the bad guy to get the location of the bomb in time to defuse it" is just a myth that people use to justify torture.Except that historically there are uncounted times when it did work. If it never worked, it would be much less frequent. Course if it always worked, it would be even more frequent. Like most things, it is not absolute.
Torturing an innocent is probably always evil since there is nothing good that can come from it. However, if there is a bomb and only the subject of the torture knows how to resolve it and you get that information through torture which results in countless innocents being saved, I cannot classify that as evil. YMMV
The reason why it is generally detestable is that no matter how many times it does work, the one time you torture an actual innocent, you have lost your moral position. At least that is how it is generally judged. Similar to how capital punishment is evaluated. Even most people who are against the death penalty are not so because of the act itself. It is because we cannot guarantee that a mistake won't be made and an innocent is inadvertently killed due to human error, faulty science, etc. If we could guarantee only the "right" people were executed, chances are it would be used everywhere and only the most absolutely radical would oppose it on some other grounds (religious beliefs, etc).
Actually your last argument works the opposite way. It is the argument used to convince pro-death penalty people to oppose it because most people who are for the death penalty still do not want an innocent person to be executed.
But that is RL politics, so better stop the derail there.
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I sadly can't find the thread, but I do recall once reading that was Paizo's, or at least James' reasoning. They rebranded aeons as the lawful neutral outsiders because there wasn't a lot going on with either them or inevitables, and psychopomps had long been the darlings of the true neutral outsider space, so they got shifted over to LN and combined with inevitables because of their concern with making sure everything is balanced and running in an orderly way.
At first I wasn't a fan of the change, but I've come around to it. I see it as an interesting byproduct of the aeon mindset. They care more about balance than neutrality or law, so unlike most outsiders they don't actually care too much what their alignment is. They were neutral before because that was what the multiverse needed them to be, but with chaos and entropy doing what chaos and entropy do they have switched to becoming lawful to counterbalance that metaphysical shift. Aeons are the only outsiders who treat alignment mechanics, well, like mechanics.
That's also why I suggested the Monad could be the agent for analyzing context that people are looking for. Pherasma judges events after they've happened, and the Monad evaluates them as they are happening. I'm not sure what the divisions of ethical or moral judgment there would be between the pair of them, but they are the two longest-lasting collaborators in our iteration of the multiverse according to Concordance of Rivals.
Also there are aeons who are called Lords of Karma, which suggests that they also monitor that kind of thing. Granted Karma, as it has been explained to me, is less about morality and more about action and response to action.
On that last point, is there really a fundamental difference or only a matter of viewpoints / terminology ?
On your broader point above, I believe there is no entity needed to ascertain alignment on the spot (and that would be contacted everytime Divine lance is used), because the axes are reality on the cosmic scale. I really like the analogy with the cardinal directions. No one is charged with assessing if you end up North, South, East or West of where you started. It just is.
According to The three fears of Pharasma, it is pretty clear to me that Pharasma is True Neutral because of the way the alignments began, being different from her in identifiable (and actually personnified) ways.
The outer planes grew from that and are the metaphysical incarnation of the alignments.
Note that all of this precedes the cycle of souls.
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On your broader point above, I believe there is no entity needed to ascertain alignment on the spot (and that would be contacted everytime Divine lance is used), because the axes are reality on the cosmic scale. I really like the analogy with the cardinal directions. No one is charged with assessing if you end up North, South, East or West of where you started. It just is.This might just be quibbling over language, so I'm not sure if its pertinent, but the cardinal directions are just arbitrary things made up by people to help us navigate. The only one that exists in the world is magnetic north, whereas Good, Evil, Law, and Chaos are all real forces.
Yeah, since it appears to work instantly for all choices at all times, perfectly Alignment has to work like gravity in that is just does, but also, the more of physics we study, the more complex it becomes. Newton's theories of gravity lead to Einstein's general theory of relativity, and now we go even further with quantum mechanics and the fundamental forces of gravity that, I think, we still don't have a good definition of.
I also don't think deities have anything to do with it, because they have alignment too, so something 'decided'/determined/detected Pharasma was true neutral.
According to the three fears of Pharasma, her walking her first steps built the cosmos, starting with the alignments. The fact that, as the survivor of the previous multiverse, she was the first entity in the current one is what determined that she was the center of the alignment grid, aka True Neutral. There was quite literally nothing other to decide it.
Which I find fascinating, because, for all we know, the being that became Pharasma might have been the epitome of LG or of CE according to their original multiverse's alignment grid, if there even was such a thing as alignment there.
But it does not matter in this multiverse because she is the center of True Neutral and everything else refers to their position compared to hers.
Not also that the cardinal directions are based on what people could observe. The East is where the sun rises and West where it sets. And North is where there is a star that never moves (at least in the northern hemisphere) and it conveniently is perpendicular to the East-West axis wherever you are.
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Torture is primarily effective as a tool for suppressing political dissent. It is primarily a question of psychological and physical abuse combined with a heavy dose of con artistry and is the least effective at extracting real, usable intelligence from its victims. It's simply not meant for that. Torture at its core is not a technique for extracting intelligence--its for extracting false confessions and again, suppressing dissent. In fact, as you might expect from extreme psychological and physical distress, torture very often helps to destroy the victim's ability retain and recall memories--not a great tool for accessing complicated codes when other means are usually far more effective.
Has it ever worked in the way described? Probably, but that's also irrelevant. The myths of torture are another propeganda tool. Furthermore, while this is a thread for debating morality in Golarion, I don't think it's really the place for a drawn out debate of the efficacy of abuse.
Let's move on.
