Chapter 5
The mood at the table reminded Minna of the part of a bard’s tale where two armies face of for a long battle. Inevitably, there is calm, where nothing can be heard but the occasional snort of a horse, an unintentional clanking of armor, and, perhaps, the call of a lark or morning thrush. The scraping of chairs on the wooden floor and of plates across the table had much the same feel.
Minna had the right of first shot. “You are right, Matron, injustice does not exist and there is no way that you can treat me or anybody else unjustly — contrary to Justice’s wishes.. However, kindness and cruelty do exist; kind acts being those that are done to benefit others and cruel acts being those that are done to hurt others. Your crime is not injustice, Matron, but unkindness, in forcing us to listen while you fill your stories with preaching of Justice and Will while we refrain from challenging your interpretation.”
“So, you think Justice is evil,” Deonta said.
Minna’s work in the dungeons had taught her to be blunt. Acting as if she were sympathetic with her prisoners’ views only weakened their sense that they needed to change. But no simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer ever did much good either. “I don’t think Justice exists, and that which does not exist cannot be evil,” she explained. “However, if He does, and if He prizes the suffering of others as you claim, then He is evil. In fact, I would be more inclined to call him a devil than a god, given the way he obtains his pleasures from the pain His servants inflict on people.”
“What a crock of troll shit,” Spek protested. “How can Justice be evil? An evil act that appeals to Justice or a good injustice is no more possible than a round square or an all-black white horse.”
Jeffers answered, his voice back to a calm and level tone.
“You equivocate, magician Spek. You and Varlet Minna are talking about two different things, both of which may be called by the name ‘justice.’ In fact, the word ‘justice’ can refer to a lot of things, and we should expect this ambiguity to cause confusion. So, perhaps, we should use different names for these things. One thing ‘justice’ can refer to is the godling Justice. Now, Justice is not necessarily good or evil; like all beings he may be either. We can continue to call Him by the name Justice. We also have the specific things that Justice commands, which we often call ‘justice.’ But the specific commands are no more necessarily good or evil than the commands of any Emperor or Noble. Let us call these Justice’s commands. In a third sense of ‘justice,’ you, Spek, speak of a justice that must necessarily be good. In this sense, we have to find out if something is good before we hold that it deserves the name ‘justice’, and a person that calls something ‘justice’ that is not good simply does not understand the term. But we can call this ‘retributive justice’. It does not follow that Justice himself or His commands are necessarily good, so it does not follow that Justice himself or justice’s demands are necessarily just in this last sense. The force or power that says that what Justice demands is necessarily good, that is the force that Varlet Minna calls a myth.”
Spek started his rebuttal, but Jeffers waived him back.
“What the Varlet was talking about is best called ‘retribution.’ Varlet Minna, I’m sure, would never deny that retribution happens; indeed, she would sadly say that it is much too common. Retribution exists, and since the person who seeks retribution seeks to harm another, the retributivist is as evil as any sadist and less evil than those who simply do not care whether other people are hurt by his actions. Justice, the godling, may or may not be real, but that does not matter. What matters is whether we do evil by doing what He would command if He did exist; that is, when we engage in retribution. Since retribution is evil, whoever seeks it is evil, and if Justice exists and seeks retribution, then Justice is evil. Retributive justice, that force or entity which is said to adhere in retribution and, thereby, make it good and right, is a myth.”
“Thank you ,” said Minna, almost before Jeffers had finished speaking. She was surprised that the Matron and the others sat silently until Jeffers finished. Seldom did prisoners in her ward wait to hear a complete argument before shouting some rebuttal.
Ben arrived with several serving boys to refill the glasses and remove the dinner ware. Minna used the lull to scan her opponents. Terrence cupped a goblet of wine in both hands and leaned her chair back against the wall. She had said little, but her nods and the subtle shaking of her head showed that she did not always agree with the Matron. Still, Deonta was clearly in charge, even if Spek had his rebellious moments. The Matron turned half-way in her chair and dangled an arm over the back of the chair while the other played with his iced tea.
