"So that's it?" he asked. "Treat morality itself as a series of relationships, not a list of rules?"
"As freely chosen relationships," she said. "Good connections cannot be forced, for the same reason a comedian cannot force others to laugh."
"I'm sure they could," he interjected.
Her own rejoinder was instant as well. "They would not be very good comedians if they did."
"Granted," he grinned. "Go on."
"Laughter is our involuntary response to pleasant shock," the former Element of Laughter went on. "In the same vein, love is your involuntary response to virtue, if you are virtuous. Princess Mi Amore Cadenza declared that insight to all of Equestria at her coronation; I asked her if I could use it henceforth, and of course she said I could. Love is our involuntary response to virtue if we ourselves are virtuous, and love is at the heart of true happiness. That is why virtue is so important. A good pony will be able to tell if you are virtuous, they will love you involuntarily, and that love will make you happy. If you are not virtuous, they will not love you. They may not even give you a chance. They may simply leave, as is their right of free will."
Ignoring the first part, that he fully understood. "Most moralists agree that free will is a necessary component to morality." It was one of the few places he fully agreed with standard moralists on anything.
Although with most people following scripts and possessing little free will to speak of, that put him in the annoying position of being held to the highest standards simply for having a more actionable free will, for being more powerful, intelligent, and independent than everyone else. In the past, after that fateful day of Legilimency in the Ministry, he ignored this annoyance entirely, and to his amusement he finally noticed that moralists had ceased to criticize him when he displayed himself to be blatantly and unfalteringly evil – perhaps because it is generally understood that evil people have free wills that are not influenced by petty words, and will punish those stupid enough to try. Instead the moralizers quarreled amongst themselves and critiqued the 'good' people opposing him, handicapping their own powers of resistance in the process.
If that's where this is going…
"Free will is the necessary component to morality," Luna said in firm agreement. "Thank you, that is exactly where I am going with this, I don't think you are ready for the love conversation just yet, free will is a much better place to start."
"You think I'll be more receptive to your stance on free will?"
"Yes, I do, for I think you will agree with it. Putting a horn to a pony's throat and ordering them to donate to charity would not make them generous. Trying to force virtue in a pony is like trying to force any other change against their will – you might achieve compliance in the moment, but you will also achieve resentment in the long run, directed at both the enforcer and the thing they are enforcing. And I wouldn't want you to resent virtue. Or resent me."
"Many Death Eaters did not resent me for what I forced of them," he pointed out. "Not in the long run, anyway."
"Because you forced them in accordance with their will. And they did still fear you," said Luna, "and that is not good either. Habitual force causes resentment or fear or hate or mindless compliance, depending on the circumstances, and none of that is good for what we're trying to do here. The only exception is when they already enjoy what they are being forced to do, or they enjoy the reward, or agree with the end goal, but even that would not be good for you because force hinders free will, and thus morality. Ethics is the art of restricting free will as little as possible while still eliminating evil and promoting happiness."
"You don't consider what you've done so far to be a forceful restriction on my free will?"
She took a moment to think about it. "A good point. In retrospect… I have been too firm in some of my advice. But I have never said you must do things. Or if I have it has been conditional, and consensual. I have always said, 'if you wish to see significant progress beyond this point, you must do such and such.' Just as you said that if I want you as an employee, I must change my dream-walking habits. Was that a forceful restriction on me, or a voluntary one?"
"But why even offer conditionals like that at all? What about the coma test?"
The coma test, as proposed by Luna in some of her past Night Court memories, goes as follows: No good moral system labels a coma-bound pony as immoral. If following the logic of a proposed moral system to its natural conclusion results in a coma-bound pony being called evil, it fails.
Morally good ponies give to the poor? That implies ponies who keep their bits for themselves are not good, i.e. evil, or at least mildly immoral. Can a pony in a coma give to the poor? No? Then isn't he immoral under that system? Does it make sense for a pony in a coma to be immoral?
It's a simple question that counters the kind of 'moralizing' he dislikes most – the kind that demands positive action from others at the subjective whims of the moralizer – which is why he remembers it. The coma test is a proposal that all good moral systems are a series of negative constraints, not positive ones, and combined with Luna's comment that ethics is the art of restricting free will as little as possible while still achieving its goals…
"With very few exceptions," he said, trying to speak directly to her own system of morality, "I have refrained from evil since my arrival here. Even if the extent of my misdeeds in Equestria were known, one could hardly build a legal case against me. Is that not enough to pass the coma test?"
She seemed to consider his words. "Hm… refraining from wrongdoing is sufficient for morality. That is enough for most ponies to be good. But it is not enough when your starting point is evil, when your history is evil. If it were enough, you would already be happy and none of this would be necessary. You have largely refrained from evil in Equestria, but not entirely. You said 'with very few exceptions', thus there are exceptions."
"And that mandates action?"
