There are two levels on which to answer that question.
First the societal level. I think there a good chance that a society with 2200 AD levels of technology will collapse when it has a significant level of those people around.
Secondly the personal level. I rather spend 20 minutes meditating and let a unpleasant emotion process itself than act it out in violence.
I think that there are cases where it might be preferable for an individual to act out his anger when the alternative is apathy. Allowing anger to manifest itself might be a step upwards from suppressing all of your emotions. On the other hand a person who resonates at a level of love and kindness is more happy than a person who's driven by anger.
I do think that it's useful to do the mental practice that allows you to stay at a level of love and kindness regardless of what life throws at you.
As far as my own level of functioning goes, there are cases where I have automatic reactions towards pressure that put me in a state of apathy that produces akrasia. Those resolve mostly about situations that are unclear. If anger comes up in such a situation I might go with it because it causes me to take action with might break akrasia.
If I do have concrete emotions that I don't consider useful and which are not behind some ugh-field that prevents me from accessing them, I don't have any trouble with just releasing those emotions. I don't need act them out to free myself from them.
To go back to the society level, it would be good if we could teach sensible strategies for emotional management on the school level that don't require people to act out in violence when the want to free themselves from some emotion that they find unpleasant.
On that note I like the CFAR post of Julia Galef where she makes the point that dealing with emotions is an important topic for CFAR.
I'm not talking about acting violently, except in a very rarefied sense. I'm talking about thinking about it, playing games or the like. It seemed like you were objecting not just to violent actions but also to violent thoughts.
Cross-posted on By Way of Contradiction
In my morals, at least up until recently, one of the most obvious universal rights was freedom of thought. Agents should be allowed to think whatever they want, and should not be discouraged for doing so. This feels like a terminal value to me, but it is also instrumentally useful. Freedom of thought encourages agents to be rational and search for the truth. If you are punished for believing something true, you might not want to search for truth. This could slow science and hurt everyone. On the other hand, religions often discourage freedom of thought, and this is a major reason for my moral problems with religions. It is not just that religions are wrong, everyone is wrong about lots of stuff. It is that many religious beliefs restrict freedom of thought by punishing doubters with ostracizing or eternal suffering. I recognize that there are some "religions" which do not exhibit this flaw (as much).
Recently, my tune has changed. There are two things which have caused me to question the universality of the virtue of freedom of thought:
1) Some truths can hurt society
Topics like unfriendly artificial intelligence make me question the assumption that I always want intellectual progress in all areas. If we as modern society were to choose any topic which restricting thought about might be very useful, UFAI seems like a good choice. Maybe the freedom of thought in this issue might be a necessary casualty to avoid a much worse conclusion.
2) Simulations
This is the main point I want to talk about. If we get to the point where minds can simulate other minds, then we run into major issues. Should one mind be allowed to simulate another mind and torture it? It seems like the answer should be no, but this rule seems very hard to enforce without sacrificing not only free thought, but what would seem like the most basic right to privacy. Even today, people can have preferences over the thoughts of other people, but our intuition tells us that the one who is doing the thinking should get the final say. If the mind is simulating another mind, shouldn't the simulated mind also have rights? What makes advanced minds simulating torture so much worse than a human today thinking about torture. (Or even worse, thinking about 3^^^^3 people with dust specks in their eyes. (That was a joke, I know we cant actually think about 3^^^^3 people.))
The first thing seems like a possible practical concern, but it does not bother me nearly as much as the second one. The first seems like it is just and example of the basic right of freedom of thought contradicting another basic right of safety. However the second thing confuses me. It makes me wonder whether or not I should treat freedom of thought as a virtue as much as I currently do. I am also genuinely not sure whether or not I believe that advanced minds should not be free to do whatever they want to simulations in their own minds. I think they should not, but I am not sure about this, and I do not know if this restriction should be extended to humans.
What do you think? What is your view on the morality of drawing the line between the rights of a simulator and the rights of a simulatee? Do simulations within human minds have any rights at all? What conditions (if any) would make you think rights should be given to simulations within human minds?