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shminux comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 117 - Less Wrong
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Comments (152)
I begin to wonder if we (the community) really found the best plan or if we are reading a sadder ending. Maybe there was a plan that saved everyone.
I don't find anything sad about it. The DEs' lives were forfeit anyway. Not refusing to kill a child on command only confirms it.
Given what Harry has done up to this point, he hardly qualifies for the "innocent child" special moral dispensation.
Death and suffering can be sad even when its causal consequences are net-positive. And death and suffering can be sad even when it happens to bad people (to say nothing of their families).
Normatively speaking, I don't believe someone can involuntarily 'forfeit their life' in the sense of making it intrinsically OK to kill them. (Though it may be instrumentally necessary.)
I suppose Draco's grief is sad, since we know a fair amount of his backstory. Still, learning that Harry preserved all these monsters for later resurrection would make me sadder.
Are you serious? What if he brought them back as Muggles?
Or as good and upstanding people. Or as angels. But since we are talking about God-like powers he can just go back in time and save them when he pleases.
We have strong evidence suggesting that bringing people back to life is possible in this setting, and turning wizards into the same person except not-magic is possible. It does not require God-like powers, or even as much investment as bringing them back to life as magical beings, so much as it requires MoR!Harry to have been more invested in his ethics.
Of course, if he were, then they'd probably not have needed to die in the first place.
On the other hand... According to various world clocks, 37 people die every 15 seconds. I'm not so heavily into the effective altruism movement as to make an enemy of all but the most efficient options, but it's a number to remember. Most alternative methods for incapacitating the Death Eaters less-lethally would have had greater risk of failure, and most methods for would require significantly more time and magical power than saving an average life.
For as much as it makes Harry sympathetic to wish he didn't kill them, there's only so much investment to that purpose before it would be bad thinking of its own -- even if you don't value their lives less.
It has been shown experimentally (by HP and DM) that magic is genetic, though LV/QQ might not know that. So, as long as her eye color remains the same, so will her magic.
Since there are rituals that involve the permanent sacrifice of a "portion" of one's magic, it would seem plausible that the Source of Magic has some sort of accounting system for this purpose. And that resurrecting someone normally would not necessarily restore the initial "balance" (which was presumably revoked when the Source detected their "death"). Even if the initial balance is determined by your genetics.
There evidence that magic was genetic was extremely weak. While a single Mendelian allele is one explanation for what they saw, they need a lot more data to distinguish that from other inherited patterns (genetic or otherwise).
When refusing would likely result in one's own death, and the painful death and torture of their loved ones, and it isn't clear if refusing personally would have made a difference, this is pretty understandable behavior.
Why do people think children have greater moral value than adults, and it's worse to kill a child than a similarly defenseless, innocent adult?
Because children are not fully capable of taking care of themselves, and so there is a norm that all adults (and older children) have a duty of helping and protecting them (even against themselves).
And also because if an adult harms a child, it is much more likely that the victim is innocent and didn't "deserve" that harm than if the victim is an adult.
(and I don't think "greater moral value" accurately describes the situation)
One justification that I've heard is that a child has a longer life ahead of them. Kill a child, and you're removing 60 years of life and happiness from the future; kill an old adult, and you're removing 10 years. Another justification is innocence; although you specified that the adult is innocent, matching the innocence of a child is a tall order for an adult to reach, at least if you think of guilt as a cumulative effect.
I'm trying to answer ‘Why do people think […]’, not ‘Why is it true that […]’, which you didn't ask.
I'm pretty sure lifespan is just a justification, a rationalization, and not the actual reason people think that. If expected lifespan was the reason, people would treat healthy 20 year olds as more valuable than mature 50 year olds, and the oppposite is mostly true.
'Innocence' is more plausible. If a person alieves in a philosophy or theology that says people acquire guilt like bad karma, and it's OK (or more OK) to hurt them the more generalized guilt they have, then children would be hurt less. But again, on this theory you would expect older people to be the least innocent. And yet it's not the case that hurting older people (but not so old that they are weak and defenseless because of it) is more morally permissible than hurting young adults.
On balance, generalized guilt sounds to me like a good partial explanation alongside other heuristics.
This isn't true in my experience. The death of a 20-year-old is grieved as untimely, while the death of a 70-year-old is often accepted as the natural order; 50 falls in between (still untimely but not the same level of tragedy as at 20). If it's murder, then you get more sympathy with age for being defenceless; you can see that that is the reason, because it doesn't apply to natural death.
People talk about the value of the elderly for the same reason that they talk about the value of female STEM majors and racially diverse neighbourhoods: to overcome society's ingrained prejudice in the reverse. (It is irrelevant to this phenomenon whether people believe what they say, or even if the prejudice is justified; such comments are still a reaction.)
Being ready to wage war when necessary, to risk death to defeat the enemy, is a nigh-universal part of the role of the adult male. When children enter combat, outside conditions of total desperation or cases where the existing technology means more meat = more force, it's often as help to the adults.