As Minna evaluated them, she started to sense a growing anger. It took her a moment to figure out why. Their casualness suggested that they viewed the conversation as merely a pleasant evening past time. They threaten to lock me in their dungeons. They are threatening to kill Zin. How dare they sit there and pretend that we are doing nothing more important than spending an entertaining evening in idle chit chat. “I should let you know, Matron, that because this service to Justice is evil, I will not participate in this human sacrifice you are arranging for your godling.” She met each of their stares in turn; even Spek stopped eating and looked up.
“I think you should give this more thought,” Deonta said, folding her hands together and leaning forward. “There is plenty of time to decide. Or are you so arrogant that you think you have a rock-hard grasp of the truth, and that no evidence we can provide could possibly show you to be in error?”
“Pending being convinced of that error,” Minna amended, feeling a twinge of embarrassment. “To convince me, you need to give me evidence that Justice and Will are real. I’ve seen no evidence so far that suggests that they are.”
“Not that Justice is real,” Jeffers said, “But that retributive justice is real. The godling can exist and still be evil, as can His commands.”
“There’s the problem, Varlet.” said the Matron. “How do you convince somebody who denies what is right before her eyes? You can sit there all evening and say that this table does not exist unless first we provide you evidence. But as long as you deny what your eyes see and what your hands feel, how are we to convince you?”
Holding her arms wide and making a mock scan of the room Minna said, “If Justice and Will are sitting here in plain view, point them out to me. I can neither see them nor feel them.”
Spreading her arms wide in imitation of Minna, the Matron said, “If this table exists, point it out to me. I can neither see nor feel it.” She smiled and leaned forward.
“Pardon me,” said Terrence, “Perhaps the Varlet here just doesn’t know what she is looking at. If she spoke a different language, we would not expect her to fully understand that she was seeing a table simply by hitting it and saying in our language, ‘This is a table.’”
The Matron nodded, “Perhaps. For the sake of argument, then, I’ll try to explain how to see justice. Well, actually, it is felt more than it is seen. That the guilty should be punished is at least as obvious as the fact that this table sits here before us. The organ by which we see justice is not the eyes or the hands, but the heart. Every reasonable person that reflects on this simple principle for an instant is willing to give it assent. I can only trust that you feel the rightness in punishing the guilty as well. Simply search your feelings. The knowledge is there inside you.”
“Metaphysical rubbish,” Minna answered. “That there is a table here is the best explanation I’ve got for the pressure I feel in my hand when I push down and the image I get when I aim my eyes in its direction. You say that the palpations of the heart that you feel when you contemplate retribution is caused by ‘justice.’ No, the simpler explanation is that they are the rush any person feels when they daydream of having something that they want. It is no different than the excitement someone feels when thinking that somebody she wants as a chosen accepting her offer, and no different than the thrill a rapist gets at thoughts of forcing himself upon his victim. Desire explains everything you feel, but it goes no further to justifying the acts you perform in getting what you want than it does in justify’s the rapist’s victimization of some woman.”
Her words brought expressions of bewilderment and anger to her three adversaries, but the disbelieving stares from Cadlius and Jeffers startled her into reflecting on what she had just said.
“You are comparing us to rapists?” Deonta asked, forcing air through clenched teeth. “I could expect something like that coming from a mindless male, but from you?”
“That’s not what I said,” Minna answered, but she could not deny the similarities she had identified. That it angered her opponents was not evidence against its truth. She turned fully into the force of the Matron’s glaring eyes. “Yes, I am. I would like to deny the truth in that accusation, but I cannot. Like most rapists in my ward, you want to hurt people, and you go to great lengths to convince yourself that there’s nothing wrong with getting what you want. I can’t even give you the benefit of claiming that you are misguided people who at least mean well, not when what you mean to do is hurt and kill.”
Spek exclaimed, “You make it sound like we torture our prisoners.”
“Pride yourself on your restraint if you will, I’ve had rapists in my dungeon proudly proclaim that they did not hurt their victims ‘that badly’ and claim themselves deserving of praise because of it.”
While she answered Spek, the Varlet could not help but see Cadlius silently coaxing her to calm down. She answered his silent objection. “This whole thing stinks, Cadlius. You should know that more than anybody else here. Hiding the stink in a perfume of flowery language will not change that fact, and it just might make the stink tolerable enough that nobody will do anything about it.”
Cadlius’s expression turned from shocked concern to anger.
