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Dentin comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 19, chapter 88-89 - Less Wrong
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He only stepped in it because its a hot-button political topic, much like abortion. The chaotic and frankly insane responses to his posts makes me suspect that most of the readers are completely unable to divorce political and gut moral feelings from internal analytical processing.
As an experiment, ask yourself how many dollars a rape is worth, how many dollars should be paid to prevent one. I suspect many of the posters in that thread will simply refuse to give a numerical answer. This is a clear indicator of mindkill.
Or an issue of how most humans are not willing to signal extreme utilitarianism because it is used easily to portray people as cold and hard. Moreover, most humans don't distinguish between "things I say for signaling" and "things I say because I believe them." So there are a lot of reasonable explanations for this without it being mindkilling. Also, some people really are just deontologists. Not being willing to answer such a question makes a lot more sense if one has a deontological rule that rape is always bad and wrong.
There's also the issue that talking about certain things in public in a particular way (and the internet counts as public) causes actual mental harm to people.
When someone is controversial for the sake of being controversial, it would be foolish for them to not anticipate consequences like no longer being accepted in mainstream company. Or ever company one or two standard deviations of 'daring' away from the mainstream in some cases.
I get that it take bravery to do this kind of thing. (Or it could take foolishness. I'm not saying that's what happened here, but I wouldn't tell someone who believed to to be so that I had strong reason to believe they were wrong: I don't know the guy.) But being brave isn't a free pass to not deal with the consequences.
And sometimes those consequences mean you aren't able to do as much good (or as much whatever you want) as you otherwise might.
He took that risk in writing it. This site is taking a risk in continuing to associate with him. I am making the choice not to take the risk of reminding anyone not involve in Less Wrong that I read stuff here and sometimes post a trifle bit.
Actually, thinking you can simplify and generalize human behavior down to rules like that is a clear indicator of mindkill.
Let me break it down differently, not like anyone else is going to see this since they're all in the new thread.
Claiming equivalency between the injury to person A and the injury to person C is very insensitive. Hinting that person A's suffering is greater takes a few steps further. It's kind of dumb, too.
The people I'm talking about don't shy away from rape. They might have, at one point, but one of them was a student to Craig Palmer, who has been rather vilified for writing a frank book on the topic. Yeah, it's an anecdote, but it's in answer to your anecdote for whatever that's worth.
I won't address the first part of your post; I think it is largely correct. We are, after all, responsible for our own actions.
However, for the second part, I don't think that anyone is even remotely trying to claim the equivalency you're describing above. It's most definitely a straw man argument.
If nothing else, the first claim should read more properly as "Person A is hurt because they have become legally responsible for a new human being and half of all associated costs and maintenance for that new human being for a period of no less than 21 years, in a situation where person A is not responsible for the creation of said new human being."
After all, we are responsible for our own actions. Not necessarily those of someone else.
(Side note: the 'control of sexual access' part doesn't make any sense, other than to construct a strawman. I don't understand at all why you felt that to be a legitimate argument or position.)
Comparing the best-case scenario outcome of one thing with the worst-case scenario outcome of another thing sounds disingenuous to me.
What does this have to do with the quoted point?
Trigger warning: comparisons involving rape
If you (generic “you”) must compare being raped to being cuckolded, you don't get to compare the least bad case of the former (“gentle, silent rape” of an unconscious woman leading to no physical injury, no STD, no pregnancy, and no memory) with one of the worst possible outcomes for the latter (your wife gets pregnant, gives birth to a child, and you never find out it's not yours until you've spent a bajillion dollars).
(I wish I could downvote myself.)
Edit: from the upvotes and the asterisk, it looks like I had already submitted the comment hours ago and was editing it, as opposed to being composing it in the first place. I don't remember what the original submitted version looked like.
See also
As far as I know Robin Hanson never uses "bravery" to justify himself, that was an argument attributed to him by loserthree as a way to justify shutting him up.