Is this intended as a moral consideration, or only an evolutionary reason? When you're judging the killing of Harry, an 11-year-old child who (arguably) isn't from an enemy tribe, this seems to be the latter.
Those aren't the only two options! It's a cultural pattern. It doesn't apply on reflection -- if you're an Austrian soldier and Momčilo Gavrić points his gun at you, you shoot him -- but it comes up on the quick first pass.
Like tomatoes. Tomatoes are vegetables because they function as vegetables: you put them on sandwiches and in salads, and you don't eat them plain or put them in fruit salad. Then you think about it and realize that tomatoes are technically fruit. Or like that last sentence: tomatoes are the classic example of a vegetable that's actually a fruit, but come to think of it, cucumbers do the same thing, and sometimes you put apples or pears in salads...
I see several reasons for that, which fall broadly in two different categories (different meaning of "why").
The first set of reasons is grounded into evolutionary psychology, "why" being taken in "why people happen to do it, whatever it's right or wrong". From the genes pov, your children are your greatest asset, since what matters is not having children, but having children who reach adulthood. There has been some evidence that the value we unconsciously assign to children growth with their age (with the resources we spent ensuring they grow healthy) until they reach puberty, that's consistent with that explanation.
The other set of reasons answer to "why should we consider killing children to be worse ?" and to that I've several answers :
children have a higher remaining life expectancy, so killing a 10 years old mean destroying 70 years of life expectancy, while killing a 50 years old mean destroying 30 years (well, not exactly, but not far) ;
children didn't have as much time to enjoy life, so killing a child is unfair (some people do value fairness as a terminal value, and I'm among them) - everything else being equal, if you've two people and together they can live 60 years, it's better to have 30 years each than one living 50 years and the other 10 years ;
children are more vulnerable and less able to defend themselves, and therefore deserve more protection from society ;
many people consider (and I think it holds true to a point, even if I'm not sure how much) that childhood is a part of life that is more full of joy and wonder than adulthood, so depriving someone of his childhood does more harm than depriving someone of the same amount of adult life years ;
children are more psychologically vulnerable and less able to deal with their fear/pain, it's very rare to kill someone suddenly without any pain, so the fear/pain that precedes death is actually worse for a child.
The second point is important: it means young adults are more valuable than young children, yet in practice morals sway the other way, with little children being the most valued now that childhood mortality is low. More specifically, a young parent who expects to have at least one more child if this one dies should be more valuable than the child.
Then we should assign lower value to people the older they get. Yet it's typically considered worse to murder a very old person than a young adult. Do you disagree?
That is a good point which I didn't consider.
Everyone is equally unable to defend themselves against a gun, or a Death Eater with a wand. This may be relevant when you're talking about hitting someone, but not for murder. Anyway, once you've murdered someone, why should it matter morally that you might have failed because he defended himself?
I think this needs evidence. FWIW it wasn't true in my own life, and I don't think I'm that atypical. It also predicts a weak effect of valuing 20 year olds more than 50 year olds.
This is a plausible argument against hurting children. But do you, or others, really think that a few minutes or even hours of pain are comparable with loss of life, to the same degree that people consider killing a child to be worse than killing an adult?
I think that's because the elderly are more likely to be defenceless and murdering someone defenceless is considered bad for virtue ethics reasons. But if you could save either an elder's life or a young adult's life I'd guess most people would say you had better save the latter.
It would make me (and perhaps others) a happier person if people saying things like "it's worse to do X than Y" would distinguish between
[EDITED to add: Oh, and "actions that broadly resemble X tend to do greater harm to the world than actions that broadly resemble Y". And perhaps it's worth remarking that if you cash out "Bad Person" as "person liable to do net harm to the world", these three correspond to a typical consequentialist's analysis of consequentialism, virtue ethics, and deontology respectively. I am not claiming that this observation is in any way original.]
Personally I don't consider it really worse. In society in general, the murder of an eldery is usually considered worse because the eldery is weaker, but the accidental or "natural" (ie, disease) death of an eldery is considered much less bad than the same death of a young adult.
It is not relevant for the murder itself, but it is relevant overall when considering how society protects people. Large-scale effects are often delt with broad heuristics (like deontology and virtues), and children being defenseless means a deontological injunction "doing harm to children is very very bad" being justified, and that injunction will apply to murder too, even if it's less justified there. Trying to exclude murder from the injunction will weaken it, make it much less of Schelling point, so overall I don't think it's something society should do.
Killing people is horrible. It's why DE are "bad people", because they kill. You can't claim DE to be bad people, and yet rejoice at their death.
Yes, killing DE has Harry did it was a required evil - letting Voldemort win would have let to much, much more suffering. But that doesn't change that killing the DE was sad. They were people, and in their own eyes, they weren't evil. And some of them, like Malfoy, was a loving father, paying political cost to help his son feel better.
And the children of the Death Eaters are just kids. Draco may initially dreamed about raping and killing people, he doesn't know better, but he did help Hermione, too. And his pain at losing his father is as real any other child pain at losing his father - something no 11 years old should ever have to go through.