“Occam’s razor,” said Jeffers.
The short statement, coming as it did without provocation or preamble, and so unexpected that nobody was listening well enough to really hear it, silenced all discussion.
“Occam’s razor,” Jeffers repeated. “It’s the name that people where I came from call the principle test for whether something exists. According to Occam, you have grounds for saying that something exists only if it is necessary to explain those things you can perceive in the world around you. You, Matron, defended the existence of justice by saying that it is needed to explain certain feelings that you have when you contemplate punishing the guilty. Minna answered that she can explain those feelings without any reference to justice, by postulating something as plain and ordinary as a desire to hurt the guilty — a desire for revenge, if you will. Until you point out something that we must use retributive justice to explain, we have no reason to believe it exists.”
Jeffers leaned back comfortably, waiving his spoon as he talked. “You could try a reductionist strategy and claim that justice can be reduced to some set of desires, but Minna has already blocked that move. If desiring something was enough to justify one’s actions in getting what one wants, then the rapist is no more guilty of wrongdoing than the retributivist. You must either show that there is something to support punishing the guilty besides desire, or allow that your actions are no better justified than the rapist’s.”
“Where, exactly, do you come from, Jeffers?” Spek asked.
Minna jumped in, “That’s not relevant to this discussion, Magician Spek. I’m saying more than that you can’t reduce justice to some set of passions. Rapists who come into my dungeon use all sorts of excuses—rationalizations, if you will—for what they do. They tell me stories that make their acts sound noble. Their victim wanted it — all women want it. Their victim was willing. ‘Sure, they may have struggled, but in their eyes they pleaded for more.’ Some say that in raping a woman they were serving Justice. ‘She deserved it,’ they say, and charge their victim with some offenses such as teasing or taunting men that, the prisoner claims, made their victim a fitting sacrifices to Justice. Belief in retributive justice itself is a myth, a rationalization accepted largely because it is rationalizes away the wrongness of the harms we want so badly to inflict on the guilty.”
Pushing his plate away, Spek stood and shouted, “I will not waste away my evening listening to these insults.”
“Yes you will,” snapped Deonta. “You are here at my invitation and I will determine when you are dismissed.”
“Why?”
“Because the Council must decide what to do with these strangers, and your advice to the council has always been prized. Good advice needs to be well informed. So, sit.”
Slowly, Spek returned to his seat.
Jeffers cleared his throat to capture attention. “What Minna is doing now is offering an alternative explanation for some other evidence that justice may exist, people’s belief in justice. However, I beg m’lady’s pardon in saying that I don’t think the mistake is as devious as you imply. We see that we are attracted to certain ends. Why? The theory that we are pulled toward those ends by a value intrinsic to them is, at least on prima facie grounds, as plausible as the theory that we are pushed toward those ends by desires encoded in our own minds. Only after we consider other evidence, such as the strangeness of an intrinsic value as compared to a desire as an entity, do we see that reason favors the desire theory of motivation to an intrinsic value theory.”
“What strange manner of speech is this?” Terrence asked. “I hear the words and my senses tell me that he speaks our language, but I don’t think I could understand him less if he was talking orcan.”
“You did not learn that manner of speech as part of your religious training,” Deonta added.
“He’s trying to tell me that I should not condemn you as harshly as I am tempted to,” said Minna. “Though perhaps he would say differently if he were the one who was about to spend time in your dungeons.”
“Occam’s razor,” Jeffers said again. “Personal sentiments aside, the issue comes down to whether retributivists can answer the challenge of Occam’s razor.”
Deonta gave the question a moment’s thought. “I think we are wrong to start with justice; it is the fact that we have a choice in our actions that make it right to punish those who choose evil. It is Will’s Power that prevents Justice from being evil. Proving that Will’s Power exists is just as easy as proving the existence of justice. What sense does it make to consider one’s options; between, say, assaulting a Lady of Sif or leaving her person alone, or between testifying before the council or getting sent to the dungeons, unless these are both real options. But you deny that these are real options. You say that the fates have already selected what the future will be, and any sense that we can thwart the fates is merely illusion.”
Minna answered, “I assume you know what golems are, Matron. They are figures made out of sticks and mud, or snow, or pieces of flesh sewn together, or molded from clay or sculpted from stone that magic gives the capacity to move.”
