When the plan ends in murder and children crying, every failure of the plan results in a worse outcome.

This does not seem to follow. Failure of the plan could easily involve failure to cause the murder or crying to happen for a start. Then there is the consideration that an unspecified failure has completely undefined behaviour. Anything could happen, from extinction or species-wide endless torture to the outright creation of a utopia.

Someone should cast a chain-Imperius , commanding the victim to:

1) Not attack anyone else subject to these rules 2) Imperius anyone not subject to these rules, and subject them to these rules 3) Inform your enchanter of any plans you know of that might hinder the grand Imperius effort.

It's established in Rowling!Cannon that the spell can be chained, and Harry has probably read the GNU manifesto, so he should have these sorts of ideas.

A liberal arch-wizard might object that this would reduce the entire world to a dull statis of mindless servitude:

every thought and worry in his head was wiped gently away

But there would be ways around it; maybe just 10% of the world could be Imperiused at any one moment as a police force. They could then use a shift system, so that everyone got 90% freedom. This might seem extreme, but I think the devastating, distributed destructive powers of magic render it (or something like it) the only sane response for a society not comprised of angels.

Well, personally, I don't see a need to engage in further ethical debate in you. Personally, I wish you'd be unable to scrub these images from your mind for a week or two. That you'd imagine the faces of your family on them, perhaps. "Detached" and "objective" debate has its limits when we're talking about the human consequences of some things while staying in guaranteed safety from them.

[TRIGGER WARNING: TORTURE AND EXTREME VIOLENCE]

For women, it was an especially violent experience. The commission reports that nearly every female prisoner was the victim of repeated rape. The perpetration of this crime took many forms, from military men raping women themselves to the use of foreign objects on victims. Numerous women (and men) report spiders or live rats being implanted into their orifices. One woman wrote, “I was raped and sexually assaulted with trained dogs and with live rats. They forced me to have sex with my father and brother who were also detained. I also had to listen to my father and brother being tortured.” Her experiences were mirrored by those of many other women who told their stories to the commission.

...

One of the first things Ms De Witt heard from a cell after her arrest was a man being beaten to death in the yard outside. She said: "They were beating him with what seemed like long chains. I can still hear the noise it made, and then the crying of the young man, eventually it stopped. I saw him later. His whole body was swollen. It was red and blue, and you could not recognise his face. His name was Cedomil Lauzic."

Ms De Witt was put through the ritual of electric shocks, beatings and sexual degradation. "One day I was tortured from 11 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon with electric shocks. Near the end I could not breathe and my heart stopped. They massaged my heart, and they stopped hurting me for that day. But it began again the next morning," she said.

[END TW]

Ain't enough dust specks on this Earth for some things. Intellectual acquiescence with certain ideas should not, I believe, be a matter of relaxed and pleasant debate - no more so than the implementation of them was for their victims.

P.S.: name ONE person tortured or violently repressed by the Allende government. That's right, zero. Allende wouldn't suspend the constitution and the legal norms even in the face of an enemy with no such qualms.

Harmer shows that Allende was a pacifist, a democrat and a socialist by conviction not convenience. He had an ‘unbending commitment to constitutional government’ and refused in the face of an ‘externally funded’ opposition ‘to take a different non-democratic or violent road’. He invoked history to insist that democracy and socialism were compatible, yet he knew that Chile’s experience was exceptional. During the two decades before his election, military coups had overthrown governments in 12 countries: Cuba in 1952; Guatemala and Paraguay in 1954; Argentina and Peru in 1962; Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Honduras and again Guatemala in 1963; Brazil and Bolivia in 1964; and Argentina once more in 1966. Many of these coups were encouraged and sanctioned by Washington and involved subverting exactly the kind of civil-society pluralism – of the press, political parties and unions – that Allende promoted. So he was sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution and respected Castro, especially after he survived the CIA’s Bay of Pigs exploit in 1961. And when Allende won the presidency, he relied on Cuban advisers for personal security and intelligence operations.

But Cuba’s turn to one-party authoritarianism only deepened Allende’s faith in the durability of Chilean democracy. Socialism could be won, he insisted, through procedures and institutions – the ballot, the legislature, the courts and the media – that historically had been dominated by those classes most opposed to it. Castro warned him that the military wouldn’t abide by the constitution. Until at least early 1973 Allende believed otherwise. His revolution would not be confronted with the choice that had been forced on Castro: suspend democracy or perish. But by mid-1973, events were escaping Allende’s command. On 11 September he took his own life, probably with a gun Castro gave him as a gift. The left in the years after the coup developed its own critique of Allende: that, as the crisis hurtled toward its conclusion, he proved indecisive, failing to arm his supporters and train resistance militias, failing to shut down congress and failing to defend the revolution the way Castro defended his. Harmer presents these as conscious decisions, stemming from Allende’s insistence that neither one-party rule nor civil war was an acceptable alternative to defeat.

It seems like a coherent position to me to assign negative utility to the lives of "evil" creatures in the first place, even if they haven't committed something that would legally be a hanging offense.

You might say that you target evil creatures because they're likely to commit offenses that are punishable under law by death, but then, you might say that certain crimes are punishable by death because they show that the perpetrators are Evil.

As a moral theory, it may not make a very good legal foundation in our world, but when we're dealing with a world where you can actually cast Detect Evil, and look at people, or even magical objects, and tell if they're Evil, things may be kind of different.

Aren't goblins almost exclusively Evil?