Ash’s POV
Leo tilted his head in the way that normally signified confusion. “Why would we stop them? They are completely unrelated to us. Remember, our job is only to escort our merchant to the beastkin town, we’re only here for the Bazaar. Given recent developments, the Bazaar is probably over for the most part, and that means that we’ll probably be leaving in the next couple of days.”
Disbelief coursed through me, quickly followed by anger. “Why would we stop them?! Maybe because if we don’t, MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WILL DIE LEO!!! DON’T YOU CARE???”
“Ash.” Sophia interrupted, infusing her voice with her semi divine presence, the choker normally around her neck seeming to have vanished. I snapped back to my senses, and realized what I’d said. I turned to Leo to apologize, but he raised his hand.
“You’re right. I don’t particularly care. Yes, millions of people will die, but to me, as long as you are not one of them, I don’t see it as any of my business. I understand that that concept may not sit quite right with you, and I understand if it upsets you.”
I calmed down, remembering the various conversations I’d had with Sophia about Leo’s mental…abnormalities. I realized just how unfair I was being. Leo had never shown me anything but unwavering support, I had no right to judge him for sharing his personal opinion. But…at some point over the last year, without even realizing it myself, I had started to see Leo as…a kind of intellectual authority. No matter what question I had, he always seemed to have an answer ready. And anytime he didn’t have an answer, he knew enough to have a few theories, as well as ideas for experiments he could conduct to find out the correct answer for me. So even though emotions in general may not necessarily be his field of expertise, it never even occurred to me that he wouldn’t have an answer to the question that was burning in my heart.
“Potentially saving millions of people, or doing nothing…any way you look at it, isn’t helping them the right thing to do? Knowing what we know, don’t we have to help them?”
Leo put his cards down and sighed, leaning back into the couch, and started stroking Sophia’s hair. She put her cards down as well, and leaned into him, enjoying his touch, seemingly unconcerned with the thought that he was about to let millions of people march to their deaths when he could do something to prevent it.
“Do you want the short answer, or the long answer?” He asked, and I responded, “The long one.”
He adjusted himself on the couch, getting into a comfortable position, before he said, “Like all truly important questions, no matter how unsatisfactory it may be, the answer is: It depends. Where I’m from, people sometimes spend their entire lives studying morals and ethics, and the more they learn about it, the more they understand that…at the end of the day, there’s no ‘universal code of morality’. People generally want to see the world as black or white, where right and wrong are clearly defined, but…there’s really no such thing as ‘true right’ and ‘true wrong’.
“Let’s take, for example, murder. Most people will agree that murder is wrong, but what if, in a specific case, the man who is killed is someone who regularly assaults children, and if left alone, he will assault more in the future. Is it morally right to prevent those kids from being assaulted? Or is it morally wrong to murder the man responsible? What if you witness someone about to be murdered, and you step in and kill the attacker? Are you morally right for saving someone’s life? Or are you morally wrong for killing someone? And what if the person you saved is a thief, who just stole from the attacker, and that’s why he was almost killed in the first place? Does that make you morally responsible for not only the murder of the attacker, but also the original theft?
“At the end of the day, it depends on what particular moral theory you happen to follow. In a few of the most popular eastern philosophies, there is a concept called Karma. Some forms of Karma act as kind of a tally system, where if you do good deeds, you get a black tally, and if you do bad deeds, you get a red tally, and the universe has a system of rewarding or punishing you based on the number and kinds of tallies that you rack up over your life. Other people consider Karma to be more of a mercurial kind of force, that’s more or less just related to the consequences of your own choices.
“With that in mind, if we go by the tally system of Karma, does every individual have some sort of Karmic score? And if so, when you save the thief and kill the attacker, do you receive a black mark for saving a man? A red mark for killing a man? Do they cancel each other out? Or do you get a red mark for killing someone with an overall ‘black’ tally score in order to save someone with an overall ‘red’ tally score?
“And then there are slightly less serious or intense examples of moral gray areas like white lies. If one day, you did something really dumb, and you were feeling like the stupidest person in the world, and you came home and just wanted reassurance, so Sophia told you that what you did wasn’t actually that dumb, is she doing something morally right, in that she’s making you feel better? Or is she doing something morally wrong by lying to you?
