Taboo "natural foods" for me, would you?

Considering people have brought up killing people when sanctioned by a democratic government with appropriate checks and balances, perhaps it refers to "unlawful killing"? Where "lawful" requires democracy or maybe some other supposedly superhumanly ethical authority.

(Arguments like this are the reason I've been drifting away from deontology towards virtue ethics. Entirely different arguments are the reason I'll never be a utilitarian.)

Really? I had assumed you were a utilitarian from your ... well, probably because you were the one shutting up and multiplying in this argument, to be honest.

I must say, I'm curious; what arguments persuade you to avoid utilitarianism in favour of virtue ethics?

Sorry, I wasn't actually being serious. I'll edit my comment to make that clearer.

Only if "pointing the gun at people and pulling the trigger" is replaced with an applause light.

Jesus Christ put a trigger warning on that. Just ... damn.

Also, emotional appeals to how terrible one option is aren't going to change the outcomes of utility calculations. I'm not knowledgeable in this area to weigh in on this discussion, but when one side is saying shut up and multiply and the other is using obvious and clumsy dark arts attacks on the audience's rationality, I'm inclined to support the utilitarian over the deontologist.

Perhaps a more realistic scary scenario would be this one: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/11/dire-problem-and-virtual-option.html (essentially: when you're no longer of productive benefit to society, you go to virtual reality / video game heaven).

It certainly seems more analogous to welfare or gated communities than a hypothetical "war against the poor" does.

That the prevailing religious establishment was wrong, somehow. In what way they were wrong depends on the details.

Well, if you phrase it like that ...

Why are you against diversity?! We should have posts for both people-like-you and people-like-me! Stop trying to monopolise LessWrong, people-like-wedrifrid!!

EDIT: This has been a joke. We now return you to your regularly scheduled LessWrong.

I think you're misreading my comments. I'm not complaining that someone finally tried checking if the current educational regime was better than no regime at all; I'm complaining that this wasn't the first thing they checked, like it is in every other field.