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Ishaan comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 28, chapter 99-101 - Less Wrong
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Except for its attraction to innocence, there's no particular reason to think that the unicorn is more sentient than a horse, is there? Did I miss something important in the story?
I don't think there's any particular evidence in the story which bears on the intelligence of unicorns, save for the fact that some non humanoid magical creatures such as acromantulas are much smarter than their mundane kin. This alone should be sufficient to raise it to the point of being worthy of consideration.
Here's another possibility which Harry failed to consider; the side effects of drinking unicorn blood may in fact be worse than death, not for the individual, but for society, if it does something like permanently compromising the recipient's morality. Quirrell is already amoral enough not to care, but if Hermione had been saved with unicorn blood, she might have come out like Demented Harry.
It might not be the sort of thing which is obviously likely enough to be worthy of consideration in his position, but the way Dumbledore described in in the original canon, I think suggests it as a distinct possibility.
I would say that "living a cursed half-life" sounds more detrimental to the individual than to wider society. And in general, the limited discourse we hear ("you have slain something innocent to save yourself") sounds more like that of punishment than corruption to me.
I always interpreted it as more of a corruption effect; a cursed half-life sounds to me like something where you lack various things that people consider important elements of being alive, perhaps things like taste and touch, perhaps also things like empathy.
So did I, in canon, I imagined unicorn-blood-drinking to be somewhat like horcrux, ripping you of the ability to love, feel empathy, ... and that's what Dumbledore and others consider "half life". It's an hypothesis that is worth probing before just saying "oh let's farm unicorns".
Makes you wonder if anyone has ever tried to research magics that restored someone's empathy etc., or gave it to people born without. Somehow, I doubt it.
It's likely observation bias, but the whole of the wizarding society seems to lack empathy; I join you in doubting that much research on the subject has been done.
I don't think you did and neither was there anything in canon about this. Unicorns are about as sentient as any other magical animal. The taboo of killing unicorns stems from the bad effects it has, rather than the sentience of the creatures.
Well, the point is that "magical animals" have very varrying degrees of sentience - some, like acromantula are fully sentient, some like phoenix are half-sentient, the status of unicorn can't be established without some inquiry.
That's true, but unicorns are immortal, and they have to be killed in order to give a human a few more years of life. Presumably some number of horse-years are worth a human-year; horses aren't quite so negligibly intelligent that the life-value of infinite horse-years converges to zero.
perhaps, but the unicorns don't actually have infinite life-spans.
Well yes, because people keep vamping on them.
Well, the magical world is full of sentient or half-sentient things, from house elves to phoenix. The hypothesis that unicorns are half-sentient like a phoenix can't be excluded a priori, it's something a rationalist should inquire before taking any decision. And the scope and nature of side-effects should be inquired. Harry doesn't even do the simplest inquiry, asking Quirrel about it, but jumps to conclusion with incomplete data, doesn't sound like him at all.