I certainly agree that the difference between living and dying is typically much greater than the difference between being tortured for a while and not being tortured.
OTOH, situations do arise where killing X becomes necessary but torturing X remains optional. I completely agree that it's typically far far far better to avoid such situations altogether, but once I've tried and failed at that I still see no reason to torture X.
Agreed that if D's chances of being caught out are high enough, the expected cost of faking torture might well exceed the expected cost of torture. But I suspect that if we eliminated the death from the equation, and his choices were to fake her torture or to actually torture her, and he chose to torture her because the expected costs of doing so were lower, most readers (even here) would censure that choice.
But the whole point of killing Narcissa is to shock the Death Eaters. If you've gotten to the point where it seems like a good idea to murder someone for shock value, you don't do a half-assed job, you do it nasty. To do otherwise would be a waste, because if you murder her and it doesn't have the desired effect, then you did it for nothing.
The new discussion thread (part 15) is here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 82. The previous thread passed 1000 comments as of the time of this writing, and so has long passed 500. Comment in the 13th thread until you read chapter 82.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: