OK, I'm adding a TW, but I'm not going to abridge or rot13 it.

So yes, I would rather people based their atrocities on a rigorous epistemic foundation rather than how those guys are The Enemy and must be fought, no matter the cost.

Has such a thing actually happened even once in human history?

I'm not the one willing to tolerate such acts given a counterfactual excuse, or measure them on an easily subverted one-dimensional scale. If they occur in the world, I not only wish to be fully aware of them, I wish that others would not be able to easily shrink from considering them either. A detached discussion of faraway horrible events is a luxury and a privilege, and people who want to participate in it should at least pay a toll of properly visualizing the consequences.

Taking abstract ideas too seriously and unreservedly privileging them over your moral emotion is a terribly, terribly dangerous thing. And it tends to corrupt the one who would make such a choice, too.

Would you like to live in a world where people thought that doing these things to you and yours could ever be justified? Sure, the apologists would say it's only forgivable in dire circumstances, only for the greater good - but still, wouldn't you prefer as firm a precommitment as possible?

And no, I'm not sorry for exposing you to such content. The enormity of the moral commitments at stake is too great for me not to "manipulate" you. The language of simplistic utilitarianism does not have enough bandwidth to express the weight of such commitments, so I have to draw your attention to them through "emotional" appeals.

"You stipulate that the only possible way to save five innocent lives is to murder one innocent person, and this murder will definitely save the five lives, and that these facts are known to me with effective certainty. But since I am running on corrupted hardware, I can't occupy the epistemic state you want me to imagine. Therefore I reply that, in a society of Artificial Intelligences worthy of personhood and lacking any inbuilt tendency to be corrupted by power, it would be right for the AI to murder the one innocent person to save five, and moreover all its peers would agree. However, I refuse to extend this reply to myself, because the epistemic state you ask me to imagine, can only exist among other kinds of people than human beings."

Instead of shutting up and multiplying, might it be wiser to shut up and obey our Glorious Leader?

Fair enough. Yeah, I ought to at least stick to using those with some more context.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English

Amusing illustration through a 1950s sociolinguistic study.

(Damn, I swear there was a far longer discussion on signaling and countersignaling around here, can't find it.)

Well, yes.

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...well, this went downhill pretty quick. Seriously, your view of human behavior and psychology appears to be rather unconventional.

By the way. Were you aware that Nazi Germany's switch from Einsatzgruppen to gas chambers as the preferred instrument of genocide was caused at least partly by Himmler visiting a mass execution by the SS in Belarus, becoming all sick at the sight of prisoners being gunned down, and immediately issuing a policy memo calling for a more "humane", "clean" and automated method of mass slaughter? Historians confirm the veracity of this episode. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Himmler#The_Holocaust)

Alas, I have no reason to think Pinochet would have treated this like a deterrent. Except that he would likely have thought it a waste of his time because he had more important things to do.

Um, I take it that shminux meant OW and not Pinochet by "him"? Grammar confusion?