Sandboxing Prompts

[Nemo]

Longstanding history is good; it pretty much means that all possible ambiguity gets resolved the way we want it to.

I'm still worried about the "none shall" clauses. If anyone in Thule goes hungry, the question is whether Miles could have done anything about it. The answer might be no, but if he didn't sell all that he owns to feed more people he'd be in hot water. Even if whatever he does instead would feed more people in the long run, he'd be as stuck as if he had sworn not to cause anyone's death and wound up with a trolley problem.

[DanielH]

With the no-death oath and trolley problem, you can fail to pull the switch. That’s why some people argue you shouldn’t—so that none of the fault is yours. If you swear not to let anybody die, as is close to the oath, you are in trouble with the trolley problem, though.

[Kappa]

By history and tradition, the thane's oath does not literally mean you need to sell all your stuff to feed the hungry. There's such a thing as breaking it, legally/socially, and you have only broken it if e.g. a substantial number of people starve to death when you knew they were starving and could feasibly (without selling all your stuff, without giving them the literal last bite of food you own) have saved them.

Conversely, you also have a duty to save the people of Thule from things other than literally precisely starvation and murder: if there's a plague, find doctors. If there's a flood, organize rescues. In general, make a good-faith effort to save and improve the lives of your people where this is possible for you to reasonably do. And don't be evil. A thane who commits e.g. rape is an oathbreaker.

[Nemo]

Oh, yeah, I consider the person who can't pull the switch to be stuck.

History and tradition help—the way you put it it could definitely attach obligations to protect against more stuff—but it won't contradict the actual words, and the words are pretty extreme. For a good faith effort you can say good faith effort. Unless the oath is the only surviving text in its language and everyone who said it for the first thousand years prefaced it with "I mean this oath in the figurative sense"? That'd have to do it, so maybe there's also a less extreme solution.

Oh, or maybe there just haven't been many/any practitioner thanes before. Then the oath could get the tradition behind it without it being suicide on the part of all the thanes, and saying it's meant figuratively could work for practitioners. It'd be better if there had been practitioner thanes, since traditions followed by people the spirits listen to will get followed more, but maybe it'd work without.

[Kappa]

What happens if someone becomes a thane and then a practitioner?

[Nemo]

Practitioners don't (by default) get held to anything they've said before awakening. They could construct something like "I've sworn the thane's oath and will be a true thane in the future" that would give them the benefits/drawbacks of the oath as intended; then the exact words don't come into it at all.

[Kappa]

Would that help future practitioner-thanes at all by establishing the precedent?

[Nemo]

Yep! Eventually, I wouldn't want to be the first to try just swearing the literal oath after awakening no matter how many people had readopted it that way, but there does have to be some point where the spirits have heard it emphasized enough that even they get it. If some practitioners have done this before, it's definitely safer than relying on just the Muggle tradition.

[Adelene]

It seems to me like at that point you should be able to swear to keep the thane oath and have that work, without saying the actual words. Safer than guessing at the tipover point, I bet.

[Nemo]

Yeah, there's no real way to find out when the tipping point even is. (Also there probably isn't a fixed one; the spirits don't have to come down hard one way or the other unless someone accuses you of having broken the oath. Still get power loss and negative karma in whatever proportion along the way.)

Swearing (by reference) to keep the oath should be about as safe as swearing to be a good thane. I just wanted the extra layer of separation from the words themselves.