“Disgusting,” Deonta answered. “We do not allow people to practice that magic here.”
“Regardless, do golems have the ability to draw upon Will’s Power?”
“No. They only follow their instructions.”
“Well, even though you ban golem building here, magicians elsewhere are continuing to make advances in the magics necessary for their creation.”
“Undoubtedly. The world is filled with havens for sick minds of all forms. Laurella is a perfect example.”
“Some recent magics allow the creator to give sophisticated instructions to their golems. It’s no longer ‘stand here and kill any person walking through this doorway unless they accompany me.’ I have seen a golem that plays chess, and can at least defeat most amateurs.”
“I am being patient, Varlet, in the hopes that you will soon say something relevant.”
“This magician has instructed her golem to assign a particular value to different outcomes; one point if it takes an opponent’s pawn, three if it takes a bishop or knight, five for a rook, nine for a queen, and so forth. The golem assigns negative values to losing its own pieces. The golem, then, computes the value of the various moves open to it and makes the move that has the highest value. And there, Matron Deonta, you have choice in a fully determined system—choice in the absence of Will’s Power. Whatever move the golem makes can be perfectly predicted if you know the values it places on various outcomes and its beliefs about the game of chess. Yet the golem makes that move only by examining various options and choosing the one with the highest value. Now, Matron, where is the ‘right’ in punishing a golem who, because of its values and its beliefs about the game, makes a bad move?”
Deonta shook her head. “That’s not choice. If the golem is or is not going to make a particular move, then it doesn’t really have an option of doing something else. It will make that move. It has no choice.”
“As with questions of justice, questions of free will need careful definitions,” Jeffers injected. “If you define choice as something that must stand outside cause and effect, then certainly there can be no choice in a determined universe. But you haven’t proved that such choice exists. If, instead, you define choice as what people do when they weigh the value of different options and select the option with the highest value, then the golems that Varlet Minna describes do make choices. The case of golems tells us how we can have choice in a determined world. You may insist that, by definition, choice must be undetermined; language is a social convention and there is no objectively right answer about what a word does or does not mean. There are only mutually agreed upon norms. I will let you pick any word you like to describe what a golem does when it evaluates different chess moves and performs the move with the highest value to it. Call it ‘fredding’ if you like. I don’t care. What I do care about is whether there is any reason to believe that actual events that you point to when you say that a human makes a choice are different from what a golem does when it ‘freds.’ And I see no difference. Undetermined choice, or simply ‘choice’ as you want to define it, does not exist. Humans, like golems, never do such a thing.”
“Are you really saying that we are nothing but golems?”
Minna answered, “We are undoubtedly more sophisticated than the best golems built today, but we are the same in everything that matters here. The gods created us with clay and sticks and wrote our basic instructions into our minds. These included instructions that caused our basic instructions to change as we learn and mature. The best conjurers haven’t been able to duplicate this yet, but it is simple enough in principle.”
Deonta paled as she said, in a voice almost too soft to be heard, “One would have to be mad to accept such a pathetic view of human life.”
Minna made a ‘so-what’ gesture. “Is that supposed to be an argument? You may not like the idea that humans don’t have access to some mystical Will’s Power, and you might not think that human life is worth very much without it. But nowhere is it written that your likes and dislikes get to determine how the world is in fact. Furthermore, I don’t think that life without access to Will’s Power is at all pathetic. Rather, I think it’s pathetic to think that our importance in the universe depends on this myth. My belief that Will’s Power is a myth does not diminish the value I place in my life or the lives of others. Hell, I’m trying to save Zin’s life and I’m willing to endure your dungeons to do it. You’re the ones who are trying to kill him, yet you talk to me about the greater value your myth places on human life.”
“So, Varlet, if you value human lives so much, and think we are nothing more than sophisticated golems, then it seems you should be just as passionate arguing to spare the lives of golems.”
Minna knew the Matron would reject her answer out of hand, and cursed being in a position where she had to give it. “If a magician ever constructed a golem so complex that it could not be distinguished from a human except by appearance, then I would value the golem’s life as much as that of any other person. I would call using such creations as slaves or damaging them at our whim or our convenience ‘barbaric’; and give equal consideration to the values programmed into their minds as I would to the values I find in human minds. If Justice, should he exist, be unconcerned about the evils done to such sophisticated and complex golems, then that simply marks Him as being even more diabolical than I first imagined.”
