"Someone somewhere has probably tried it, but the investment would be a long shot and if you have anything else to do with the resources..."

"There are also reds with green parents, and intelligence is heritable. I wouldn't object if you'd said 'there are probably some reds who'd be perfectly good intellectuals but until recently we were dealing with such scarcity that arranging for adequate prenatal care and education for reds was not the best way of improving our citizens' lives'."

She smiles that insincere smile again. "Perhaps you are right."

"Luckily now you have the resources to offer every single one of your citizens adequate prenatal care and education. Our expense."

"I am sure this will be well-received by the purples. We have a delivery problem with the reds."

"I imagine their own doctors would be more adequate if better-supplied and better-educated."

"Educated by whom?"

"We'll do it." 

"Do you not see the problem here? After Allocator Savo's idiocy the rate of people injuring themselves by slipping in the shower septupled, people want to be clean, if you go anywhere near the reds you will lose buy-in on everything else."

"I do see the problem here, though I'll confess I am diagnosing it as 'collective insanity'. The people who teach red doctors and handle our supply chain will follow all of your purity rules. If you like we can just kill them so they can get new bodies that are definitely clean. But if your mistreatment of these people is propped up by your conviction they're too dumb to do anything else, then at some point someone has got to change the thing where they're too dumb to do anything else. If it's true at all."

"That will prevent people from drinking bleach in revolted despair if they happen to run into an Elf who isn't involved with the project, it still costs you political buy-in if you hope to do things gently."

"You are making doing things gently sound less and less attractive."

Thin smile. "Yes, it's somehow very difficult to step in over the legitimate authorities of a people and supplant their culture without the use of force. We could've told you that."

"That's not the part I wasn't clear on coming in. Who are the people who are going to be unwilling to cooperate with Elves on healthcare and education for your purples if other Elves have the nerve to train red doctors, and why are those people in power?"

"Oh, for one thing the purples hate the reds more than anyone else does."

"We picked up on that. Everyone else can look down on the purples, but the purples haven't anybody else to look down on, and it seems to be a psychological need of your species to hold some of your fellows inherently inferior. If they don't want schools and medical care I don't really care, long as it's offered. And you're welcome to frame any of the humanitarian things we want as a concession we're offering in exchange for something else, instead of a project of ours."

"Oh, here I imagined you'd mind if a few million purples turn down your charity because they feel it insults them, but if a few tens of thousands of reds matter more in spite of your commitment to the idea that everyone matters equally..."

"It will grieve me if anyone refuses medical care for stupid reasons, but less than if they're never offered it."

"And the numbers are meaningless?"

"Not meaningless. It's - 

- you've built a society whose stability rests on the extraordinary suffering of a small number of people. That would be distressing under any circumstances, but since I have good reason to think that it's possible to build societies whose stability does not rest on that, it's intolerable. Any given action to help reds trades off against a chance to help more other people, but all of the helping-other-people in the world will only get you a slightly bigger pile of stability built on enormous suffering, and what I want is to dismantle that pile. I can't help establish a bigger and shinier society around the same rotten core. I can't. Maybe we can swap out the core with robotics, maybe it'll be fine, but if not - 

- then, yes, you could not possibly be so numerous as to tip the scales to justify what you are doing to these people."

"I will certainly not disrupt an attempt at implementing robotics. You rather make me wish we'd done it fifty years ago and you'd come upon a society of people each individually innocent of the subsequent slaughter. You would have gotten along better with the children of those exterminators."

"Yes, we would have. The fact that makes you wish you'd done it disturbs me nonetheless. We're not denying you anything because of what you're doing, we're just not going out of our way to help continue to deny it to reds just so you'll feel better about taking it."

"You're not? That was not my understanding."

"We'll offer everybody health care! The thing we will not do is refrain from offering reds health care so that everyone else is likelier to take us up on the offer!"

"And the technology and so on?"