Denying humanity to people, considering they are better dead than alive, that their death isn't any sad, is exactly what Death Eaters did wrong. Harry, Dumbledore, Hermione, McGonagall know better than the eternal loop of hatred, they know that "an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind", and that a tragedy never undo another tragedy.
Yes, you can kill Death Eaters when they actually threaten you and you need to do it to prevent Voldemort from ruling the world - but that doesn't mean killing Death Eaters isn't sad, or that you should rejoice when a 11 years old kid suddenly loses his loving father.
OK, I agree with the "sad" part (though not the "sadder" part). It was unfortunate that people had to die. I don't think HP should torment himself for not having thought of saving them.
Sure you can. Life is full of trade offs. When the tradeoff is sufficiently in your favor, you rejoice. Sometimes that involves people dying.
Then I won't expect them to rejoice at their own deaths, but in my eyes, there is plenty to rejoice over.
I don't think that you and kilobug are actually in contradiction. Kilobug is saying that the deaths of the Death Eaters is a negative term in the utility function. You are saying that the total utility of the act that kills them is positive (or greater than the alternatives). Unfortunately, idiomatic English discusses these two very different points in similar language.
In other words: kilobug says that, as you survey the consequences of Harry's act of transfiguration, when you get to these deaths, you do not rejoice; buybuydandavis says that, considering all of the consequences of Harry's act of transfiguration, you rejoice. At least, that's how I understand you two.
That's... more than a little sociopathic. You seem to be saying that the only value of people's lives to you is instrumental: if you benefit from someone's death overall, then their death is a good thing.
I think you're misreading the comment -- it only says that a human life does not have infinite value and that worthwhile tradeoffs where part of the cost is someone's death exist.
I'm not convinced. I agree that worthwhile tradeoffs where part of the cost is someone's death exist, but the way that's framed in the comment suggests that people dying is irrelevant to whether one rejoices over a worthwhile tradeoff or not. This contrasts heavily with, say, Harry's view, which is that a necessary death is still a tragedy.
I don't see how you got that from what I said. I said "trade off" - that implies relevance.
I guess I misread your tone. The way you put "sometimes that involves people dying" immediately after "you rejoice" made it seem like the former was an afterthought.
Maybe you were psychic about my tone.
Retribution. Vengeance. Justice. Comeuppance. I value that somewhat. Bad guys should get what they've got coming. I understand that not everyone approves of such sentiments, and probably a lot of people here. I look at it as a predictable adaptation in line with rule consequentialism. But I also understand that some value it much more viscerally than I do.
I recall Peter Hitchens opening a window into his mind one day. Basically, he didn't want to live in a universe without Justice built in, which from him I take as bad people not getting get their comeuppance. He wants God to settle the scores. He seems very committed to bad guys getting their just deserts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ATJ23ftuho
Starts around 13:30. Around 14:30 is another chunk.
In the sense that the cost of people dying is already folded into the evaluation of the tradeoff and it still is worthwhile -- yes.
I understand your position, what I don't agree with is that any other view is necessarily "more than a little sociopathic".
I think it's the tone and the context that does it for me. It seems less "worthwhile tradeoffs where part of the cost is someone's death exist" and more "I don't care if people die as long as I get enough out of it".
Well, making psychiatric diagnoses on the basis of short internet comments is a popular and time-honored activity :-)
Yes. That's pretty much the definition of consequentialism. Values can be compared and weighed, and when the weight is greater compared to the alternatives, "then X is a good thing".
You're confusing two things, the direct and indirect consequences. The death of "innocent people" (who is truly "innocent" anyway, who defines what "innocent" is, and aren't the kids of death eaters "innocent" and yet themselves victims too ?) and the death of murderers are, in themselves, terrible. The direct consequence of killing is something very, very bad in both cases.
The indirect consequences are more complicated. Killing murderers when it's the only solution you have (ie, you can't incapacitate them) to prevent them from killing again is acceptable, not because killing murders in itself is good, but because it saves more lives.
But the indirect consequences unfold in many different ways, that you can't always fully apprehend. That's why there are deontological rules like "killing innocents is worse than killing murders". It's not inherently true, it doesn't mean the life of a "murder" has no value, it just means that the broad, general consequences for society as a whole if people are allowed to kill "murders" when they feel cornered tend to be less bad than allowing them to kill "innocent" when they feel cornered.
But it's not even that simple. Was Dumbledore right to kill Narcissa (if he did) to stop the Death Eaters from targeting family of the Order ? Narcissa was "innocent". And yet, in the specific situation, while the direct consequences of killing her are horrible, the indirect consequences (protecting family of the Order) are positive. But that long-term reasoning doesn't make the death of Narcissa, and the pain of Draco, any less horrible.
And that's why Harry was right to kill the Death Eaters, because the alternative would have lead to much more death. But that doesn't mean the death of the 36 people, including the father of one of his best friends, isn't a very tragic event.
In that event, Voldemort survives and finds another host. Maybe not sad in the same sense, but certainly a bad situation.