The Valdemaran word 'evil' doesn't have a direct correspondent word in Baseline.  It is not that dath ilan has never seen foul acts and harmful deeds, but there are different words for specialized kinds of wrongness.  There is utilitarian wrongness: predictable consequential net harm.  There is deontological wrongness, the transgression of a rule that existed for reasons.  There is virtue-ethical wrongness, things that make you a worse person to do and inflict harm against your own soul.  There is aesthetic wrongness, acts that are ugly.  There is oathbreaking, the tainting of the Algorithm, the cracking of the trust that underlies everything, the archetypal thing never to do even if there is a reason.  There is a word that Valdemaran might translate as 'hatred', the cognitive-emotional state that exists in human nature and which dath ilani are warned against ever falling into, when some conflict has spiraled completely out of control and you start to directly take pleasure each time you imagine inverting the private part of someone else's utility function; people who walk around with that possibility in mind are closer to being walking bombs if they go insane or schizophrenic; you do not want agents walking around with precalculated inverses for other agents' utility functions, it could lead Reality into a very ugly place.  There is a specialized subword of 'hatred' that means taking pleasure in others' pain, what might translate as 'sadism'; it is known that such an awful possibility exists within human nature, and any dath ilani who found themselves veering near it would mentally back off and ask themselves what they were doing wrong.  There is a short snappy single-syllable word that means 'defecting in a game-theoretic dilemma', even though dath ilan tries to avoid that coming up in reality, because so many important counterfactuals center around that possibility.

There is a word in dath ilani that means the harmony and song between the many varieties of goodness: kindness and altruism and honor and beauty.  It is the word for those rare occasions where, instead of tradeoffs, there is a nontrivial question on which utilitarianism and deontology and virtue ethics and aesthetics all agree.  It would describe the act of printing books in order to prevent children from starving in winter.  A high-functioning society should present its individuals with only rare true moments like that, because usually things should not be going wrong in that many ways at once; there is a dath ilani proverb that, like acts of heroism, such moments should be found mainly in fiction.  In ordinary reality it applies to two lovers deciding to conceive a child, and doesn't need to apply much more often than that.

There is no dath ilani word that means the opposite of the Light.  It's not a topic that comes up often enough to need its own word.

Thellim does not have time to think anything like all that; she has only heard one mental word in a sentence full of other words while Very Serious matters were being discussed.  The connotation that briefly flashes across is that the Eastern Empire is extra bonus bad in a way that is dangerous, self-corruptive, icky, and deontologically forbidden.

:Vanyel mentioned it to me, this morning, as said; he seemed hesitant about it, as said.  That Vanyel said it at all, implies that he did not consider obvious that the Eastern Empire was extra-bonus-bad enough that the harm they would do with more books would outweigh the good of importing their food.  Unless you know more than Vanyel about the Eastern Empire, and you know they would - just take that food away from an equal quantity of children there, or some such horror?  Separately, I infer from context that Gates can't reach to regions as distant as 'Hardorn', or are too expensive, or that I'm overestimating how much food could pass through one.  But I am very ignorant of that and all your magecraft; somebody may need to spell out numbers for me.:

The Valdemaran word 'evil' doesn't have a direct correspondent word in Baseline.  It is not that dath ilan has never seen foul acts and harmful deeds, but there are different words for specialized kinds of wrongness.  There is utilitarian wrongness: predictable consequential net harm.  There is deontological wrongness, the transgression of a rule that existed for reasons.  There is virtue-ethical wrongness, things that make you a worse person to do and inflict harm against your own soul.  There is aesthetic wrongness, acts that are ugly.  There is oathbreaking, the tainting of the Algorithm, the cracking of the trust that underlies everything, the archetypal thing never to do even if there is a reason.  There is a word that Valdemaran might translate as 'hatred', the cognitive-emotional state that exists in human nature and which dath ilani are warned against ever falling into, when some conflict has spiraled completely out of control and you start to directly take pleasure each time you imagine inverting the private part of someone else's utility function; people who walk around with that possibility in mind are closer to being walking bombs if they go insane or schizophrenic; you do not want agents walking around with precalculated inverses for other agents' utility functions, it could lead Reality into a very ugly place.  There is a specialized subword of 'hatred' that means taking pleasure in others' pain, what might translate as 'sadism'; it is known that such an awful possibility exists within human nature, and any dath ilani who found themselves veering near it would mentally back off and ask themselves what they were doing wrong.  There is a short snappy single-syllable word that means 'defecting in a game-theoretic dilemma', even though dath ilan tries to avoid that coming up in reality, because so many important counterfactuals center around that possibility.

There is a word in dath ilani that means the harmony and song between the many varieties of goodness: kindness and altruism and honor and beauty.  It is the word for those rare occasions where, instead of tradeoffs, there is a nontrivial question on which utilitarianism and deontology and virtue ethics and aesthetics all agree.  It would describe the act of printing books in order to prevent children from starving in winter.  A high-functioning society should present its individuals with only rare true moments like that, because usually things should not be going wrong in that many ways at once; there is a dath ilani proverb that, like acts of individual heroism, such moments should be found mainly in fiction.  In ordinary reality it applies to two lovers deciding to conceive a child, and doesn't need to apply much more often than that.

There is no dath ilani word that means the opposite of the Light.  It's not a topic that comes up often enough to need its own word.

Thellim does not have time to think anything like all that; she has only heard one mental word in a sentence full of other words while Very Serious matters were being discussed.  The connotation that briefly flashes across is that the Eastern Empire is extra bonus bad in a way that is dangerous, self-corruptive, icky, and deontologically forbidden.

:Vanyel mentioned it to me, this morning, as said; he seemed hesitant about it, as said.  That Vanyel said it at all, implies that he did not consider obvious that the Eastern Empire was extra-bonus-bad enough that the harm they would do with more books would outweigh the good of importing their food.  Unless you know more than Vanyel about the Eastern Empire, and you know they would - just take that food away from an equal quantity of children there, or some such horror?  Separately, I infer from context that Gates can't reach to regions as distant as 'Hardorn', or are too expensive, or that I'm overestimating how much food could pass through one.  But I am very ignorant of that and all your magecraft; somebody may need to spell out numbers for me.: