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buybuydandavis comments on The noncentral fallacy - the worst argument in the world? - Less Wrong
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Absent any reason to do so, disliking all murders simply because they are murders makes no more sense than disliking all elephants simply because they are elephants. You can choose to do so without being logically inconsistent, but it seems like a weird choice to make for no reason. Did you just arbitrarily choose "murder" as a category worthy of dislike, whether or not it causes harm?
At the risk of committing the genetic fallacy, I would be very surprised if their choice of murder as a thing they dislike for its own sake (rather than, say, elephants) had nothing to do with murder being harmful. And although right now I am simply asserting this rather than arguing it, I think it's likely that even if they think they have a deductive proof for why murder is wrong regardless of harm, they started by unconsciously making the WAITW and then rationalizing it.
But I agree that if they do think they have this deductive proof, screaming "Worst argument in the world!" at them is useless and counterproductive; at that point you address the proof.
Why should a preference have to "make sense"?
A particular preference that does not make sense at all is empirically unlikely to exist due to the natural selection process. We should thus, if for whatever reason we prefer correspondence between map and territory, assign reasonable probability that most preferences will "make sense".
As for why it should, well... I'm not able to conceive of an acceptable answer to that without first tabooing "should" and applying generous amounts of reductionism, recursively within sub-meanings and subspaces within semanticspace.