Multiheaded, usually I would pay the karma toll to reply to your comment, but I've just been karmassasinated and so I'll put it here instead.

Firstly, while I personally am perfectly capable of reading such material without serious harm (thank God), many people are not, so I was fairly shocked to stumble across it in the middle of your post. It would not have damaged your point to warn those who find such things traumatic beforehand, and neglecting to do so is, to be dark-artsy for a moment, hardly strengthening your claim to be the empathic one in this discussion.

As for whether I would like to live in a world where people are willing to torture me and my loved ones if they think it's justified - I already live in such a world. This is a thing humans do. Emotional appeals are, in fact, noticeably more effective at getting people to do this than cold utility calculations. So yes, I would rather people based their atrocities on a rigorous epistemic foundation rather than how those guys are The Enemy and must be fought, no matter the cost. For the children!

I'm well aware of the dangers of self-deception, as should anyone trying to make such calculations be. But it's even easier when you're relying on outrage rather than rationality.

Finally, it's interesting that you claim it's OK to make use of dark arts techniques to (attempt to) manipulate us, because this is so important that the usual LessWrong standards of trying to minimise bias, mindkilling and generally help people discern the correct position rather than the one that's covered in applause lights. Isn't truth and so on another precommtment you shouldn't break just because the expected utility is so high?

Taking abstract ideas too seriously and unreservedly privileging them over your moral emotion is a terribly, terribly dangerous thing. And it tends to corrupt the one who would make such a choice, too.

Would you like to live in a world where people thought that doing these things to you and yours could ever be justified? Sure, the apologists would say it's only forgivable in dire circumstances, only for the greater good - but still, wouldn't you prefer as firm a precommitment as possible?

And no, I'm not sorry for exposing you to such content. The enormity of the moral commitments at stake is too great for me not to "manipulate" you. The language of simplistic utilitarianism does not have enough bandwidth to express the weight of such commitments, so I have to draw your attention to them through "emotional" appeals.

"You stipulate that the only possible way to save five innocent lives is to murder one innocent person, and this murder will definitely save the five lives, and that these facts are known to me with effective certainty. But since I am running on corrupted hardware, I can't occupy the epistemic state you want me to imagine. Therefore I reply that, in a society of Artificial Intelligences worthy of personhood and lacking any inbuilt tendency to be corrupted by power, it would be right for the AI to murder the one innocent person to save five, and moreover all its peers would agree. However, I refuse to extend this reply to myself, because the epistemic state you ask me to imagine, can only exist among other kinds of people than human beings."

Instead of shutting up and multiplying, might it be wiser to shut up and obey our Glorious Leader?