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gwern comments on Holden's Objection 1: Friendliness is dangerous - Less Wrong
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Not dealing with your point, but that sort of analysis is why I find Heinlein so distasteful - the awful philosophy. For example in #1, 5 seconds of thought suffices to think of counterexamples like temporary derangements (drug use, treatable disease, particularly stressful circumstances, blows to the head), and more effort likely would turn up powerful empirical evidence like possibly an observation that most murderers do not murder again even after release (and obviously not execution).
Absolutely. What finally made me realize that Heinlein was not the bestest moral philosopher ever was noticing that all his books contained superheros - Stranger in a Strange Land is the best example. I'm not talking about the telekinetic powers, but the mental discipline. His moral theory might work for human-like creatures with perfect mental discipline, but for ordinary humans . . . not so much.
This was pretty common in sf of the early 20th century, actually — the trope of a special group of people with unusual mental disciplines giving them super powers and special moral status. See A. E. van Vogt (the Null-A books) or Doc Smith (the Lensman books) for other examples. There's a reason Dianetics had so much success in the sf community of that era, I suspect — fans were primed for it.
Is that true of all of Heinlein's books? I would say that most of them (including Starship Troopers) don't have superheroes.
Well, I'm not exactly a Heinlein scholar, but I'd say it shows up mainly in his late-period work, post Stranger in a Strange Land. Time Enough for Love and its sequels definitely qualify, but some of the stuff he's most famous for -- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Have Space Suit, Will Travel, et cetera -- don't seem to. Unfortunately, Heinlein's reputation is based mainly on that later stuff.
The revolution in "Moon is a Harsh Mistress" cannot succeed without the aid of the supercomputer. That makes any moral philosophy implicit in that revolution questionable to the extent one asserts that the moral philosophy is true of humanity now.
To a lesser extend, "Starship Troopers" asserts that military service is a reliable way of screening for the kinds of moral qualities (like mental discipline) that make one trustworthy enough to be a high government official (or even to vote, if I recall correctly). In reality, those moral qualities are very thin on the ground in the real world, being much less common than suggested by the book. If the appropriate moral qualities were really that frequent, the sanity line would already be much high than it is.
It might be relevant to note that Heinlein served in the U.S. Navy before he was discharged due to medical reasons.
Most men in his generation did military service of some form.
I read Starship Troopers as a critique of fascism, not its endorsement, but I could be wrong...
I wouldn't say the Starship Troopers government was fascist, but Heinlein clearly thinks they are doing things pretty well. The fact that the creation process of that government avoided fascism with no difficulty (it isn't considered worth mentioning in the history) is precisely the lack of realism that I am criticizing.
Hmm, I could be confusing the book with the movie. I'll need to re-read it again.