"Infants are moral patients!"

"...Huh, how does that work?"

"What do you mean, how does that work?"

"...Okay, I am going to back up several inferential steps here. People have experiences of the world where they - understand the things they see, and think about them, and then form plans about how they'll manipulate their environment to make themselves happier. Morality is when you cooperate with that when other people are doing it. Humans gain the ability to do things like - like reach for a thing they want, or do magic, that are the simplest possible realizations of 'observed the world, wanted to change it, did change it' - at different ages but always at some point well after birth. So if I wanted to help a newborn human achieve their goals, I don't know how I'd go about that."

"So maybe you'd be terrible at babysitting but that doesn't mean that it's okay to just, what, kill them if it's convenient -"

"Well, if you have reason to believe they have goals that seems important to know about, and if you have reason to believe I'm misunderstanding morality that also seems important."

"They get hungry and cold and tired like anyone else!"

"...I mean, so do animals."

"Animals don't learn to talk later."

"Crows do but I don't know if your world has them. And humans don't say 'oh, yeah, I remember when I was one month old and you said blah blah blah that I didn't understand at the time but do now.'"

"...I don't think crows learn to talk on my world? That I've ever heard of. Uh, I can't remember anything from before I was five, but I could talk by then."

"Yeah, I think a lot of humans don't remember not knowing how to talk. Crows in my world only learn if someone teaches them, they don't invent it, and they don't say things more sophisticated than 'I'm hungry.' People're keeping an eye on them because they're only barely too stupid for magic and they could get smarter and being only barely smart enough for magic is dangerous."

And if that happens, every last one will be enslaved or killed.

"Some animals are magic in my world. Like unicorns, some paladins ride them. But they're not smarter than griffins, like what I ride."

"I have heard of worlds like that before but in mine, to a first approximation, if you ask a creature a question like 'Ariu, who is not a knowledge mage, hides a ring in an opaque box and then leaves the room, and then Seihra takes the ring out of the box and hides it under the mattress, where will Ariu look when they come back?' and get the right answer, the creature can do magic, and if you don't get the right answer, either it can't do magic or you just asked a couple months too soon. So it gives information it wouldn't elsewhere."

"And do babies not have magic in your world?"

"You can tell which kind they'll have - they show up if you're searching for, say, knowledge mages nearby or something - starting when they're born, for viviparous species - but newborn humans never do spells. There have been a lot of humans and a lot of parents who've taken their time with binding arrangements and there's just no risk that there'll be a magic accident the day they're born. It's not that they don't have it, it's that they're not able to use it."

"Well. I'm not... sure how to explain to you that babies are moral patients... if you don't already know that. I've never had to do that before."

"I think usually good explanations involve detailed models of the claims you're making or lists of evidence that led you to believe them, but sometimes book recs can be good explanations, if only because the books contain better ones."

"I don't think I've read anything that is specifically about how babies are moral patients! How many authors do you have?"

"...I have no idea. You mean just of books or would you count the people who write scripts for - I think other places just have plays, in person, but we have illusions of plays with other illusions to make the actors look different sometimes - and then recently people have been publishing instructions for computers - we've had writing for, I don't know, maybe 1728 years, the population's risen and fallen - why am I calculating this? Bar, how many distinct authors does my world have?"

Kaja looks at the napkin. "...I don't think we have anywhere near that many in the world, let alone in languages I can read."

"Not in languages you can usually read, that is."

"Okay, true, but I still can't recommend you books I haven't read before."

"That makes sense. We'll have to put together a library for you take home."

"Will I be able to read them when I get home?"