"Um, is there an ethics class because you want us to learn it?" ventures Bird.

"I do want you to learn it!" the professor says approvingly. "However, that is not the reason there is an ethics class. Anyone else?"

"Because someone thought it was funny?" Tom offers.

"Ding ding ding!" the professor says, clapping. "That is the correct answer. Please feel free to experience the warm glow of satisfaction. Someone - namely, Dean Mesmerra - thought it would be very funny if there were an ethics class at this school. In fairness, she also thought it would exercise your growing minds and cause you to think in a bit more depth about what you're doing here. And I'm here to make sure it does! My name is Semiramis Vesmarran; you may call me Professor Vesmarran, or if you like you may call me Sahar. I'm going to be telling you about the ethics of mind control."

This is so far outside of Chantal's previous educational experience.

"I'm intrigued by the proposition that you can ethically mind-control people!" Edmund says brightly. "I was kind of under the impression ethics had gone out the window at the outset."

"That's probably because you have a limited understanding of ethics," Sahar says. "You can easily have an ethical system which permits of mind control - and even if your system is strict enough that control per se is disallowed, there are many things you'll learn here that you can apply freely, or at least, under certain circumstances."

"I was mostly thinking I'd just use the things I learned on my enemies. Are you saying something different?"

"Very much so. Mind control can be used in many fascinating ways without violating even the most stringent ethical principles. Take the example of controlling someone with their advance consent - for example, to cure an addiction, or to ensure ethical conduct by soldiers. Almost any ethical system will accept this. Only a few, however, would accept turning someone into your willing slave, and most of those do not really deserve to be called ethical systems. The distinction is not sharp, but it is certainly present."

(Oh no, she has a question but she doesn't have the courage to ask it. She bites her lip.)

Bird has no such qualms. "Why can't you call something an ethical system if it accepts turning people into willing slaves?" she wonders. "Everyone does it at home, and I think they have ethical systems there."

Sahar hums thoughtfully. "Let's look at a different angle. I might, if I were good at metalwork, create a sword. It would have a sharp blade, and a hilt, and I could use it to hurt people. But I'm not good at metalwork. If I tried to make a sword, it would be blunt, and bent, and it would look completely hideous, and I would not be able to hurt people with it effectively. The sword I made would not be a very good sword, would it? I, for one, might not call it a sword at all. That is the rhetorical point that I am making with regards to ethical systems. Yes, miss Myers?"

"Oh, um, I just—I wanted to know whether, when you said willing slave, you meant that they'd been willing beforehand, or—not. Because I think it makes a difference. Ethically speaking."

"I meant willing after the fact - there's certainly a difference, excellent point. With an unwilling subject, no matter how delighted they may be after you've done your work, the fact remains that someone's natural rights have been violated. That may not matter to some of you! But it matters to others."

Cautious nod.

Bird, meanwhile, is still chewing over the sword analogy.

"In my home country - well, in the country in which I usually teach - almost all forms of mind control and mental alteration per se are strictly forbidden. It is considered impractical to verify after the fact that the 'victim' consented beforehand, and in many cases irrelevant. I consider this to be regrettable. There exist those who would simply be more comfortable in a different mind. There exist those who cannot be happy without substantial adjustments. However, consent is paramount. Unless, that is, a significantly greater virtue is served by the violation of said consent. Let's look at the example of a species with an overpowered reproductive drive, a maltreated slave caste, an inability to function in a universe containing people who do not respect their religious traditions, and a bone-deep attachment to all of these traits..."

She begins to explain the species in question.

Partway through this explanation, Bird abruptly interrupts, "But then what's the purpose of an ethical system?"

"To limit our prospective actions in such a way that we do not harm others in ways we cannot countenance while seeking our own happiness," Sahar says immediately. "An ethical system which does not reduce harm is a failed ethical system in the same way that a legal system which did not outlaw murder, theft or rape would be a poorly thought-out legal system, no matter how internally consistent either might happen to be."

"...but then what's 'ways we cannot countenance'? Isn't that just... not doing things you already didn't want to do...? Or is the problem that figuring out which things you don't want to do is very hard?"

