Brand New Days (Persona 3 x The Good Place Crossover AU)

Chapter 17- This Ain't A Scene, It's A Goddamn Ethics Lecture

"This is an exciting day. We are going to tackle one of the most famous ethical dilemmas, The Trolley Problem." Chidi explains.

"Is this a game? I go first! I call blue!" Jason exclaims as he points to the blue wooden toy person thingy.

"There's no-No, this is- No, this is a thought experiment first introduced by British philosopher Phillipa Foot in 1967. You are driving a trolley when the breaks fail and on the track ahead of you are five workmen that you will run over. Now, you can steer to another track, but on that track is one person you will kill instead of the five. What do you do?" Chidi explains as he shows a demonstration with the trolley model.

Eleanor then raised her hand. "Do we know anything about the people? Like, is one of them an ex boyfriend or that snooty girl from Rite Aid who was always judging my purchases? It's like, yeah, chicky, a Baby Ruth and Birth Control. I see the irony. Keep a swipin."

"You don't know any of the workers."

"Ok, well, then that's easy. I switch tracks. Kill one person instead of five."

"Same thing. I'll kill the one person and save the five people." I answer.

"Yeah. Kill one, save five." Shinjiro answers.

"But this is hard because the only trolley I've ever been on is James Franco's ironic trolley. It travels backwards from his penguin grotto to his garage of adult tricycles."

We all just silently stare at Tahani after she said that.

"Um, kill one, save five."

"I kill the one guy, but me and the five other guys we get together every year, no matter how busy we are and we pour one out for our flat homie." Jason answers.

"Wholesome." I say while nodding, to which Jason smiles at me.

"Good! We'd all switch tracks. But there's a lot of other versions of this, like what if you knew one of the people? Does that change the equation? Or what if you're not the driver, you're just a bystander? Or let's throw out the trolley altogether. Let's say you're a doctor, and you can save five patients. But you have to kill one healthy person and use his organs to do it."

"But that's not the same thing." Tahani says.

That isn't really my concern to be honest, it's the fact that I wanna know whether or not this is legal. Or maybe I'm looking way too much into this.

"But why not? It's still choosing to kill one person and save five, isn't it?" Chidi answers. "Michael, you've been kind of quiet. What do you think about all of this?"

"Well, obviously the dilemma is clear. How do you kill all six people? So I would dangle a sharp blade out of the window to slice the neck of the guy on the other track and smush our five main guys." He says as he shows us a picture.

This time it's Michael who we all silently stare at.

"Oh... I did the thing again, didn't I?"

"Yep. Ten more, buddy."

Chidi flips the chalkboard to reveal all the times that Michael had to write "People good. People good." As a punishment

"Why is that so hard to remember? People... What is it?" Michael asks.

"Good." Chidi reminds.

"Good."

*Timeskip*

After a while, our lesson was over.

"Cool. Later, guys." Jason says as he got up.

"Oh, hey, twerps, we have an hour before we have to pretend to be tortured by Vicky. You want to hang out?" Eleanor asks. "We could work on our forced grins. Check mine out."