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anotherblackhat comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85 - Less Wrong Discussion
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MoR!Horcrux might be different, but it seems likely that killing a willing victim isn't good enough, it has to be murder most foul. If a MoR!Horcrux is different, and only requires a death, then why assume a human death is required?
Additionally, it seems (at least in cannon) that making a Horcrux mutilates the person, damaging (or completely destroying) his ability to love, use empathy, ... so from an utilitarian point of view, it's not "a lot of life years" again "a few life years" but "a lot of years living a mutilated life" against "a few years living a complete life", which is not the same.
And if horcruxing really gets rid of empathy, love and related emotions, it's likely that if it were generalized, the whole society would collapse - leading to lots of negative utility.
The only cannon example is Voldemort who mangled his soul six or seven times. A single Horcrux might be less destructive. Also, we may be confusing cause and effect. But then we also have no examples of a Horcurx actually extending life - Voldemort's was cut short despite making several.
I would also like to point out that it's possible to value diversity. The utility of a single point of view for 200 years may not be as great as two points of view for 90.
The soul-mangling is what causes Voldemort's snake-like appearance, IIRC, and MoR!McGonagall remembers a snake-like Voldemort from her battles. So either MoR!Voldemort has been doing some serious damage to his soul, or he decided to look freakish just for effect and stumbled by chance upon the exact same look which canon!Voldemort got from making Horcruxes.
Why isn't "EY is making him look like in canon" a sufficient explanation for the look being exactly the same? It would be a rotten explanation within the MoRverse, of course, but within the MoRverse there's no coincidence to need explaining.
I see your point. As an author I would think I'm misdirecting my readers by doing that though; "Voldemort has the same deformity as in canon? He's been playing with Horcruxes!" is the reasoning I would expect from them. Which is why I would, say, remove Quirrell's turban as soon as my plot had Voldemort not on the back of Quirrell's head.
I don't think this is ever made explicit. It's probably the reason J. K. Rowling had in mind, but I don't think there's anything in the text that rules out the possibility that he looked that way because he wanted to.
Well, the book shows a progression which correlates with the creation of Horcruxes via some of the flashbacks. There's a scene where he's in Dumbledore's office asking for a job/planning to hid the Horcrux somewhere and he looks half evil Voldie and half handsome Tom.
Rather unfortunately, I think JK has confirmed that a large part of Voldemort's inability to love is because he's effectively a child of rape (via love potion).
Although I have no doubt your 'too much butter spread over too little bread' approach to Horcruxes as damaging.
I was pretty sure that it was the love potion, not the rape, that was decisive in neutering Riddle's capability for love.
I'm not sure whether that's better or worse, really.
This link is pretty shoddy work, but assuming it's accurate, it was the loveless union that started it off--though Rowling made sure to say that his environment had a major part in it too.
You know, this sounds terrible but might be able to put the abortion debate to rest using the creation of a Horcruxes. It would be a horrible violation of human rights and ethics, but you could nail down the exact moment it became murder with enough testing. (Edit: I suppose you could do this on fetuses already slated for abortion anyways to avoid the ethical dilemmas.)
I wonder if pro-lifers and pro-choicers would have different threshholds for age required when to create a horcrux. And if so, I wonder if it would it be possible to create a horcrux with a murder that exists entirely within the mind of the murderer (eg, fake murder like in the Milgram experiment).
It's probably best that I'm not a wizard scientist.
It would be a neat solution if murdering fetuses, animals, infants, etc. as compared to adult humans ripped apart varying-sized fragments of your soul depending on the level of personhood of the victim, and the resulting Horcruxes could store more or less of your soul (i.e. more or less of your personality and memories) depending on the same. Canon probably rules it out, though, or Voldemort would not have gone after a baby for his final Horcrux.
He didn't; the Harrycrux was accidental, and he killed Bertha Jorkins to make Nagini in '94.
I can't find confirmation of this online, and I don't have the books with me, but I seem to remember Dumbledore telling Harry in HBP that Voldemort had intended to use the murder of baby Harry as means to create his last Horcrux (the planned Horcrux would not have literally been dead baby Harry, of course). Of course, that might have been mere speculation by Dumbledore, or I might be misremembering.
Seems like speculation to me:
It should be noted that "he reserved making Horcruxes for significant deaths" is flat wrong.
How do we know it's wrong? As far as I can remember, the only two deaths to which we can pin the creation of horcruxes are Moaning Myrtle's and Harry Potter's. Myrtle herself wasn't significant, but she was the casualty of Slytherin's Basilisk, which Tom Riddle had commanded, which proved that he was the Heir of Slytherin. It was his coming out as the Heir of Slytherin, which would have been very significant to Riddle.
All the sources I've found indicate the deaths used to create the Horcruxes are Myrtle (diary) - Riddle Sr. (ring) - an unnamed Muggle tramp (locket) - Hepzibah Smith (cup) - an unnamed Albanian peasant (diadem) - Voldemort himself (Harry) - Bertha Jorkins (Nagini), in that order.
Ah yeah, that list does ring a bell. Right you are, then.
I thought that the Nagini horcrux was made via the killing of Frank Bryce. Don't have the book with me to check, though.
This being the 21st century, shall we make it up or look it up?
Wouldn't he? I though he got madder & less reliable as he shaved off more & more of his soul; less & less recognizably human, too. If it had been the case that he could make a small Horcrux later on when that decay was already advanced then it might have made a sort of sense to take a smaller fragment of himself away from the already damaged original.
So after thinking about it some more, I came up with a possible rationale/rationalization why a wizard's death might be needed.
Assume the "script kiddy magic" theory is right - A powerful wizard can be bind complex magic into a simple to execute script, with a key phrase (and/or emotion or gesture). Thus it wasn't some perverse law of the universe that decided "Wingardium Leviosa" is how levitation is activated, but some perverse ancient wizard.
A Horcrux stores an image of you, and the activation sequence is bound to the death of a wizard. It was meant to be an emergency backup script, activated on the death of the wizard. I.e. the ancient who created it was thinking that when a wizard dies, they would automatically be backed up into a Horcrux. This explains where ghosts come from, and why the ghosts we know of were all wizards. Later, someone figured out how to activate the script without dying. Unfortunately, the method they discovered involved killing another wizard.
A backup is limited by the hardware that runs it, so ghosts, which can only barely be said to run, don't seem like real people. They have limited ability to form new memories, so they seem more like chatbots than people (in the MoR universe). A Horcrux is even more limited unless it can get near a brain, but has some "upload" magic associated which means it can possess people under the right circumstances. Harry could be a Horcrux, in the sense that he might contain a backup image of Voldemort, but it can't (normally) run for much the same reason Voldemort can't cast a spell on Harry. That's why the hat didn't sense it.
I would be astonished if Eliezer wrote a story in which it were implied that murdering, say, a centaur, was on an intrinsically more justifiable moral ground than murdering a human (ceteris paribus). But you probably meant a nonsapient animal.