"If no person in the world were the type to kill another, what would be the point of making it illegal? If everyone in the world were the type to kill another, what would be the point of making it illegal? If it were legal, would it be moral? If it were legal but not moral, would you do it? What about the day when morals aren't convenient anymore? What about the exceptions those around you make but you don't? What about the day you realize the cost of your own actions, or the price of shutting people out for your vices?"

My vices? What is he talking about?

"Are you talking about my laws or societies' laws?"

"Is there really a difference?"

"Then the law is just there to punish everyone," I said, getting caught in the strange connection of ideas he'd led me into. "All parties lose in the end."

"Then the law is powerless to save."

"To save from what?"

"It repays an evil, which the individual considered good, with another evil, which the society considered good."

I tried to continue following him, my motivation shifting to curiosity, reaching the point of needing a solution; but at the point where good and evil threatened to untangle, where everything I knew of life became suspect, I found myself lost and frustrated.

"Where are you going with these questions?"

"What's the point of any question? What happens when people see that questions and answers aren't supposed to be simple automations? What do you think can happen to the limits of the human mind when questions aren't tied down by convention or even..."

He smiled somberly and swiped his foot over the pile of sand he'd made.