If a kingdom is ruled legitimately and fairly (enough) by a lich?

[Keltest]

I'm not sure I follow. Can you elaborate?

So if I do something wrong, nothing else I do has any effect on the ability of the wronged party to forgive me (unless I like murder them or something, obviously). It might affect their willingness, but whether or not I am forgiven is entirely up to the people doing the forgiving, and I cannot render myself incapable of receiving forgiveness.

[Zanos]

So if I do something wrong, nothing else I do has any effect on the ability of the wronged party to forgive me (unless I like murder them or something, obviously). It might affect their willingness, but whether or not I am forgiven is entirely up to the people doing the forgiving, and I cannot render myself incapable of receiving forgiveness.

Forgiveness doesn't really have an effect on Good/Evil in any case. If someone refuses to forgive someone who did something wrong, it doesn't mean their decades of doing Good seeking atonement don't matter.

[Segev]

So if I do something wrong, nothing else I do has any effect on the ability of the wronged party to forgive me (unless I like murder them or something, obviously). It might affect their willingness, but whether or not I am forgiven is entirely up to the people doing the forgiving, and I cannot render myself incapable of receiving forgiveness.

Forgiveness doesn't really have an effect on Good/Evil in any case. If someone refuses to forgive someone who did something wrong, it doesn't mean their decades of doing Good seeking atonement don't matter.

Zanos's reply is good. Expanding on it a bit, the notion of redemption has little to do with whether you're forgiven or not. You can be forgiven and never do a thing to atone. Forgiveness, in this case, might be fore the forgiver's sake, to let go of the pain of what you did to wrong him.

Even if you want to atone, and the people you wronged forgive you, it may also be beyond your ability to recompense them for what you've done. Hypothetically, an act of "irredeemable" evil would be one that, even if you were forgiven by all, and you strove the rest of eternity to be a paragon of virtue and righteousness, you're getting away with something you shouldn't, if you're not punished. And no amount of punishment can really be enough, either.

That's what makes a singular act of "unspeakable" evil so hard to reconcile, because conceiving of such is so difficult.

I think the best we are likely to come up with is either something that makes it an ongoing cost of your continued being (in which case your choice to not destroy yourself and your phylactery is ongoing villainy), or is going to "merely" be something so wicked that it takes somebody who is blackest-hearted evil to do it, no matter how good his reasons. But, potentially, redeemable...if he can come to truly repent of what he's done to the point that he would never do it again, even for the same or more compelling reasons. (This is amazingly difficult, because "I do this horrible thing for good reasons, and I'll just repent for it" is setting yourself up for failure.)