“Enough of this nonsense,” Deonta said, finishing the last of her tea and sliding the cup onto the table.
“You still haven’t answered her argument,” said Jeffers. “She claimed that this Will’s Power does not explain any real-world phenomena. You waved your arms around and grunted words like ‘nonsense’ and ‘pathetic,’ but these aren’t arguments. Show us your data. Provide some set of observations that Minna cannot explain without mentioning Will’s Power.”
“I have, male. I can show her this table and put her hand up against it. If she still insists that there is no table — or, worse, that there is no such thing as tables — I’m at a loss to go any further.”
“That’s not really how she answered you,” said Jeffers. “Using your analogy, she answered your evidence that there is a table here by saying, ‘it’s a chair.’ Your next step is to identify how tables differ from chairs and to show her that this has the qualities of a table, and not those of a chair. You said Will’s Power is at work in human choice. She answered that desire is at work in human choice, and that choice is possible in a determined system. Tell us how Will’s Power differs from the instructions of a sophisticated golem, and that human choice has the characteristics of the former and not the latter, and you have answered her.”
Dropping her chair forward and placing a hand gently on the Matron’s arm, Terrence said, “Allow me. I see examples of Will’s Power operating here often enough. There are people, as I’m sure you well know, Varlet, who have a great fondness for drink. Occasionally, one comes around who decides to master this urge. I’ve seen it happen where a man giving up alcohol is driven in here by his need for a drink. I fill his order, as I should, for it is not my position to determine how he should live his life. He stares at it, internally doing battle with his urge to drink, and, after a few moments, he leaves with the drink untouched. Now what is that if not an example of a man who has called down Will’s Power to best his urges?”
“It is an example of a man with two very strong desires near to being in balance, where each desire recommends a conflicting actions,” said Minna. She turned half around in her chair, then pointed towards the scales sitting on the end of the bar and asked Ben, “Could you bring those over here please?”
Ben looked at Terrence, who nodded approval, and then complied.
While Ben fetched the scales, Minna opened her pouch and poured some of the gold and silver onto the table. “To answer your question, Lady Terrence, I need to explain the instructions that would cause a golem, who never draws upon Will’s Power, to behave just like the man in the example you just gave. It’s easily enough done.”
Ben set the scales on the table and began to adjust them, but Minna dismissed him. “I won’t be using it to make fine measurements.” She placed two gold coins on the right pan; their weight drove the pan down to its stop. “We’re assuming that my golem has been constructed to give a high value to alcoholic drink. How he got it, I don’t know. Maybe I miscast some spell or mismeasured the ingredients I used in constructing it. Maybe the meta-instructions I gave it somehow caused it to learn a high value for drink.
“Against the force of this desire, the golem has others; desires for the things he could purchase with the money that goes to drink, desires for things he can create if not for alcohol hindering his abilities, aversion to the harsh words and treatment others bestow upon him when he is drunk.” For each desire she listed, Minna dropped a copper coin onto the left pan. The first two landed as if the pan was as solid as the table top. The third bounced the right pan up short distance, but failed to keep it off of its stop. The fourth carried the pan off the stop and kept it hovering, though the four coppers combined still did not outweigh the two gold. With the fifth coin the left hand pan dipped below the right, then rose, then settled back.”
“Here’s your reforming alcoholic, Terrence. He’s got competing forces acting on him, pushing him one way, then the other, then back again. One day he refuses a drink, the next he insists on one. These scales are not a perfect analogy for our mind; our desires themselves change weight constantly. The waxing and waning of the appetites like hunger and thirst show this. It would be like using copper and gold that constantly change their weight.”
Minna poured some of her tea on the right hand pan. “One moment, thirst is adding its weight to the desire to drink.” Then she threw another copper coin onto the left pan. “The next day he has hopes of being chosen by a woman who would not choose a drunk.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” says Terrence. “If wanting a drink when he is home brings him to go through all the effort to come here, it should be all the stronger when the drink is sitting on the bar in front of him. But a person can come in here to get a drink, and then leave without drinking. I’ve seen it happen.”