"It's very hard," Sahar says quietly. "You may not know you've hurt someone until later. Or you may not think it matters right here, right now. Having a strong and internally consistent ethical system isn't a perfect defense, either. You may never be able to live your life without hurting someone, and the only thing you can do about it is say - 'I guess I can live with that, because here I am, living with it.' But knowing your ethics - knowing what you believe - it helps."

"Hmm." Time to think about that for a while.

"What if we don't care?" Tom asks. "What if hurting people isn't a problem for us?"

Edmund shrinks into his chair, looking profoundly embarrassed.

Sahar looks at Tom with an expression of deepest distaste. "I suppose you won't get much out of this class, then. But you'll still have to attend it, I'm afraid. Perhaps you'll learn something."

"How can you not care if you hurt people? What kind of utility function do you have, if it doesn't involve sapient flourishing?"

"I do what's good for me. You should try it sometime."

"Which things are good for you?" wonders Bird. "And how do you know?"

"If I want something, I get it. If I'm not getting something I want, I'm working to get it later. I don't deny myself things because they'd hurt people. And I certainly don't deny myself things because they're not right."

(Oh dear.)

"Is that what makes things good? What if you want things but then they're not as good as you thought? One time I wanted to eat an entire wheel of cheese and it turned out not to be very good for me at all."

"Hasn't happened yet. Maybe I've just got good instincts."

"You don't have regrets? Is that some kind of human disability?"

Edmund squirms slightly in his chair.

"It's a human superpower, actually."

"Humans have a lot of superpowers!"

"I'd offer to show you some more, but Teacher might get snippy."

The look that flits across Edmund's face this time is less embarrassed and more frightened.

Bird looks expectantly at the teacher, who will perhaps be better able to explain what just happened.

"He was offering to have sex with you," she explains neutrally, "and characterizing it as a 'human superpower' despite the fact that it is an innovation shared by 90% of observed multiversal species because he's obnoxious."

"But we're so good at it. That has to count for something."

"Sixty-fifth percentile of pleasure," she says absently. "We barely place."

"Oh! I thought he was threatening to murder me and I was confused how that related to being human."

"You have mistaken his intention in this very specific case. Shall we resume with the Amentan case study, or did you have further questions? For the record, I approve very much of organic debate; you are here to learn, not for me to talk at you."

She nods thoughtfully. "I don't think I have any more questions right now."

Sahar completes her explanation of the Amentan species.

"So. You have been informed. Let's say you're in a more conventional University session, one where you're encouraged to manipulate and enslave your classmates, and you have a classmate who happens to be an Amentan. You know that, given the opportunity, he will return to his world, bearing with him the secrets of FTL and dimensional travel, the ability to rewrite the minds around him at his whim, and no moral improvement whatsoever - because in this conventional session, of course, there is no Ethics class."

She leans back on her desk. "What do you do? Do you do anything - do you live and let live? Do you try to reach him on a personal level?"

Softly: "If that fails, do you subsume his will for the greater good?"

"If you were planning to enslave your classmates already and you don't want him to go home and do the things he's going to do if you don't, then probably enslaving him is a good idea!"

(No?????)

Sahar smiles. "I should state, for the record, that this example was drawn from my own time at MCU. So, that being the case, let's say that you are me - that you had intended to go through your semester without enslaving anyone who did not actively seek you out, and make it to graduation without violating your own ethical principles. But you have been given the potential to exert leverage over an ongoing moral atrocity. Do you compromise your ethical principles, in the knowledge that they are made to keep you from hurting the people, because more people would be hurt if you did not? It's not a question anyone else can answer for you. But it is a question each of you, if you have such an ethical system, is likely to face."

Edmund speaks up. "I think... I understand not wanting to do it, but I think there is a right answer here. You have to help the most people you can."

"But at the cost of taking away someone's humanity?" Asthirin blinks. "Translation glitch. That concept is more inclusive in Thought-Speak."

"You don't... necessarily have to enslave them," Chantal says tentatively. "If you could instead just... very aggressively explain things."

"Some people take very aggressive explanations."

"Excellent point," Sahar says. "This is one thing that I want you all to take away from this class: mind control should not be a first resort. Almost always, you will have other options. If you don't, you are probably missing something. It might be due to a blind spot. It might be that you are too proud to consider something to be an option. It may be that those options are less likely to work. I befriended Ehan, and probed him on his society in great detail. This is how I know so much about it. I became his friend, in a very real sense his only friend, and I asked him what his plan was for his society. What would he do about the reds? What would he do about the reproductive instinct? What would he do about aliens who didn't want to follow pollution protocols?"

