Waking Life

by FullMetalFurbee

A Sweet Filly

Once he found a sufficient spot to occupy in town square, Mac unhitched himself from the cart. In his periphery, he saw a filly jumping. He looked over to the right. A young unicorn no bigger than Applebloom hopped up in down in a desperate attempt to retrieve her pinwheel from a windowed flower pot on the Cake's bakery. Mac trotted over to her, smiling internally at the adorable scene. He graciously extracted the pinwheel from the dirt and handed it to the diminutive pony. She looked up at him with curious eyes.

“Thanks mister,” she said casually. “I might have been here all day if you hadn't come along.”

“Eeyup,” said Mac. He then thought of something. “Ya couldn't reach it with yer magic?”

The unicorn giggled and shot him a look of condescension. “You're funny, mister. I don't have any magic.”

He decided not to question her counter-intuitive remark and instead began walking back to his cart. To his mild surprise, the young pony trailed after him. She walked right up behind him, stalking his shadow. When they reached the cart, Mac sat on the ground and asked the filly why she'd followed him.

“Oh,” she said. “I just wanted to ask you something. I hope that's okay.” She blew on her pinwheel and observed the shimmering plastic rotating hypnotically.

“Sure,” Mac agreed.

“Why did you help me? You didn't have to do that.”

The answer was easy. “Ya needed help,” Mac stated.

“Well, I'm thankful. Even if I don't buy into our current ethical standards, I still appreciate it. It wasn't your moral duty or anything.”

Mac shrugged. He was just happy to help.

The filly sat down across from him and set her pinwheel beside her. “I get the feeling that you're a very moral pony. Do you help others a lot?”

“Eeyup!” Mac said with a smile.

“That's really good. We need to have at least some social contract in order to maintain a healthy society. You know, you help me, I help you, nopony murders anypony. I just don't like the way things are now. We don't account for race or anything like that. Everything gets muddled and too complex. Besides, why shouldn't I just leech off of a free system of caring individuals? See, an agreement on how to behave doesn't delineate what it means to be a truly moral pony. It only covers actions, for the most part. Obligations too. There's so much more that's left unaccounted for! This is why I hate it when adults try to assert themselves as domineering forces. They really need kids like me in the government. I have a lot of really proactive ideas that the Princesses should hear.”

“Yeah!” said Mac, going along with her.

“Say, can I have an apple?” asked the child.

Mac stood up, fetched her one, and sat back down.

“Thanks again,” she said. “Random question: do you know what social relativism is?”

He did not. He indicated this by shaking his head.

The filly said, “It's easy. It's just an idea that every culture has their own ethical standards and viewpoints, and that there cannot be any overlap between them. After all, one cannot ethically judge another for having different worldviews. Let's say you and I went to Maretonia. They're a pretty violent group of ponies. Everypony knows that. But, we have no right to pass judgment on their practices and laws. There's no correlation between our set of rules and theirs. We absolutely cannot hold them to our legal standards, nor they us. It just won't work like that. Let's say an acceptable sentence for a misdemeanor over there is a public stoning. Here, that would likely count as murder. Well, too bad. Isn't up to us.” She paused to let the information sink in.

Big Mac waited patiently for her to continue.

“There's a point to all this, sorry,” she said after another minute. “Here's where it gets interesting. You know how infants are basically non-sentient, right? They're blank slates, free of any sense of blight or duty. Yeah?”

“Eeyup.”

She polished off the apple and tossed the core behind her. “Well, recently a group of scientists did a bunch of studies on foals. I'm not exactly sure what they did because I haven't researched it enough. Either way, they found something amazing. Turns out that even newborn foals have some minor degree of moral sense built in. There's a small little compass in their heads that knows right from wrong even at birth! Can you even grasp the implications of such a discovery? They're immense! This means that ethics as a whole is largely grounded in the noumenal world! See where I'm going with this?”

Big Mac hoofed at the dirt. “Uh...?”

“It means that evolution itself has developed morality almost like an appendage. Ethical natural selection! Trust me, a lot of ponies think that the entire philosophical field of ethics is just a sham. Even I was pretty iffy on the validity of certain ethical standards for a while. I thought it was all made up, but I was wrong! Social relativism is wrong! If there is an over-arching scale to measure the goodness of our actions naturally built in, then we can't just make up our rules willy-nilly! This is a ground-breaking discovery. A lot of pompous philosophers are going to fly off their nut when they finally realize 'hey, morality is real!' It's a resounding vote in favor of fairness, and I for one am big on fairness.”

“S'good,” affirmed Big Mac. He stood up and attended to a customer looking to buy some apples. The filly got up as well and politely waited for Big Mac to finish before speaking again.

“I'm sorry, mister. I didn't intend to hog so much of your attention. I know you have your wares to sell. I guess I just got a little overzealous when I started talking about my first grade dissertation.”

She was no problem at all. Mac smiled and shrugged. Company was company.

“I really should get going, I suppose,” said the filly. “You look like you have a lot on your mind. If you've never meditated before, I can't recommend it enough. Oh! Or a sensory deprivation chamber. You'll find layers of yourself you never knew you had. I swear, you could spend days in there if you didn't have to eat or drink. Oops!” She giggled. “I'm rambling again. Sorry. Okay, bye mister! I had a great time talking to you!”

She clutched her pinwheel in her teeth and scampered away from the cart. Mac watched as the returned to the Cake's house and subsequently chucked her toy back into the flower pot. Pretty soon another pony came and fetched it for her. She thanked him vehemently and followed him down the road and out of sight. Mac couldn't help but chuckle. Kids.

Comments

[defunct321]

Ah, now I see the tone this story is going to be taking. I wonder how many philosophical topics you can do before you run out.

[FullMetalFurbee]

4404336 My philosophy tanks are still at approximately full capacity. We'll see how it goes.

[Anmynous]

I was just thinking, could we write a big book of objective ethical calculus for determining punishment for crimes? Such that you have modifiers and base values, like murder is base 400 days and heat-of-thee-moment crimes get a 0.8x modifier, in contrast to planned crimes which get 3x. That sort of thing.

[FullMetalFurbee]

4407408 That's sounds efficient, but way too fair. Determining crime sentences should only be allowed after massive amounts of alcohol consumption.