She took a while before she answered that question. "Yes. If you wish to be happy. The end state of being virtuous often is, as you point out, the avoidance of enacting any evil at all. But that state is not easy to achieve. The journey to virtue when you are not already there requires countless positive obligations to action. If you are obese, the journey to fitness is a long and grueling one, with many habits that must be broken, and many others that must be formed. It is easier to stay healthy than it is to reverse bad health because unhealthy ponies must constantly resist temptations that healthy ponies cannot even imagine, in mind and body. Pushing wing-bound pegasi to what they thought was their deaths, for example, is not something a good pony would ever want to do-"
"It was Mr. Silver's idea, actually," Riddle interrupted. "He might have been trying to brighten my day when he first thought of it. Is he not good?"
Luna took a deep breath. Exhaled. "Not fully. And the key problem is that you enjoy doing it. Complications aside, I suspect there are other legal evils… no, let us call them legal wrongs you have pondered, things not proposed by Silver. And I further suspect you have pondered illegal wrongs, truly evil actions as well. Did you refrain from those temptations?"
"Hm… so requiring positive action from me is necessary to turn me into a pony who resists 'temptation'?"
"To turn you into a pony who is no longer tempted in the first place," she corrected. "But that takes a while, and it is a delicate process. When positive action has been required of you – like in the Changeling Sense sessions – I tried my best to stick to reason, evidence, arguments, or at worst bribery. The carrot, not the stick."
Riddle tilted his head to the left. "Hm… perhaps." He tilted his head to the right. "Or perhaps not. I can think of one instance where you used threats."
"Yes, but it was a threat of revoking privileges, which is not quite the same. If you violated that thing you were tempted to violate," she said, clearly referring to 'create another horcrux', "your crown-sanctioned status would have been rescinded and you would have been fired. You yourself considered those to be fair sanctions, and none of them impose on you, which makes them permissible in the realm of redemption. And finally, it is a negative constraint. It is not a threat regarding what you must do, only what you must not do."
Riddle reflected on that for a while. A phrase came to mind, and he muttered "though shalt not" to himself.
"Exactly," said Luna. "That is exactly right. 'Thou shalt not' passes the coma test. Thou shalt not steal, rape, assault, or murder. Those are the only hard moral 'rules' you will ever hear from me. Achieve those four – in real life, not just on the law books – and you are 99% of the way to a good society."
He considered that as well. Then he shook his head. "When I originally said you have been forceful, I was not referring to my great creation, or to negative constraints. It was an attempt at forcing me to positive action."
She frowned in puzzlement. "Anything to do with your employment does not count. You willingly accepted the position and you may quit at any time."
"It was after working hours."
"Oh?"
"Discord."
She blinked. "Oh. Right…" She took a pause to think. "You are correct of course, but… my philosophy… no, not just mine. Philosophy in general revolves around prevention, not cure. The ethics of emergencies… once a desperate crisis is set in motion, the golden and silver rules no longer apply. If we were Earth Ponies on a boat in the middle of the ocean, and we were thrown overboard with a charmed teleportation necklace that could only fit one, it is not a stain on either of our characters to fight over it using any means at our disposal. When ponies are reduced to states of nature, the appropriate thing is not to criticize the morality of the ponies who are just trying to survive, but to criticize the one who reduced them to that state."
"You want me to criticize Discord instead of you?"
"That is not what I was getting at. He might be more culpable than any, but one does not criticize a volcano for eruption." Her gaze seemed to grow distant. "I was trying to explain the moral dilemma of emergencies in general. A good pony's first moral instinct should be to judge the one responsible for the emergency, not the responders. Remark on tactics all you wish, there is still value in that, but morally speaking? Virtue ethics, the kind that bring happiness, the kind that can apply to the vast majority of all situations and choices? Those morals go out the window in emergencies. Especially emergencies that bring about utter chaos."
"I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting you to ever say that morality should go out the window."
"Not that it should, simply that it does. And not all morality, just conventional morality. Deep desperation replaces deontology with consequentialism within the minds of most ponies, whether we like it or not. Good moral systems should not be based around this rare fact of reality, but they do account for it. In Equestria, we call them the ethics of emergencies, and the first rule of emergency ethics is to be as proactive in preventing emergencies as possible, or if an emergency is inevitable, to be as proactive in preparing your response to it as possible. Once the emergency is set in, there is but one rule: win. Save as many lives as you can, do the best you can, at the very least survive. Turn your desperation to good."
"The situation didn't seem overly desperate to me," he observed. "More mischief than mass murder."
"Says the one who fled," she pointed out. "And who was fully justified in doing so."
That pre-empted his rejoinder, so he simply huffed.
"After fighting Discord for so long," she said, "I came to understand that he was like a walking state of nature. If he restrained himself long enough – if he bloated himself, as you and Ms. Sparkle discovered – then he was capable of reducing the whole world to a state of nature. And that meant mass casualties. My sister and I never knew he needed time to bloat, we thought he simply did it with a snap of his fingers, at will and at whim. 'Tis why we were so intent on stopping him, and why I violated my peacetime principles when I first learned of his escape: to put a stop to the deadly chaos he inflicted. "
"That is your excuse for attempting to force me to act against my free will?"