"He would bring home robots, and reds would be obsolete, and no one would have to think about them anymore. He would have lightspeed travel, so the reproductive instinct wouldn't be a problem. If there were aliens polluting the universe, then he'd make them change their wicked ways; wasn't that why he was here? Maybe he'd give them a pollution instinct, like they should've had in the first place."

"And I looked into his mind. He was not going to be convinced. It wasn't like I was asking him to go vegetarian, or quit smoking, or something. These were things he couldn't lose without losing himself."

"So I took them from him. I made him love me, first - that's almost always the first step to a successful reinvention - and as the semester went on I molded him into someone who would do what I thought was the right thing, even when I sent him back to his home planet. I experimented on him, ratcheting his pollution instinct back and forth by stages, directly manipulating his empathy to apply to reds both specific and in general, playing with his reproductive urges like Silly Putty. Dean Mesmerra took me into her office and told me personally that I was skirting the edges of the rule that stated that the person who graduates has to be the person who received the invitation. I cared exactly enough to make sure I didn't break that rule. The man who went home was, technically, the man who received his invitation. But the one would have killed the other in a second, given the chance."

Her vividly scarlet eyes are hollow. "In a very real sense, I killed Ehan. And I would do it again."

"But—going faster doesn't make more space," says Bird. "There's an amount. You run out. Couldn't you have told him?"

"I tried. It was one of the first things I said to him - and he said, 'this place proves the world is wider than any of us knew. If they don't teach us to move between universes, I can learn how myself.'"

"...hmm," she says. "It still seems like... like he wasn't creative enough. Like he wanted things to be easy instead of interesting."

Sahar blinks.

"Yes, though I haven't met many people who would put it that way. But you're right; he wanted things to be easy, and he wanted to make there be more of what he knew, rather than wanting to learn more ways for things to be."

"But that's wrong!" she says. "There are so many ways things can be and you miss so much if you don't look for them!"

"Yes. There are more ways to be than we can imagine. If we choose too soon to make the world the way we want it to be, we miss valuable perspective. But every moment we don't we're letting people suffer and die. This is another dilemma: do we delay change so we can understand what we're doing, not hurt people through our own inexperience, but let them suffer? Or do we charge heedlessly forward, making whole everything that once was broken, trampling those in our path?"

"...neither??"

Sahar raises an eyebrow. "Interesting. What would you do instead?"

"If you want to change something, understand it first. If you don't understand it, how do you know what you want to change it to? But you can understand one thing, and change it, and then learn another one. You don't have to wait until you know everything to start doing things."

"...yes. Yes, ultimately, that's the best we can do. But there's only so much you can understand some things - often the biggest things, that are hurting the most people, are the most complicated. My country had fully legal and unabashed racial slavery until only about a hundred and fifty years ago. I've thought often about what I would have done, in those times. With my powers, without my powers. With modern technology, without. Born then, or sent back. And the answer, I think, is that even if I did not fully understand the systems in play, I would have put forth the best effort I had to dismantle those structures. With my bare hands, if I had to. And I would hurt people to do it. That's the cost of being a person who wants to do things: sooner or later, someone gets hurt."

"But if you don't understand something how do you know how to change it so it's the way you want?"

"The way I'd put it is that some things, you only need to know enough about them to be confident that whatever happens when you change it, it'll probably be better than the status quo. Sometimes you'll be wrong."

"Like - my go-to example is that in my world, wizards don't interfere with muggles - non-magical people - even though we could fix a lot of their problems. And I don't know how it would go in practice, maybe some people would get hurt in the transition. But a few years ago, fifty million muggles died of a flu, and my little sister could make a flu-cure potion when she was eight years old. That's the kind of situation where you don't have to understand what would happen to know that something has to change."

"...maybe we mean different things by 'understand'?"

"Maybe so. In an ideal world I'd understand not just what the problem was but what was propping it up, what its secondary effects were, what the downstream effects of removing it would be - I'd understand the whole problem. But in practice you kind of scale it off of how bad a problem it is."

