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Christian_Szegedy comments on Rationality Quotes: July 2010 - Less Wrong
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I am stunned by the relatively high mod-points of this exchange.
I agree that the quotes are moderately funny. (Albeit the M.S. quote was much more funny in the specific context within the game, but even there it was his white-wash response to an action that earned Shepard renegade points.)
Still, I can't see, how all this is related to the "art of human rationality"...
"Killing is wrong, no matter what," is a very powerful and standard meme for heroes.
It is counter intuitive for someone who "loves people" to kill someone. It requires a less-biased assessment of expected utility than is typically performed. That's why I enjoyed the original quote; in the context of the movie, it made sense in the way of typical human failings for him to say no, and his body language and tone highly suggested he would do so right until the end.
It's also convenient for writers. Imagine what would happen to the Batman comic book series if someone finally got around to putting a bullet through The Joker's brain. (In a Discworld story, it's suggested that "heroes" and Dark Lords have a bit of an understanding: Dark Lords keep on making all of the mistakes on the Evil Overlord list, and heroes keep on letting Dark Lords escape after the day has been saved.)
And nauseating. Don't forget nauseating.
In my reading, the assessment was funny exactly because it was emotional and therefore biased. That's what use of "son of a bitch" suggested as well.
Emotion drives value and purpose; logic is compatible with emotion; Spock is a bad example for rationalists.
It's related because it portrays someone disregarding the omission/commission distinction.
Among consequentialists (who seem to be quite common on LW), how something happens is not directly relevant to its moral value. Untutored intuition, in contrast, seems to say that killing is worse than letting die.
Therefore, if consequentialism is right about this, then many humans' moral intuitions are wrong in a predictable way. Thus they are biased. Thus they are irrational. Thus this is related to the art of human rationality.
The situations in which a habitual killer-of-humans will cause death come up more often than the situations in which a habitual letter-of-humans-die will cause death. If you're a consequentialist who negatively values death, it seems to follow that a habit of killing humans is worse than a habit of letting them die.
Thank you for pointing out this argument.
I'm not sure I agree that "let-die" situations arise less often than "kill" situations. It seems that every moment you have disposable income (i.e. more than you and yours need to survive) involves a choice between saving someone's life and not saving anyone's life.
(nods) That's fair.
And yes, if it makes sense to classify what I'm doing right now as choosing not to avert avoidable deaths, it follows that my lifestyle is morally worse (from a consequentialist perspective) than that of a poor murderer.