everyone is going to keep their oaths to the letter
Not having read it, does this necessarily follow? Oathkeeping isn't quite the same deal as truthfulness, particularly if the means of enforcement is a soaking at the moment of speech. Because when you tell a lie, it's clear that the morally bad act (if you consider it such) is at the moment of speaking that which you know to be false; but an oath can be a statement of completely sincere intent at the time it's spoken, and the morally bad act comes a long time later when (if) you break it.
Of course if you got drenched at the moment of breaking the oath, that would be an incentive to keep it. But if the water instead appeared when people made oaths, then it would either have to constrain itself to punishing only the ones whose authors already knew they were going to break them later, or else it would have to have foreknowledge – and aside from all the usual time-paradox dangers of the latter, it seems to me that the effect would not be that everyone would keep their oaths so much as that people would refrain from making any in the first place unless they were really exceptionally sure of themselves. (Which you might still see as a positive effect, but it's not the same positive effect.)
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Date: 2014-07-10 03:18 pm (UTC)Not having read it, does this necessarily follow? Oathkeeping isn't quite the same deal as truthfulness, particularly if the means of enforcement is a soaking at the moment of speech. Because when you tell a lie, it's clear that the morally bad act (if you consider it such) is at the moment of speaking that which you know to be false; but an oath can be a statement of completely sincere intent at the time it's spoken, and the morally bad act comes a long time later when (if) you break it.
Of course if you got drenched at the moment of breaking the oath, that would be an incentive to keep it. But if the water instead appeared when people made oaths, then it would either have to constrain itself to punishing only the ones whose authors already knew they were going to break them later, or else it would have to have foreknowledge – and aside from all the usual time-paradox dangers of the latter, it seems to me that the effect would not be that everyone would keep their oaths so much as that people would refrain from making any in the first place unless they were really exceptionally sure of themselves. (Which you might still see as a positive effect, but it's not the same positive effect.)