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wedrifid comments on Luminosity (Twilight fanfic) Part 2 Discussion Thread - Less Wrong
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Oh, you can if you want to. But you don't need to and certainly cannot rely on emotions to be protecting you from threats the way they usually do.
Don't misuse that 'murder' word. I wouldn't walk into another man's house carrying a gun and call it 'attempted murder' if he tried to take me out. Walking into range with values destroying capabilities without some sort of alliance or truce is a far more hostile act. Expect death.
Don't mind the words, we are discussing something more important than that. The consequence of a person becoming dead has the same moral value in each case, some situations might just have that on the preferable side of the calculation. That it's a correct decision doesn't diminish the moral value of the pattern.
(If the implicit inference you were seeing in the word "murder" is that it has a morally negative aspect, then I endorse this particular inference, being right doesn't make it better. If the inference is that one should be punished by society for this act, then it's not an inference I explicitly endorse in this context, and one that's not relevant to the discussed situation.)
If we are talking about the loss of having to kill the vampire witch rather than moral negative of murder then I can see your point. Vampire!Wedrifid would prefer to keep them alive. Unfortunately wedvamp does not yet have the power to protect his enemies from themselves as well as protect everything else he values from his enemies.
This is a matter of values and mathematics. Everything that wedvamp holds dear is at stake (so to speak) and in clear and present danger. His values are vulnerable to instant unwilling modification and the witch has signaled her hostile intent by walking within range without arrangements in place. This is not a time to play Ghandi. And I'm not sure even Ghandi would be willing to stand by as his mind was altered to make him unthinkingly loyal to a group of ruthlessly evil bloodsucking fiends.
No, this isn't a time to signal a naive morality to idealistic lesswrong members. It is a time to shut up, multiply and protect. This Wedrifid is a vampire, he has what it takes.
The way this convention works would have you write it vampire!wedrifid. It's descriptor!character.
Fixed. (With a tinge of reluctance. The convention is suboptimal. That's how I would code something in Java, not Ruby. :P)
It was invented/adopted by early fanfiction writers. Just be thankful it's not "wedrifid-who-is-a-vampire".
Since I'm not arguing about whether the decision is correct, rather that the disutility of having a person killed doesn't diminish from the decision to kill them being correct, it's confusing why the thrust of your replies is on correctness of the decision, dismemberment of arguments for its incorrectness, even the ones clearly not advanced by anyone, and glorification of the decision's correctness. This can't help but leak connotationally into the inference that the value of person's life is getting diminished in this context (and I do keep wondering whether you're evil!). The explicit disclaimer doesn't have much detail to resolve this ambiguity, it only states a sign:
I have made my position clear and given the morality interrogation more of an answer than necessary. My only response to your objection, whatever it is, is to emphasize the key point once again:
You can call vampire!Wedrifid whatever names you like, evil, whatever. Just don't get in his way with the yabbering about the moral value of the enemy. The moral value has been considered. It will be very sad to lose them. Maybe he'd cry later if he was into that sort of thing. But he's done the multiplication and there was a factor of a heck of a lot more than 2 to spare. It would be a shame if someone interfered and wedvamp had to shed another tear for them once he was done with business.
Vampires are physically incapable of crying.
That's ok. So am I. Believe me, I've tried. :)