"Good. I'd hate to leave it unsaid." His head should be on Kaleva's shoulder. 

"Can I tell you what I put in the Remedial Goodness textbook?"

"As long as there are absolutely no icebreaker activities or multiple choice questions about whether you should have friends." 

"None of those, I promise. --Imagine that you and your friend both stole something, but the government thinks you committed a murder. They put you and your friend in separate rooms, and a police officer comes up to you and says 'if you both stay silent, you get one year in prison for theft; if you turn in the other guy for murder and he stays silent, you'll go free and he'll be in prison for ten years; if the other guy turns you in for murder and you stay silent, he'll go free and you'll be in prison for ten years; and if you both confess, we'll give you the year in prison for theft and another two years for perjury, since you both can't have done it.' What do you do?"

"Keep quiet. They're my gang, you dont stab your people in the back when it's important." 

"But the rational thing would be to not do that, right? You'll be better off if you turn him in either way-- if he turns you in, you'll only get three years instead of ten, and if he doesn't turn you in, you'll get to go free."

"...I guess, if the prison term is all you care about, but one, Queenie would kill me, and two, having a gang is how you eat and how you don't get attacked all the time." 

"Yeah!" he says, excited. "So you can cooperate to get the best outcome for both of you, even though the individually correct choice is something different. --This is basically what ethics is."

"...It really seems like actually ethics is not having friends unless they share your values and by your values I mean Fairy Godmother's values. She was very clear on this point." 

"Fairy Godmother is bad at explaining things, especially because she doesn't actually believe in ethics, she just has the weird fairy blue-and-orange morality thing except it maps closely enough to human ethics that it's possible for people to not notice."

"She is very bad at explaining things," he agrees. 

"So the thing is that there are actually lots of things like the problem I told you. Like, have you noticed that Auradon is really really clean compared to the Isle?"

"I had. I kind of assumed it was because you have money and send us your garbage instead of having literally nothing to work with but garbage." 

"There is that. But there's also-- what do you do when you have a piece of garbage?"

"...eat it if it's edible? Make something out of it if you can do that?" 

"No, I mean, something you don't have a use for at all."

"You.... leave it somewhere? Auradonians leave it somewhere too, you just have special leaving it somewhere places and we don't." 

"Yeah, having a remotely competent government makes this easier but-- you sometimes have to walk farther to leave the trash in the trash can and it's easier to just drop it where you are, but if everyone does that there is trash everywhere? And if you're just thinking about yourself you're going to go, like, one piece of trash doesn't matter that much, if it's already a huge mess it'll stay a huge mess and if it's already basically clean it'll be clean, whatever I do with my garbage. So it's like the situation with the prisoners-- people have to do stuff that isn't in their best interest in the short term so that things can be better for everyone in the long term."

"...that makes sense, but also, if we tried to put all our garbage in special garbage bins, the bins would be overflowing, because we don't have a second smaller Isle to send our garbage to, it just stays. It wouldn't help for very long." 

"Yeah, I think-- there are reasons the Isle is the way that it is that aren't just that it was founded by a bunch of villains, even though that doesn't help."

"Yeah. 

And — even when people know the Isle sucks to live on, they don't really... acknowledge it? Apply it? Like, Charlotte was horrified to find out that the fruit I had eaten before was basically always rotten, but she just didn't get at all that the reason it's like that is that Auradon sends us nothing but garbage and maybe that's fucked up." 

"Most people in Auradon aren't particularly good. They're just-- normal people in an environment where they know they're supposed to be trying to be good, and where things are set up to help them be good, like with the trash cans. And I'd have to talk to, uh, more than one VK, but I think you are normal people in an environment where you think you're supposed to be trying to be evil, and everything is set up to help you be evil."

"There are people who are trying to be evil but honestly lots of people are just trying to not die. We aren't trying to be good, but — I think not trying to be good is a different thing than trying to be evil." 

"That makes sense. I guess I'm not trying to be a bad person I just-- am one."

"There are people who are trying to be evil, it isn't nobody, it's just — most people are not Mal and most people are not Harry Hook."