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Nick_Tarleton comments on Absolute denial for atheists - Less Wrong
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What Thom said; whether your habits of thought tend to lead to good or bad outcomes is a matter of ethics (not legitimately interpersonally enforceable, but that's a very different matter). I don't think everyone needs to have an unconditional ethical injunction against thinking of people as manipulable physical systems, but I'm sure you can see how that mode of thought could be harmful.
The thought itself is an object in reality, and you can care about objects you can't observe. If your though itself implements a tortured person, you shouldn't think that thought, even if there is no possibility of somehow "acting" on it, even if thinking that thought improves your actions according to the same human moral reference frame. This is not as extreme for mere human thought, but I see no reason for the thoughts in themselves to be exactly morally neutral (even if they count for very little).