“And speaking of lying, there’s a philosopher by the name of Immanuel Kant, who believed that no matter what the situation, you should never lie. If someone asked you where your best friend was, and you knew that he wanted that information because he was on his way to murder that best friend of yours, you should still tell him the truth, and that whatever actions he took after the fact are not your moral obligation. Now, while I consider this particular take to be utter bullshit, that does pose the interesting question about committing wrongs in order to prevent greater wrongs. If by killing one man, you could save the life of 5 people, is that more morally right than killing one man to save one life?
“This exact question is actually very famous where I’m from, it’s called the trolley problem. Basically, in terms that you guys can understand seeing as how none of you know what a train is, you arrive at a place and see that a boulder is rolling downhill towards five people, and is about to kill all of them. Now, you are not strong enough to stop the boulder, but you are strong enough to push it off to the side. However, if you do, then you will end up pushing it directly towards a different person, killing them instead. So what do you do?”
I thought about his question, and answered, “Move the boulder, save the lives of as many people as I can.” X nodded in agreement beside me and said, “The choice that kills the fewest people.”
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Leo pointed at both of us and then asked, “Now, Ash, what if the one person who you would be pushing the boulder towards is X? And X, if the person you would be pushing the boulder towards is Ash?” The pair of us fell silent.
Leo seemed to nod in understanding as he continued, “Exactly, it gets a lot more complicated once personal feelings get involved. What you want starts conflicting with what you believe to be right. The trolly problem has thousands of different variations, some of which have to do with going back in time and killing someone before they could commit various atrocities, choosing who to kill based on what they might do in the future, some take into account numbers, or age, or different levels of personal relationships. For example, where I’m from, it’s generally considered that if in that choice it was 5 people who are elderly, and have already lived full lives, vs one small child who still has a hundred years ahead of him, you should choose to save the small child, though again, there are still a significant number of people who would disagree with that assessment.
“And all of this,” he continued, “is only with regards to the morals and ethics of personal choices. When you get to cultural group dynamics and politics it only gets far more complicated. After all, each person has a slightly different belief, a slightly different opinion of what is right and what is wrong. Your job as their leader is to find a way to somehow unify all of these different beliefs, or at least get them to acknowledge a third version.
“Where I’m from, a very common way to create a sort of unified moral code was through religion. Basically, there were four or five extremely common belief systems, and each one of those belief systems had a strict set of rules to live by. Now, not everyone who claimed to be a part of one of those belief systems necessarily followed those rules, but for the most part, they did genuinely believe in the inherent morality of the rules as they had been laid out.
“Where this started becoming a problem, is when ‘religious authorities’ started manipulating these rules and their followers in order to further their own agendas. In order for these religious authorities to build greater influence, they made it part of their doctrines that anyone who did not subscribe to the same particular religious beliefs were morally inferior, and those outliers either needed to adopt the same moral system that the invading people had, or they needed to die. This ended up causing several ideological clashes, and resulted in several wars in the name of ‘morality’, when in reality, it was simply due to greedy and overly ambitious leaders trying to gain more power and influence. However, in this place, as far as I'm aware, while the people of the Capital accept the existence of various gods, those gods have no sort of associated moral code that I am familiar with.
“Now, in this particular case that we are experiencing now with the Capital, in order to fully understand the morality of our choices, we first need to analyze the most likely results of our actions.
“Option 1: We do nothing. This option would lead to the deaths of 1-2 million people, and many more injured, however, the end result would be 3-4 million people in a stable country, with a foundation set to maintain stability for a thousand years to come. However, this would also mean that everything they suffered for during the previous war was all for the sake of a lie, and that they were all deceived into killing each other by the Royal Family.
“Option 2: We assassinate the Royal Family. As the main perpetrators of this plot and deception, without them, the civil war wouldn’t take place, however, the underlying reason for the plot would still exist, only the people would have no way to know about it. Things would run relatively smoothly, as the various lords and other ruling bodies would most likely keep the fact that the Royal Family has all died under wraps in order to prevent mass panic and hysteria, until one day, food supply just can’t keep up anymore, and Famine hits. Millions of people starve to death, and those who don’t evacuate, seeking refuge from nearby towns and villages. Due to the fact that there would be millions of refugees leaving the Capital, whatever towns they end up in would almost immediately face the same crisis of having too many mouths to feed, and they would either kick out the refugees, leaving them to die on their own, or they would try their best to help, ultimately going into a famine of their own, causing another round of thousands of deaths, and potentially more refugees fleeing to a town where food supply can sustain them. Overall, most likely far more people would die in this option than the previous one, only this time they wouldn’t be manipulated into dying by an outside force.