"Things are... harder to understand than they look," she says. "You can look at something and think 'oh, I see what that is' and be wrong. Blowing on a candle puts it out but blowing on a campfire makes it bigger. And that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to put out fires but it means you should—remember what the differences are between what you're trying to do and what you've done before and watch out for how they might matter?"

"Yes, exactly. But if you ask around, say 'I've put out candles but this fire looks bigger, what should I know about it?', do some reading on how fire works, then you can learn how it's different from what you know. If you study what's happened in similar cases, like - if you knew there was a little country that had slavery and you wanted to stop it, so you looked at what happened in other countries when they stopped having slavery? That can give you an idea of what'll happen if you interfere. And you can make a change without it blowing up in your face. Hopefully."

"Yes. I think... you said 'you don't have to understand what would happen to know something has to change' and I thought of blowing on campfires because sometimes that's what happens, when you really don't understand what would happen and you do something anyway. That's why I wondered if we meant 'understand' differently."

"Sometimes that can happen. Or - if oil catches fire, and you try to put it out with water like a campfire, it'll explode. That's what I'd think of - a situation where it doesn't just not work, it gets worse. But that's what I mean about not fully understanding the situation if it's bad enough. For all I know, if I make wizardry public, the muggles will declare war and bomb us and we'll all die and it'll be worse than it ever was. But I've done enough research that I don't think that'll happen, and I'll do more, but - every year we don't intervene, five hundred thousand of them die of smallpox. Just smallpox. I think I'd risk getting bombed to fix that. I wouldn't do it if they would probably bomb us, but as the risk gets smaller it gets more worth it, right?"

She nods thoughtfully. "I think I see what you mean. I think... more things are like campfires to me than to you."

"That makes some sense. You have seemed a bit lost - how old are you? If you even measure that in years."

"I'm not sure? I've been human for a while and I wasn't for a while before that."

"Huh. Well, it sounds like it hasn't been a long time. You don't yet have all the experience you'd need to really know how people work."

"Are you going to offer her yours?" Tom wonders. "Take her under your little wing?"

"Maybe I will," Edmund says, blushing slightly.

"Is this about sex again?" she wonders.

"Is for him, isn't for me."

"I have never encountered such an irrepressibly horny species."

"Is it the whole species or just some people?"

"I am including the evidence of my own morph-instincts here."

"Oh! That makes sense." She sighs longingly. "I want to turn into creatures....."

The tiny robed figure in the corner makes a chittering noise. "Diki not thinking this particularly ethics-related. Um, teacher, Diki wondering... Diki Jedi. Jedi ethical code... not always good. Diki able to use code for foundation of new moral system? Or just have to make new one himself?"

Sahar shrugs. "Explain the Jedi Code and let's see."

Diki closes his eyes and says, in a much less frenetic tone:

"There is no emotion, there is peace.
There is no ignorance, there is knowledge.
There is no passion, there is serenity.
There is no chaos, there is harmony.
There is no death, there is the Force."

His eyes open again. "Um, emotions bad. Emotions make Jedi vulnerable to Dark Side of Force. But Diki think maybe emotions good sometimes if not too much? Ignorance bad obviously. Diki not disagreeing with that. Always wanting to know more, always wanting to know consequences of actions. Passion... again, emotions not good... Jedi say. Chaos bad, disrupts Force, makes hard to predict consequences; harmony better all around. And. Um. Death not real. Because universal Force take everyone when they die. But... maybe Diki care about if people die anyway?"

"Any other opinions from the class?" Sahar asks, neutrally.

"...what, um... does being taken by the universal Force consist of...?"

Eserik flickers into view, standing behind Diki's chair. "No one has any idea, and the only reason we suspect it to be anything other than total oblivion is that when immersed in the Force we can feel echoes of those who have died. Noteworthy Jedi scholars suppose it must be pleasant, because the Force is ultimately benevolent. They conveniently ignore that the Force is an incomprehensibly vast and alien pseudo-super-intellect about which we know nothing except how fucking dangerous it is. You may note for the record that in lieu of joining the Force, I became a ghost."

"I don't... think that's the same as what happens to dead people where I'm from..."

"It likely isn't. We know that the Force extends beyond our own universe into most others, but for whatever reason it's... dormant, in most of them. Doesn't do anything unless there's a force user there to manipulate it."