Minna removed one of her copper coins from the left pan and dried the coins and the right pan to restore their previous balance. With the scales again oscillated in favor of the copper one moment and in favor of the gold the next. She held up a copper coin. “My golem is very sophisticated, remember. In obeying its instructions it constantly reassesses the situation and how any given move will bring about what it has come to value. The sight of the drink itself could remind him of the weight of a reason against drinking which he had not considered until then.” She dropped the coin onto the pan and the balance shifted in favor of copper.
“And then, suddenly, he walks out and I never see him again.”
“A desire to decide,” said Minna as she removed the last copper and restored the balance. “Just to decide and have it done with, regardless of what the decision is. This desire will add its weight on the side of whichever pan is lowest when it comes into play. But, when played, it keeps the balance in favor of whatever decision was made.”
She watched the scales for a moment, then closed her eyes. “Alright, I’ve had enough of this indecision. I will make my choice and live with it.” She opened her eyes, found the balance favoring the coppers, and tossed her copper onto that pan. They did not outweigh the gold so much that the balance never again favored it, but enough to show that the balance would settle in favor of the copper — unless something else upset the balance. Of course, there will be those who never decide, and those for whom the desire to decide will resolve the issue in the other direction, in favor of the person who simply decides to live a life as a drunk. Terrence, you’re familiar with those types of cases too, I’m sure.”
Minna then turned to Deonta. “That is the fallacy of your test for the ability to draw on Will’s Power, Matron. You’re going to ask me if there are times when those desires which moved him to strike the Lady were outweighed. If I answer ‘yes,’ you are going to infer that it was possible for him to do something other than what he did at that particular time. It’s like arguing that since the copper occasionally tilt the scales in their favor, that they have the power to instantly stop the balance with the scales tilt in their favor. It doesn’t follow. Yet, on the basis of this mistake, you are going to conclude the legitimacy of taking Zin’s life.”
There was a startling clang as Terrance added a pair of copper coins to the others. They tilted the balance in favor of the copper and kept it there. “Even if you’re right, Varlet, still the aversion to punishment might weigh seriously enough on somebody’s mind to prevent him from doing something he shouldn’t do.”
“No doubt,” Minna said. She reached up and removed two of her copper coins. “But now you need to explain why it’s permissible to harm people whose minds hold one set of values, in order to keep people whose minds hold a different set of value from doing something you don’t want them to do. You see, Lady Terrence, the people your punishment harms are not those that are deterred, and the people who are deterred are not the ones who get punished. So, by what right do you harm the undeterred . . .” she returned her copper coin to the pan ” . . . in order to deter the unpunished?”
Jeffers interrupted Terrence’s response. “I’m sorry, Varlet, but I think there may be a slight problem with that argument.”
Minna turned with surprise at Jeffers.
Jeffers asked, “What makes you think there’s something wrong with what Terrence suggested? You’ve already admitted that since justice doesn’t exist then neither does injustice. So you can’t argue that we are treating the undeterred unjustly when we punish them, where the threat of punishment deters others.”
“You agree with her?”
“No. I think she’s wrong, but not for the reasons you state. Goodness is in helping others — altruism, kindness — and evil is in harming them. A good person can never be happy with suffering. People who are punished are being harmed, but Terrence is free to argue that ending punishment will result in even more people being harmed by criminals who then have nothing to fear. The good, kind, benevolent person is caught between choosing two evils; and it is open for reasonable people to disagree about which evil is the greater.”
Deonta tipped her glass towards Jeffers and said, “Young man, I see there is hope for you yet.”
“But,” added Jeffers, pausing a moment. “A necessary evil may be necessary, but it is also still evil. To the good person, the fact that somebody is made to suffer—made to ‘pay’—is never something to cheer about. The person who is pleased with punishment — the person who eagerly serves Justice, since Justice demands punishment for its own sake and not for the sake of some further good — still comes out being evil.”
Minna quickly added, “Even the person who argues for deterrence needs to be careful. She may be arguing for ‘deterrence,’ not because it is in fact necessary, but because it provides a convenient excuse for fulfilling her lust for retribution.”
“I’m not convinced,” said Deonta.