“Option 3: We make the public aware of the plot by the Royal Family. In a way, this would ironically lead to almost the exact same situation that not telling them would, in that the populace would most likely become outraged, and a civil war would break out. The only difference is that the Royal Family wouldn’t have the opportunity to split into two, which means that the war wouldn’t be meticulously planned and controlled to only hit the bare minimum necessary loss of life, and instead, it would be a war of extermination where the people fought to eradicate the entire Royal Family. Now, this war of eradication could only feasibly go four ways.
“The first way is that the Royal Family simply evacuates, leaving the citizens to clean up this mess by themselves. Domestic order would break down, riots would be a daily occurrence, and pure anarchy would descend upon the Kingdom.
“The second way is that the Royal Family is executed at the cost of millions of lives, seeing as how the common citizen can’t even approach the castle they live in without experiencing overwhelming soul damage. This would result in the people feeling avenged, so social order wouldn’t be as chaotic, but there would still be a high crime rate as they establish a new system of government.
“The third way is that the Royal Family would win, killing millions of people themselves, and stamping out all flames of further rebellion through pure tyrannical might.
“The final and least likely way, is that the Royal Family would someone charm the citizens into not believing the ‘false rumors’ and claiming that this was some kind of attack from an outside force, and then they would pin the blame on some nearby group of people, in this case, probably the various Beastkin villages Northwest of here, and they would launch a full scale invasion into those territories, still deceiving the people and carrying out their population control, yet now they’d also be conquering new farmland, solving the problem from two ends simultaneously, and also dragging unrelated beastkin villages into their problem.
“Basically, at the end of the day, no matter what we do, millions of people will die. The only choice we have is how they die. Morality is built on a foundation of Empathy, so for you to do the morally ‘right’ thing, that would involve putting yourself in the shoes of one of the common citizens, and deciding how you would want someone else to treat your situation. Due to…the way I am, I have no experience with empathy, which consequently means that I have no business even attempting to be any sort of moral compass, and as I’ve already mentioned, as far as I’m concerned, the Royal Family can do whatever they want, so long as they don’t drag either of us into it. However, if you feel differently, and you want to do something, you know I’ll support you and have your back.
“The way I see it, morality is nothing more than a figment of collective imagination. Right and wrong don’t actually exist, and instead, the only thing that does exist are our choices, and the subsequent consequences of those choices. Action and Reaction. So choose what you want us to do, but do so knowing that there’s a very likely chance that it may lead to a worse overall outcome, and choose an option that you won’t regret in the future.”
As he finished his lecture, Leo stood up, lifting Sophia into his arms and carrying her towards their wing of the house. “Take the night to think over what you want, and what you believe, and in the morning, tell me your decision. We’ll go from there.” And with that, he shut the door behind him, leaving me, Duke, and Lord Xavier alone to consider his words. I turned to X, asking, “What do you think? After all, it is your country.”
X gave me a complicated sort of look, before responding, “The same as that trolly problem I guess. Whatever option leads to the least loss of life. In this case…That means letting the Royal Family go through with their plans.”
“So you’re fine with just sitting around doing nothing, watching millions of people who follow your lead die without even knowing why?” I snapped at him.
“Damn it Ash!! No, I’m not fine with it, but what fucking choice do I have!? You heard the options, literally every single one of them is worse!! At least this way, we can minimize our losses.” He yelled back. I saw a certain…hopelessness in his eyes. He truly didn’t want to take the option of inaction, he wanted to do Something, Anything, but…he seemed so…lost.
I thought back to the example that had stumped him just as much as it had stumped me. “Are you going to tell your family what’s going on?” He paused for a moment, then sighed, not responding, but I knew what he would do. “The people of the Capital…They have families too you know. It’s not fair to them that they don’t happen to be related to Lord Xavier. They deserve to know just as much as your family does.” And with that, I walked over to my wing, leaving X alone in the living room with a gnome, an odd little rotating machine, and an abandoned card game, as he sat there, thinking about what choice he should make.