"I understand."

He nods.

"Many people would probably if asked find that their sense of morality came with - hm, thinking about knock-on effects of their actions? It's not that, say, rape is just bad in isolation, it's that it would make the victim miserable and others afraid..."

"It's about—who I am, for me, I think. Being the right kind of person, doing the things the right kind of person would do."

"But certainly it would be a problem if everyone tried to aspire to the same ideal."

"Yeah. I don't have feelings like that about what anyone else does, at least."

"Hm. Do you have an idea why you assign yourself this - exceptional role?"

"Because I was born an imperial prince? I'm not actually sure if that's it."

"Mm?"

"...it feels like the right kind of person for me to be is defined by my - imperialness, that this is who I am because my father was the Emperor. But I don't know if that's actually why I feel that way, or if I'd have exactly the same moral compass if I'd been born in a gutter."

"Does it matter that you're currently Emperor more by virtue of magic than by birth?"

"Not especially."

"Hmmm."

"Mm?"

"How does your - native morality-like system - handle tradeoffs?"

"What do you mean?"

"You could imagine a situation where conventional morality would pull in multiple directions - stealing to feed the hungry, or something - does yours do that?"

"...not exactly. I can't think of a situation where everything I could possibly do would be wrong the way mercy is wrong."

"I'm not sure I currently understand it well enough to make up my own examples, I assume something trivial like multiple possible targets it would be inconvenient to go after in parallel isn't a good one."

"Yeah. I don't know, I've never tried to explain it to anyone before. And I think it might be different because... I'm not trying very hard to be the person I feel like I should be, I'm mostly trying to live my life without letting that person get in my way too badly. So as long as whatever I'm doing doesn't feel actively awful, I don't bother too much about whether it's better or worse by that measure than something else I could be doing instead."

"So you're not optimizing on this metric, that's good."

"If I was doing that, my empire would be a giant flaming mess, possibly literally."

"And that would be undesirable on so many levels."

"Yes!"

"Are there - components of mercy, here?"