It appears, however, that this principle is not aligned with the magical culture's approved treatment with children.
If we allow examples from MoR, we have Draco not having any moral problems with raping another child, and most of the Hogwarts faculty and students see nothing wrong with physically violent bullying between students. In canon, I understand that Harry tested out unknown (potentially deadly) curses on random (stranger) Slytherin children (instead of, say, kittens), and wasn't told off by anyone. Etc etc.
In our world, where it is against cultural norms, posters in this thread report that dissecting live (and recently killed) animals in class has indeed been diminishing. (Personal anecdata: I was in highschool in Israel 10-15 years ago and we witnessed a dissection of a single dead frog for the entire class, and only once.)
If we allow examples from MoR, we have Draco not having any moral problems with raping another child
As initially presented, Draco's habits of moral thinking — I wouldn't say "principles" — seem to have been trained to the expectation that might makes right; and that doing something that you want to do, and that can't be held against you, can't be sensibly objected to. Draco is probably not typical.
most of the Hogwarts faculty and students see nothing wrong with physically violent bullying between students
This was, until relatively recently, a pretty typical attitude in the real world.
The next discussion thread 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 84. The previous thread has passed 500 comments. Comment in the 14th thread until you read chapter 84.
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, 14.
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: