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Desrtopa comments on Torturing people for fun - Less Wrong Discussion

13 Post author: cousin_it 14 February 2011 08:52PM

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Comment author: Desrtopa 15 February 2011 01:20:29AM 2 points [-]

Horrible in the sense of being frustrating to have to answer, or horrible in the sense of not being a useful job interview question?

It's exactly the sort of question I hate to be asked when I have nobody to ask for clarification, because I have no idea how I'm supposed to interpret it. Am I supposed to assume the intrinsic rightness has no relation to human values? Is it testing my ability to imagine myself into a hypothetical universe where killing babies actually makes people happier and better off?

It's a popular religious stance that before a certain age, babies have no sin, and get an automatic pass to heaven if they die. I've argued before that if that were the case, one of the most moral things one could do would be killing as many babies as you could get away with. After all, you can only get condemned to hell once, so on net you can get a lot more people into heaven that way than would have gone otherwise.