‘As we know, inflicting pain upon the erring individual has limited value to the policosmos. In particular, it serves no purpose in dissuading like-minded individuals from committing similar offences in the future. Despite all our efforts to improve their design, our citizens maintain a complete inability to generalise the situation of one of them to their own lives. They think—if they think at all—that they would never be so stupid as to be caught and punished for any such actions. Each citizen considers that she would either never have occasion to perpetrate any such idiocy, or that she would succeed without detection. Folly, both notions, as you and I know, my lady, but there! The common citizens are not equipped with sufficient intelligence or training to know any better. As a general
