A tall handsome stranger walks into the bar. He looks around curiously, but with an air of distant recognition, like 'oh yeah, this place'.

Eventually he makes his way around to Valanda's sign.

He reads it. He reads it again.

The question he settles on is, "What's 'command magic'?"

"Some people from my world have the ability to magically prevent people from taking actions."

"Well, that sounds obnoxious. And what do you mean about morality in governance?"

"Okay, so, you know how a group of people can keep the peace by agreeing to enforce certain rules? You can go even farther and work toward each other's goals informally, as a series of favors, and - this is the coolest part - you don’t have to make sure you’re getting a good deal with any one person because someone else will probably let you take advantage of them!"

"I think you and I might think about governance very differently. Or I'm missing something. Or both."

"How do you think about governance?"

"Ruling the world is a much tougher job than I thought when I was your age—I guess this is Milliways and you might be older than you look—when I was a teenager, at any rate. But just because it's hard doesn't mean that it would be better to stop. Though I've definitely turned over all the day-to-day stuff to people who are better at it than I am."

"...That sounds really likely unless you’re omnimalevolent. My world also has a single government. But, um... since no one in the imperial government cares if people are happy, it’s only good for people's happiness kind of accidentally, and maybe it could make people even happier if anyone involved wanted to."

"...huh. Well, I have no idea how to convince people to want other people to be happy. I just want my people to be happy because... they're my people. Or, I guess happy among lots of other things, like 'safe' and so on, there's ways to be happy that end up making people worse off. But like, generally as happy and safe and free and okay as I can figure out how to make them. ...this line of conversation has made me sound way too benevolent and now I want to list a bunch of my flaws but I'm not sure how to without going too far the other way."

"Well, I guess it would have to come in degrees, wouldn’t it? I'm a governor at home and I care about morality but I don’t know how that means I should act as a governor sometimes. It’s hard figuring it out. I guess if you don’t know other moral people you’ve probably noticed that."

"I would actually tend to think of most people I meet as more moral than me, not less." He thinks about that for a second and then amends, "Maybe not most people I meet. I meet a lot of shitty people. But, say, most people who work in my government."

"...Well, have any of them written any good books about governing morally?"

"...I think the normal assumption where I'm from is that governments are supposed to make people better off. I guess that might only be the normal assumption because I've been up there in charge for the last five thousand years making it, but it still is. So people don't write books about it from the perspective that 'governing morally' is a specific weird thing you might consider doing but probably aren't already, because—that's not the situation they're in. They do write books about how to govern, I'm pretty sure, though I haven't read any because reading involves too much sitting still for my taste. But I don't know if they'll be the kind of book you're looking for because I think they're... asking different questions than you seem to be."

"What kinds of questions are they asking?"

"Well, I haven't read the books. But - it'll be things like 'how do you figure out which policies do the things you want and which policies look like they're going to but then don't', or 'how do you make sure the people you trust with your money are only stealing normal, manageable amounts of it and not massive catastrophic amounts', that probably aren't about governing morally even though they're... about governing, and the governing is supposed to be making people better off."

"We do have some books about that already, but I guess I can’t rule out that those might be helpful anyway."

"Could be! And for all I know somebody might have written a book about why it's a good idea to make people better off. Though I'm not even sure, like... what does your government think of itself as aiming for? If 'making people better off' isn't it?"

"Convincing the electorate to vote for them, giving kickbacks to their personal factions - it's a lot like making people better off, because those are people, and the government makes them better off, but they're only the people who are allowed to vote, so slaves who don't have any say in who's in charge don't really end up with anyone looking out for them. And if there's an expensive way to make everyone better off, but the voters haven't noticed it yet, they might not end up bothering. Just - it's sort of like if the government were an uncooperative slave, or a badly designed spell, that's sort of aiming to make people better off but not really."

"...I might understand 'uncooperative slave' differently than you because in my world there isn't magic to make people obey other people. But I think I get the picture, overall."

"Probably for the best from a moral perspective. I have a ward against command magic and if it means someone who might have wanted to enslave me just kills me instead that's exactly how I intended it to work."

"Pretty fair of you. We do still have slavery but it's not magically enforced."

"I’ve been trying to come up with alternatives but it’s hard, but we could compare notes."

"What are you using slavery for that you need alternatives to?"

"We use slavery to keep people who can’t follow the law on their own out of other people’s way. It’s absolutely horrible for them but - you know the magic that does it? It can make you stop breathing or keep you from talking or from literally any action, and people are born with it. We’re additionally kind of - leaning on it as part of being polite to people who want to withdraw from society, possibly in the company of an opposite-sex partner. And of course slave labor is a big part of some industries like chemical synthesis and medical research, and the proceeds from auctions fund public works in areas like public health. And some people who like hurting people can vote and most people, unlike me, can’t just use someone who's just that desperate for their touch."

"...so in my world when someone's going to be catastrophically powerful and I can't satisfy myself that they'll be sane about it I kill them, but if people usually turned up that way as babies I'd be very glad to have a better option than murder. I'm not sure what you mean about people wanting to withdraw from society."

"...Also eleven twelfths of people are that powerful so it'd be pretty difficult to keep up a population if you killed all the kinds of mages that can affect the world with their magic. Uh, some people, mostly not humans, hate interacting with other people and prefer to go live by themselves on private islands that are imperceptible and impossible to affect from the outside, and occasionally they do this in pairs that could conceivably grow their own new slaves."

