Can you be neutral through extreme acts of both good & evil?

[NichG]

I don't see how this is different. Earning good points before or after you "spend" them by acquiring equivalent numbers of bad points doesn't really make a big difference.

If having a 10000 white stone excess has no extra consequences than having a 10 white stone excess, and you know your white stone count, it very easily needs to a mindset of 'I have this resource which I can spend, and if I don't spend it then it will go to waste'. So someone who lives for 40 years and finds themselves with enough excess white stones for a couple murders might say 'well, I've been good for a long time now, so I'm owed the right to kill that bully who is pestering my kids, that guy who plays loud music, etc'. So you could get evils of convenience, from people who have been unnecessarily good and are looking to cash out their excess near the end of their lives. Doing so is zero risk to them so long as they can know their balance well enough.

Whereas if you do evil first then you're under the tension that you have to earn back those white stones before you die. That means that if circumstances don't permit it for some reason, you have an accidental death, etc, you could still be in trouble. So its non-zero risk, which will suppress the unwanted behavior more effectively even for people who could potentially earn things back. But of course it won't totally suppress it because if someone can be 99.9% certain to earn back enough white stones in time to die with a positive balance, that's probably good enough.

And thus in settings where this is the case, "the cosmos" is an immoral monster, and the entire population should start each day by raising a middle finger to the sky and telling the cosmos to bugger off.

Or maybe just don't look to laws of physics for moral guidance...