You are analyzing "heroic responsibility" as a philosophical construct. I am analyzing it as [an ideological mantra]. Considering the story, there's no reason for Harry to have meant it as the former, given that it is entirely redundant with the pre-existing philosophical construct of consequentialism, and every reason for him to have meant it as the latter, given that it explains why he must act differently than Hermione proposes.

[Note: the phrase "an ideological mantra" appears here because I'm not sure what phrase should appear here. Let me know if what I mean requires elaboration.]

If I believed you to be a virtue ethicist, I might say that you must be mindful of your audience when dispensing advice. If I believed you to be a deontologist, I might say that you should tailor your advice to the needs of the listener. Believing you to be a consequentialist, I will say that advice is only good if it produces better outcomes than the alternatives.

Of course, you know this. So why do you argue that Harry's speech about heroic responsibility is good advice?

You don't use rational argument because it's the most effective way to convince a child, you use rational argument because it's the most effective way to teach a child the use of rational argument. (which as a side benefit, eventually makes rational argument the most effective way to convince the child)

This is a fantastic post and I'd really like to see more like it, on any topic really.

It'd be really really cool if we could maintain them as wiki articles too, i.e. update them with new info. Is that feasible? Would you, Stuart, be interested in doing that for this topic?

Here's some comments from an economist blogger I follow (that found you thru Yvain's blog).

Neither Hermione nor Harry dispute that they have a responsibility to protect the victims of bullying. There may be people who would have denied that, but none of them are involved in the conversation. What they are arguing over is what their responsibility requires of them, not the existence of a responsibility. In other words, they are arguing over what to do.

Human beings are not perfect Bayesian calculators. When you present a human being with criteria for success, they do not proceed to optimize perfectly over the universe of all possible strategies. The task "write a poem" is less constrained than the task "write an Elizabethan sonnet", and in all likelihood the best poem is not an Elizabethan sonnet, but that doesn't mean that you will get a better poem out of a sixth-grader by asking for any poem than by giving them something to work with. The passage from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Eliezer Yudkowsy quoted back during the Overcoming Bias days, "Original Seeing", gave an example of this: the student couldn't think of anything to say in a five-hundred word essay about the United States, Bozeman, or the main street of Bozeman, but produced a five-thousand word essay about the front facade of the Opera House. Therefore, when I evaluate "heroic responsibility", I do not evaluate it as a proposition which is either true or false, but as a meme which either produces superior or inferior results - I judge it by instrumental, not epistemic, standards.

Looking at the example in the fanfic and the example in the OP, as a means to inspire superior strategic behavior, it sucks. It tells people to work harder, not smarter. It tells people to fix things, but it doesn't tell them how to fix things - and if you tell a human being (as opposed to a perfect Bayesian calculator) to fix something, it sounds like you're telling them to fix it themselves because that is what it sounds like from a literary perspective. "You've got to get the job done no matter what" is not what the hero says when they want people to vote in the next school board election - it's what the hero says when they want people to run for the school board in the next election, or to protest for fifteen days straight outside the meeting place of the school board to pressure them into changing their behavior, or something else on that level of commitment. And if you want people to make optimal decisions, you need to give them better guidance than that to allocating their resources.

Full disclosure: I stopped reading HPMoR in the middle of Chapter 53. When I was researching my comment, I looked at the immediate context of the initial definition of "heroic responsibility" and reviewed Harry's rationality test of McGonagall in Chapter 6.

I would have given Harry a three-step plan: inform McGonagall, monitor situation, escalate if not resolved. Based on McGonagall's characterization in the part of the story I read, barring some drastic idiot-balling since I quit, she's willing to take Harry seriously enough to act based on the information he provides; unless the bullies are somehow so devious as to be capable of evading both Harry and McGonagall's surveillance - and note that, with McGonagall taking point, they wouldn't know that they need to hide from Harry - this plan would have a reasonable chance of working with much less effort from Harry (and much less probability of misfiring) than any finger-snapping shenanigans. Not to mention that, if Harry read the situation wrong, this would give him a chance to be set straight. Not to mention that, if McGonagall makes a serious effort to crack down on bullying, the effect is likely to persist for far longer than Harry's term.

On the subject of psychology: really, what made me so emphatic in my denouncing "heroic responsibility" was [edit: my awareness of] the large percentage of adults (~10-18%) subject to anxiety disorders of one kind or another - including me. One of the most difficult problems for such people is how to restrain their instinct to blame themselves - how to avoid blaming themselves for events out of their control. When Harry says, "whatever happens, no matter what, it’s always your fault" to such persons, he is saying, "blame yourself for everything" ... and that makes his suggestion completely useless to guide their behavior.

There are various types of consequentalism. The lack of distinction between ethical necessity and supererogation, and the general focus about optimizing the world, are typical of utilitarianism, which is in fact often associated with effective altruism (although it is not strictly necessary for it).

I think you're wrong about how the other nurses on your unit, and other people generally, would react to the idea of 'heroic responsibility', depending on you were to both bring it up and present it.

The key part of the quote with which I would expect lots of people to agree is:

“You can’t think as if just following the rules means you’ve done your duty."

I'd expect everyone to have encountered an incompetent or ineffective authority figure. I'd also expect nurses to routinely help each other out, and help their patients, by taking actions that aren't formally or technically their responsibility. Ex. "Did Ms. Smith ever get that pillow she requested?"

But fully accepting heroic responsibility means you're also accepting responsibility for (a) doing what needs to be done despite feelings of guilt; (b) not burning oneself out (unless that's the best course of action); (c) not accepting heroic responsibility for one thing (unless that's all you truly care about).

Accepting heroic responsibility for all your patients very well might be best honored by you doing whatever you need to do "to care less – and thus be less frustrated and more emotionally available to comfort a guy who was having the worst week of his life".

As I interpret it, heroic responsibility doesn't mean not accepting roles; it means not accepting roles by default.

So "heroic responsibility" just means "total utilitarianism"?