"So uh, second day after this, I'm hiding in a rope trick during the time window I was told to expect a scry, I get the scry, I exit the rope trick as ordered so I can get teleported to, I give a signal as I exit (as planned so the Eagle Knights know to prebuff for the ambush).  Uh, they're on top of the wizard in less than a round, he teleported with two reinforcements, one of those reinforcements decides to defect right then and there and helps stab the wizard, so together they manage to take down, I mean kill, the wizard before he can get off a spell, and they kill inquisitor who was with them as well."

"As it turns out, as we hear from the defector, uh his name is Mateo, the wizard probably planned to maledict me, and maybe Mateo as well if he didn't legibly learn from the example that was going to be made of me.  A few hours later, as we disarm the traps on his bag of holding and look through it, sure enough, he had two scrolls of malediction.  So... yeah."

"I guess we made the right call?  But I feel bad because he was helping to fight Asmodeus, and he did help my group out all those years with supply drops and probably intelligence and coordination behind the scenes."

He has been told several times over this session that his feelings are actually buried Good impulses, so he'll share them even if it feels kind of dumb feeling bad for a guy that was going to maledict him.

"It makes sense that you would have complicated feelings about that. I think that your feelings are — a reflection of something real and important. It would have been better if there had been another way, if you and Mateo could have renounced your affiliation with the Baphomet cult without killing the wizard and the inquisitor, for the sake of the fight against Asmodeus but also for their own sake. I expect that there wasn't an alternative option that you could have reasonably expected to work — while there are circumstances under which it would have been better to inform them that you were leaving, it sounds like you had good reason to believe that that would not improve the situation."

Presumably if you try to negotiate with a Baphomet cultist on the condition that they not use information derived from the negotiation against you, they agree and then use it against you anyways. This is among the many ways in which being a cultist of a Chaotic Evil god is kind of hitting yourself in the foot with a hoe.

"It isn't Evil to defend yourself against a Baphomite who intends to attack, Maledict, and kill you, including by ambush. It is possible that it would have been Evil if he'd actually been perfectly willing to let you leave, even if the situation had otherwise appeared similar, though it would have been a mitigating factor that you did have genuine reason to believe he was attacking you. It's good that you and your group let Mateo live; in principle it could have been an improvement to have a clear policy surrounding the circumstances under which you would have accepted a surrender from the others, but in practice it seems like this would have been difficult to communicate or to safely enforce. But even though it wasn't Evil to defend yourself, it is not unusual to feel guilty about killing someone, even in self-defense. Even if you had no other reasonable choice I think it is an impulse towards the Good that you are concerned on his behalf — that's not to say that it would be Evil not to feel troubled, to be clear.

There's... a perspective someone might have, if they were very new to Iomedaean reasoning, that because he was fighting against Asmodeus, and presumably reasonably skilled at doing so, it would therefore have been better to let him kill and Maledict you. But that's a policy where — if it were widely adopted, and so cultists of Baphomet could reasonably expect that those opposed to Asmodeus would allow themselves to be Maledicted to avoid hindering the fight, they would attempt to attack and Maledict people much more frequently, such that this policy would not actually improve things overall.

Does that all make sense to you?"

Justice is maybe hardcore enough to let herself get Maledicted if it helps to fight Asmodeus more, but he certainly isn't!

"That all makes sense.  Um, not a criticism or anything, but I'm somewhat surprised by how much of this advice is about listening to my feelings?  Like if I were to have guessed yesterday about Lawful Good vs. Chaotic Good I would have thought Lawful Good leaned on feelings a lot less?"

Short pause. "When people call something an 'impulse towards Goodness' that usually means something along the lines of — that it is a feeling that points towards an underlying Good principle, even if listening to that feeling wouldn't necessarily lead to Good in every specific case. Feeling uncomfortable with torture is a reflection of the principle that it is better for people not to suffer if it can reasonably be avoided. That doesn't mean that you should make every decision just by listening to your feelings, but I do think Cheliax worked quite hard to get people to suppress or ignore those feelings, because otherwise it couldn't have survived, any more than it could have survived if everyone sat down and reasoned through the question of whether they should serve Hell." 

Pause. "I do expect that, in the ordinary parts of most people's lives, most things that feel to their conscience like awful wrongs will in fact be bad. That isn't always true — much of the Church's theology is focused on how to handle times of war, which is both a situation in which many people will convince themselves that totally unnecessary Evils are acceptable and a situation where the natural instinct most people have against killing other people can be counterproductive — but it's true most of the time for most people. If something feels uncomfortable, but to a lesser degree, there's generally some aspect of the situation that's non-ideal, but depending on the details it might be too costly to be worth avoiding. Does that make sense?"

So if Cheliax invades, just kill whoever the Church says its okay to kill, yeah, sure, he totally believes that.  ...he could actually ask a more cautious version of that gut reaction.

"That makes sense.  Uh... does refusing to fight because of your natural instinct not to kill people cost any Goodness?"

"—When you say 'cost any Goodness', do you mean in the sense of 'being an Evil thing to do,' or in the sense of 'being less Good than the most Good thing to do'?"

"I'm not really sure?  Like would the judge use it as a reason to keep me out of Elysium or Nirvana?"

"The short answer, which is a bit of a simplification, is no, she generally wouldn't. There's some nuance to this, so I'm also going to give you a longer answer with a few parts to it, but if you just want to know whether you can have Nirvana or Elysium if you never kill anyone again — yes."

Long pause. "The first thing to keep in mind is that at your final judgment, the gods don't only see your actions, they also see what is in your heart. —The fact that they do not exclusively look at actions has been confirmed by Commune on multiple occasions, to different gods, with different phrasings, though the Judge and her servants are not human and do not necessarily care about every nuance of motivation that a human would. But they can tell the difference between refusing to fight someone who is causing great harm because of your instinct not to kill, and refusing to fight because you approve of what they're doing, or because you think it will keep you safer.

In general, a person who lives a completely ordinary life in every respect will not make Elysium or Nirvana, you do need to actually do Good for that, but there are many ways to do Good without killing anyone. There is a Shelynite religious order that swears never to take a person's life, even in self-defense, and the general consensus among theologians is that this is foolish but not Evil; Shelyn has on rare occasions chosen paladins from this order. Lastwall conscripts nearly all its young men, but my colleagues from Lastwall tell me that it allows them to refuse on grounds of conscience, in which case they spend their term building roads and so on. With that being said, there are situations where the most Good thing to do involves killing someone, or fighting them in a way that puts their life at risk — that doesn't mean it will damn you to refuse, but whatever you do instead might count less in your favor."

(It's usually kind of dishonorable for a man to be unwilling to ever fight or kill people, but it does seem like a reasonable choice, rather than an indication of cowardice, for a repentant Baphomet cultist who has participated in an enormous amount of extrajudicial violence to decide to err in the direction of never doing that again.)

"The main cases where I would expect it to damage someone's Goodness to be unwilling to kill someone are situations where they have taken on a responsibility that requires them to fight. If brigands demand that a father hand over his children to them, and he is unwilling to fight in their defense, I expect that would weigh on his soul. If you decided to use your wizardry to make a living as an adventurer, and your companions were relying on you to fight by their side, refusing to do so could weigh on your soul. If it's important to you not to have to kill anyone, you should avoid taking on responsibilities like that.

...There are also some additional considerations for people who, like you, are trying to make up for Evils in their past, but those are complicated enough that I think it will be easier to explain separately. Did you have any questions about what I've already said?"