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DanArmak comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 117 - Less Wrong Discussion
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The second point is important: it means young adults are more valuable than young children, yet in practice morals sway the other way, with little children being the most valued now that childhood mortality is low. More specifically, a young parent who expects to have at least one more child if this one dies should be more valuable than the child.
Then we should assign lower value to people the older they get. Yet it's typically considered worse to murder a very old person than a young adult. Do you disagree?
That is a good point which I didn't consider.
Everyone is equally unable to defend themselves against a gun, or a Death Eater with a wand. This may be relevant when you're talking about hitting someone, but not for murder. Anyway, once you've murdered someone, why should it matter morally that you might have failed because he defended himself?
I think this needs evidence. FWIW it wasn't true in my own life, and I don't think I'm that atypical. It also predicts a weak effect of valuing 20 year olds more than 50 year olds.
This is a plausible argument against hurting children. But do you, or others, really think that a few minutes or even hours of pain are comparable with loss of life, to the same degree that people consider killing a child to be worse than killing an adult?
I think that's because the elderly are more likely to be defenceless and murdering someone defenceless is considered bad for virtue ethics reasons. But if you could save either an elder's life or a young adult's life I'd guess most people would say you had better save the latter.
It would make me (and perhaps others) a happier person if people saying things like "it's worse to do X than Y" would distinguish between
[EDITED to add: Oh, and "actions that broadly resemble X tend to do greater harm to the world than actions that broadly resemble Y". And perhaps it's worth remarking that if you cash out "Bad Person" as "person liable to do net harm to the world", these three correspond to a typical consequentialist's analysis of consequentialism, virtue ethics, and deontology respectively. I am not claiming that this observation is in any way original.]
Personally I don't consider it really worse. In society in general, the murder of an eldery is usually considered worse because the eldery is weaker, but the accidental or "natural" (ie, disease) death of an eldery is considered much less bad than the same death of a young adult.
It is not relevant for the murder itself, but it is relevant overall when considering how society protects people. Large-scale effects are often delt with broad heuristics (like deontology and virtues), and children being defenseless means a deontological injunction "doing harm to children is very very bad" being justified, and that injunction will apply to murder too, even if it's less justified there. Trying to exclude murder from the injunction will weaken it, make it much less of Schelling point, so overall I don't think it's something society should do.