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sallym comments on Rationality Quotes March 2014 - Less Wrong
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"As I fear not a child with a weapon he cannot lift, I will never fear the mind of a man who does not think.’”
Words of Radiance, Brandon Sanderson, page 795
Both the metaphor and its literal application only make sense if "cannot" and "does not" means "never", and they really don't.
While I'd never fear the mind of a man who literally is in a coma and doesnt think at all, I'd have plenty of reason to fear the mind of a man whose ability to think is merely limited. He can be a stupid moral reasoner and a clever killer at the same time.
I recall one Sherlock Holmes book, where Holmes said that he has a lot of trouble predicting the actions of idiots; an intelligent man, Holmes can work out what actions he would take in a given situation, but an idiot could do anything.
Of course, this presumes that one knows the goals of said intelligent agent.
In that case, though, you're afraid of the man's axe more than his mind.
No, because it works as metaphor too.
It's certainly possible to convince people of a proposition that is false; consider Eliezer doing the Ai-box experiment. In the Ai-box example, Eliezer understands that the proposition is false, but that need not be true in general; you can be bad at thinking in one way (and thus not understand that some proposition is false) but good at thinking in other ways (and thus be able to readily convince other people of the false proposition).
In other words, instead of a stupid reasoner and a clever killer, a stupid reasoner and a clever convincer.