Huh? When you're holding something, you expend energy because your hand shakes. The longer you hold it, the more it shakes.
I wasn't claiming that the hypothetical physicists made a valid inference -- just the opposite! And FWIW, the shaking (cycling of tension level in the relevant muscles) can't provide net energy to the object because you apply as much work to it on the up movements as it applies to you on the downward movements. The reason you expend energy while holding it in place is because of the muscle adjustments that your body must undergo to maintain an upward force on the object, which indeed involve "force through a distance" -- it's just that body-ene...
It seems to me that usually, when someone says "ethics" on lesswrong, ey usually means something along the lines of decision theory. When an average person says "ethics", ey is usually referring to a system of intuitions and social pressures designed to influence the behavior of members of a group. I think that a lot of the disagreement regarding ethics (i.e. consequentialism vs deontology) is rooted in a failure to properly distinguish between decision theory and what society pressures people to do. Most lesswrong users probably understand the distinction fairly clearly, but we only ever talk about decision theory. Why don't we talk about the social meaning of ethics?