"...no."

?

"I really think you should interpret the once a month thing as 'if this is not your highest priority at least occasionally, that is very bad for you', not as 'this does not need to be a priority at all except when it has been a month since it last was'."

"...yes, that seems like a reasonable interpretation of the rule, I have been assuming it's a self-maintenance instruction..."

"So yes, but - if there were someone who in fact suffered no consequences to their judgment or fighting skill whatsoever from being miserable all of the time, it would still be preferable that they not be miserable, and it would not be preferable specifically that they experience non-misery once a month, but whenever it could be cheaply purchased."

".........yes? I've already - said that in practice I wind up playing chess more than once a month -"

"And yet you still do not seem to be making predictions about what is worth someone's time from the assumption that you being miserable is a bad thing."

"...at steep enough exchange rates I do, I asked the other paladin for permission to cast Prestidigitation."

"I am sincerely glad to hear it. You are still speaking of this in a way that suggests some important gap in understanding but it is possible it is only a gap in communication."

"I am still confused but not in a way where I know what questions to ask."

"Sometimes I find it helpful to describe to myself - a great many situations that are all variants on the same theme, and contemplate whether I think there are morally important differences between any two of them."

"I don't recall that any examples of this exercise made it into the book, sir."

"Is murder wrong?"

"Yes sir."

"So if I am riding down the road and I see a man walking and I take off his head as I ride by, this was wrong?"

"...unless he's a zombie or something, sir, yes."

"He is for now a human man, twenty years old, offering no provocation at all. But perhaps instead of the Empire I live somewhere uncivilized where this is entirely legal, is it less wrong now?"

"It's...... less stupid? I don't think it has bearing on - are you tracking the time, sir, your sermon was soon -"

"Huh! I would have said that some of the ill is the ill of lawbreaking, and the betrayal of a trust, and so there is a little less of it in this case. Unknown to me or to him, the man was about to die right around the next bend of a bear, does this make the deed less evil?"

"Less... consequentially so, I suppose... the book does say that you tend to think of Good and Law as facets of the same thing but that's neither otherwise conventional nor intuitive to me."

"What if I did know that the man was about to die of a bear around the bend, and chose to kill him only because he was already doomed?"

"...I guess that might be slightly less evil if you were specifically on a mission to deprive the bears of food to the Good end of reduced bear activity in the area? Possibly much less evil if you somehow knew the man to be bound for Paradise and to prefer swords over bears as a way to get there."

"What if I don't kill the man at all, but I know there's a bear around the corner and could shout a warning to him and don't bother? Am I as guilty as if I had killed him myself?"

"...I don't think so?"

"Hmmm, why not?"