"Do you mean that if you let people go off to live by themselves without outside interference you can't stop them from enslaving their children even if you were going to stop people from enslaving their children more generally, or do you mean something else?"

"Yeah, that’s it."

"I bet there's better ways to fund public works than slave auctions but I couldn't tell you what they are. As for people withdrawing from society, I guess the question there is how much you care about letting people withdraw from your society even if they'll do things you don't like in their hiding places."

"It wouldn’t end well to try to keep them. And I don’t think it’d be moral to keep everyone prisoner anyway, right?"

"Well, then it sounds like you have your answer."

"Maybe. But maybe I haven't thought hard enough. And - even if there's no way for totally eliminating it to not make things worse, maybe there are - ways I could change people's incentives a little, or something."

"What kind of incentives are you thinking of?"

"Well, it’s the fact that I'm not thinking of them that’s the problem, right? But some incentives that do exist are - owners are responsible for slaves' crimes, but of course that cuts both ways. Slaves don’t vote, and so they can’t vote for the people their owners would - and they would vote for the same people in a lot of cases, if they could, a lot of interest groups go by language or species. But that one’s also double-edged. There’s no such thing as a slave committing a crime against their owner - the state won’t intervene to save or avenge if you leave a loophole that gets you killed, though that’s not common. Happened to me, though, and I'm glad it did."

"—I have to ask: the thing that happened to you was getting to kill someone, or the thing that happened to you was dying?"

"First one. Sort of. I ended up with a good enough opening I could afford to threaten her in case she was willing to just let me go instead. She was eventually."

"I don't know if congratulations are appropriate but they're what springs to mind."

"They definitely are." Also condolences. Both, really.

"Well, congratulations then. Anyway in my experience the most reliable way to figure out which incentive structures work is to talk to a lot of people who are smarter than me and then try some and see, but probably that's not very helpful advice."

"I guess I’m in the right place for talking to people. I wish I knew how to experiment and had more leeway to do it."

"Hmm, what do you mean by knew how to experiment?"

"So, I don't know what to do about things like - what if I set things up in such a way that it's possible to move from the control condition to the experimental condition and then people self-sort and ruin my data? How do I measure what I care about? What if the fact that it's a temporary experiment has effects? That kind of thing."

"Hmm, I see what you mean. Again the sort of thing that the people who actually run my government know more about than I do."

"I wish I could delegate that much."

"What's stopping you?"

"I imported the concept of morality and some moral people but there aren’t enough people who understand my empire and care about other people and have good judgment and aren’t doing something more important."

"Yeah, that's a pretty tough one. I'm, uh, lucky, if you could call it that, that there's plenty of people in my government who are better at running it than I am. —that part's lucky, the part that's not lucky is that I'm so bad at it."

He laughs. "I’m guessing you’re a warlord?"

"I'm not sure what you mean by that?"

"You’re holding a country together by military force or by personally talking everyone into following you, not because an otherwise stable country voted for who they thought would do the best job of governing and picked you."

"Ah. Yeah, definitely closer to the first thing than the second thing. The deal is that I did something kind of objectively stupid that left me with enormous amounts of magical power and then I killed my father and took his empire and extended it to the rest of the continent, and that was all thousands of years ago so by now people are just kind of growing up knowing that I've basically always ruled the world."

"Power doesn’t really come in degrees like that where I’m from and so far I think we’re lucky that way. Congratulations on your conquest, though."

"I was pretty young and stupid at the time but I like to think I've grown up a lot since then."

"Sounds likely! Is however you’ve lived that long for sale?"

"I can make other people immortal but I've got no idea what you'd pay me for it."

"I could make your belongings unbreakable or make you immune to extreme temperatures or some kinds of injuries or other people’s magic but we should check that I can actually do that. I could pay in cash. I could tell stories. I don’t know, what do you want most?"

"I want to make my empire more prosperous. But I don't know how to do that."

"I might! Which if any of germ theory, printing presses, electricity, computers and vaccines are unfamiliar?"

"...the printing press is pretty new but we have it, I want to hear more about the rest."

"Bar can sell you books on all of them, just so you know, but - so, some contagious diseases are caused by creatures so small you can't even see them, like how it's hard to see mites but much smaller, just kind of eating you from the inside, and they can be gotten off of surfaces by washing with soap and they can usually be killed by extreme heat, so for example by boiling water before you drink it. Vaccines can teach your body to recognize them in advance, which - so, you know how some creatures only get some diseases once in their lives? Vaccines let you skip straight to the part where you don't get them again. Complete with the thing where if there's anything really wrong with your immune system you'll still get them. They're like a nonmagical and slightly worse version of a disease ward. Computers are objects that can remember information and do math and do small nonmagical illusions of images and sounds, which in practice means you can do things like write a letter and have it sent almost as fast as if you were using paired artifacts, or ask it to multiply a bunch of numbers, or even have a public discussion forum where it's possible to remove instances of people showing up just to annoy everyone by reciting the entire alphabet. And if you don't already know about those, it's likely you don't know much about nonmagical automation, either - that's a thing where people use steam or electricity to make their tools move on their own. I would definitely recommend getting some books - and reading them here and copying them out by hand because they won't be in your language if you take them home."