Another month, another rationality quotes thread. The rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
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Your analogy breaks down because in the case at hand, there is no impartial police that can enforce a fair punishment. Also, oranges and apples are not moral patients.
EDIT:
To clarify, a more apt analogy would be if somebody shooted in the air in the general direction of your house, knowing that with overwhelming probability he was unlikely to hit you, and in retaliation you dropped a napalm bomb in his neighborhood, killing everybody but him.
Oh, and let's not forget that you provoked him to shoot at you by kidnapping and killing various members of his immediate familiy after accusing them, without any judicial oversight or even plausible evidence, of kidnapping and killing your dog. A dog that you had intentionally let illegaly roam their property in the first place.
How about that?