She slowly nodded. "Yes. Emergencies are emergencies. Shouting at a foal is a terrible thing to do. It should never, ever become a parental habit. But if a distant foal is about to walk off a cliff and shouting 'stop' gets them to freeze when nothing else would, then it must be done. And in fact, shouting at a foal on a day-to-day basis will cause them to become used to shouting and they may potentially ignore it in a true emergency, which is one of the many, many reasons not to shout at foals."
Much like Mr. Potter's 'Merlin says' system during his generalship of the Chaos Legion, Riddle realised.
The Defense Professor had not been expecting that part of Mr. Potter's training to bear as much fruit as it did, for both officers and soldiers, but he could not argue with results. The average worth of a chaotic legionnaire was much higher than the average worth of other army soldiers. The same with chaotic officers, even though they started off worse than most other army officers.
The Defense Professor had expected Mr. Potter's 'squad suggesters' to abuse the 'Merlin says' system, and Theodore Nott had abused it, briefly, before Mr. Potter had carefully explained the system to Mr. Nott, using a similar argument to what Luna had just used. Mr. Potter had said he really didn't want to, but he would demote Mr. Nott if he continued to do the orderly, unchaotic thing of saying 'Merlin says' all the time.
Think of your soldiers like children, Mr. Potter had told to Mr. Nott and the other officers of chaos. It's just the way of the world that they are going to disobey some of your orders. (They were given direct orders to disobey their squad suggesters' orders if they thought it was a good idea.) Sure, you could force them to obey, but what would that teach them? Certainly not that you're smart. That you know what you're doing. No, it only teaches them that you're in charge, and if that's how you want it to be, he'll put one of them in charge of you.
The officers of Chaos should do as their general has demonstrated. Your soldiers won't disobey if you're competent, he explained. If you have the habit of giving good orders, your soldiers will follow them. If you don't have that habit, if your soldiers are constantly disobeying, if they constantly think it's in the army's best interest for them to do their own thing, that's probably a you problem, not a them problem, and it's an opportunity for you to improve. It is not an opportunity to use 'Merlin says'. 'Merlin says' is for emergencies and times of extreme need. It is not a tool to be used lightly, or often, or as a habit.
Just like shouting at children, apparently. And threatening adults into action, if Luna's reasoning is valid.
"Although in retrospect," Luna mused, "even though it was an emergency, you are right to point out I wasn't thinking clearly. I spent the previous day preventing casualties during the Changeling invasion, so I had little sleep. I was still in 'battle mode', and many years of fighting Discord with the aid of reluctant ponies has resulted in many lingering habits."
"For one who regularly denounces excuses…"
She sighed. "Yes. I know. But that is not a hard rule. If it were, I would say your upbringing is no excuse for your evil, and that it was all, entirely, you and your own decisions."
It was, came the honest thought, born from a decade of watching the stars and taking responsibility for his own past failures. But he didn't say it aloud.
A/N: Can't resist. Ignore this stupidity: "Pain is never the fault of the feeler. It's only the result of all the actions you consciously chose to make." -XRA
"So you have no intention of apologizing?" Riddle surmised.
"I wish I could trust myself to apologize about it, but no."
"What do you mean by that?"
She gave him a significant look. "An apology, my fool – a meaningful apology – is a promise that I will never do it again. If I reoffend, my past apology becomes a BNAp, a bull-manure non-apology. And I do not wish to bull-manure you. 'I'm sorry you feel that way', 'I'm sorry but I can't change the past', even 'I'm sorry for circumstances beyond my control'. Think of those as commitments a pony is making to do the exact same thing in the future, for they are not taking any measure of responsibility."
"But you are more than capable of taking responsibility for your past actions," he observed.
"Yes, but not about that one. Not morally, anyway. A crisis might arise again in the future, and I might engage in emergency ethics once more. If I apologized for doing so, then did it again in the future, my apologies to you would be rendered meaningless forevermore. A true apology is regret combined with commitment. A true apology is a promise that is never broken."
Riddle's eyebrows rose. He'd never heard that explanation for the concept of apology before. He'd heard her speak of 'BNAp's in Night Court memories, pointing out obvious cases of false remorse whose only goal was emotional manipulation, but she never fully explained the inverse, never explained what true remorse looks like. Until now.
"There are no other kinds of apology?"
"There are polite remarks about minor, unintended mistakes, but when it comes to significant matters? Nothing less than an oath, upheld for the rest of your life, can fully repair a broken bond of trust. Everything else is a BNAp. And I am not confident I could maintain such an oath for you, if I made it. Not about emergencies."
"So you have no regrets about how you initially handled Discord's escape?" he asked.
"I did not say that." Luna tapped her chin. "Even on the grounds of consequentialism, your tactics turned out for the best. I suppose I should… no. I won't suppose, I will. Thank you for responding in the way you did."
"You mean by not responding to your call to action?"
"Quite right." She grinned ruefully. "In the end, our free wills were not infringed, even though I succumbed to the worst state of life, at least for a time. Thank you for wrenching me from it, for making me realize it was not necessary after all, and for saving so many lives. In the future, I will try to concede to your wisdom during emergencies, though I cannot make guarantees, and I only ask that you do the same for my wisdom when we have not been reduced to a state of nature."