“I’m not surprised,” Minna sneered.
The Matron ignored her. “This whole idea that we are golems constructed by the gods is absurd. There’s a whole life full of experiences you deny. Golems can’t really value things. Do you think you can make a golem that can love, that can enjoy the beauty of a sunset, or feel real pain if you should start to disassemble it? You are spouting utter nonsense. It’s these feelings, feelings that a golem can never share, that make up our moral sense. It’s these feelings that put us in touch with Justice and allow us to know His will.”
“If I can make a golem that acts in every way like a person who feels pain, what reason do you have to say that he doesn’t feel pain? If I sew a golem together out of human flesh, and when I am done he acts in every way like a living human, on what grounds do you say he lacks the ‘feelings’ that humans have? And what difference would it make if he were made of clay or stone instead?”
With a chuckle, Jeffers said, “What you’re talking about is known in my world as Turning’s test; or a reasonably close corollary. Turning suggested that we can know when we have created artificial intelligence when we can create a computer — a golem — that is indistinguishable from a human. Let a person ask it questions. If they can’t tell if they’re talking to a person or a computer, then for all practical purposes they’re talking to a person, even if it is a computer.
“Turning’s test is grounded on Liebniz’s law, which states that if one thing has all the same properties of another, then the two things are identical. According to the Varlet, we have to be able to find the difference before we can say they are different. Matron, what property does our feelings have that no golem can duplicate?”
“The very feeling itself,” Deonta answered, turning from Jeffers back to Minna. “What is different is that a golem can never really feel things the way we do, Varlet Minna. You know what I’m talking about; the sting of pain, the exuberance of love. I have no difficulty imagining a golem sitting where you’re sitting, a thing, going through all the same protestations that you would go through if I threatened to brand you. But it would all be an act. It would feel no pain if I did brand it regardless of how much it acted like somebody in pain.”
“It’s frightening that you are so certain,” Minna said. “I would be even more frightened if I were a golem.”
“Varlet Minna, you’ve shown yourself to be intelligent. You don’t talk at all like someone in the grips of madness and you speak as if you can recognize sound reason. Give it some thought. I don’t know how these crazy ideas got into your head, but I’m sure that if you seriously thought about them you would recognize them for the nonsense they are. I cannot force you to admit a truth you refuse to see; that is something you are going to have to do on your own. As for me, I doubt if anything of value can come from continuing this conversation.”
“And consider this, Varlet Minna,” Deonta said, leaning forward, her eyes falling into narrow slits. “There is a penalty for failing to answer a summons to appear before the council. And there is a penalty for failing to answer the council’s questions. Refuse us, and you will be spending the next five months in our dungeons—not as an overseer, but as a prisoner. When those five months are up we may, at our discretion, ask our questions again. Refuse, and you will go back. You could be spending the rest of your natural life with us.”
The Varlet’s tone differed so significantly from the mood of the conversation so far that Minna doubted she had heard correctly. “Are you threatening me?” she asked.
Terrance stood slowly. “If you define a promise to enforce the laws of K’non a threat, then you are being threatened, just like everybody in K’non is threatened daily — with punishment — if they should seek to displease Justice or the Council.”
“The Earl will hear about this,” Minna answered.
The soldiers surrounding the table stiffened, shifting to a careful balance and resting their hands on the hilt of her swords. The gesture brought Cadlius to his feet and, with a step back away from the table, he took the same pose as the guards.
“I’m sure she will,” said Deonta. “But the laws are ours, and our charter holds . . . “
“Damn your charter!” Minna shouted, standing in a rush that sent her chair sliding off of the stage. “The Earl did not sign the province of Malikii over to you when she signed that charter.”
Calmly, with no hint of anger, Deonta answered, “It is you who will be damned, Minna; damned by Justice for your refusal to serve Him. He exists, whether you admit that or not. And his only purpose for being is to see that the guilty are punished. Protecting the guilty from the punishment they deserve will earn you no honors in His court. I have not yet give up hope that reason can guide you to the truth of His ways before you do something foolish.”
Minna turned and stormed from the platform. Cadlius’s heavy, abrupt foot steps followed close behind. Beyond them she heard Jeffers give a soft and polite “Excuse me,” as he left the table.