Albus nodded at the author’s name. The ideas of the test were interesting enough, but in the end, it was more of a story he didn’t care for: a man grossly misjudging, overestimating, his own potential, to an enormous extent. The business of ending life carried a cost Albus revered, and it frustrated him that so few seemed to understand that a thing could be both deplorable and necessary, and that in order to find redemption it had to be not only justified, but grieved.
“The cornerstone of any society is its legal sanctions, and Beccaria sheds the first true light on efficacy in maintaining an ordered society, turning the collective mind from self-congratulatory moralisations.” Albus didn’t bother to keep the breeze of respect from his voice. Although general populations the world over would hardly identify Beccaria as more than a pleasant series of syllables, his seemingly self-evident ideas had changed the enforcement arm of the human legal system-- the component of society that was both representative of and capable of shaping society’s moral platform.
For the first time in what felt like hours, Albus let his eyes properly settle on Gellert’s, a part of him that felt as if it had been sleeping for years starting to blink itself awake. “Unquestionably?” he repeated. And he missed the way his tone lilted to mirror Gellert’s, just a little. “What a dreadful thought. The elimination of other options. The death sentence on nuance. Surely there’s nothing so terribly depressing as an absolute.” It was small bait. And harmless enough. It was polite, not unduly friendly. Surely.
Gellert practically beamed at Albus’s response, grinning so wide he felt as if the tension in his lips might split his cheeks. The pillow was abandoned as Gellert bounced forward across the bed toward Albus, a new surge of energy suddenly rushing through him--and that moment of something like balance felt gone completely. Gellert was in his element again, where not everything was entirely predictable and the stakes were high. A gambling game where he already knew most of the cards.
“But there are so many absolutes in the world!” he exclaimed, falling forward onto his stomach and propping his head up in his hands, legs swinging excitedly through the air. “There is no temperature lower than absolute zero, for example. Saying that there are no absolute truths is, in itself, an absolute truth. And even as science avoids absolutisms, for a society to function there must be a previously agreed-upon set of absolute truths.” He held up a hand, ticking off the crimes on each finger. “Rape, murder, theft, all for no purpose but one’s own gain -- are evil, for example...or so society agrees. And so they must, lest civilisation dissolve into chaos.”
Gellert only half-believed the point he was trying to prove, but that was the fun of it--argument for argument’s own sake. “And even if my thoughts are not unquestionably correct, if I can prove that they are significantly more correct than those of the civilian, am I or am I not bound to enforce them--if I knew I could bring the greatest good to the greatest number of people, am I or am I not ethically expected to do so?”
It was too many things at once, but so excuseable. Nothing more than a conversation, and Albus was hardly about to outlaw that. Never mind what it did to his stomach, the way Gellert’s face lit up. It was easier at Hogwarts, where he had colleagues and correspondence to engage with, with whom he could discuss the obscurities of philosophy and science. None of them, however, truly compared to what he’d had with Gellert. Not that this was that. This was something entirely different.